r/nosleep

I don’t know what to do. This is going to sound completely, batshit insane. But I have to tell someone.

About a week ago, I saw a jogger on my way home from work. We live in a small town with a lot of sidewalks, so it’s pretty common to see joggers or people walking their dogs after dark. Sometimes they’ll get creative with the lights—I’ve seen dog leashes strung with LEDs, people wearing headlamps. This is especially common now, in winter, when the sun sets before 5 pm.

So, I thought nothing of it. A pinprick of light, bobbing up and down the sidewalk, about thirty yards ahead of me. Just another jogger.

But then I got closer. And I realized the way the light was bobbing was… strange. I couldn’t really put my finger on why it was strange; it just was. Something in my brain clicked—it doesn’t look like it should.

And then, as I passed him, my entire body froze.

He had no head.

I know. I couldn’t be sure; I only saw him for a second. As soon as my brain registered it, he’d already passed. I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw the bobbing light receding, but it was too dark to see whether he had a head or not.

As I drove home, I struggled to find a reasonable explanation for what I’d seen. Maybe he’d been wearing a balaclava—it was pretty cold out. That would render his face nearly invisible in the darkness. Wouldn’t I still see his eyes, though? Or, something? Or could he have been wearing some sort of costume, some sort of mask? But why? It wasn’t anywhere near Halloween.

Well, whatever it was—there was no way he was actually headless.

It’s easy to see things. Not hallucinations, but little glitches in your brain, misinterpreting reality. Like when a bit of hair falls in front of your eyes, and you think it’s a shadow person for a second. Or when you see a misshapen tree stump by the road, and think it’s a deer. I remember the time I convinced myself Santa was real, even though I was too old to believe, because I’d seen a shadow in the neighbor’s front yard on Christmas Eve. When it was probably just a bush, or a deer, or even a piece of my hair in my peripheral vision.

By the time I was at the front door, I’d completely convinced myself that it wasn’t a headless jogger.

“I scared myself so bad tonight,” I told my husband over dinner. “On the way home, I saw this jogger, and I thought—I thought he didn’t have a head.”

My husband laughed. “The Headless Horseman trying to lose a little weight, huh?”

I chuckled.

“Maybe you’ll see him at Dawn Yoga next. Doing a downward-facing dog.” He took a bite of garlic bread. “Or, hey, movie idea. The Headless Horseman for 2024. Ichabod Crane goes on TikTok and finds a headless fitness guru. They could call it… The Headless Influencer.”

“Oh my gosh,” I laughed, rolling my eyes.

But that was before things got worse.

On Tuesday night, I took our dog out for a walk after work. And about halfway down the street, I saw it: a light, in the distance, bobbing up and down. I crossed to the other side of the street, to get out of his way.

Something felt wrong about it, though. That same sense of wrong I couldn’t place when I saw the light on the headless jogger. But I continued down the street as he grew closer.

And that’s when Sadie started to growl.

She stared at the light. Ears pinned back, teeth bared, growling. My stomach dropped. “It’s okay, girl,” I said, but the pit in my stomach grew.

I tried to walk forward, but Sadie wouldn’t budge. So I stood there, phone in hand, pressed against the curb as the light got closer. And closer, and closer…

Until he came into view.

The jogger’s pale arms swung with each step. His feet hit the pavement with a rhythmic thump, thump, thump. The light shone from something strapped to his wrist, erratically bouncing off the asphalt.

Thump, thump, thump. Closer.

I held my breath, staring at the spot above his shoulders. Fifteen feet away, now… ten…

No.

He had no head.

It was obvious this time. Absolutely clear. There was nothing above his shoulders but thin air. Yet his body was still pumping away, his feet pounding the asphalt. I stared at him, petrified with fear, not even understanding what I was seeing. Sadie let out a snarl.

Then he passed me.

And I saw something else.

The muscles in his exposed shoulder. In the short, smooth stump of his neck. They moved. As if…

He was turning to look at me.

I yanked on Sadie’s leash, and this time she had no problem running. We sprinted back to the house, both of us panting, terrified. As soon as I got inside I locked every lock we had, even the deadbolt we rarely used.

“Steven!” I screamed.

I told him what happened, tripping over my own words, blabbering, barely coherent. Not knowing what else to do, he called the police. They came over and searched the neighborhood; but they didn’t find any headless jogger.

Of course they didn’t.

The three of us packed up and went to my sister’s for the night, just an hour away. I couldn’t sleep at home. It was on our street. Maybe it even followed me home, knew where we lived. I knew that sounded crazy. But I had seen it, and I would swear on my own life that there was a headless man running around out there.

As I stared at the ceiling, trying to fall asleep, a childhood memory popped in my head. A lesser known Dr. Seuss story that I had loved as a kid. What was I scared of?, it was called. A pair of “pale green pants, with nobody inside them” follows and torments the main character. It has a happy ending, of course, but the biting unease of seeing something that’s so empty, that doesn’t have a head or any place to put intelligence or a brain or a soul—yet is moving, acting like something sentient—stuck with me.

It felt oddly similar the feeling I had now, dialed up to 100.

We spent two nights at my sister’s place, but after that, we had to get home. The extra commute time was wearing on both of us, and my sister’s one-year-old was waking us up at night. So we headed back home, and I tried to pretend like I’d never seen the headless jogger. Maybe that was the last time I’d ever see him.

It wasn’t.

Because at 3 AM that night, I woke with a start. And when I rolled over, I saw a light twinkling in through the blinds.

What the hell…

Without thinking, I pulled up the blinds.

No.

My blood ran cold. I stood there, frozen, my feet stuck to the floor. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think.

I was face-to-face—or rather face-to-nothing—with the headless jogger.

It was just standing there, six feet outside my window. Still as a statue.

The blinds clattered shut. When I finally had the courage to peer through them, it was gone.

I’m terrified. I don’t know what this thing wants, or what it wants to do to me. I don’t even know how it’s thinking. How it’s moving. I went to the police again, but no one will believe me. My husband is suggesting a vacation, just the two of us. He thinks I’m going crazy.

I’m not.

So, please—if you ever see a jogger at night, and you think for a second they don’t have a head—

Don’t brush it off as a brain glitch.

Run the other way, and don’t look back.

It was one of my earliest memories.

I must have been right around three years old - I remember waking up in the middle of the night crying and afraid. I cried and yelled but my mom wouldn’t come, so I hopped out of my bed to wake her. Opening my bedroom door, tears in my eyes, is when I first saw it.

I was able to see out the front door from the hallway between our bedrooms. Our front door had four long, vertical glass panels, each about 4 inches wide. Stretched across two of the panels was an oddly-shaped figure peering in.

It’s hard to say whether my later experiences have colored this early memory of mine, but I can still see this figure in my mind with such startling clarity that I don’t think it unreasonable to suggest that the way I describe it to you now is the way it looked on that very night. It was not human, though it seemed to have a head - an oblique, boomerang-shaped head that spanned half the length of the door. Under its head was a body too narrow to hold the weight of its head. A flowing ribbon-like substance was draped around it, carrying an indistinguishable color that contrasted against the dull gray of its body.

In hindsight, the strangest part of this exchange was my immediate comfort from the figure. My fear was gone and I simply and easily went back to bed.

My memory is more sporadic after that first night, but over the next 3 years or so I would continue to wake in the night with giddy excitement to peek at the front door for the thing I called Arrowhead. He didn’t visit frequently, and sometimes it would feel like forever between sightings and my developing brain would question whether the previous sighting was indeed just a nightmare, like my mom kept suggesting. I always told her she was wrong! Nightmares were supposed to be scary, but I was never scared when I saw Arrowhead.

Things changed when I was 5 years old or so - I decided that the next time I saw Arrowhead, I would let him in the house so that my mom could see that the thing I was seeing at night was, in fact, real. I figured that he was visiting us for a reason, and standing outside the front door was its way of asking to come in. As luck would have it, Arrowhead visited shortly afterward, and I strolled downstairs in a childlike stupor to let him in.

When I approached the door, I saw its eyes for the first time. On both sides of the boomerang of its head was a single, golf-ball sized black pupil, hanging abnormally still in the center of a white membrane. The best I can compare it to now is the eye of giant squid; it was the eye of something that would not seem strange if you were told beforehand that it had evolved in the abyss of the ocean, but staring at me through my front door, I remember feeling an intense horror I had never quite felt before. I ran upstairs screaming to wake up my parents, but they just would not budge. I remember shaking them and screaming in their faces until I just couldn’t scream anymore. I locked myself in my room and cried until I passed out on the floor from sheer exhaustion.

The years after were difficult - I started seeing a child psychotherapist who attributed the experiences to night terrors caused by pediatric sleep apnea. She explained to my parents that I would stop breathing at night when sleeping on my back, causing terrifying and disorienting hallucinations involving the visitor at our door. I maintained that what I was seeing was real, but in any case, she taught me vital coping mechanisms that I still use to this day to navigate what she would call an “apneic episode”.

It’s simple but it goes like this: whenever I “wake” up, certain of Arrowhead’s presence at my door, I use cues to remind myself that I’m sleeping. It’s sort of like lucid dreaming, but as a nightmare therapy. I ask myself what time it is, or try to wake up someone in the dream. If they don’t wake up, I know I’m still “dreaming”. I know not to look for Arrowhead. I’m able to go back to sleep without issue.

But I’m never actually sleeping during these episodes. It’s hard to explain, but everything I’ve described above happens to me in a waking state. I’m convinced that these aren’t actual nightmares, at least not the ones most people experience.

In high school and college, sharing these stories actually won me a few friends, though none were ever convinced that I was anything other than an imaginative storyteller. More years went by. I married a woman I adore. I got my first job, and then I got a better job. I lost my dad a few years back. We were close but we never really talked about my episodes. The whole thing made him very uncomfortable, and we never really lingered on the subject.

I’m in my late twenties now and life is good. I’m married and my wife and I are expecting our first child (a boy!). We live in a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a walkup in Brooklyn, and like many before us, we’re eager for more space and an elevator. The only problem is that I don’t really want to move. Our apartment has a unique feature that I haven’t seen in any other NYC apartment: a 6x5 foot mudroom between the front door of our apartment, and the front door to our living space. My wife says that once we move, she’ll miss having a dedicated space to leave our boots during winter snow. I’m going to miss having another door between me and Arrowhead.

I wouldn’t be writing this post if everything were “normal”. I know Arrowhead still visits me at night, but like I said, it’s not really an issue if I don’t go looking for him. The problem started shortly after my wife became pregnant. I started waking up more frequently than usual from Arrowhead’s presence at the front door. Being used to the routine, I was more concerned by my lack of sleep than by any malevolence on the behalf of my visitor. Until last night.

I woke up to all the familiar sensations. I was in our bedroom, but something about the room was slightly off. I could recognize the furniture and dimensions of the room, but couldn’t really focus on anything in particular - as if everything in the room was in my peripheral vision. I asked myself to check the time, but I couldn’t convince my body to follow through with the idea. I caught a glimpse at my wife sleeping, and wondered whether she’d wake up if I screamed in her face.

That’s when I heard a knock.

My heart sank. It was a FUCKING knock and I’m certain of it. That’s never happened before. The same horror I felt as a five year old rushed through my chest and I felt like balling up on the floor and crying myself to sleep again. But reason quickly overwhelmed me and inspired a more primal terror when I realized the knock I heard was too quiet to have come from the front door. It had to have come from inside the mudroom.

I don’t know what came over me but I just acted without thinking. I ignored all my cues. I ran to the door of the mudroom and ripped it open to greet my old friend, but nothing was there. Nothing except the front door of the apartment standing tightly shut across six feet of darkness. Fluorescent light from the communal hallway of the building outlined the front door, but no light flowed through the peephole. I knew he was looking through it from the outside. I took a step forward to meet his eye through it - to invite him in and feel the warmth of our first encounter. But then I remembered those dead eyes of his. I closed the door and cued myself back to sleep.

I’ve calmed down a bit and wanted to share my story here. I don’t really have many other outlets and I fear my closest relationships would suffer from the revelation that I am still visited at night, so I mostly keep my episodes to myself these days. I wanted to share that I have a plan for when he visits next.

I’ve spent too long hiding behind the security and comfort of my door. With a little one along the way, I can no longer just ball up on the floor and cry. I need to discover what he wants from me and stop pretending that he’s not there. I need him to move on from me and my family.

Next time, I’m going to open the door, but it won’t be to let him in.

Next time, I will step outside with him.

They say that home is where the heart is. I can't exactly relate to that saying, though. When I was 2, my family and I left our small hometown in a hurry and never looked back. They've always refused to explain when whenever I tried to ask about it, and eventually gave up on asking. I managed to dig up when we left, which was December 21st, 2003.

When I say my hometown was small, I mean it. Maybe a population of 100 or less. We made due as a small community, or so I've been told. All I know, location-wise, is that it was somewhere in Maine. I managed to find an old map with the town on it (confirmed by parents). Doesn't even show the name. Other maps don't even show it, like it vanished.

About a month or so ago, I began to pack stuff up for a trip. Without telling my parents, I planned to go visit the town. The goal was to try and find out if still existed, and find out why we left. I've been planning this trip for a few years now.

I've been saving up money to be able to go, and pay for gas. We live in Virginia right now, so 12-ish hour drive. I'll just skip any other background details, along with the drive itself. I've been in my hometown for about 3 days at the time of me, shakily, typing this out.

Not much seemed off when I arrived, other than my GPS shutting off when I reached the town. My wi-fi also cut off, so thank god for data. Other than that, my first day was simple enough. The town's population had nearly halved in the 2 decades I've been gone, but they seem to still be going strong. I was given an empty home as a makeshift hotel.

It was weird during those first few hours. I got the house, was given a short tour and left to my own. I didn't even have to pay for anything.  They said that they "already knew who I am", and they welcomed me with open arms, almost like I had always lived there. The house itself wasn't anything special, wasn't really lived in but had furniture.

Going to the local shops I found that the streets were empty. Not a soul in sight. The only people I saw were cashiers, and even then they had an empty feeling. Like staring into a chasm with no sense of a bottom. Their pupils were almost as dark to match. They just stared while I shopped, not saying a word. It was pretty eerie.

I had bought some random vegetables and spices to try and attempt making a meal, but it ended up going wrong so it doesn't matter. The first actual thing to scare my shitless so far happened when I left the shops.

The street I was on had everyone on it. They were all just... staring at me. The entire time I went back to the donated house. They even followed to keep staring.

I felt my heartrate rising as I approached the house, some were getting closer. I turned the knob and slowly opened the door. Then I looked back. And they were all gone. Not vanished, but there were less people, and they were behaving like regular people. Just walking around town. I quickly entered the house and locked the door after that.

After that whole fiasco, I decided to call my parents to tell them how I was doing. I had to keep up the ploy that I was actually in Wisconsin. I had to choose somewhere basically as far as the town. They always seemed to act strangely if I ever mentioned the town, no less visiting it. So I thought it was best to go in secret.

The call went smoothly until my mother asked me, in a suddenly stark tone and hushed voice, if I had seen something she referred to as "The Stars". She said they weren't literal stars though, they were eyeless people who would stalk people for years on years, right until that person entered their hunting grounds.

She told me she knew where I was, and I wasn't safe.

Then she laughed it all off and went off about that all being nonsense. But something tells me that it wasn't. I grew up knowing everything happens with a reason.

That night I set up my phone to record the front door while I was asleep, but it was limited because I had to keep it charging throughout the night. I had a hunch that I needed to record at least something, anything. So, with the thought of those things she mentioned, I left my phone to record.

On the second day, I immediately went to review that night's footage. It absolutely tore through my storage, so I knew I could only record that one video. Throughout the night, things came in and left my house. They looked like townsfolk, specifically those that were staring at me, and they were staring at the camera the entire time. They knew.

I felt my anxiety starting to grow while I watched the footage. If there weren't any streetlights, they'd probably look like little stars moving around because their eyes glowed in the dark. Not like they were being reflected, no. They produced light, they made silhouettes of each other, their eyes were bright enough.

And one of them went upstairs. Where I was. I recalled a sense of being watched in my sleep. I know now that I was. They all eventually left when the sun began rising, but they did leave something for me.

I found a slip of paper when I woke up. It had 3 drawings on it. Scratch marks, some eyes, and then a grave. They were each marked with a date. Yesterday was the scratch marks. Tonight will be the eyes. Tomorrow is the grave.

I sorta freaked out a little bit when I saw the paper, but it was mostly confusion. I did have a decent bit of anxiety for the night though. Other than that, I wasted the day reviewing the footage from the previous night. What a stupid mistake. I wasted time trying to figure out what happened, I went to bed pretty late, and hungry.

I had a dream last night, the day of the scratch marks. I was sorta flying in the sky over the town. It was a cold night, snow covered the ground. A little bit into the dream, the stars above me suddenly started falling into the ground, sinking through the earth. One of them grabbed me and dragged me down with it.

It was like a person, but with giant glowing wings. It was so bright I couldn't see its face, but I could just feel those eyes staring at me. It screeched and started scratching me all over. My face, my arms, stomach, legs, everywhere. Everything except for my eyes. It did something to my eyes. Tore them out, replaced them, then I woke up.

I woke up screaming and in a cold sweat. And in pain. Lots, and lots of pain. Something had broken through the window of my room and attacked me in the night. There were long, thin scratch marks all over my body, not deep enough to bleed but just deep enough to be red. The drawing came true. My dream was true. I had a horrible feeling.

It had stolen my eyes. I was sure of it. I don't know what did, but it did. Those stars did. I sorta panicked about that all morning. At the time of my writing this, its almost 5 pm. My eyes seem normal. I found some basic medical supplies in the house, so I sorta treated the wounds in hope they didn't get infected.

I'm too scared to leave now. I feel like whatever those stars were, whatever those people who stare are, they'll follow me. I'm scared for my mom and dad. I should have just trusted that the town wasn't a place to return to. I'm scared they'll go for my parents. God dammit.

I'll be staying through the rest of today and through tomorrow. I managed to get all of this rambling to one of my friends, thank god again for data. I told her as much as I could and, after I post this, my account is forfeit to her. I don't want them to have this account. I will return whenever I leave this town with the truth.

Until then, I hope I can see you all soon.