Paranormal or explainable.
I grew up in St Catharines Ontario, home of Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo the serial killing couple who abducted, raped and killed teenaged girls, including her 12 year old sister, for a while in the 90s. It was EVERYTHING in my world for a long while. I was extraordinarily fanatically careful about where I went from then on, never travelling anywhere alone, etc. Bernardo also raped a great many women at bus stops before escalating to murder.
And one night I hit my twenties and said fuck it and decided to walk home from the bar we were doing karaoke at, and isn’t there a man with a car idling at the top of the small hill I was climbing waiting for me for what seemed like hours. It was plain he intended to take me, and I think it was only the stark terror on my face that made it clear I’d be a very unwilling victim and fight back and that I was sober as a judge. He told me he was just going to offer me a ride, and I said no, saucer eyed, and he paused for a minute and then said “sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you” and drove off.
As a baby, my son went through a period of febrile seizures. Basically, if he got a fever, it could cause him to have seizures. Even after learning what was happening and that it was “harmless,” it was an absolutely chilling/gut-wrenching experience, but the first time was particularly nightmarish.
I had the exact same experience. My son became cyanotic since his breathing was so shallow, and then he passes out. For a second I thought he died there and then. Quickly came too. And the ambulance took a wrong turn. Rember running after it. Man, had I had that motivation when young and fit I would have beat Usain Bolt
Just awful. I remember sitting on the couch, friends were over, my ~1-year-old son was sick/feverish but still happily toddling about, came over to me, eyes rolled back, he collapsed backward and was convulsing. I picked him up and was cradling him, sort of yelling at/pleading with him/trying to comfort him? Just panicking basically. Friends called ambulance, I ran outside in barefeet holding him still completely limp. Ugh. There was absolutely no thinking, in that moment, that “this is totally fine and okay/harmless,” even though that was the general response of the various, multiple hospital people.
A sudden, relatively small ice patch on a curvy mountain road with no road barrier and a car coming towards me. I swirled towards abyss, then a rock wall, then back to the abyss, and the other car somehow passed me too. Thankfully neither me nor the others were hurt.
Unironically, I cannot remember.
That time I ate way too much cubensis and was molecularly taken apart and put together again by the void, that was fun.
Ah, yes. I can’t say I had such a transcendental experience… still I remember watching a small animal, like a field mouse -but bearing wings, that was sipping from my beer using a long trunk reaching down to the heavenly liquid.
On a trip to Iceland, was hiking with my mom. I see a spot I want a photo in so I hand her my phone and trek out there. It was a small outcropping at the same height of the trail, overlooking some gulleys. Others had been out there because there was a worn path.
I’m standing out there for my photo, and some wind blows through. It picked me up off my feet. Like, I was weightless and severed from the ground for a few seconds.
I knew in that moment I was going to die. The wind would carry me over the edge and down to the gully below. Luckily, it didn’t last long enough to do that, and dropped me back on my feet, but I was so close to death, I could feel it.
People, the Icelandic wind is no joke. There was no uptick to warn me, no dirt or grass or whatever whipping around. It wasn’t A windy day. It was just no wind, then sudden wind strong enough able to pick up a 190lb woman clear off the earth.
I kept to the main trail after that.
Iceland has many crazy areas, and even where there signs (particularly on the beaches), people still venture onto the deadly rocks
Blimey I had no idea that could happen sounds scary
Waking up to Trump’s day-one anti trans EO calling me an “anti American Ideology” and waging war on trans people. My partner and I made the decision then and there to escape.
Close second is choking on a piece of baked potato while home alone as a kid
Not affecting me, came back from a trip to find my friend nearly comatose on my couch. She had been watching the apartment. Her blood sugar was over 1000.
When I woke up blind from surgery. Years ago I had FFS. Mine involved significant reshaping of the brow bone among other things. And like any surgery, beforehand the surgeon makes sure you’re aware of the potential risks and complications. The rate of complications is low, but the risk isn’t zero. If you’re doing substantial work on your face, that can result in nerve damage, loss of feeling, loss of facial motor control, etc. The vast majority of people turn out just fine, but the risks are not zero and are always on your mind. Oh, and I did this in Buenos Aires cause I was a broke-ass 24 year-old not so long out of college. So add that to the fear of potential complications. I wasn’t just getting major surgery. I was getting discount major surgery.
So I go in for surgery. Put the gown on, lay on the hospital cart, the whole nine yards. They give me the gas and I quickly go off to nowhere. Several hours later, I slowly regained consciousness, the surgery complete. And to my horror, I saw…nothing. Absolute darkness. Nothing at all. Pitch blackness. I command my eyes to open, but still nothing. Absolute inky blackness. I’m still hopped up on pain killers, but I’m quickly jolted to heightened awareness. I was aware of the risk of potential loss of feeling, but this? Blinded? Complete blindness in both eyes? I was in complete panic. Absolute terror.
Thankfully however this state did not last too long. A nurse realized what was wrong and helped me out. My eyes or ocular nerves hadn’t somehow been damaged. My eyes were swollen shut. They were able to rinse out my eyes and help me to open them a bit, and it was clear that I would see just fine.
Ultimately, I didn’t have any nerve damage and made a complete recovery. But that moment remains one of the most terrifying I have ever experienced. Alone in foreign country, thousands of miles from home, and I woke blind.
I felt my blood pressure spiking from just reading this. I’m glad you were okay!
Fell on the road with a car going straight at me, I slipped in panic when I tried to get up, I don’t know if I was actually in danger but it was close
Possibly my biggest adult fear moment was when my cousin was in the hospital having had a brain bleed.
I was going back to school in a dumbass bid to alter course in my career, it was the last day of the semester, lunchtime. I was sitting in my truck eating lunch with my girlfriend at the time, I get a call, it’s from my oldest cousin. “Hey, [middle cousin] is in the hospital. Duke hospital. In the ICU.” That was a rough winter, spending a month watching someone you grew up with as their brain very gradually reboots. She survived, by the skin of her scalp. She lost some vision, has near constant headaches, had aphasia pretty bad but that’s eased a bit. At first it was like the nouns fell out of her dictionary. My uncle said to her “What do you want for dinner, babe?” And she said “Oh I want the, you know the, with the, ugh!” and she got up and started boiling some spaghetti.
The most certain I was going to die was one night when I went up for a night currency flight.
Some of the rules pilots have to follow are weird; pilot’s licenses in the US don’t expire, but you have to log certain recent experiences to be eligible to fly solo or to carry passengers. To carry passengers at night, you have to have performed 3 takeoffs and landings to a full stop at night. I was 18 or 19, I took off to do exactly that, just three quick trips around the pattern…it was windier than I’d ever dealt with. I took off and that Cessna bucked in ways that I’d never experience before, in the pitch black of night. I remember thinking “I’m going to die tonight. I’ve always wondered how, now I know.” I did make it to downwind, basically training had kicked in, I was going through the motions, and I noticed out ahead of me in town some flashing blue lights, and I thought to myself “Uh oh, someone’s getting a ticket down there.” And that little moment of casualness allowed me to re-center. I thought about it for the rest of downwind, came in with 20 degrees of flap and a LOT of left rudder for a textbook upwind wheel landing. Taxied back to the ramp, tied the plane down, then sat in the cockpit until my hands stopped shaking and I could write down the hobbs and tach times.
My six-year-old and my eight-year-old started fighting and chasing each other around on a skinny trail at the top of the Grand Canyon with very long drop-offs and no fences to either side.
They didn’t die, then, but each time I remember it again they are at risk of being murdered
My first deployment in a fast-attack submarine, in the fall of 1991. We were working under British operational control, and they ordered us to cruise surfaced, in the North Sea. I was standing watch as a lookout, with another lookout and the Officer of the Deck (OOD), in the sail superstructure of the boat. We were wearing body harnesses and lanyards, clipped into the superstructure - normal procedure.
I was a sailor aboard USS SUNFISH (SSN549), a Sturgeon Class boat, where the sail superstructure was 25 feet tall. We were in 48 foot seas.
The 3 of us on watch that night were washed overboard more than 10 times each. Often all 3 of us at the same time… flung overboard, hanging by our lanyards, trying to roll around and grab onto the ladder rungs, or one another, to get back into the bridge pooka. None of us broke any bones or lost any teeth, but we were pretty battered and bruised by the end of it.
That was the first time I got to see the entire boat out of the water… at the top of the wave, I could see the stem planes, stabilizers, the end of the towed-array housing, and the propeller. At the bottom of each trough, we’d see just a tiny hole of sky, through the water, as it all crashed down upon us, and we all hold on, trying to stay inside the superstructure.
We pulled into the Navy Base at Rosyth Scotland the next afternoon. The windshield, booked in for surface operations, was completely missing, as well a the port running light. We sustained damage to our observation periscope and main communications antenna as well.
The experience was both scary and exhilarating.
Harrowing. But as someone unfamiliar with anything involving with anything naval, why the Hell did they have you do that? In conditions like that, why wouldn’t you just cruise submerged and avoid the waves entirely? And why do they have people up there “on watch?” I can’t imagine you can actually watch for that many things in such insane conditions. To my ear, it seems like they risked three lives and caused countless thousands of dollars to naval equipment for no damn good reason.
We were told at the time, that the Brits has a surface group in the area, and didn’t want a sub submerged in the same area. Neither we, nor our radar saw anything. But in 21 years spent in the navy, I’ve never seen seas like in that 1st deployment. Modern subs, with round hulls, are optimized for submerged steaming, only cruising on the surface when arriving/departing ports or when operationally necessary (i.e. shallow waters or transferring personnel).
I’ve probably been out in seas just as bad as that 1st deployment - when the boat is rocking at 600-800 feet submerged depth, it has to be really, really bad on the surface, but being submerged, I really didn’t get to see it on those occasions.
Yeah, might as well have had them on watch while submerged, at that rate.
whew !!!
The cops had a shoot out with my neighbor in the apartment next to mine. I wasn’t positive it was gunfire, and I walked into my living room to get a better assessment. I was about a foot away from whizzing bullets, but I still wasn’t 100% sure lol. I decided to not risk it and take cover on the floor of my bathroom, until about 20 minutes later when the cops busted my door down and kicked me out of my apartment for 2 days. When I came back, I had 17 bullet holes in my wall (all from the cops) and my fridge and cabinets were all shot to hell. I definitely almost died that day
Holy crap what country do you live in? /s
That’s insane! Did anyone pay for your damages?
Within a few days, someone had let themselves into the apartment and patched the holes and replaced the fridge.
It was a really strange situation. The cops kicked in our door, pointed guns at us, and screamed at us to get out of the apartment. My girlfriend had the foresight to grab her purse on the way out, but I didn’t have my wallet or shoes.
They escorted us out of the complex, and I realized they weren’t going to let us back in after a short while. I asked a cop for some info, and he told me we weren’t allowed back in, and he couldn’t give a timeline, but to watch the news if I wanted an update. I asked him where I should watch the news, and he told me to get out of his face lmao
We made arrangements to hang out at a friend’s place for a few hours, and when we checked back on the complex, they had blocked off the whole street. We couldn’t approach anyone without them getting super aggressive and telling us we couldn’t be there.
We stayed the night at a different friend’s place, and tried to go home again around noon the next day. Our door was wide open, our cat was missing, our shit was tossed around, and there were a couple of evidence markers strewn about. After a bit, someone told us that they were still collecting evidence and cleaning up, and that we had to leave for a few hours.
That was the only sort of official conversation we ended up having with anyone about the whole ordeal. We were never contacted by the cops or the apartment management about it directly, but a week later we found out everyone in the complex got 4 days taken off their rent for that month. Cool, I guess.
Was your cat okay?
Yeah, thanks for asking. We found him deeply burrowed in a box of Christmas decorations in the back of our closet. He was traumatized, but he was safe
During Helene, I had a tree fall through my house while I was in bed, and it stopped about 6 inches from my face
Holy shit. During Chido all we had were mild damages to doors and the like. But… it was already frightening as hell. I never thought wind could be so strong. People in the slums had it way worse. I only saw the aftermath. Some got chopped in half by their metal sheets carried by the wind, or their lost an arm or a hand…
That’s some Donnie Darko shit right there.
Right after we bought our house, a storm brought a tree through the roof. At the time we were in the living room staying away from windows, but a branch punched through the roof right over my wife’s side of the bed. More than 6 inches away, but still spawned some unnerving "what if?"s.
Paragliding, I was literally on the last step from the clif, the next step would be off the cliff. Right as I took that last solid step, I got a collapse (meaning my wing folded, this basically turns it from a parachute to a shopping bag in the sense of keeping you from falling to the ground)
Luckly I noticed, took a few steps back and started going “what the fuck was that???” Sat down for 15 minutes while figuring out what I did wrong. After the 15 minutes I took off again, this time safely.
I’m pretty good at handling scary and dangerous situations so even though I was a literal step away from probably death, definitely life long disability, I can’t really say that I was extremely scared.
