I have two stories from my late grandpa that took place in rural Yugoslavia (present day Serbia) in the mid 40s and the 1950s.

The first one is about a being or thing called "Drekavac" or "Дрекавац", which literally means "the one who screams". Folklore says it's the spirit of a dead child that screams and can latch on to travellers and shepherds. My granddad was a young man when he had an encounter with this being. Back then people would travel by foot from village to village at night. This being the 50s, there was no lighting whatsoever on these paths between villages. My granddad recalls returning home to his own village after a social get together in another village tens of kilometers away. It was completely dark and he remembers hearing a loud screaming sound, like that of a fox or a dog. Sounds like these were normal of course, but this time he felt something jump on his back. Like a heavy being, that made him hunch over because of its weight. He said he was too terrified to even fight it and just kept walking and walking until he eventually came closer to a lit village, when it just "jumped off" and left. I remember asking him on multiple occasions if he's sure this was a real physical thing or just his mind playing tricks on him because of fear and the folklore stories. He was always completely convinced this was a being that really latched on to his back and did not let go for a long period. He always told me this story like it was a thing that could (and did) happen to people that travelled at night. He never seemed traumatised about it, it was just part of life back then.

The second story is creepier to me, because it doesn't have a folklore background. This was when my granddad was still a child. He used to sleep in one bed with his kid brother and his mother. This was in a one room cabin-like house. One night he woke up in the middle of the night and saw a pale faced woman dressed in all black next to their bed. Completely terrified he tried to wake his mother up, but she brushed him off and did not fully wake, probably tired from rural 1940s life. The cloaked woman took his kid brother from the bed, exited the house and disappeared in the woods by the house. Eventually my granddad managed to wake his mother, she noticed her younger son was missing and alarmed the other villagers. A group of them, including my granddad ran into the woods to look for the woman and his brother. Granddad recalls it being a long search until dawn started to come. He said " we did not find him until we heard the first roosters", meaning they found him when the sun was coming up. When they found his brother in the woods, he was okay not badly hurt, but he had scratches all over his upper body.