14 people share the scariest stories from their town and DEAR GOD WE CAN'T SLEEP NOW.

Anyone from a small town or tight-knit suburban neighbourhood will have that house on the end of the street with a dark story behind it.

The one they drive slowly past each time as they impart dramatic tales to their passengers of the terrors which once occurred behind the front door.

Sometimes it’s not entirely clear whether these stories are just urban legends cooked up by a gossipy neighbour at the street-wide Christmas party, but it makes for great storytelling, doesn’t it?

Is Toowoomba Australia’s most haunted city? Post continues after.

This week, people have taken to Reddit to share the scandalous stories of their small towns – and some of them are truly chilling.

We also pooled some of our own stories from the Mamamia office and yikes.

Here are 15 of the juiciest we could dig up.

(Some of these definitely sound fit for a Netflix series we would binge in a weekend).

From Reddit:

1. The missing wife

“Some lawyer’s wife went missing, there was a big search effort to find her including air force jets flying over the surrounding woods to find recently disturbed ground (indicating a possible burial).

“They couldn’t find her for days until finally a neighbour went to the media to point out the lawyer had remodelled the sitting area in his garden recently including pouring himself a nice big concrete slab right outside his back door the day before he reported his wife missing. Sure enough, they dug up that area and found her body.”

2. Dwindling population

“Five students and a teacher committed suicide all within a week of each other. The youngest was eight years old. All cases were unrelated and murders and suicides are very common in my town so our 5,000+ population keeps dropping.”

3. Unsolved murder

“There’s still an ‘unsolved’ murder in our town. The whole town and most of the next county knows who did it but no one will come forward.

“It was a terrible story- teenage girl vanished while in plain sight. There’s only one genuine suspect – it really was kinda a done deal but… no arrest.

“It’s a weird, weird place anyway. 1/100th uber wealthy, the rest poverty level. This suspect was from the 1/100th of the population, the whole family owned half the town for generations. Suspect ‘remains at large’ although he was mysteriously beaten up a few years ago. He’d walked into a bar and made a joke about the missing girl.

“Case was on one of the TV shows asking for help solving it, there were billboards put up by her family for years and it’s still a major source of scandal. Dirty secret indeed.”

4. Town cannibal

“There is a convicted cannibal in our town. Seriously. He killed his friend while being drunk, then ate his jaw. He had his trial, went to prison, but was set free because the largest political party in the country wanted to free their leader from the prison (corruption) in a legal way. This meant that many criminals were pardoned. Also, he is a drug addict, he sniffed glue on a daily basis.”

5. Never swim in the lake or walk in the woods

“I live in a small town in the middle of the woods. It’s a beautiful place, with a large lake nearby. Ask anyone you meet in the local café, and they’ll say that it’s a lovely place. However, somethings happen that you can’t ignore.

“Never go into the lake. It doesn’t matter how well you can swim. More people died in that lake last year than I could count with my fingers. A well trained swimmer was out with his kids, and the kids were on a raft. He drowned right in front of them. There are cracks in the lake, and many people fall down and can’t get up. Tourists never know better, and usually die.”

“Never go into the woods alone. It reeks of death. Bones are scattered about, most are deer. There are also cat bones, bird bones, coyote bones etc, but these aren’t as common. Pre-dug shallow graves cover the ground, so watch your step. Old abandoned houses covered in graffiti are home to creepy dolls and old machetes, sometimes home to people. One of my friends we call ‘the bone man’ because he goes out in the woods with a big pillowcase and collects bones to clean and sell. He always brings a weapon with him, just in case.”

6. Craigslist killer

“Some guy from a town north of ours put an ad on Craigslist promising work in our town on a farm two miles from my house. He murdered all of the men who responded to his ad except for one who was shot in the elbow, ran a mile or so to my neighbour’s and reported what happened.

“The bodies were buried maybe 1.5 miles from my backyard. The man who posted it on Craigslist was arrested and police discovered he had a 16 or 17-year old helping him out. Both are serving life and the older guy is a possibility for death row.”

7. Hot air balloon kidnapper

“One guy in our neighbourhood kidnapped people in hot air balloons. This guy held his kids hostage in a balloon when his wife wanted a divorce. He ran/runs a hot air balloon service.”

8. Disappearing cars

“Several dozen tourists parked their cars on the frozen lake when it wasn’t adequately thick ice. Their cars went for an unexpected dip in the lake.

“The whole town was talking about it but everyone was split between sympathy for the people and those who thought it was funny that the tourists hadn’t thought their parking choice through or bothered to ask a local about the ice.

“It actually made the town a little tense for a while with half the people thinking It was sh*tty that some locals thought it was funny, which is fair, and the other group thinking it’s okay to laugh at the city folk being a bit naive, which is kinda fair too.”

And from the Mamamia office:

9. Neighbourhood watch

“My neighbours had a drug greenhouse. One day my mum was at home and the cops ran up our driveway with their guns out and in bullet proof vests and she was like ‘OMG what has my husband done’. Then when I came home from school our entire cul-de-sac of neighbours were in my bedroom watching the house next door. They all got arrested and my mum still talks about it with the neighbours to this day.”

10. Pumpkin Man and Ziggy the Bagman

“In my hometown there was a man who would walk the streets daily with a trolley full of pumpkins. Pumpkin man still walks the same route to buy pumpkins every single day and lugs them home. The walk is long and he’s orange from only eating pumpkins.

“I also lived near ‘Ziggy the bagman’, he’s a super friendly gentleman who chooses to be homeless but in reality is quite wealthy.”

11. Mysterious green house

“We had this neon green house in my suburb, and there was this rumour that this man killed his family in a car accident and went crazy and painted his house green.”

12. Haunted restaurant

“A few years ago, a restaurant opened in town in an old bank building that was built around the time of first settlers. It was going really well but it closed abruptly after just a few months in business.

“I went on to work with a chef who worked there who claimed there was loads of paranormal/weird activity going on in the restaurant. Like plates randomly flying off the shelves and customers complaining about super cold spots, it’s just really weird and unsettling.”

13. Murdered parents

“Three kids from my neighbourhood murdered their parents. One guy beat his mother to death because she was mad at him for not practising piano, another girl, who actually went to my school, stabbed her mother and tried to kill her father because they wouldn’t let her be with her boyfriend, and the third stabbed his mother during a mental breakdown.”

14. Creepy open house

“Mum and I once went to an open house in our neighbourhood and it just had a really weird vibe. Everything was dishevelled, things half still there, like the people had left really suddenly. The walls were also freshly painted, and we noticed there were photos of the Virgin Mary and Jesus, but the frames had been placed face down. Later we discovered, the house was the scene of a horrific murder where a Sydney teenager had slaughtered his parents and 18-year-old sister one-by-one.”

Do you have a dark tale from your small town or suburb? Let us know in the comments below.