The 5 MOST HAUNTED Videos of the Year — Real Paranormal Moments Caught on Camera (Don’t Watch Alone!)

“Five Nights That Wouldn’t Let Me Sleep”

By the time you’ve spent a few years in the dark, you start to realise not every haunting feels the same.

Some places cling to you because of what you see. Others because of what you hear. And then there are the ones that get inside your head for reasons you can’t explain—even after you’ve watched the footage a hundred times.

Those are the ones that keep you up at night.

I travel the world exploring haunted places: historic estates, derelict homes, forgotten institutions where voices are heard and movement is seen where no one should be. I’ve seen doors slam, heard unseen footsteps, watched equipment go off when it shouldn’t. Most of it, with enough effort, you can rationalise.

.

.

.

But not everything.

What follows are five encounters from 2025 that refused to be filed away as “just the wind” or “old buildings settling.” Five nights I can still replay in my head, frame by frame, and I still don’t have an answer I’m comfortable with.

1. The Poet’s House

We called it the Poet’s House because of the notebooks.

They were everywhere—curled, mold‑stained journals left on beds, stuffed into drawers, scattered across the floor as if someone had tried to take them all at once and given up. Pages full of rough ink lines, scribbled verses, half‑finished stanzas. Whoever had lived there had written obsessively, right up until the moment they’d stopped.

The house itself sat back from the road, behind a curtain of trees and a rusted iron gate no one had bothered to lock. The path to the front door was half swallowed by weeds. The upper windows were blind with dust and cobwebs.

Inside, the air was thick with damp and paper rot. Every step sent a soft puff of dust up from the floorboards. The wallpaper had sloughed from the walls years ago. Still, the place had a strange kind of order—as if someone had walked out one morning planning to return that evening, then never did.

We’d already spent an hour in the bedrooms, asking questions, getting responses.

“Is there somebody in this bed?” I’d asked in one small room, the SLS camera pointed at the narrow single bed pressed against the wall.

The device, which maps human shapes using depth sensors, showed something. A skeletal, flickering stick‑figure form curled on the mattress.

“In these beds,” I’d corrected quietly, noticing a second shape at the foot of the bed.

“Go back to the end of this bed,” I said to the air.

On screen, the mapped figure shifted obediently.

The K2 had spiked in certain spots. The spirit box had thrown out the word “American” with suspicious relevance when we’d asked who had lived there. The house was active in the way you expect a classic haunting to be active.

But then, in the upper corridor, things changed.

We were filming the landing—narrow, dim, a series of doors gaping into shadow. My torch beam floated over peeling paint and open doorways. At the far end of the corridor was a closed door, its paint blistered and cracked. For no obvious reason, the air around that door felt wrong. Heavy.

“I just had a weird feeling down there,” I said, nodding toward it.

The words had barely left my mouth when a sound came from the same direction—loud enough to make both of us flinch.

WHAM.

It sounded like someone had thrown their body against the door. Or shoved something heavy into it from the other side.

“What the—was that?” I snapped, heart jack‑knifing.

We froze, listening. The house held its breath.

“That was behind you,” Aaron said. “That was downstairs.”

But I knew where I’d heard it: from the end of the corridor. From the direction I’d just said I felt uneasy about.

We checked, of course. That’s always the first step. No branches against windows. No fallen plaster. No loose doors hanging in drafts. Nothing that matched the sound we’d just heard.

“At this point,” I said to camera, trying to keep my voice steady, “I think it might be time to leave. For safety.”

We headed for the stairwell.

“And those noises were like someone was trying to get in, right?” I said as we approached the front door, half joking, half not.

The house remained stubbornly quiet.

Then I opened the door.

As I pulled it toward me, letting the cool outside air breathe in, something behind Aaron moved in the dark—a sharp, violent crash from a side room.

The sound was unmistakable: something thrown. Hard.

“Run, run, run, run,” I heard myself shout on the footage. We bolted down the path, the beam of my torch bouncing wildly as we ran.

Out in the open air, heart hammering, I replayed the moment in my head. The crash had come from behind us, from a room we’d already checked. A room we knew was empty.

What scared me more than the possibility of a spirit throwing something at us was the other option:

That someone had been in the house with us the entire time.

2. The Priest’s Cottage

The priest’s cottage in Leeds does not look like a horror movie set.

It’s small. Modest. The kind of place you’d picture a kindly old vicar in—books, tea, a worn sofa, a little garden out back. But the history behind it is a different story entirely.

This was where bodies had been prepared.

I learned that standing in the basement, my torch beam sliding over stone walls and old hooks. The air down there was colder, carrying a hint of something metallic.

“This is where he prepared the bodies, apparently,” I said to the camera.

“Yeah,” my friend replied, his voice bouncing hollowly off the low ceiling.

I was about to ask something else when I heard it.

“Knock,” I said instinctively. “Did you hear that?”

A single, crisp rapping sound from elsewhere in the basement, like knuckles against wood.

“Yeah,” he said.

“And again,” I added a second later, as another knock came—closer this time. I turned, scanning the room.

“That was the bed,” I said, realising the sound had come from near an old frame against the wall.

What we didn’t notice at the time was the other sound our camera picked up—soft, low, and layered under the knock.

When I reviewed the audio later, cranking the volume, I heard it clearly:

A voice.

Not loud. Not clear. But woven through the knock sequence like someone exhaling words through gritted teeth. It sounded like someone in distress.

We didn’t know that yet, though.

We decided to leave the cottage for an hour, to see what the place did without us. We set up equipment in an upstairs room—a teddy bear trigger object, some blocks on the floor, a few devices—and left. Completely empty house, no one inside.

Later, going through the footage, I watched the empty room.

The bear lit up on its own. A REM device chirped. Two very distinct knocks sounded from inside the room, in a clear answering rhythm to the questions I’d left running on a loop.

“Can you sing for me?” my disembodied voice asked from a speaker.

Silence.

“Can you sing for me?” it repeated.

A knock.

Then another.

We’d been nowhere near the building at that point.

The activity didn’t stop there.

That night, we decided to do a séance in the cottage—just the two of us, a circle of candles, the recorder running.

“If you’d like us to leave,” I said into the dimness, “make a sound now. Make a knock.”

The response was immediate.

THUD.

It came from directly above us. Heavy. Solid. Like someone dropping their weight on the floor.

“If you’re angry about us being here,” I pushed, “let us know.”

We held still.

Several loud knocks pounded across the ceiling—one, two, three—like fists or feet.

Upstairs, we’d left a set of wooden blocks on the floor, neatly stacked.

“The blocks have fell over,” my friend called down when he went to check. “Oh, you’re joking. The blocks have fell over.”

We filmed them as they lay scattered—pieces that had been standing now toppled, as if someone had nudged them in passing.

Maybe it was just vibration. Maybe the house had creaked hard enough, at the exact right moment, to send them sliding.

Maybe.

But it felt like something was answering.

3. Hell Hospital

Brongnog Hospital was never built to heal. Not really.

It was built to separate—sick from healthy, infected from clean. An isolation hospital, not a sanctuary. A place to move the problem out of sight.

Decades after it closed, the building had been left to sag and peel in the Welsh weather. Paint bubbled. Wallpaper hung like sloughed skin. The corridors, once designed to be efficient and clean, now felt like veins in a sleeping animal.

We were moving through one of those corridors when the first thing happened.

“They’re waiting rooms,” I said, turning my camera toward a side room with plastic chairs still lining the walls.

“Woo,” Sean said behind me in mock excitement. “I’m here for the chaos.”

She always said things like that to cut the tension. It worked—for about half a second.

“Did you hear that on the glass?” I asked, freezing.

“Yeah, I did,” she replied.

Just as I’d been about to step into the waiting room, a tiny tap had sounded on the glass of the inner door. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just a single, purposeful tick.

Like someone flicking a finger against the pane to get my attention.

“I already had a bad feeling about this corridor,” I admitted later. The tap didn’t help.

I decided to go in anyway.

“Stay there, keep the door open,” I told Sean. I didn’t like the idea of being inside that room alone, with the heavy door shut.

I stepped in. The air felt marginally colder. The camera picked out faded posters, chairs, a defunct wall heater. Behind me, the corridor was a strip of dim light.

And then the door moved.

On camera, you can see it clearly: I step just past the threshold. The door, which had been open for years, swings slowly in behind me.

I didn’t touch it.

At first, it’s subtle. The kind of movement you’d blame on a draught. But half a second later, it commits. It picks up speed and slams shut with a force far beyond what a stray breeze could muster.

I jumped, of course.

“Oh my god,” I said, whipping around. “Sean!”

From her side, she saw it close in her face. No one touching it. No obvious reason.

A rational brain says: old floorboards. The shift of my weight rocking the frame just enough. Air pressure.

But something about the timing didn’t sit right.

We carried on in different wings of the hospital. Because if you leave every time a door slams, you never get anything done.

Later that night, we were on the far side of the hospital, filming in what used to be a palliative care room. The atmosphere there was thick, heavy with the knowledge that this was where people had often taken their last breaths.

“Is that why you’re still here?” I asked softly into the darkness. “Was it very traumatic for you?”

On the raw footage, it looks like a standard shot. Corridor in the background. Doorways leading off. Nothing unusual.

But when I slowed it down in editing, I saw it.

One of the doors in the palliative care wing—closed to just a crack—moved. Not all the way. Just enough.

Something on the other side pulled.

The door jerked inward a centimeter or two, like someone on the inside had taken hold of the handle and tugged, as if checking if it was safe to come out.

We didn’t see it in real time. We were asking questions, focused elsewhere. The subtle movement didn’t register until later.

Taken together—tiny taps on glass, doors closing at exactly the wrong moment, doors pulling from the inside when we were nowhere near—Brongnog felt less like a dead building and more like a place that still had… reflexes.

Was it the most haunted place in Wales? I don’t know.

But walking those corridors, listening to the echoes of our own footsteps, it felt very much like a building that was still listening back.

4. The Demon of Cornist Hall

Cornist Hall doesn’t look demonic in daylight.

It looks tired.

The grand staircase is splintered. The big windows are mostly gone, leaving jagged mouths that let the weather in. The grounds are overgrown. The building is slowly folding in on itself, one wet winter at a time.

But the air inside is wrong.

There’s a flatness to the silence that feels less like emptiness and more like anticipation. As if, the moment you open your mouth, something else will answer.

“If there’s anyone in this building that would like to communicate with us tonight,” I called into the main hall, my voice bouncing off stone and plaster, “you can come forward. Let us know that you’re here in some sort of way. That’d be absolutely amazing.”

I hadn’t finished the sentence when it started.

From somewhere deeper in the building—metallic, sharp, unmistakable:

BANG. BANG.

The sound of something striking metal. A gate. A sheet of iron. A barrel.

“Let us know that you’re here in some sort of way,” my voice repeated on the audio later.

As if in direct response: BANG.

Sometimes buildings creak. Pipes expand. Roof beams shift. This wasn’t that. This was impact.

We followed the sound as best we could, tracking room to room. The metal noises came and went, never quite in front of us. Always a room away. Always where we weren’t.

At one point, Sean stood in a doorway, hair falling over her shoulders, as we listened to something that sounded like a door gently knocking on its own hinges.

“Sounds like a door,” I said.

“Does sound like a door,” she echoed.

On the footage, as we talk, you can see it:

One strand of her hair lifts.

Just one.

It doesn’t waft gently like hair in a breeze. It rises—smoothly, deliberately—as if pinched between unseen fingers and drawn upward.

Then it falls.

I’ve watched that clip more times than I can count. If it had been wind, more than one strand would move. Her whole fringe would have shifted. The door beside her would have swayed. Instead, everything else in frame is absolutely still.

Just that one, fine strand, raised and released.

“Let’s see,” I say on the audio, unaware.

We laughed about it later, the absurdity of being haunted at the follicle level, but in the room at that time, I remember feeling like something was standing very close to her.

The doorway seemed to be a focal point. A threshold again.

Moments later, in that same doorway, we got something far less subtle.

“Did you hear it then?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Sean replied.

We watched as the door, slightly ajar, began to move.

At first, it crept, like a hesitant hand closing. Then, just as I approached, it slammed shut.

“Oh my god,” I breathed. “No way.”

“Could have been the wind,” I said on the recording. “Could have been.”

But when I watched it back, the sequence was wrong for a simple gust. The door closed slowly, steadily, and then—when I stepped toward it—it snapped shut with force.

“You got any bad feelings?” I asked Sean later that night, in the main hall.

“I don’t,” she said.

Neither did I—until right then.

Because as I finished the question, something hit the front door.

Hard.

The sound echoed through the hall like a body slamming into wood. Deep. Heavy. Intentional.

To understand how unsettling that was, you need to picture the exterior: gravel path, no pavement, no passing pedestrians at 3 a.m. No visible houses overlooking the front. No sign of security or neighbours. And if there had been someone out there, they would have had to stand right up against the door, on the gravel, at three in the morning, and strike it without saying a word.

No footsteps approached. No footsteps retreated. Just that single, bone‑deep thud.

“What do you think this was?” I asked in the voice‑over later. “A sneaky neighbour? Security? Or was it the spirit letting us know he was there—and that we weren’t welcome?”

In all honesty, none of those options made me feel better.

5. The Screaming Girl – Holly Lodge

Holly Lodge in Liverpool is less a haunted house and more a haunted site.

The building itself—a former boarding school—sits on land that has been talked about for centuries. Stories of unrest. Of things seen at the edge of vision. Of sounds where there should be no sounds.

Some people believe whatever was here before the school was built never left.

I understood what they meant within minutes of stepping inside.

The corridors smelled of dust and old chalk. Rooms still held rows of desks, chairs upended, textbooks damp and curling on shelves. It was like walking through a school caught mid‑evacuation.

“I mean, we can push our way in here,” I said, leaning into a stubborn door.

Spirit Talker, running in my pocket, chose that moment to speak.

“It’s watching you,” it said. Clear. Emotionless.

I went still.

“It’s watching you,” it repeated.

Almost immediately, from the far side of the room, two loud bangs sounded—sharp, hollow impacts echoing through the empty space.

“Hello?” I called.

No reply.

I hadn’t explored the full building yet. I didn’t know if I was alone. The logical part of my brain insisted I keep going until I could check.

“Horrible things happened here,” the app said next.

I swallowed. “Horrible things happened here,” I repeated quietly.

“And you can’t leave,” it added.

I glanced toward the staircase. The banister wobbled under my hand. The treads sagged.

“Oh my god, these stairs,” I muttered. The building felt like it was physically disintegrating, right under the weight of all the history it held.

“Don’t be afraid,” Spirit Talker said.

“Oh my god,” I said again, half laughing, half panicking. “Don’t be afraid as I’m just panicking about this.”

“He wants to talk,” the app insisted. “He wants to talk.”

After covering the upper floors and confirming there was no one else there, I sat down near the back of the building, away from the traffic noise, and set up a spirit box session.

“I’m going to head to the back of the building, away from the traffic,” I said into the camera. “See if we can get anything.”

The box hissed and muttered as it scanned.

“So,” I said, “can you do that? Can you knock for me? Knock, knock, knock.”

Almost immediately, a voice cut through the static.

“Knock,” it said.

“Come on,” I said, pulse picking up. “It doesn’t get more relevant than that. I say knock, you say knock. Let’s stop playing games.”

The responses stayed sharp for a while. Answering, deflecting, sometimes mocking. But as the session went on, a different tone slipped in.

“They do seem hostile,” I said into my recorder as I prepared to wind things down. “They do not seem to want to speak to me.”

On the raw audio, over those words, another voice emerges.

To speak to me, it whispers.

I played it back three times in the editing software. Each time, the same thing:

My voice: “They do not seem to want to speak to me.”

Under it: a breathy, disembodied phrase.

To speak to me.

After checking the building again—no one outside, no one in the corridors, no children hiding behind desks—I decided to try one more thing.

An EVP session.

I pulled out a more sensitive recorder. No spirit box, no apps. Just my questions and whatever the building wanted to give back.

“Let’s see if this picked it up,” I said, clicking record.

“Okay. If there’s anyone in this building that would like to speak with me—any of the students, a teacher, maybe the headmaster—can you speak to me through this device?”

I left a long pause.

In the room, I heard nothing. Just the faint hum of distant traffic, the creak of the building, my own breathing.

On playback, there was something else.

I didn’t catch the whistle at first. What I did hear, very clearly, was the sound of children talking.

Not one voice. Several. Overlapping, the way kids sound at the start of class when the teacher hasn’t arrived yet. Echoes. The reverb in the audio matched the space I was in—the way sound behaves in a high‑ceilinged classroom.

“It’s like a classroom, eh?” I said on the recording.

Because that’s exactly what it sounded like: a classroom still in session, years after the last bell.

What made it worse was knowing how few houses were close enough for outside sound to have bled in—and how different that sound would have been if it had. Different echo. Different direction.

Whatever the recorder picked up, it wasn’t outside.

That should have been enough.

It wasn’t.

I tried one more EVP, because curiosity is the worst and best impulse in this work.

“Can you give me a name,” I asked, “of somebody that still resides here today?”

Silence.

The kind of silence that presses on your eardrums.

Then it came.

I didn’t hear it in the room. On the raw audio, it’s unmistakable.

A scream.

Not distant. Not muffled. Not like someone shouting from across the street.

This was close, right up on the recorder. High‑pitched, sharp, and ragged, like a young girl in pain. No drawn‑out horror‑movie wail—just a sudden, desperate, banshee‑like cry, ripped out of nothing.

It was over in less than a second, but when I heard it on playback, every hair on my arms stood up.

I replayed it. Over and over.

Each time, it was the same: the timbre, the intensity, the direction. It didn’t shift like radio interference. It didn’t carry the fuzziness of a distant sound. It was there—and then it wasn’t.

“What do you think?” I asked in the final cut. “Do you hear a girl scream? Something human? Or something trying to sound that way?”

I still ask myself that.

Standing in that empty classroom, recorder in hand, I had no idea there was someone screaming in my ear.

Or something.

🧠 Why These Five Won’t Let Go

I’ve been doing this long enough to know how easy it is for old buildings to trick you.

They creak. They shift. They swell and contract with temperature. Sound does strange things in empty hallways. Electromagnetic fields spike for reasons that have nothing to do with ghosts.

I know all that.

And still.

There’s the moment in the Poet’s House where something throws a crash at us the second we open the door to leave.
The voice in the Priest’s Cottage that groans beneath knocks we thought were just wood. The toys that move when we’re not there.
The door in Hell Hospital that closes at the exact second I step in—and the door in palliative care that tugs from the inside when we’re nowhere near.
The single strand of hair in Cornist Hall that lifts like someone’s testing how real we are. The front door that takes a hit with no footsteps to explain it.
And at Holly Lodge, the classroom voices, recorded in a building that should have been empty—and the scream that never reached my ears until I put headphones on.

Could all of it, taken separately, be coincidence?

Maybe.

But these five nights aren’t separate in my head. They sit in a row, linked—not by proof, but by a feeling. A sense that, in each of those buildings, for a few seconds, we stopped being the only ones observing.

Something observed us back.

So I keep traveling. Keep filming. Keep asking questions in places where nobody should answer.

Because the more I see, the more one thought refuses to leave me alone:

If even one of these moments is real—if even one voice, one knock, one scream belongs to somebody who didn’t stop existing when their heart did—then the world is stranger, and bigger, than we think.

And that’s worth losing a few nights’ sleep over.