A Reddit user going by IglooAndYou woke up in pain one morning, looked at his wrist, and found something he couldn’t explain.
A near-perfect circle of raised, reddened skin. No memory of how it got there. No one else in the house.
He posted a photo to r/ParanormalEncounters along with some context that made the mark harder to dismiss. He’d been experiencing a string of unsettling events in the house since moving in: terrifying nightmares, unexplained growling sounds, apparitions, hot and cold spots, hearing what he described as unintelligible gibberish, and seeing shapes distort in ways he couldn’t account for. The mark on his wrist was the latest thing in a series of things.
“I’m not sure what caused this,” he wrote, “but I’ll be getting it checked out soon.”
What the Comments Said
The Reddit thread drew hundreds of responses, and they broke almost immediately into two camps.
The majority landed on ringworm, a common fungal skin infection that typically appears as a circular raised rash. Several commenters pointed out that ringworm is contagious and urged OP to get it treated and keep it covered. One esthetician in the thread pushed back slightly, noting the mark didn’t look quite right for a typical ringworm presentation. “Ringworm starts as a solid raised area that clears up in the middle,” she wrote, adding that it still warranted a doctor visit regardless of the cause.
Others threw out fungal infection, eczema, a brown recluse bite, Lyme disease, and one suggestion involving carbon monoxide affecting behavior during sleep. A few pointed to granuloma annulare, a skin condition that produces ring-shaped lesions without any obvious trigger.
Then there was the paranormal camp, which noted that the mark arrived in the middle of an ongoing series of experiences the OP had been documenting in the house.
What OP Thinks
IglooAndYou came back to the thread several times. He’d looked up ringworm himself and wasn’t convinced. “There’s one thing it looks like to me,” he wrote, “which is a human bite mark. But that can’t possibly be it. I live alone.”
He confirmed he was staying in the UK at the time, not his primary US residence. He said he’d be going to the doctor and would post an update.
Whether the mark has a medical explanation or not, the combination of ongoing activity in the house and a physical mark appearing overnight is the kind of thing that’s difficult to file neatly under either column.
The Honest Answer
Ringworm is the most statistically likely explanation. Skin conditions can do strange things, and a circular rash on the wrist of someone living in a new house in a foreign country is not, on its own, remarkable.
But the wider context matters to the people in that thread who weren’t laughing it off. A mark that appears during sleep, in a house full of reported activity, on a person who lives completely alone — that’s a different frame than a standalone rash with no history attached.
Whatever the doctor found, the photo itself is striking. And the question of what left it is genuinely open.
So we’ll ask you directly: what do you think it is? Drop your theory in the comments below.
