10 Families Whose Houses Scared Them to Death

Most people can’t wait to get home after a long day at work. Some can’t even wait to get home after being away on vacation. After all, your house is supposed to be your safe haven. The place where you can be yourself and do whatever you want, be it binge-watching a series for three days or sleeping until noon.

But in the dead of night, some houses turn into something quite the opposite of a safe haven. They become, as the covers of old horror movie DVDs used to spell out, A DEN OF NIGHTMARES.

A wooden staircase that looks warm and welcoming during the day becomes creaky and creepy in the dark, with shapeless shadows lurking on the landing. A carelessly tossed coat turns into the Boogey Man. A cat’s habit of staring proves THERE IS SOMEONE IN THE HOUSE.

However, for the following families, these scenarios are far from the worst they’ve experienced in their homes. For some, there was no choice but to flee something most people don’t believe even exists.

Related: 10 Chilling Myths and Ghosts You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

10 The House with Disembodied Legs

Comedian Daisy May Cooper can see the funny side of anything, but her new house soon left her speechless (and terrified). Cooper bought a gorgeous countryside house in southwest England in 2021—the biggest house she had ever lived in. She never imagined that she’d eventually be interviewed on a podcast about her haunted house experience.

For Cooper, everything was fine until her friend stayed over one night. Sarah slept in a spare room on the top floor of the house and told Cooper in the morning that she had heard what sounded like a person breaking into the house during the night. Since nothing was out of place, Cooper didn’t think much of this until other house guests started reporting hearing voices and seeing shadow figures inside their rooms.

Furthermore, Cooper’s housekeepers told her that some pictures she’d hung on the walls kept disappearing and reappearing on the staircase landing. Cooper only started getting scared when she woke up one morning and her shower was on full blast. Shortly after, Cooper’s dad saw a man casually strolling past a window.

These spooky happenings culminated in Cooper seeing something she simply could not comprehend. One night, while watching TV with her son, she heard the security light come on on the landing. Then, she heard feet running over the wooden floor. Even worse, she suddenly spotted a pair of disembodied children’s legs running around the bed she and her son were sitting on. The legs, wearing white shorts, vanished after a few minutes.

The podcast host who interviewed Cooper researched the house and discovered it sits next to a railway that used to stay open for trains transporting injured soldiers. A young boy also drowned in a lake nearby in 1959. This lake is visible from the top floor spare room window.

Cooper wasn’t about to stay in the house any longer and moved out soon after the podcast interview (to go and live in an 18th-century house).^[1]

9 The Ghost on the Camera

Things don’t necessarily have to get thrown around or float in the air for a family to become terrified of their house. No one realizes this more keenly than Amanda Pitt.

Pitt woke up at 3:40 a.m. on a cold October morning in 2022 to hear someone stomping inside her house. Her first thought was that an intruder had somehow gotten in, so she checked the security camera. To her shock, on the screen, she saw a figure standing in the kitchen doorway. Terrified, she ran back to her bedroom to check on her husband, who was still sound asleep. She woke him up and told him what she saw. When he went downstairs to confront the intruder, he found only the family dog walking around in the kitchen.

Pitt could not fall asleep again and tried to watch TV to stay calm. She kept checking the camera but did not see the figure again. However, she got a screenshot of the camera footage, which depicts a blurry figure of a woman standing in the doorway.

The incident led Pitt and her husband to seriously consider moving out of their Pennsylvania home. As their security camera once recorded a door inside the house opening by itself and a kitchen sink turning on by itself, moving may be the best idea for the couple and their four children.^[2]

8 Paranormal Activity

When Lauren Roth and her family moved into their new Teesside rental home in 2021, they never imagined their stay would last only seven months. Everything was fine and normal for a couple of weeks. But then, weird things started happening.

Roth began to notice unexplained bruises on her body. Lights in the house started turning on and off by themselves. Objects moved on their own around the house, with some tossed down the stairs.

Things took a turn for the worse when Roth felt unseen hands choking her, and her son started screaming in the middle of the night. Six-year-old Caleb told his mother he saw someone standing in his bedroom at night. Roth’s four-year-old daughter Arabella told her she saw a cat roaming the house and even had scratch marks.

In June 2022, Roth put Caleb to bed at around 8 p.m. Suddenly, the boy started screaming, ‘Leave me alone’ and ‘Get off me!’. As he screamed, the bathroom light went off. It took a few hours, but Roth gathered their essentials and bundled everyone into a taxi. They left for Roth’s mother’s house, where they stayed the night.

The Roth family did not return to the house save to pack up the rest of their things. They lived in a camper on their neighbor’s driveway until they found a new rental.^[3]

7 Ghost That Plays with Toys

A young mother from Glasgow never thought her family home would terrify her to the point where she would consider asking a priest for help.

The unidentified mom of two strongly considered moving after her three-year-old daughter talked about monsters hiding in her bedroom in 2022. The little girl also started having terrible nightmares. Before this, a kitchen tap or the fridge door would randomly open. The mom kept hearing the baby gate opening by itself and once saw a shadow disappear into her bedroom.

Then, one of her daughter’s toys started moving and making sounds in the hallway. The mom checked on her daughters while this was happening, and neither was near the toy at the time. Her three-year-old also walked into her bedroom, pointing at one corner, and said, “The monster is sleeping.”

The mom’s friends refused to stay over when she told them what was happening. She also considered asking a medium or priest to bless the house. Whether she got someone to do so or simply moved out of the house is unknown.^[4]

6 Driven Out by Evil

You know things are bad when people would rather sleep on their balconies than inside their homes. In 2020, Patricia, David, and their two kids moved into their new apartment in Replonges, France. The apartment was only four years old, having been built in 2016.

Like the other families on this list, this one was happy and content in their new home. Until they weren’t. The couple’s daughter started complaining about seeing weird things in the apartment soon after they moved in. These weird things included black shadows flitting through the house. The lights went out for no reason, and the TV turned on by itself.

The couple soon sought help and found a magnetiseur (hypnotist) to investigate the paranormal activity happening in their apartment. The magnetiseur inspected the place and told them the spirit of a 19th-century woman was trapped inside and wanted the family out.

Considering that the family is not rich, they couldn’t just up and leave and move into another home, no matter how much the ghost hated them. The apartment is within a social park, and there was no other open unit for them at that time.

So the family decided to move to the balcony and stay in a tent at night. This way, the spirit would be free to roam the apartment until dawn. They slept on the balcony for a month, but there have been no further updates on the paranormal activity since.^[5]

5 Time to Call an Exorcist

You know things are even worse when you have to call in an exorcist to drive an angry poltergeist out of your home. A young couple renting a house in East Hull was thinking of nothing but their new baby girl when weird things suddenly started happening.

It started innocently enough, with their stereo turning on by itself. The couple didn’t think much of it and soon forgot about the incident. But then, the baby became restless one evening and wouldn’t settle down. Her mother gave her a dummy, and when the baby quieted down, she returned to bed. As she did so, she distinctly heard someone whisper, “Coochy-coo.”

This terrifying moment was the start of a string of strange events. The mom would take her baby upstairs only for the lights to trip for no reason. The baby’s grandmother started thinking twice about visiting because she felt a choking feeling whenever she entered the house. One of the couple’s friends visited, only to be terrified by the image of an unknown baby in a mirror.

These incidents and many more happened over three years. In 2022, things escalated. Pictures on the wall began to swing, and cold spots appeared throughout the house. One morning, the couple woke up to a message scrawled on their bedroom window. It was only one word: Move.

Move they did. The couple took their baby and fled, not knowing what else to do. Once they were far enough away, they called an exorcist for help. The exorcist’s visit came after a local ghost hunter visited the house. The ghost hunter’s team told the couple that the house was haunted by the angry spirit of a mother and her baby.

The exorcist calmly went about the exorcism, dabbing the house walls with holy water and praying. The couple believes that the exorcism worked, as they moved back into their home and have lived there incident-free ever since.^[6]

4 The Ghost Who Didn’t Want to Leave

Vicky Dann struggled with things for two years while living in her Dalkeith home. She and her two daughters started seeing strange floating orbs and even apparitions. Her eleven-year-old daughter, Emma, regularly saw a man dressed in black walk down the hall and disappear.

Naturally, this terrified the close-knit family. They set up a makeshift bedroom in the living room so they wouldn’t be alone when the spook appeared. Emma also missed school because of the strange events taking place at home. Vicky asked the Church of Scotland minister Keith Mack twice to bless her home. But this only made things worse. By 2012, Vicky was fed up and called in the help of a medium, Jackie Drummond.

Jackie was part of the Midlothian Paranormal Investigations team and soon figured out that the ghost who didn’t want to leave was a man named Thomas Laidlaw. He died in 1923 and, according to Jackie, was simply lost.

Unfortunately, this is not where things ended. The MPI team also told Vicky that her house stood on top of a mass grave filled with the remains of dead children and women. Jackie performed a cleansing inside the house, whitewashing every room. Afterward, Vicky and her daughters felt at peace, and despite living on top of a suspected “plague pit,” they could carry on with their lives.^[7]

3 Fleeing After Only One Week

Josue Chinchilla and his fiancé Michele Callan lived in their Toms River rental for only one week before fleeing in terror. After experiencing flickering lights, doors that opened on their own, and a voice whispering, “Let it burn,”‘ they weren’t about to wait and see what else would happen.

The couple also launched legal action against the homeowner, alleging that he knew about the hauntings but neglected to warn them. The homeowner shot back at the allegations, stating that the couple simply couldn’t afford the rent. He also refused to pay back their security deposit.

The couple told him that the ghost pulled the sheets off their bed and that Callan saw a dark shadow roaming the bedroom. But the homeowner insisted that he’d previously rented the home to several families without issue.
The kicker is that the Shore Paranormal Research Society investigated the house and noted supernatural or paranormal activity. Another investigator from NJ Paranormal Investigators claimed that the house harbored an intelligent haunting. For some paranormal enthusiasts, this means the couple could have brought the ghost with them when they moved in.

There hasn’t been an update on the outcome of the court case. But there is a chilling comparison of sorts to consider. George and Kathy Lutz were also met with skepticism when they claimed that paranormal entities drove them from their Amityville home in 1976. This incident would eventually be immortalized in a novel and subsequent movie(s).

Guess where the 1979 movie was filmed? None other than Toms River, New Jersey.^[8]

2 When Ghosts Start Fires

From the outside, the house above “Sophia Nails” in Ammanford, Wales, looks like just another quirky dwelling. But those unlucky enough to have lived in it know better.

Neighbors of the family who lived in the house most recently have been in the area for many years. They believe the house has been haunted since the 1970s. They also confirmed that the family moved out in 2024, too terrified to stay there any longer.

The house was in the news a few years back when the former owners sensationally claimed they’d heard screams emanating from underneath the basement. Alan and Christine Tait couldn’t deal with the screaming and other strange noises, so after eleven years of terror, they moved out in 2019. Before moving, they captured the sounds of women and children screaming from the basement by installing microphones throughout.

The couple even called the police to investigate, but nothing came of this. When the Taits eventually fled the house, they decided to start over by living in a camper van.

After the last family moved out of the house, it mysteriously caught fire in September 2024. Residents of Ammanford believed the ghosts inside the house may be to blame for the fire because they don’t want anyone else moving in.^[9]

1 The Growling Demon

Claire Lench moved into her new rental home with her partner and five-year-old son at the beginning of October 2016. Little did she know then that they would flee just two weeks later. The three-bed home in Five Oak Green, Kent, is nondescript, but what happened inside this house over the two-period was nothing short of dramatic and frightening.

In addition to doors slamming shut on their own and candles flickering when there was no breeze, something knocked on the windows. And then, drawings started appearing on the walls. On October 13, Lench felt a cold spot in one part of the house. No matter how warm it got outside, this spot would stay frigid. She knew it was time to leave when she heard a growling noise from the hallway. Lench believed it was a demon growling at her.

Lench contacted the estate agents for the property and asked that they find her family a new place to live. She wanted the one-year lease she signed void but was told she would likely have to pay the entire year’s rent anyway because she had already moved out.

Lench claimed that she had researched and found that previous tenants living in the house had experienced similar incidents. The estate agents denied this, stating that no tenants had ever complained of ghosts or demons before Lench. Eventually, Lench had to pay only two months’ rent, which she gladly did in exchange for getting as far away from the house’s growling demon as possible.^[10]