8 Stories of People with Inexplicable Childhood Memories

Childhood memories are often some of the brightest and happiest. However, it is also from childhood that we often retain strange and unexplainable memories that can confuse and even frighten us in adulthood. Here are a few such stories.

• I was 4. My family had a bad car accident. My mom died. I only have a few memories from before the accident, but I do remember her well. She had brown hair, was short and chubby, and had a very sweet, toothy smile. I remember her holding me in her lap in her rocking chair. I remember her singing to me
  My mom today is a different woman. She insists that she gave birth to me... My dad and my older sisters have no memory of my first mom, who died. All my memories of my second mom begin after my first mom died. Whenever I bring it up, my family cracks a joke about me being crazy and then changes the subject. But here’s how I’m sure my mom today is not the same woman:
  1. My birth certificate lists my mom’s name as Marie, and that is not my current mom’s name! But she insists it was a clerical error at the hospital that they never bothered to correct.
  2. My cousin, who is 11 years older than me, once made an off-hand remark about the accident, and how different our family would be if it hadn’t happened. I asked what he meant, and he said, “You know, your mom...” But he wouldn’t add anything else.
  3. My sister once told me, “Sometimes you just need to accept the truth of your life as it is now, there is no truth in the past.” © Imnotcrazythrowaway / Reddit

• Laying in bed one night, it’s pitch black apart from the light creeping under the door from the landing. My mum was actually with me in the same room as we had only just moved in, and she was sleeping on the floor. I look up and the door slowly creeks open and slowly an oldish women peers around the door looks at me and goes away. I just thought I was in a nightmare and turned around real fast and went under the covers, hoping I would wake up. Then I will never forget my mum whispering to me, “Did you just see someone peer round the door?”. Safe to say, we didn’t sleep a wink that night. © PM-ME-YOUR-POEM / Reddit

• Once upon a time I was at a family friend’s house and went to their toilet. For some reason I decided to open the lid of the box part of the toilet, and for some reason there was a large live crayfish in there just chilling. © SuperGIoo / Reddit

• When I was 9, I fell down the stair leading from the second to first floor. A woman walked up to me and asked me if I was okay, I thought she was a friend of my grandma’s. I told her I was okay. And then I asked my grandma in the other room who her friend was.
  She had no clue who I was talking about. I saw this woman multiple times. Finally, my mom took me to the previous owner of the house, and she showed me a photo of her grandma, it was the woman. © Unknown Author / Reddit

• I woke up in the middle of the night and I looked in the corner of my room and saw a hooded figure next to my dresser. At first, I thought it was just some clothes hanging off my dresser, but then it turned, and I saw red eyes staring at me. I immediately jumped out of bed and turned on the lights. There were no clothes hanging off my dresser.
  I would have just brushed it off as a bad dream, but then I saw my dog staring at the corner. I was outside of the room and I kept calling her to come out, but she would not stop staring where I had seen the hooded figure. She did not react at all to me calling her, and so I finally just went back in my room and yanked her off the bed.
  I slept in the living room the rest of the night, and my dog slept in my parent’s room for the rest of her life. © baronjohnson / Reddit

• When I was a kid, my dad would take us to a giant lake, with a big sandy shore, like a landlocked beach. I was wading in the shallow end, when I felt something brush through my fingers. Being 7, and wishing it was a real beach, I thought, “Maybe these are sea plants!” Then realized that was stupid.
  As I squeezed the tendrils that were brushing my hand, they squished and sunk, and I felt bones through the soft, squishy mass. Finger bones like I was holding the hand of a child my age. I got out of the water, sat on the shore, and told no one.
  A year later, my sister said she thought a boy had been kicking her under the water, but when she grabbed at the foot, it felt cold and squishy, and she also told no one. © Bathysphere710 / Reddit

• When I was around 7, I was lying down on my bed with a recorder in hand. Then my hand with the recorder suddenly closed in, and the recorder was gone, never found it again. RIP recorder © VeryRoomy / Reddit

• At a roller skating rink when I was about 12, I was just rolling towards the rink after getting food, and suddenly I felt a prick on my right arm. I looked back and saw a woman holding a long, needle-like object. So I stopped and asked what she was doing, and the lady said, “Body fat test” and then hightailed it out of there. The employees were all 17-year-olds, so by the time I got anyone’s attention, the woman was gone.
  I have since been tested for tons of illnesses and diseases because of my job, which confirmed that I wasn’t given any random disease then, but to this day I still have no clue what happened. © lifepuzzler / Reddit

Do you have any strange or frightening childhood memories? Here are some more stories from people who do.