Ready to Be Freaked Out? It’s Scary Story Contest Time!

Submit your real-life scary stories in the comments. There are just a few rules...

By Nora Biette-Timmons  |  October 1, 2025 | 7:00am
Photo: iStockphoto In Depth
Ready to Be Freaked Out? It’s Scary Story Contest Time!

For well over a decade now, the Jezebel commenters have collectively been spooking the pants off the internet at this time of year. A lot has changed in that period of time (for you, for me, for Jezebel, for our poor miserable world), but I’m pleased to be proving that the more things change, the more they stay the same: our scary story contest is back for another year. 

If you’re unfamiliar with this game, it’s pretty simple: Submit your real-life scary stories throughout the month of October, and at the end of the month, we’ll publish the winners. There are just a few ground rules: 

  • Your story must be true. The best guidance on this comes from former Jezebel editor Madeleine Davies: You are “on the honor system here and—of course—when we’re talking about ghosts, the truth is relative to what you believe. To clarify: It must be experienced or sincerely believed by YOU, the teller.”
  • Your story must be scary. Not pithy or moralistic… Frightening. Unnerving. Makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. But you can also interpret “scary” somewhat broadly—humans can be just as scary as beings from other realms.
  • Your story may not be written using AI. If I detect so much as a whiff of phrasing that only a computer programmed by tech losers would generate, your entry is disqualified. (This is a new rule this year.)
  • You must submit your story in the comments of this post. The public nature of these scary story submissions is half the fun.
  • Unnecessarily long stories will be penalized in the final judging—aka I am less likely to pick them. We’re reading these to be scared, not to memorize blueprints of the haunted theater you used to work in. The only edits I’ll give the final stories will be for readability.

For reminders of what we’re looking for (and to tide you over until the comments section of this post becomes stuffed with scariness), here are some winning scary story posts from past years: 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.

Now, get to posting your own terrifying tales in the comments. We’ll select the scariest at the end of the month and publish them for everyone’s collective reading horror just in time for Halloween.

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