There are few things more disturbing to experience than a moment of sheer panic. Whether it's the moment you hear footsteps in the house when you're alone, when you're driving and something jumps out in front of you in the road, or when you realize you've made a huge, life-changing mistake, the same response kicks in. Adrenaline. Cortisol. Fight-or-flight. Your every nerve is screaming because they know: this is bad. Very very bad. Redditors shared real-life stories of the moments when their blood began rushing and their brain began pounding. Their stories are proof that when panic sets in, it can range from absolutely chilling to utterly devastating.
#1 Let It Go, Dude
My ex-husband went off the deep end when I left him three years ago, despite the fact that he was cheating on ME every step of the way. Anyway, I moved 1,000 miles away and began to restart my life. One day, about a month after leaving him, I checked my mail and saw that I had a huge, heavy envelope in the box. When I opened it, I was horrified.
It was photos of me doing allllll the activities of my daily life, but the photos were clearly taken from afar, and without my knowledge. Immediately, I contacted my attorney. It turns out, my ex was hoping to catch me with someone else, because he wanted to try to sue me for abandonment. It was awful, and it took me a long time to feel safe and secure in my new home.
#2 Mommy's Little Pre-Cog
When my sister was little, she asked my then-pregnant aunt to pick her up. My mom said, "She can't pick you up honey, she has a baby in her tummy." My sister looked at them both and uttered a truly disturbing reply. She yelled, “That baby is dead!” My mom started freaking out about it and panicking, but everyone else laughed it off.
A few days later, my aunt went for a routine checkup, only to get some chilling news—my sister had been right.
#3 The Bitter Taste of Tragedy
We were standing on a downtown corner, watching the 4th of July parade, when we saw the parents of one of the players on a soccer team that I coached talk to someone. They began running like hell through the crowd with panic-stricken faces. Someone came to our door later and told us the Matt, their 10-year-old son, had jumped off a float to get some candy thrown by someone on another float and had tripped.
The float he was on ran over his head, killing him. Our son was on the same float and hadn't gotten home yet. One of the most depressing moments in my life. The parents were never the same. The people on floats in our town never threw candy again. I think of Matt every Fourth of July.
#4 Dearest Ex-Wife
I used to work at a call center for a popular gift company. This one couple calls up and says "We need to cancel our order!" I look it up, and tell them UPS already has the order to deliver it. Then they tell me the horrific truth. They say, "You don't understand. We are sending this to our son and his wife. We accidentally put his ex-wife's name on the card. It will ruin Christmas if they receive this gift!!!"
I was finally able to call UPS and get them to not deliver the package. Not my screw up, but dang.
#5 Ask for a Doctor’s Note Next Time
I was with this girl for just shy of two years. Holidays, festivals, discussions of marriage the lot. Claimed she lived at home with her mum, who had terminal cancer, and as a result, her mum didn't want to bring anyone new into her life, as the pain of knowing she would soon leave them was too much. Therefore, we spent all our time at mine, and I never met her family or mom.
I received a message from a guy one night asking how I knew her. I explained the whole story. What he told me made my blood run cold. Turns out her mom was fine, and she had been engaged to this guy and living with him the entire time...they were due to get married in two weeks. It still blows my mind that she managed to play us both so well the entire time. I'll never forget the feeling of panic and heartbreak I felt when he told me the truth.
#6 Do Not Adjust Your Set
I was watching Degrassi with two friends at one of their houses. During a commercial break, the screen abruptly cut to static. We had the black-boxed, white font subtitles on, and they started saying things like “Help me” and “I’m trapped.” It was back in 2006, so I can’t remember exactly what else was written, but it freaked us out to say the least and we shut the TV off. No one believed us afterward.
#7 Total Wipeout
I accidentally deleted the e-mail accounts for my entire organization...stopped the command once I realized what happened, but by that time it had wiped out three-quarters of the mailboxes, including both of the owners' accounts. That was a dark, dark day...I'll always be careful with "rm -rf" from now on though...
#8 Avoidable Mix-Up
My grandparents were getting me and my brother ready for kindergarten. They put the wrong nametags on us but we did not notice. I was just sitting in class and all of a sudden the teacher goes "[my brother's name], you're in the wrong class"—we had different teachers. She brings me to my brother's classroom and takes him to hers. I was so scared I didn’t say anything, but I felt like I did something wrong.
After a few minutes, I was so freaked out about being in an unfamiliar place and seeing all the strange faces I started crying. My brother’s kindergarten teacher figured out what was wrong and sent us back to our real classrooms. The worst part? My twin and I are fraternal and look nothing alike. This was like the third week of class.
#9 Do NOT Call This Guy With a Medical Problem
Firefighter-Paramedic/Nurse here. I dropped a newborn baby. What it sounds like really. As soon as the sucker popped out, she was quite slippery and fell out of my hands right onto an ambulance floor as I was handing her to my partner. In the end it was okay, but the mother freaked out entirely, understandably of course.
I also kicked a cardiac monitor/defibrillator into a pool during an active cardiac arrest. The patient was pulled from a pool, and as equipment was getting shuffled around, the monitor got moved and I inadvertently kicked it. It ended up at the bottom of a pool. They cost about $20K each. Luckily there was another one there.
#10 Don't Let Sleeping Babes Lie
I worked daycare and was told to never accept babies sleeping in car seats or sleeping children at all. So if Mom or Dad brought a kid asleep, I immediately woke them up and pulled them out of their car seat. This made so many parents displeased with me, but it's policy. I used to think it was to help the kid be on a schedule, but one day I discovered the disturbing truth.
That day, a grandma brought a baby asleep and he was not waking up at all. Just would raise his head, whimper, and go back to sleep. Immediately my boss called 9-1-1 and grandma was trying to downplay "he had a rough night, he's just tired, etc." I knew this baby, he wouldn't sleep if he thought he was going to miss out, we had music playing and kids loudly singing and dancing.
In the chaos, grandma slipped out and at some point, someone called the parents. Turns out Granny had a history of giving kids stuff to knock them out when she babysat, but this time she did it to a six-month-old and that's why he wouldn't wake up. I think they pumped the kid's stomach and he had a stay at the hospital. Actions were taken and the family moved away.
To clarify, the policy was put in place because my boss knew people have been known to do this. They'd break the kid's arm, dose them, dump them with the sitter who lets the baby asleep all morning then because the kid was with the sitter all day, it's easy to blame them for the baby's injury. Or worse, the baby passed on and they do this to blame the sitter.
So yea, to this day if I'm babysitting, I don't accept sleeping children. I flat out refuse to watch kids at their home while they're sleeping for the same reason. I've pretty much stopped doing any child care because as much as I love kids, watching parents make bad decisions on purpose when they know better, was ruining my soul.
#11 Consider Me Plucked
My first job when I was 16 was at PetSmart. I had been working there for a few months when one night I was cleaning out the bird/small animal habitat. The procedure was to haul a ShopVac into the little room and vacuum up the spilled bird food/seeds/litter. Easy peasy. So, I'm cleaning out the cage with the cockatiels in it, when one of them decides to investigate the loud sucking machine. FWOOMP. The bird is gone.
I opened up the canister, no bird. I take the hose off the tank and, bird. I used a box cutter to rip the hose in half so I could get him out. So, this freaking bird is missing feathers and is bleeding and I am in tears. I run to my boss crying and say "IJUSTSUCKEDABIRDUPINTHESHOPVACHESGOINGTODIEIAMAHORRIBLEPERSON." He takes one look at me, then the bird, and starts laughing.
I ended up driving him to another PetSmart that had a Banfield vet in it; he laughed and gave the bird some fluids. My coworkers named him Hoover and he lived in quarantine in the back of the store for months until his feathers came back.
#12 One Monster Can Change a Family Forever
I grew up best friends with my sister, and one day she didn’t come home from work. I was 16 at the time, she was 22. I heard my parents start to rumble around the house turning the lights on and I could hear more commotion and panic. The cops had called our house because they found my sister's car damaged on a street in the middle of a neighborhood with the driver's side door still open and they found one of her shoes was in the middle of the street.
The next morning, still no sister. She worked as a bartender. She left work that night and, some guy followed her, and sideswiped her car. When she got out to swap insurance, he kidnapped her and put her in his truck and drove off. That night, he continued to assault and abuse her and held her captive through the night and into the next day.
My sister managed to escape that next day and run to the nearest house, banging on the doors, the homeowners let my sister in and called 9-1-1. They could tell she had been beaten and attacked. She was taken to the hospital which is when we got the phone call where she was. She had two broken ribs, her face was nearly black and blue, both black eyes, and scratches all over her body.
After that, I’ve never had my sister back. She survived the attack, but she suffers horrible, horrible anxiety and panic attacks. She can’t go out in public alone. She drinks heavily and is terrified to move out of my mom's and live alone. I don’t know, I just used to look up to her. We would laugh and watch movies and bounce on the trampoline, and she would drive me to try local food chains.
We would listen to music and ever since I’ve never had my big sister back…I’ll always love her, but it breaks my heart. In one day, her life changed for the worst.
#13 Having Your Heart Ripped out
My brother is a surgeon, and during part of his residency, he had to work in the pediatric unit. He was working with two newborns. One was getting much better and fighting for life. He was going to make it just fine. The other baby was hours from passing on. He wasn't going to make it. My brother was in charge of informing the families.
My brother realized about 15 minutes later that he had mixed up the families. He told the family with the healthy baby that their baby wasn't going to make it, and he told the family with the dying baby that their baby was going to be just fine. He then had to go back out to the families and explain the situation to them.
How devastating. To be given a glimmer of hope and have it ripped away from you not even an hour later. That was most upset I've heard my brother. He felt destroyed.
#14 Promise Not to Tell
There is no point where a guy is more vulnerable than immediately after a, shall we say, satisfying and intimate moment. Everything is just drained. Knowing this, my girlfriend, who has an identical twin, awaited this moment one morning. Immediately after I finished, she looked up at me, took a deep sigh, and said something that made me blood run cold: "Don't tell [her name]" while mimicking her sister's mannerisms.
I freaked right out, pulled away from her, and flipped out of the bed in what I can only describe as an emotional clustercrunch. It was only as I came to my senses that I noticed my girlfriend giggling helplessly. It was then that I knew that I am dating the evil twin.
#15 Runaway Driver
I was working on one of those TV shows where you do stupid things in public and film people’s reactions. In the skit we were doing, a man would be jogging with a stroller containing a life-like baby doll, and I was going to hit him with a car. The jogger was wearing bright green—they dress funny on these shows so that you don't mix up the cast with pedestrians. So, I'm cruising up to the stop sign in a beat-up old Ford, my adrenaline is really pumping.
This was my first time actually being involved in a skit. I see the bright green jumpsuit, and I rev it. But when I realized what was happening, it was too late. I hit the wrong guy. It was just some dude jogging with his kid. I realized what happened when the guy I hit didn't jump onto the hood the way you're supposed to in these stunts.
I honestly don't remember anything about the incident after that, I was in shock. The dad had a few broken bones, the baby was fine. Needless to say, there was a huge settlement paid out. I'm currently pursuing an unrelated career.
#16 The Monk in My Closet
When I was about 10 years old, I was cleaning my room and had just finished vacuuming. The floor in my room was a thick kind of carpet that left footprints after it had been vacuumed. After finishing cleaning, I left my room and started walking down the stairs. The door to my room and the stairs were next to each other, so while going down the stairs you can see through the balusters into the room.
As I'm walking down the stairs, I see something moving out of the corner of my eye through the balusters. It was a person in a brown monk-like robe, with the hood over their head and one of those rope belts. I saw this person walk through my vacuumed room and into my closet. I panicked and ran downstairs and straight out the front door where I knew my mom was visiting with the neighbor.
They ran upstairs and looked in the closet. No one was there, but there were large footprints that lead into the closet and just stopped there. I'm not a religious person and don't believe in anything supernatural, but I have no explanation for this occurrence.
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#17 An Incompetent River Flows Through It
I had an employee who was working night audit (hotel). I was the manager, so he called me when I was on-call and told me that a guest complained about water dripping from the ceiling in his room on the first floor. Uhhhh did you go up to check on the room above it? "No"... How long ago was this? "Like a couple of hours ago."
I've never flown out of bed faster. I threw on some clothes and made it to the hotel in record time. By the time I got to the second floor, I could hear a WATERFALL. The source of the water was, in fact, not the second floor. Nor was it the third floor. No, no... it was the FOURTH FLOOR. We had the water shut off earlier in the day for work that was being done on the pipes.
A guest got angry and checked out because it took too long for the water to come back on. Apparently, they had tried to turn on the bath and didn't think to freaking turn it off. So, the bathtub overflowed for god knows how long, flooded the room, and the room underneath it, and the room underneath that, and finally the room underneath that.
As it turns out, my idiot employee had moved someone from the room on the third floor for the same thing, but he didn't think to check on it. Instead, he decided to call me when a second guest, now on the first floor, complained of the same thing. THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of dollars of damage.
#18 Leave the Love Drama at Home…Oh, Wait…
The first one that pops to mind is one of my coworkers arriving at work sobbing hysterically. It took a while to calm her down to the point where we could understand anything she was saying. I thought she must have been robbed or something, but it turned out she'd just found love letters in her car, from her mother to her husband.
All I could think was that a) if that were me, the last thing I'd do is show up to work and tell everybody, and b) I'd probably drive off a cliff. Or, I don't know, murder my husband? How do you ever recover from that? I mean, if my husband was just having an affair with a chick or another man, I'd just divorce him...but MY MOTHER???
I could not even. I still think about that. Poor girl. She was such a nice person and did not deserve that. I found out later they were actually having an affair. It wasn't just that the mom was infatuated and writing to him.
#19 The No-Pants Dance
I invited this guy over to my place for dinner after we'd been casually seeing each other for three weeks or so. Things were going pretty well - we were chatting, getting along like a house on fire, and he was helping me cook dinner—when I started to feel extremely intestinally unwell. I've always been kind of a private pooper, and I could tell that this one wasn't going to be fun.
To get him out, I asked him if he'd pop down to the shop at the end of the road to grab a bottle of wine for dinner. He agreed and toddled off down the street, and as soon as he was gone, I raced to the bathroom and relieved myself with something roughly akin to the force of a...well, you can use your imagination here.
I took a minute to catch my breath, reached over to the toilet roll holder, and came back empty. Well, darn. No matter. I had a full nine-pack of toilet paper in the back room - I didn't have space to keep it in my tiny bathroom; it was a very small apartment, so I usually just grabbed a roll or two. Plus, he'd only just gone.
I had plenty of time. Cut to me, thirty seconds later, pants around my ankles and my poop-caked bunghole shimmying my way down the central hallway of my flat when I hear a still, small voice from behind me. "Erm... what are you doing?" Turns out he'd managed to get to the shop and back in record time, and was sitting on my couch in my living room with a perfect, perfect view of my little burlesque.
I was framed in the doorway like an unholy Renaissance painting. It was as though I was presenting myself to him in the worst possible, “You like?” come-on in the history of dating. It's very difficult to have a civilized dinner after that.
#20 Shhh
One time when I was in middle school, I fell asleep on the couch in our living room. Around one in the morning, I woke up and saw a man walk through the wall adjoining our living room to my brother's bedroom. The man noticed me and turned to face me. He had half of his face missing as if he had been dragged along the highway.
He put his finger to his lips as if to tell me not to tell anyone and then turned forward and walked through our glass door out into the yard. Obviously freaked out, I ran into my brother's room to find an empty bed. I run screaming and crying to my parents and they freak out and start calling all my brother's friends' houses trying to find him.
When they finally got in touch with him they found out he had been at a college party drinking about an hour away. My dad went to pick my brother and his best friend up not wanting them to drive home drunk. The next day we got news so disturbing that it made my blood run cold. We found out that the kid who was originally going to drive my brother home passed away after he was ejected from his car during a drunk driving accident.
#21 The Town Fool
I worked as a cameraman in high school. One night, I was working alone at our town hall filming a committee meeting and my boss gave me the keys. I was told to break down and lock up after the shoot. I forgot to lock the town hall. My freaking town hall was wide open for a whole weekend. I realized this after I returned the keys, so for the whole weekend I was freaking out, thinking everything would be taken and they would trace this mistake back to me.
#22 Who Can You Trust These Days?
Just gonna jump in on this topic to share a story that happened to a girl that I dated. I'll leave out specific details because I don't know how much she'd want it out there. She used to work at a home improvement store and there was this middle-aged guy who used to come in regularly and hang around the store and talk to her. He seemed a little slow and clingy, but harmless.
He would always address her by name and say that she was pretty. Then one day he was in the store as they were closing and he saw a male coworker give her a hug before he left. The next day that male coworker woke up to find his tires slashed in his driveway. No one made any connection to the nice middle-aged guy who came in to buy batteries five times a week.
Meanwhile, this girl had been noticing that she was always losing underwear at home. She just assumed that she had been losing them in the wash or simply misplacing them and thought nothing of it. She even joked about it with her mom. Then it happened. She was sleeping one night and woke up to find this guy standing silently over her bed, staring down at her with her panties pressed against his face.
She flipped the heck out and he ran out the sliding glass door on the back of the house. The same unlocked door that, as they found out once he was caught, he had been coming into night after night for months to watch her sleep.
#23 The Mad Chemist
I am a chemist, and over a period of about a year, I was doing a series of very dangerous reactions. Essentially, I had to mix a strong acid with an alcohol solvent and several other chemicals, put the chemicals in a strong glass bottle (high-pressure reactor), seal the bottle, and submerge the reaction vessel in 175-degree (c) silicone oil.
If any of you have heated up a closed container, you know this builds internal pressure inside the container. I kept a valve on top of the reactor to monitor the pressure; the container was rated to be safe at pressures up to 150 PSI. Unfortunately for me, one particular day I started warming up the reaction, and the heat was applied to the solution just fast enough in just the right way to start a runaway polymerization reaction.
If you're a chemist, you just cringed. This runaway polymerization reaction gave off massive amounts of heat very quickly, thus shooting the pressure of this flask from 130 PSI to HOLY HECK RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! The resulting explosion was so loud it sounded like an 18-wheeler slammed into the side of the building. Luckily for me and my lab associate, no one was in the room when the explosion went off.
Hot shards of glass were spewed across the entire room, as well as a nice spray of hot silicone oil. Even worse, this explosion happened right next to the CEO's office. He ran out looking for me, to which I assured him, "We totally have everything under control (oh God oh God please don't walk in there and notice I ruined your hundred thousand dollar lab)."
Luckily, the damage to the facilities was minimal, no one was hurt, and I got to keep my job!
#24 So Close, Yet So Far Away
My roommate's sister lives in a suburban part of Delaware, right outside of Wilmington. Her neighborhood had been experiencing all these weird break-ins for a bit, break-ins where nobody could figure out what had been taken. Finally, one day she comes home and finds a pair of men's boxers on her pillow (to the skeptics, she lives alone).
She immediately calls the police and gets the heck out of dodge, locking her doors before she leaves. The police come with her back to her house, and find the door unlocked, meaning the man was almost certainly inside her house when she made the discovery.
#25 A Case of Mistaken Identity
One time, I went up to my girlfriend in a busy mall and put my arms around her from behind, greeted her and went to kiss her neck. Then, I felt my blood run cold. At that exact moment, the stranger I was hugging said, “uhh, hi.” The stranger thought it was hilarious, my girlfriend who saw me do it thought it was hilarious and everybody in the vicinity who witnessed it was laughing.
#26 Demons in the Basement
My extremely Catholic grandmother owned a house in rural New York. We'd often go there when we went to camp or for family holidays. The place always had a weird vibe to it, as it was over 150 years old. I had several paranormal experiences like seeing what I believed to be a spirit of a man in a brown coat and top hat in the kitchen.
I would also hear children's voices in the bunkbed room when nobody was home, as well as light fixtures acting strangely, like bulbs going out on holiday lights one by one in sequence instead of all at once. Anyways, these experiences were never particularly emotion-inducing or threatening, just weird things I was convinced I saw...
...until one day when I was about ten. I was there alone while my grandmother went shopping and was just watching Avatar the Last Airbender and playing with Legos, pretty standard. I went to the bathroom at one point and noticed the door to the basement. I never thought anything of the basement because it was always closed and off-limits, but being unsupervised and the bold kid I was, I opened the door to get a peek.
It was pitch black down the stairs, but within about three seconds I felt an intense chill and an absolutely terrifying feeling of pure evil wash over me, like a primal fear. Every instinct in my being and soul went into full panic mode as I felt the presence rapidly approaching up the stairs. I shut that door and locked it as fast as I could and ran to the common room and grabbed a cross, convinced it was some sort of demon.
Upon telling my grandmother this, her face went white, as if she wasn't as shocked as afraid, and as if she knew something about it. She called a priest into the house and had him bless the place. When he opened the door to the basement he stopped abruptly and slowly descended. He performed his blessing down there and confided in us that he had felt the same feeling of dread, but that the house was protected by the lord now and we had nothing to fear.
I was always wary after that, but never experienced it again, and certainly never went near the basement. As I grew up, it weighed less on me, and I thought that maybe I was just a kid who spooked himself, maybe I had a grandmother who was so religious that she thought a non-existent demon was present, and maybe the priest felt what we were telling him we had felt, and it wasn't real.
Unfortunately for that theory, and the reason I share this, is because I learned a few years ago that the family that had moved into the house after my grandparents moved to Florida had abruptly moved out. They had forfeited their down payment and left immediately because, and I quote from the realtor's report, “The demons in the basement were terrorizing their children to an unbearable degree.”
So I don't know what was down there, but it wasn't human, it wasn't benevolent, and it wasn't make believe.
#27 Lucky Pull
Dentist here. I was performing a simple extraction and preparing for the case when I didn't realize that I had the X-ray flipped the wrong way the whole time. I was viewing the film backwards and pulled out the wrong tooth. When I realized my mistake I started freaking out, only to find out that by some dumb luck, the tooth I extracted had to go as well.
#28 The Man in Black
When out exploring an old abandoned quarry with some friends we found this dude stood staring at this rock, occasionally twitching, but he never turned around. We were pretty creeped out, so we didn't investigate, and left pretty soon after. Later on that night we found out that another friend was driving down the lane that runs parallel to the quarry found a guy in a black coat stood in the middle of the road, and wouldn't move.
She was pretty freaked out and had to reverse all the way back up the lane in the dark because he was still there. Pretty sure it was the same guy, otherwise it was just a big coincidence.
#29 Inside Jokes Are Not Outside Jokes
At work (on my personal email) I was emailing my best friend who was Polish, and we often used “polak” as a joke. Me being part Italian, I also referred to “greasy Italians.” Sent the email to my friend. Then I looked again, and my stomach dropped. I realized I had typed it up in the wrong email window and had sent it to a client.
#30 Oh Deer
Over the years when I have told this story, many people haven't believed me, but it's true as the sky is blue. Me and my brother were hiking out in our new backwoods (we had just moved in to a new house) and we stumbled upon a small, open, grassy field. In the center of it, there was a person with a blue jacket crouched over.
We thought it was a friend of ours that we had recently met, so I ran out to greet them. I did not have my glasses on, but I got pretty close enough to see that it was a grown man leaned over the carcass of a deer, stabbing it with an unsharpened stick. He looked up and saw me. I was pretty freaked out, so I turned around and yelled at my brother to run, and so we started to sprint as fast as we could back home.
#31 Don’t Mess With the Internet
Not my mistake, but I think our CEO wins this. I used to work for a telecom company and our CEO went to a site to look at our new fiber optic shelter. While going around the shelter, he accidentally stepped on fiber that was transmitting more than a quarter of the data of our country. All our country had outbound connection problems for 18 hours. It affected more than 10 million people.
#32 Need a Hand?
I went camping in southeast Ohio once with my dad and sister miles from civilization. As it started to get dark, my dad and I started to prep food for the fire while my sister went to change in her tent. A couple minutes later she walks over to me and asks “Were you outside my tent?” I asked her why, and she tells me that someone walked out from the direction of the trees to her tent and placed their hand on the wall of the tent.
She smacked the hand away thinking it was me messing with her but when she came out no one was there. We tell my dad and he says he did it and left it at that. The problem was, I knew it wasn’t him, because I was with him the whole time. Later that night I asked him why he lied and he told me it was too late to go home so there’s no sense in scaring my sister when there’s nothing to do about it.
I stayed in my sister’s tent that night with a knife in hand. I didn’t sleep. We stayed for another night without incident, but I couldn’t get my mind off of the fact that we weren’t alone.
#33 A Black and White Issue
I was officiating a soccer game of 15-year-old boys. The teams’ respective colors were RED and WHITE. There was one African American boy on the Red team. As the game progressed, it got more dangerous and out of hand. At half-time, I informed both benches that I would be calling the game tight, and that the next flagrant foul would not go unpunished.
30 seconds into the 2nd half, the African American boy had a hard foul. I blew my whistle very aggressively and yelled, "TAKE A REST BLACK!" After realizing what I had said, I immediately tried to correct myself. I stumbled over every word. The damage was already done. One player on the other team said to me, "Not cool dude.”
#34 This Is a Horror Movie
When I was younger, around 14 or 15 years old, my family used to camp at a state park. Every night, my friend and I would walk through the woods. We called this "the ritual." This particular night, we decided to walk further into the woods than usual. We had flashlights, but we liked to try and navigate through the woods with them turned off. This was a horrible mistake.
We were about half a mile from the nearest campsite when we heard soft whispering behind us. Obviously, we hit the flashlights and spun around. Didn't see anything. So we kept walking and we hear it again. This time, we stop and look around a bit before we decided to head back to our campsite. Then we see what's whispering.
It's a lady crawling on the ground whispering just random words. She was wearing dark clothes and was covered in dirt. When she sees that we notice her, she stands up and declares that she is looking for her campsite. We ended up walking her back to the campground and tried helping her find her group. Turns out, she was just got lost trying to find a bathroom.
Her friends didn't even notice she was missing and if we didn't go that far into the woods, she would have been lost all night. It was pretty creepy.
#35 A Super Screwup
Back in high school, I had a job as a web designer at a small webshop servicing non-profit organizations. My bosses didn't let on that I was as young as I was, and they handled all the face-to-face client meetings. My job basically entailed designing and preparing the website for our clients. One of our big clients was the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation.
I sliced up the site and put in filler text, knowing full well that only people coming from our internal IP would be able to see the development. I should mention that my company was small, close-knit, and had a great (albeit vulgar) sense of humor. Rather than going the standard lorem ipsum route, I did what ended up being the worst thing imaginable.
I instead filled in something along the lines of "Herp derp I'm Christopher Reeve, I drive myself with a straw. Weaknesses include kryptonite and falling off horses." It got worse, but I'll let your imaginations fill in the blanks. There were about four paragraphs of filler text. I came into work after school one day and all three of my company's owners/my bosses were waiting for me.
I thought they were pulling some prank, but they asked me to come into their office. At this point, I knew something was definitely up. My boss: "Chris and Dana saw the site." Me: "What? Who?" Him: "CRPF. Chris and Dana Reeve. The director wanted to show them the progress. Apparently he didn't check before he showed it to him in person."
At this point, I think my stomach hit the floor and kept going straight on to the Earth's core. My boss told me he'd let me know what the next steps were, but just to know that I was in deep, deep trouble. Anyway, I didn't get fired (despite how adamant Dana Reeve was about that fact) and I had to write an apology to the Reeves.
I found out later that Chris actually had a pretty solid sense of humor and thought it was funny. RIP, Mr. and Mrs. Reeve.
#36 Heave-Ho!
This was quite a few years ago now. My friend and I had this really cool spot to hang out, in the woods. You had to walk in the middle of a creek for a kilometer and duck through sharp bushes and thistles. The hike was well rewarding though. The spot was about half an acre big, it was pure green grass on an incline with beautiful clear water ponds everywhere.
There was tons of wildlife and butterflies lived there. My friend Levi and I were walking along the river on the way to the spot. It was in the middle of a valley and nobody else ever went down there. Suddenly, Levi stopped moving and ducked into a bush, I did the same because I thought there must have been a large animal somewhere.
I saw him staring up the hill and so I looked up to. There were two people standing at the top of the hill heaving back and forth a lifeless body. We watched as they threw the lifeless corpse down the hill as it bounced off the trees and eventually got stuck on a tree at the bottom. Then they took off. Levi and I were terrified and I was shaking so badly I couldn't speak.
So we decided to verify that it was a real body. Levi got about four feet away before screaming, “IT HAS NOSTRILS!! IT’S REAL!! RUN!!!” So, of course, we take off running, and I glance back to see the two people run back to the top of the hill. Levi and I ran two kilometers through thick brush and trees to get away from them.
The next day we were with his parents driving to town. And we saw like 10 fire trucks at the school closest to the forest. Terrified, we told his parents, balling our eyes out worried that we were going to get murdered. His mom started laughing at us and said, “They are training for search and rescue, that was a dummy that the firemen had to find.”
I never slept as well as I did that night.
#37 Someone’s Ears Are Burning
Texted my friend to complain about someone. Sent the text to the person I complained about instead. It was awkward.
#38 Basement of Horrors
I used to work in low-income home weatherization, basically giving free stuff away to help lower electricity and gas bills and make the home more comfortable to people who really needed it. One step in qualifying a home is testing combustion appliances to make sure they’re not emitting carbon monoxide into the living space, because if they are and we seal up the house we could kill the whole family.
During a pre-inspection of a home on the outskirts of the city, I ask to see the owner’s water heater. He tells me that it’s in the basement, which is fairly normal, and I tell him I have to inspect it before work can start. So, he goes into the kitchen and starts moving the refrigerator. Turns out the entry into the basement is underneath carpeting beneath the fridge.
I should note that I went and did thousands of homes over the years, and had never seen such a thing. But, whatever, needs to be done regardless and so I pull out my flashlight and shine it down the stairs, to check out the layout but really to look for black widow spiders. At this point, I notice a dead cat, mostly down to a skeleton.
Not my favorite sight, but really common in crawlspaces and basements. I take a few steps down the stairs and continue my spider check, and notice another couple of small animal skeletons. At this point, I start to worry about gas, or poisons, or something equally dangerous having been responsible for the skeletons. I start looking closer.
There are animal skeletons everywhere, at least ten on a cursory look. Some of them are so degraded I can’t determine what they used to be. I also happen to notice that this guy is waiting at the entrance a little too quietly, with his hand on the door. Something clicks in my brain and I get this immense sense of danger.
I’m about four steps from the door being clear to close, I have no partner on the job with me, there’s death all around me, and I realize just how hidden the entrance to the basement really was. I noped the hell outta there, told the guy I needed extra tools and would be back, and marked the job as non-feasible for health and safety as I was driving away.
I have no idea if I was actually in any danger, it could have been completely innocent; but I still remember the adrenaline rush and sense of doom, and sometimes you just don’t take chances.
#39 Close Shave
I was working at a shaving razor company. They had these large coils of metal that they ran through a machine. I had no idea what the heck I was doing, and removed the cover on the coil. This large coil just starts spinning fast and unraveling everywhere. I tried to stop it with this cutting tool I was holding...because I was supposed to take a sample of the metal.
This scrapes a huge line down the side of the coil. I managed to stop it and wind it back up, then put the cover back on like nothing happened.
#40 Everything Was Going Swimmingly… and Then Came the Scream
We were exploring some woods on the outskirts of my city when we were around 12 years old. These woods had old barracks in them that were used during WWII but are completely abandoned, overgrown, and run down now. To actually get to any explorable barracks you had to go quite deep into the forest and up some very steep hills in which you use the tree's roots that grow down them to climb up.
This was the first time me and my friends had ventured this deep before, so we were all pretty excited at seeing how far we could go and how big the place actually was. Eventually, we had to squeeze through some tight stinging nettle bushes but luckily we all had long clothes on to protect us. We stumbled out into this huge clearing area where right in front of us was the building. We were all astounded. But being young, we were all pretty nervous to actually set foot any further.
We hung around the entrance for a bit messing around when my friend says, “Guys I swear I just saw a face or something in the dark over there.” My friend and I are thinking he's trying to spook us. That’s when it happened... The loud scream of an adult male fills the entire building amplified by the echo. With that, my friends and I look at each other absolutely terrified and let out shrieks ourselves. We bolt it towards the bushes in which we came and start making a break straight back the way we came without looking back.
We must have run for a solid ten minutes straight without even stopping. Those huge steep hills I spoke about earlier we literally jumped down and just slid down them getting covered in dirt. We finally reached the edge of the forest and stopped running. We never did find out who was in there or why but considering how young I was it was definitely one of my most terrifying experiences.
#41 Get Clean and Then Clean Again
I was working in a sterile hood when a massive sneeze hit me out of freaking nowhere. The force of it caused me to duck my head under the hood and blow mucus everywhere inside. The whole lab froze, and eyes slowly rolled my way in disbelief like this. I contaminated every sample and they had to call in an outside company to re-sterilize.
#42 A Terrible Sight, An Honorable Deed
I was driving home after an extremely late night at work, I lived in the middle of nowhere, about a mile before I got there a woman covered in blood jumped out of the woods into the middle of the road screaming. I panicked and went around her, then slammed on the brakes to help. Her boyfriend had beaten her and was currently chasing after her in the woods.
I got her in my car and called the police, they met us at the hospital because I told them there was no way I was waiting on the side of the road when he was coming.
#43 Little Troublemaker
I'm a high school teacher, and this one student in my class is notorious for being a little troublemaker, to the point that no one in the class thinks he's funny. I had my back turned and was trying to help a student when the delinquent asks to use the restroom. Problem is, he already went 30 minutes ago near the beginning of class,
Plus, passing period is about five minutes away, so I said “no” and to wait until passing period. He then repeats: "Mr. can I use the restroom, Mr. can I use the restroom." Over and over again, this kid is 16 years old...not a little kid, bigger than me in fact. The other students are telling him to shut up, and he keeps going.
Finally, I turn around and snap at him, "Shut up you little turd!" He had his phone out and was recording me the whole time. "Ha! I'm sending this to my mom!" I messed up, and I'm thinking I'm in some serious trouble. But his mom's response was perfect. I got an email from his her later in the day: "He is a little turd, isn't he? My apologies."
#44 Abandoned Buildings: A Haven for Wild Animals
There used to be this abandoned asylum in the woods by the park near my hometown. The main building above ground was torn down but the basement was still there and you could enter it by crawling through a small window. The furniture and some medical stuff was all still down there. I was too afraid to go through the window but my friend wasn’t.
He was down there for about five minutes before he screamed and jumped out of the window. He said something was chasing him. We could hear it down there scurrying around but none of us wanted to get close enough to the window to look with the flashlight. A few years later a woman got attacked near there by a bunch of super-aggressive raccoons.
#45 Chemical Conflict
I was doing laundry and noticed our washer had a bit of funky smell to it, so I looked up some home remedies online that involved baking soda and vinegar. While I was standing at the washer I thought, "A cup of bleach wouldn't hurt." As soon as I threw it in and started the washer, my brain went "HEY! YOU PROBABLY SHOULDN'T JUST BE MIXING CHEMICALS ALL WILLY NILLY!"
So I pulled out my phone and googled “vinegar + bleach.” I almost cried when I read the result. “Vinegar + bleach = Toxic Chlorine Gas” I proceeded to panic and scream for everyone to get the heck out of the house. Be careful with chemicals people.
#46 One Step Ahead
My old man was an avid outdoorsman in the Colorado Rockies in the late 80s. He'd go on week-long treks with his buds. One summer, they'd been out for a few days in Pikes National Forest. They set up camp in a ravine they thought was safe. That night my dad unzipped the tent to take a leak in the dark and outside stood a pair of pale bare feet.
My dad screamed and zipped up the tent. Everyone else woke up and asked what was wrong. My dad said someone was barefoot out there. They went out and flashed their lights for a bit, hollering. My dad swore he saw what he saw and described the feet in detail: they were old blotchy feet, one even had a lump on the ankle. Tony, his bud, asked which foot, left or right.
My dad said it was the right. Then Tony said they needed to move their camp immediately. Dad asked why. Tony said they didn't have time. They went along with it and packed up and moved on top of the hill. The next morning they woke up to find a flash flood had torn through the ravine during the night. It would have surely killed them.
Tony's grandfather had just died a month prior and one of the last things he said to him was that he would always watch over him. The feet my dad described reminded Tony of his grandfather's feet.
#47 Cake Drop
I made a cake for work, and accidentally swapped sugar for salt. As I was prepping it in the staff lounge, I cut myself a small bite and tasted it, it was horrible! People were already arriving for lunch, and being known as someone who bakes amazing cakes, people were excited to have a slice. So I came up with an ingenious plan.
I picked up the cake and, using all of my acting abilities, "stumbled" and dropped it on the floor. Left a huge cake mess, but saved my reputation! Best part was that the boss felt so bad for me (and perhaps disappointed at not getting any cake) that he told me to head down to the local bakery and pick up a cake, and he'd wire me the money to cover the expense!
#48 Smile and Say Cheese!
Back in 2014, I was sleeping over at my cousin’s house for New Year’s eve. It was just my three cousins, my brother, and myself. We all decided to sleep in the same bedroom for the night, as we had just become old enough to stay at home on our own and our parents were staying out all night, so we were a little nervous.
My point here is that we were all 100% certain that we were the only people in the house that night, and we all slept in the same place together. I woke up the next morning and was getting in the car to leave, when I just happened to take a look at the camera roll on my phone from the previous night. To my absolute horror, I discovered that there were five photos of all of us sleeping.
Every single person who was there was in the photos, fast asleep, so there was no way that any of us could have taken them ourselves. My aunt showed the photos to the landlord shortly after, and he had no explanation. To this day, nobody has any idea who took them—or how. My friends have even accused me of making the whole thing up.
#49 A Teacher Gets Schooled in Empathy
I'm a teacher. I had a particularly difficult student who gave me a very hard time on an unusually hard day, early in my career. After class let out another colleague stopped by and without thinking, I said, "Nobody wants ("that difficult kid") in their class! It's hopeless." I turned around and went white as a sheet. He was walking in the room to apologize and heard me.
However withdrawn and difficult he was before this, it multiplied tenfold, and I felt terrible. I tried to apologize to him, but he didn't want to hear it. After that, I didn't breathe a negative word about a child on school grounds. As an educator, you have to learn sooner or later that your students are the ones who get to act like children. Not you.
#50 Light Switch
I was outside during recess in kindergarten, playing catch with my friend. I suddenly saw the day turn into night, in the blink of an eye. There was no warning or "gradual" setting; the day simply turned into night. Everyone stopped playing and looked up. I remember my friend's eyes looking at me in horror, as my other classmates started to scream.
Suddenly, the memory stops. I do not remember anything else that happened after and I still get goosebumps thinking about that memory.
#51 Alert the Authorities: I’m an Idiot
When I was working at a liquor store, we had a super-serious alarm system that was ultra-sensitive once you activated it and locked up. Once you set it, you had 60 seconds to get out and lock up. My first time closing, I set the alarm and left, then realized I left something on the counter. I ran back in to get it, then ran back out and locked up again, thinking everything was cool.
As soon as I got to my car, the freaking thing started blaring "ALARM! ALARM! INTRUDER ALERT! INTRUDER ALERT! CALL THE AUTHORITIES! CALL THE AUTHORITIES!" over and over again. People a mile away could probably hear it, it came out of a PA on the outside of the building as well as one on the inside. I freaked out and went back into the building and called the security company and they had to verify my employment and walk me through turning the alarm off.
I then had to call 9-1-1 to let them know that I messed up and already talked to the security company.
#52 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to a New City
So, I had a football coach back in high school who was also one of my teachers for a semester. He told us one story that freaked us all out pretty bad. He had a coaching job at a small college in Montana when he was a lot younger and newly married. He said that after practice one evening, he was making his long commute home, and the route ran alongside fields and fields of hay, grain, whatever. Since it was late summer/early fall, it wasn't even approaching dark yet. His car was an old beat-up truck with just a bench seat.
Anyway, he's driving along when he sees a hitchhiker on the shoulder. This being back in the day and in small-town Montana, my teacher pulled over to let the guy in without a second thought. The man was described as wearing a really old, outdated style of suit. Not quite a zoot suit, but styled in a similar, baggy way. He also had a big, stylish hat.
This guy looked like he was out of the 40s, and "sort of like a pimp." My teacher thought it was weird that he was so overdressed, it being super hot out. But maybe that was the only clothing he had. So the guy gets in next to my teacher without a word. Teacher asks him where he needs to go, and the guy just points forward. Teacher drives on.
Later, my teacher tried talking to the guy, just trying to make simple conversation, but the guy wouldn't speak or even acknowledge him. He just pulled his hat down like he was sleeping. Out of nowhere, the guy just tips up his hat, looks out the window, and says, "Stop the car. Now." My teacher pulls over and lets him out, not wanting to offend a possibly crazy man.
The guy stands on the side of the road for a second, and then at a dead sprint, just runs off into the field beside the road, until my teacher couldn't see him anymore (granted the crop was fairly tall). He waits there for a while, thinking maybe the guy had the runs or something and didn't want to defecate next to the road. After a long enough wait, my teacher gets back in the truck and starts to accelerate back onto the road.
The thing about really old trucks is that they don't accelerate very fast. As my teacher got back on to the road, he looked in his rearview mirror to check for a safe merge. But there wasn't a car in sight. What there was, was the hitchhiker, on all fours like an animal, running (crawling?) after the truck at an inhuman speed. Meanwhile, my teacher is beginning to fish-tail as he attempts to go faster. The whole time his eyes glued remain on the mirror, watching the man chase after his car.
Eventually, he was able to get up to speed and lost sight of the guy in his mirror. When he was able to stop at a gas station to use a pay phone, he called his wife at home to tell her the story, and to lock up the house. She thinks he's just messing with her, and he had been talking to her coworker about the hitchhiker.
When he asks why she would think that, apparently at her office in the town she worked in, one of her coworkers told her a story of the exact same thing happening to them. And it is a well-known urban legend in that town. She thought it was just folks playing with the new girl at work, who had to drive home alone at night.
Anyways, my teacher assured her that he was not lying, and she evidently believes him and can vouch for her side of the story, because she showed up to one of our fundraisers and I asked her about it. So yeah, now I just avoid lonely roads in Montana.
#53 Foot in Face Disease
My story involves harming small children. I was working at a video store and was turning on all our display televisions. The controller was dead, so I was doing it the old-fashioned way by going up to each television and hitting the power button. Some were higher up than others, so I had to climb to get to them (probably against company policy).
Well, I climbed up a pillar to turn on a television near the top of the wall and when I jumped off, I landed right on top of a 6ish-year-old kid who was watching from right under me. When he got up, he had a perfect red shoe print on his face and was screaming. His dad came over and said not to worry, and proceeded to scold his kid for standing right underneath me. Whew!
#54 Time to Face the Music
We were gathered at the dinner table with some friends and I had been offered a glass of wine, despite not having been 21 yet at the time. I took it and casually turned to look out the window while drinking it. As soon as I looked out, I suddenly felt a weird sensation as if someone was staring back at me. I then spotted a man with no face standing on the sidewalk outside, way off in the distance. He was tall and very thin, but he had no face.
There was just a blur where his face should’ve been. I obviously freaked out and let out a scream. When all the adults turned to me, I stammered trying to explain what I had just seen. Of course, nobody believed me. They all said I was probably drunk off of the small sips of wine I had taken, but I know what I saw. I still get this acute sense of dread whenever I think about it.
#55 Save Some Cringe for the Rest of Us
A female friend of mine–to whom I was admittedly attracted–had been expressing her reservations about an upcoming vacation with her family. Though it wasn't being overtly presented as such, the trip was meant as a way of re-solidifying her parents' marriage, which had been more than a touch rocky at the time.
They would all be driving from San Francisco to a small town in Northern California, where they'd stay at a bed-and-breakfast inn for a weekend before continuing northward for some unknown destination. In keeping with the alleged purpose of this so-called vacation, two rooms had been booked at the inn in question.
To her dismay, though, my friend discovered that her mother would be occupying one room, her father would have the other, and that she and her sister would each have to bunk with one of their parents. This was worthy of lament on its own, but it was made unforgivably worse by the verbal diarrhea that I offered in an attempt at providing comfort:
"Aw, it won't be so bad!" I told my friend. "Your father will probably enjoy sleeping with you." A moment passed before I realized what I had said. Then, with a feeling of growing horror, I tried to explain myself. Things only got worse from there. "Wait, I didn't mean it like that!" I hurriedly said. "I mean, like, he's probably sick of sleeping with your mom."
"No, wait, I mean... I just mean that he wants to spend some quality time with his daughter." If I had stopped there, I might have been able to salvage the situation, but as it happened, I decided that the best course of action would be to keep talking. "I can't say that I blame him, really. I'd love to sleep with you." She and I don't talk much these days.
#56 There’s Evil in Them Thar Woods
In the late 80s I was in my early 20s, and two friends and I went camping in central Florida. Two of us were working for the Park Service at that time, so we were able to camp for free in other parks in the state. Both of us had done a lot of camping before. Me, I grew up camping with my family on every single vacation, all over the state.
For the other friend with us, this was her first camping trip ever. We were camping in the youth area, which was empty that weekend and was quieter and more isolated than the regular campsites. Later in the afternoon on the second day of our trip, we were all sort of spread out in the area of the campsite, being within shouting distance but enjoying a little solitude.
I was collecting firewood. Every now and then, I'd kind of feel like someone was watching me. I'd look around, see and hear nothing, and then shrug it off and go back to what I was doing. Later on around sunset, we had the bonfire started. One of the rangers who lived on-site about a quarter-mile away came over with a truckload of firewood and a six-pack of beer.
We all sat around talking for awhile. Well after dark, we could suddenly hear what was probably a bunch of teenagers fooling around on one of the trails a couple of miles away. Since the trails were closed at sunset, the ranger and my coworker drove off to shoo them back to their campsites. My other friend and I were just relaxing around the fire, talking a little, mostly enjoying the night and the peace and quiet.
All of a sudden, I had a cold chill go over me. The hair stood up on the back of my neck, and out of nowhere I was terrified. I tried to ignore it, but it kept building. I didn't say anything to my friend since I didn't want to scare her. Then I glanced over at her just as she glanced at me, and she said, "Do you feel that?!" I said, "Yeah...I think maybe we'd better go to the car."
We both felt like we were in deadly danger, but no idea from what. We started walking at a casual pace, not wanting to appear scared, then halfway to the car we looked at each other again and simultaneously broke into a dead run. We reached the car, jumped in and locked the doors, and turned on the headlights.
I sat there with my pistol, feeling like it was totally inadequate for whatever was out there. We both just sat looking straight ahead—we were afraid to look around. I had the feeling at one point that if I turned my head and looked out the window, I'd see something that would drive me insane. I don't know how long we sat there.
It was probably just a few minutes, but it felt like forever. Then it just...left. We could actually feel it going away. A few minutes after that, the other two came back in the truck. We kind of laughed it off afterward, but I'll tell you, I've never been that scared before or since. I've faced a lot in my life and NOTHING has so completely terrified me like that. I don't know what it was, but I'm still convinced we were in terrible danger.
#57 Sound the Alarms
I screwed up opening a simple valve and shut down a port on my first day on the job. The estimated cost was £6 million. I was a brand new industrial QA chemist working for Exxon. The lab was located in the middle of the plant, it was a two-story glass-fronted building slap bang in full view of the control tower.
This was a production facility, the docking point for ships offloading petrol and fuel oils. The other plants on this strip of the dock were a natural gas cylinder company and four other petroleum companies, all with their own lines, ships, and docks. Job 1 was to test the viscosity of lubricant oils at low temperatures. For this job, one needs blocks of dry ice.
The CO2 cylinders were stored on the first floor under the stairs at the front where all that glass was. I went down there, box in hand, hooked up to the pipes, and tried to turn the wheel on the top of the 6 ft tall cylinder. Unable to budge the darn thing, I resorted to good old brute force and used a metal pipe to coax that thing loose. It was the worst mistake I've ever made.
I snapped the handle off and the whole canister (thankfully secured to the wall) dumped its load of compressed CO2. So…the whole building is now filling up with white gas and I can see alarmed yellow-helmets rushing around in the control tower trying to figure out what was happening. Knowing that they would suspect a fire, I ran out of the building trying to signal that things were ok.
For some reason, the sight of a lab-coated dude running from a building billowing smoke, waving his arms above his head like a maniac was interpreted as a bad sign. They hit the port alarm. The port alarm that sounds like a tornado siren. The port alarm that can be heard throughout the entire city. The port alarm that means all facilities must immediately shut all lines down and evacuate all personnel.
Yep. Every plant shut down and a throng of workers downed tools and headed for their evacuation points. Two of the tanker ships stripped their lines and started to remove themselves from the impending doom. Shutting these facilities down is NEVER done, ever. It was an unmitigated fiasco, and to this day (15 years later) when I go back to my home town, I still get tanker drivers beeping, honking, and pointing at That Guy Who Shut The Port Down.
The worst part of all of this was I got that job through nepotism: My dad also worked there, just not that day. So after the storm had cleared, I headed over to his house. "Hey kid, how'd the first day go? I heard the port alarm, odd time for a test, what was happening...?" "Ehh ...dad...well the thing is....."
#58 A Transient Guest
My sister is 10 years younger than me. When I was in middle school, both my parents worked long hours and swing shifts, so I would take care of her after school on any given day. One of those particular days, my sis was napping in her bedroom, which was on the far end of the house, and I was watching TV in the living room.
I even remember very specifically that I was watching Clarissa Explains It All. The show was on commercial break when the weird thing happened. Aside from the sounds coming from the TV, the house was quiet as could be, when all of a sudden, from the other side of the house I hear a very decisive slam coming from within the house somewhere.
I remember sitting bolt upright and freezing in that position. I don't remember having any way to verify it, but I swear it was my parents' bedroom door that had slammed. Well, a full minute or so goes by before my sister—she couldn't have been a day older than three at the time—saunters into the living room with the sleepiest, dazed look on her face.
At that point, I was so jostled that I couldn't really speak. My sister was the one to break the silence to ask, "Where did she go?" As I regained the wits enough to be able to piece words together again, I asked: "Where did who go?" To which my sis replied, "The lady that was just talking to me." I have no way of really knowing for sure, but I'm certain that at that point I must have gone pale.
I distinctly remember the intermingled feelings of vertigo, nausea, and paranoia. No more than half a minute passed by before my sister shrugged it off and with humor in her voice said, "never mind" and went back to her room as if all was business as usual. I don't remember what eventually broke my paralysis or how long I was in that state, but I eventually got the nerve—after getting the largest kitchen knife I could find, of course—and did a perfunctory sweep of the house.
To this day, the part about the whole thing that sticks with me the most—and still sends shivers down my spine—is how nonchalant my sister shrugged it off. Almost laughed it off, one could say. It just didn't sit right with me. Something about her mannerisms that felt far beyond her years. Like a two-year-old adult.
Of course, through the years I've brought it up and she has always maintained not having any recollection of it whatsoever.
#59 Nice Save
One time I went to send my buddy a picture of this girl I matched with on a dating app. Derp no. I accidentally sent it to her instead. Talk about freaking panic mode. Felt like the biggest creepy tool ever. My saving grace was that the picture wasn’t just of her, and had some of her friends in it. So, when she texted “why did you send me this?”
I responded with “Who is the girl to your left? She looks super familiar. What’s her name?” even though I had never seen her in my life. My buddy still rips me to this day about it.
#60 Ghost Has Joined the Chat
I've worked in property management for a while and one of the properties I managed was an old abandoned bank/office building. It had two elevators, but only one of them worked. Once, while doing a routine safety inspection, I got on the elevator in the basement and pressed floor 12 (the top floor). The next three minutes made my blood run cold.
The elevator stopped on floor three. The doors opened. A cool breeze blew in. The doors closed. The elevator continued to floor 12. I swear a freaking ghost joined me in the elevator.
#61 New Tenants
A few years back, my girlfriend at the time—she’s my wife now—just got a new apartment and we moved in together. About a week after we moved in, I was in the shower. Then the most terrifying moment of my life happens. The door gets kicked in and I get dragged out of the shower. Butt naked and soaking wet. My girlfriend is on the couch, handcuffed.
They start asking me about some Spanish named guy Roberto something. There were more uniforms in our apartment than I'd seen anywhere before, like two to three dozen in our apartment and you could see a bunch of other men, through the windows, walking around outside. I have no idea what this Roberto guy did but I’ve never seen such a show of force before.
The whole thing ended with the head officer yelling at the rookie who was supposed to verify the address. I guess it was the right address, but Roberto had moved out the month before.
#62 HELP
I used to go to Army Cadets in like 2011-2012, and on the way back there was an abandoned building. I started in winter so it was always dark on the way back (around 9:00 pm) so I didn't notice the most chilling part of the building until it was too late. I went there in July when the sun went down much later in the night. As I looked around, I felt a chill run down my spine.
The word "HELP" was carved into the window. If it was the bottom floor I could brush it off as a prank or something, but it was the top window of a four-story building. The place got knocked down thankfully.
#63 Do You See Her?
I have a version of sleep paralysis, so as terrifying as it can be, I’m generally pretty used to waking up to seeing things. I was on a road trip with my friend and we were staying in a hotel off of Route 66. I went to sleep before her and she stayed up to watch television on her phone. We turned the lights off and I started to doze off.
Every so often, I’d wake up to her panning her phone light to the area in between our beds. After a little while, she got up to go to the bathroom. I woke up once or twice to see a dark figure of a woman standing in between our two beds looking at me. Being exhausted from driving and prone to hallucinating when I sleep, I thought nothing of it.
A bit later, I woke up to the sound of a door slamming and my friend crossing the room and climbing into bed… she was laying directly on her side, stiff as a board, staring at me. I yelled, “What the heck, Mary?!” And turned on the light...but there was no one there. My scream brought Mary out of the bathroom though, and I just told her I had a nightmare.
Later that night, I woke up again to see the woman standing in between our beds. But this time, she moved over to the desk in the room, seemingly writing something. I quietly said Mary’s name, but before I could say anything else, Mary cut me off, asking: “Is that you?” We turned on the lights and stared at each other for a minute.
She started to ask me what I’d seen, but I cut her off and told her that we were both too tired to get on the road at three in the morning and we’d already paid for the room. We slept with the lights on in the same bed for the rest of the night. The next morning as we were driving away, we compared notes.
She said she kept flashing her phone light because she kept seeing the shadow of a woman standing between our beds. It freaked her out so much that she went into the bathroom to watch TV with the lights on. She saw the woman walk over to the desk as well. We now both have tattoos commemorating the terrifying road trip from the underworld.
#64 Having a Gas
When I was a kid, I used to work at a gas station. It was one of those one-man stations where the attendant sits in a little booth in the center of the pumps. This was before the days where you could pay at the pump. You would go to the booth, give your credit card to the cashier (through the little slit under the plexiglass) and they would open your pump.
One day, one of the pumps jammed, and I had to go out to fix it. As the station was very busy, I hurried out to the pump. Suddenly, I heard a sound that made my stomach drop. The click of the door closing behind me. I had locked myself out of the booth. Needless to say, the variety of people who were trying to get gas and now couldn't were quite upset.
Not quite as upset as the people who had their credit cards locked inside the booth, though. I ended up having to call my manager at home from a payphone to bring another key to let me back in. I was left dealing with irate customers for the hour it took him to arrive, and turn away other irate potential customers, one whom was completely out of gas and stuck there.
My manager had a chuckle when he arrived and I later learned that this eventually happened to everyone, and that you could use the stick used to measure the gas levels in the tank to push through the tiny slot in the front through the booth to unlock the door.
#65 Dad Saves the Day
I always kind of entertained the idea of the paranormal, but my first experience really solidified that belief. I live in the rural countryside with lots of wildlife. Anyway, it was late at night, and I was driving down the road a little faster than I should be, when my dad shouts, "STOP!" I slammed on my brakes and this massive elk-sized deer runs in front of the road.
What’s so creepy about that? My dad's been dead for a few years. I'm short and have to sit really close to the steering wheel, so I'm sure I wouldn’t have lived if I hit the deer. I pulled to the side of the road and cried.
#66 Count Them All
Fun story, while my wife was having her c-section for our daughter she overheard one of the nurses say "there's only nine," and my wife thought they were talking about my daughter's fingers or toes. So she's freaking out that our daughter is missing a finger or toe, and I keep assuring her that our daughter was perfect, which she was.
We found out about ten minutes later that the nurse was talking about the surgical tools that were supposed to be accounted for, and one of them was missing. So my wife got to spend the next two hours in x-ray because they thought they had left a tool inside her and stitched her up. They found the missing tool, not inside my wife, a couple of hours later, so that was a relief.
#67 Shared Fear
I was sitting in my room at like 11:30 PM, heard lots of stuff downstairs, assumed it was my mom. I heard her walk up the stairs to my room, and stop. I called out to her, but she didn't say anything and walked downstairs. I went down about half an hour later, only to an absolutely terrifying note. It read, "You're lucky I'm scared too" on it, and a whole bunch of stuff was missing.
I called my mom, she still hadn't arrived home from a dinner she was at with her friends. I called the authorities and locked myself in the bathroom. I think whoever was in my home left when they realized I was still there. When I was hiding in the bathroom, it was probably the most scared I've ever been.
#68 Horsing Around
My very first job in high school was at a horse farm with about 25-30 horses. One of those places where rich people board their horses because they don't have the time or space for full-time horse ownership. The owner spent about a week training me on my duties. Each horse had their own stall and most of them had special diets that had to be memorized.
I figured the hardest part would be remembering which stall got which feed so I concentrated really hard on remembering it. The part that seemed easy was bringing the horses in from their pastures to the barn. There were three separate paddocks for obvious reasons; one for the geldings, one for the mares, and one for the stallions.
The owner showed me how all you really had to do was open the gate for one group. The horses would make their way to their own stalls. After locking that group in their stalls, you let the next group out. Simple enough, right? Well, the day came that the owner let me do my work unsupervised. I mean completely unsupervised. I was the only one at the stables.
I'm pretty proud of myself that I got the food combinations correct, so I head towards the mares. Normally, the horses would be waiting because they knew it was feeding time. Today, they were nowhere to be found—until I opened the gate. Suddenly, 25,000 pounds of horseflesh came charging up over a hill and toward the gate.
Every single horse on the farm was within the mare's paddock. I freaked. There wasn't a darn thing I could do but get the heck out of the way and hopefully they would go to their own stalls and I could save the day. Nope. I don't think a single one of them went to the right stall, and moving them around was impossible.
I sat there, not sure whether I was angry at whoever put them all in the same field or disgusted in myself for failing so miserably at my first job. After they were all done, I put them back where they were supposed to go, although I'm quite sure I was so flustered that I put some mares in the gelding pen and vice versa.
Convinced it was somehow all my fault, I was too cowardly to call the owner and tell her what happened, and I never went back. To this day, I imagine them coming back to the stables, only to find horses in the wrong pens and complaining about what an idiot I was.
#69 Teddy’s Last Words
When I was around 16, my rapidly growing family finally moved from the house I had spent my entire life in. As you would expect, we spent a lot of time fondly remembering things we used to do in the house as we were packing everything up. At some point, I decided to go into the downstairs closet with a flashlight and read, something I used to do when I was younger to get some peace and quiet.
Now, this is one of those deep closets that goes under the stairs; it went back around eight feet and then had a left turn into a very low, maybe three-foot-high, space. This space was largely occupied by a mountain of old blankets and stuffed animals. Of course, this is the most comfortable spot to settle in and read.
About an hour in, I shift a little to get comfortable and I hear a low, slow, warped, hoarse voice say, "You always make me happy." I flipped out, hit my head on the low ceiling, and practically broke the door down getting out. After hyperventilating and explaining to my family why there was no color left on my face, I went back to see what it was.
It was my stuffed Little Bear from when I was three or four years old that I happened to lean on juuuuust right to press his belly. When I pressed his stomach again though, nothing. This poor bear I hadn't played with since I was a toddler used the last of its power, used it's dying breath to tell me I made it happy. You make me happy too, little bear.
When you're not making me pee myself from fear.
#70 A Slip of the Hand
I was in the middle of a remote assistance session with a user who was having trouble with his Outlook. I resolved his issue and proceeded to send a test email to myself along the lines of “test test this is a test.” I was doing a million other things at once, so I wasn't paying attention to the screen or keyboard. When I looked at the screen, my heart sank.
“Twat twat this is a twat.” Luckily, the user I was on the phone with was a good sport and thought it was hilarious. I was pretty mortified.
#71 Horror Unmasked
I used to live in a rented house that, along with my neighbors, sat across the street from a fairly bustling city park. At night, when the park was deserted, I would walk out my front door, sit on my porch and look at the trees and the stars. One night, around 1 AM, I opened the front door and started to sit down. That's when I saw a man standing in the deserted park.
He was directly in front of my house. The man was dressed all in black and was wearing a Halloween skull mask. The mask seemed fairly intricate, but was most definitely a store-bought cheapo. The sight of this guy sent a chill down my spine. He didn't move at all—although I know he saw me. The entire neighborhood was silent and still and we just paused there holding our ground.
We watched each other for a long time until he finally sauntered away. I ended up calling the cops because I figured this guy was casing the neighborhood. Cops came, took my statement. Nothing ever came of it. A couple of months later, I'm doing some yard work around the side of my house. I'm pulling a huge tangle of weeds out from a thicket underneath my kitchen window.
I see something that looks like trash and pick it up: it's the mask I saw that night.
#72 Jabba the Hutt Would Be Proud
When I was like 10 or 12 years old, I was in my room after just having taken a shower, when for some reason I got the weird idea to use my belt and a couple of towels to make the Princess Leia slave outfit bottom (by the way, I'm a boy). As I stood there wearing it (the front flap slightly raised since I had been thinking about Princess Leia) my mom walked right on in.
For what seemed like an eternity I saw her confused face trying to figure out what was happening, and just as she was about to ask about it, I jumped across the room and slammed the door in her face. With my face bright red, I hurriedly threw on my clothes and went downstairs as if nothing had happened. My mom tried to bring it up once, but I feigned ignorance.
Not another word has been spoken of it since.
#73 Deer Xing
I was going about 50mph, looked at my motorcycle gauges, then looked up and saw three deer crossing the road. While panicking, I literally said, "Here we go" right before I impacted with the third one. I was ok. The bike wasn't...
#74 I’ll Stick With Uber
My grandfather and his four brothers spent their summers at their family's bay house (more of a shack, really) in Fairhope, Alabama when they were young. It was a five-minute walk to the Mobile Bay, and growing up around there, I can personally attest to the areas long history of spooky stuff. One night, my grandfather and his brothers were sleeping on the house's screened-in front porch, with air conditioning not being readily available and it being South Alabama in the middle of summer.
My grandfather and his brothers are fast asleep in the middle of the night, and an old taxi drives up and parks in front of their house. A man and a woman get out of the cab dressed in seemingly weather-worn wedding attire, top hat/tails and all. They walk up to the house, and the woman scratches the wood siding of the screen door with long fingernails, and the pair proceeds to go back and get in the cab.
All the boys were awoken by the sound of the scratching but were way too scared to move or make a sound til morning. The next day, my grandfather brought it up to his brothers, and they all confirmed it actually happened and wasn't a dream. They called the woman the Witch, and claim to have seen/heard her multiple times throughout their lives.
A few years ago, I went to see the house before it was torn down, and there were five scratches spaced in the same way that fingernails would leave on a wood plank. I told the owner the story, and he became visibly disturbed, telling me about an old taxi that would park across the street occasionally from midnight (ish) til right before daybreak. Still gives me the heeby jeebies.
#75 How About a Whole PACK of Condoms!
I brought a girl home when I was 16. She spent the night and the next day my dad walked in as we were sleeping, introduced himself, took me to the kitchen and handed me a box of Trojans. The economy family value-sized box. In front of my entire family. Upside down. open. And he had separated each of the 150 condoms from the roll.
Cue me scooping armloads of condoms into this freaking box while everyone is watching.
#76 Big Air
Last snowboard vacation, I was in front of a medium ramp. My first try going at it, I went too slow and made a small jump. I decided to try it again with a little more speed. So, I took the chairlift up, and made the run again, this time without slowing down. Reaching the edge of the ramp, full speed, I noticed that I didn't lean forward. At the apex of the jump, two meters high in the air, I noticed that my body was not oriented to the ground.
"Well, I'm screwed." Landed on my bum, legs in the air. A very dignified moment for me.
#77 I See You
I was nine and watching Spongebob. I went to the kitchen for a drink, and when I came back, the TV had a message: "Welcome back. Did you like your drink?" Scared like crazy, I went to the living room to see if the message would still be there (like turning it off and on again). When I came back..."You know, I'm not like cake. I'm still here when you get back."
Truly scared by now, I get my dad. And like every cliché horror movie, the message ain't there.
#78 Dental Hygiene is a Matter of Black and White
When I bought my first pair of night-vision goggles, I had them delivered to the TV station I worked at, not trusting my neighbors to leave my stuff alone. So, I took a break and tried them out in the only truly dark room I could find. The men’s room. A coworker came in, flicked on the lights, and was startled to find me in the middle of the room, blinded by the sudden flash of normal light, brushing my teeth in the pitch dark with night vision goggles.
I had to go talk to HR about it. He was freaked out.
#79 Darwin Awards Honorable Mention
I was on a holiday in Fiji, and was in a pretty isolated area of rainforest on a tour walk. I had climbed about 10 or 15m up a waterfall (I'm an idiot). I started climbing down and went to stand on a landing when my feet started slipping like I was standing on ice. I was heading for the cliff edge with nothing to stop me. I remember everything was in slow motion, and when I looked down, I saw jagged rocks and the faces of the people on the tour looking up like everything was over for me.
I thought to myself this is it. Anyway, I somehow managed to keep myself on the landing but still tumbled pretty badly, got a few cuts and bruises and barely avoided a Darwin Award.
#80 Wait, What??
A friend of mine from college had a project for his astronomy class and he needed to take progression pictures of a constellation over the course of a night. He went out to a field in the middle of nowhere and set up his camera on a timer next to his truck, where he slept that night. The next morning, he looked through his pictures—and his blood ran cold.
He sees a picture of the constellation, picture of the constellation...picture of him sleeping in his truck...picture of the constellation, picture of the constellation.
#81 Momma’s Boy
I was laying in bed with my then-SO, who wanted to email me some pictures we had taken that day from his phone to me. The first email was sent a couple of hours prior, addressed to someone I didn't recognize. The subject said, "love never dies," and all the body said was, "I want you." I laid in bed completely stunned. I typed in the email address on his phone to see if it was a contact, and to my surprise, he had sent it to his mom’s best friend.
That was a long night...
#82 Lost in Dubai
As a little kid, I was traveling with my family on a plane to Dubai. Once it landed, I went down one aisle, and my family went down the other. I didn't know, and thought my family were behind me. I kept walking forward and eventually when I looked back, they weren't there... Well... Shoot. I walked back and forth for what felt like an eternity in the airport trying to find them.
So I was lost in a foreign airport without my passport or identification (my parents were holding onto them). I was freaking out because there was a police person there and people kept looking at me funny since I was a little unattended Asian kid. Eventually, I was reunited with my family, but man, it was terrifying as a kid...
#83 Super Eerie Country Creature
I lived in the countryside as a child, literally middle-of-nowhere territory, and my bus ride was an hour long so I had to wake up very early to catch it as it went by my house. I had no neighbors for a few miles around, and the stretch of road I lived on is flat and you could see a good mile in either direction before it curved off again into the forest which is cut back about 10 feet on either side of the road because of the electric poles.
It was winter and the plow had banked it three feet on either side, and I was waiting atop my driveway at 7 am before the sun has even come up, but there is enough light to see, especially since there is all the snow. To my left, I see something running on the opposite side of the road. I can't tell what it is because it is so far away, but I can see the silhouette against the snow, and I remember thinking to myself that I'm lucky to see a deer, because I enjoy wildlife.
They often run along the road when the snow is deep, I've seen it before, albeit when the sun is higher. I realize that its gait isn't right for a deer. It's now halfway to me, and I come to the absurd conclusion it's a man, running. As the figure jogs closer and closer, I can see he's not exactly wearing winter gear, like I am, all bundled up for the -10F, in fact he's barely covered at all.
I feel panicked and disturbed. At 20 feet, he veers from his course and comes/directly at me/diagonally across the road. He's running and to me it feels too fast for a man. It stops in front of me, just this grey naked silhouette at 7 am that I can’t see anything in or about, and I'm just petrified, standing there, looking at this thing, that's just standing there looking at me.
It doesn't say anything, do anything, just stands there. This happens in the course of maybe three seconds. Then it turns and runs back the way it came. I wanted to leave and go hide in my house, but my bus would be there any second and I didn't want to be yelled at by my mum. So I stood there terrified, watching that thing just run away until it had cleared the bend of the road.
10 minutes later the bus arrived and I was on my way to school. I tried telling myself it was just a jogger, or someone playing a prank, but no one lives near me. When I got off the bus that evening, I couldn't find one footprint in the snow on either side of the road and there should have been, there should have been at least one footprint from this thing because it hadn't snowed while I was at school.
I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it.
#84 Coming Out the Closet…As a Gamer
Maybe it's not humiliating, but I always get reminded of this. Me and my brother were so obsessed with Mortal Kombat 2 when it was first released. We heard of two characters that you could unlock (Smoke and NoobSaibot) and we were trying to unlock them for days, until I managed to find a guide that tells you how to unlock them.
However, when I found the guide, my father was already at home and we weren't allowed to play on the TV when dad is home. Instead, my brother, who's good at tinkering, brought my grandfather's black and white TV that was probably made in the 60s and tried to get our Sega to work on it—after 30 mins of tinkering it worked.
And we hid the TV inside the closet and started trying to unlock them, three minutes in, my father walks into the room and catches us. We get scolded for it. I'm 26 and my brother is 29, and when we're visiting parents my father from time to time enters our room and checks the closet "in case we're hiding a TV there" as a joke.
#85 Poor Career Choices
I used to make slightly altered driver's licenses. Everything went smoothly for months. Then September 11, 2001, happened, and they cracked down in Illinois and Iowa. Then one weekend, two different people in two different cities got caught with their real and my slightly altered ID. The cops wanted to know which was real. When they both called me that's when I knew I was screwed.
In the end, I made a plea and did not do any jail time. On the other hand, I was also a criminal justice major until my arrest ruined that whole thing. Good times.
#86 The Locker
This was when I was in seventh grade. I went to a really small Catholic school, and a lot of times my parents helped out around the school on weekends. So, I was often there in an almost empty school with nothing to do. For some reason, I had a very different locker than most of the other kids. Mine was really short, but also weirdly wide.
I always wondered if I could fit inside of it. I figured this was a good time to do it with nobody around to see me finally solve this stupid mystery. I get inside and I'm kind of scrunched in there. And then everything goes wrong. The freaking door shuts on me. I'm trying to use my fingers to open the latch from the inside, but I can't do it. I'm panicking. So, I've locked myself inside my own locker until probably 20 minutes later, my Dad and another adult family friend comes along and I start pounding on the door.
They laugh. And laugh. And laugh. And laugh. You know what, I'll just let you guys know when they're done laughing. But it's been 14 years, so I'm not sure that's going to be any time soon.
#87 Leave!
I was stationed in Seoul, South Korea several years ago. I was taking a shower in my room and when I got out, the word "leave" was written in small letters in the fog on the bathroom mirror. I didn't have a roommate because NCOs got their own private rooms. A little freaked out, I decided to do exactly that—leave. I went off post for some Korean BBQ and wandered the city a bit.
I came back a couple hours later to find the barracks evacuated and half burned to the ground. The fire was pinpointed to faulty electrical wiring that caught some insulation on fire inside the walls. Something knew it was going to happen and to this day, whatever that something was, it didn't want me in the middle of it. I'd gladly thank who or whatever it is if they'd give me the chance but it's been years and I still have no idea.
#88 Scheduling Conflict
I had been with this chick for about one year. At our school summer camp, a guy from the class above me came up to me and straight-up said: "Hey, I hear you’re so and so's new boyfriend, I’m her ex and just wanted to say hello.” I didn't really know what to make of the situation but for some reason, I just asked when they broke up. His answer made my blood run cold.
He said: "Oh, like one month ago." Needless to say, that relationship was over quickly.
#89 Rough Waters
Just a few days ago, it was my first time going rafting, and my group and I were about to get in the raft. All the instructors kept saying, "Wow this is the roughest water I've seen in seven years!" No biggie, let’s go rafting! I ended up being caught between two currents and flipping over. I was stuck under the raft for about 2 minutes until I was finally yanked out.
I got dragged through the river until I hit a rock and climbed on top. The entire time my only thought was, "Well... this is how it ends." Turns out a woman in my group wasn’t as lucky. She hit her head underwater, passed out, and drowned.
#90 Weekend Confusion
I woke up on a Saturday morning and decided to blow off my phone for the weekend and turned it off. I watched TV and played some video games. That night I went out and got all the ingredients for lasagna, and made it from scratch. I slept in on Sunday until about 1 pm. I watched TV in bed all day and ordered a pizza for dinner. I really felt extremely rested.
A TV show I watch comes on Sunday nights at 9 pm, so I made some popcorn, sat down at 8:59, and turned on AMC. Well, my show wasn't on—and HOLY MOLY IT'S TUESDAY NIGHT. I WORKED OVER THE WEEKEND, FORGOT, AND DIDN'T SHOW UP TO WORK MONDAY MORNING THINKING IT WAS SATURDAY. I no-showed to work for two days with my phone off.
#91 Guardian Angel
I was eight months pregnant with my second child. I had to take my mom to a doctor’s appointment, she was getting a procedure and could not drive home after. I had my not quite two-year-old with me. He was in the backseat behind my mom in his car seat. I was driving a Jeep Wrangler. I pulled up to the intersection to make a left turn. I was in the crosswalk and the light turned red.
I heard a loud man's voice tell me to "BACK UP NOW!" I put the car in reverse and backed out of the crosswalk. I did not have time to look up or put the car back in drive when I heard a loud crash. Two cars collided in front of me and a SUV was where my car just was. On my hood was the headlight cover for the SUV.
As the police, fire dept. and EMS showed up they wanted to treat me since I was really pregnant and I had to keep telling them we were not involved in the accident. One EMS guy picked up the plastic on my hood and said "How?" I told him what I heard. He said "I guess you have an angel." My mom did not hear anything. I still don't know what that was.
#92 Tree Climber
As a child around 11 years old, I was climbing a big old tree at "the secret lake." I must have been 20-30 feet up when the branch I was standing on just went like dust away from me. Falling headfirst was one of those life flashing by moments... and being only 11, it didn't take long. I was saved by ending upside down tangled in a barbed wired fence. I never did tell my mum the truth about how my new jeans and leg got ripped to pieces.
#93 The Ghost of School Days Past
My friends and I used to frequently visit the abandoned Joseph P. Ladd school. It was rumored to have been haunted, but most of the time I had simply assumed that the strange noises that came from it were just other people on the property. I had never experienced anything supernatural there, or anywhere else for that matter. At the same time, I was still a bit on edge and nervous due to the rumors and from just imagining what could happen if they were all true.
One of the last times that I was there, I brought my crowbar along with me because the state had started boarding up and welding the doors shut. I knew that I could get in if I could wiggle a small space free in the door, as I had done a few times in the past. After a few tries, I started to get pretty aggravated, saying to myself “Is this even really worth the effort?!”
It was a pretty well lit night. The moon was really bright, so I didn’t need my flashlight unless I was inside a building. I also generally preferred to use it as little as possible, so as not to alert any security people to my presence. So, I’m peering through these two doors down the empty hallway with my flashlight, and about 50 feet down the hallway, what appeared to have been some light dust suddenly came into view.
The dust entered the area that my flashlight was aimed at, and then it suddenly turned around. I could now see the cloudy, barely visible outline of a chest, shoulders, and head. Nothing else. As it turned around, I can still vividly remember seeing what appeared to be the ghostly, misty outline of shoulders and a head moving towards the flashlight. At that point, as any sane person would do, I ran away and started screaming. I have never been so scared in my entire life.
#94 Hiding in the Grass
I looked down and realized it wasn't a cat that had scratched me, but that a rattlesnake had bitten me. Bad day.
#95 Snail Mail to the Extreme
There was this abandoned school turned World War I military hospital near my house that my friend and I liked to break into. One day, we were rooting around the third floor and we found an empty envelope on the floor of a closet. It was old, and the address was written in script. It only had a name on it. That name on it was the exact same as my friend’s name, whose name is rather uncommon. We booked it out of there real fast.
#96 Keep a Calendar
A friend called me saying he had been kicked out and need help picking his stuff up. I was doing well in chemistry at the time—the only class I had that morning, so I figured I could skip one and go help. I show up two days later for the next class, and they begin handing out some papers. I didn't know what was happening until I looked at the paper my neighbor got. My blood ran cold: It was a graded mid-term. The one class I missed was the day of the big test.
The teacher did not let me retake it, but I had good grades up to that point and made a good grade on the second midterm and the final. I also did an extra credit assignment near the end which boosted my grade. Overall, I probably lost half a letter grade, but my final grade was 82 so it would have been a B either way. Still, one of the worst feelings I have ever had though.
#97 Strange Visit
My cousin Dave and I were out on an all-day fishing trip, and he told me that if I wanted to spend the night at his place, I was more than welcome to. I hadn’t seen him in a while and I still wanted to spend time with him so, I said sure! He lived in a ranch style house with his wife of two years and their seven-year-old son.
When we got back to his place, we had dinner, watched TV, you know did normal things. Eventually, his wife and son went to bed, which left us alone in the living room. That’s when I asked him, you like this place so far? He said “yeah,” but was making a face that I could tell he wanted to say more. He eventually followed up with, “Don’t get me wrong, this place is great but there’s just something weird about it."
An hour goes by and it’s getting late, and Dave can hear his son talking on the monitor so he decides to check on him. He enters his son's room with a “Hey buddy, why are you—” This is followed up by him shuffling to pick up his son, carrying him out, and slamming the door to his bedroom. Then he woke up his wife and sent us all out of the house.
As soon as we’re out, he asks me to call the police. I oblige and while we're waiting I ask, “What happened man?” It took him a while to gather a response, and then he looked at me with the weirdest facial expression and said his son “was sitting up talking to the closet, and when I looked over, I saw an old man, and I swear to god man, he was smiling at me.”
He was tearing up as he was telling me this. The police arrived, they check the house, no sign of entry at all, everything except the front door was locked. After they left, Dave made everyone sleep in the living room. Four months after that, they moved to a new house. I asked him once if he moved because of the man he saw. And he just shrugged it off. I think he saw him again. I mean, either way, something happened that night.
#98 Explosive Training
I was doing a grenade training exercise in Afghanistan and my platoon had the day off, so the tour commander scheduled a big range for us to go practice. We were using many types of arms that day, with a lot of bigger stuff. It was an exciting day, because as a standard infantryman you don't get to use that stuff hardly ever. The range was just starting and our other squad got to start with rocket launchers, I was very jealous because my squad got stuck with grenades first which is the most boring range of all those listed before.
We start a line to start lobbing them over the barriers downrange. A guy in my squad, let's call him Smith, comes up to the plate and readies his grenade. As he threw it, the spoon on the grenade caught on his sleeve and hit the top of the barrier and fell straight down. Everyone yells and takes off running back to the concrete safety trench about 30 feet behind us. Everyone except me. I was next in line (so closest to the grenade minus the guy throwing) and as I pivoted to run, I slipped and fell no more than 10-15 ft away from the grenade.
At that moment I decided not to get back up and thought "It's over". When grenades explode, there is a cone of the explosion where a sliver above the ground does not get hit by shrapnel, and I just so happened to be in that protective cone. Those 3 seconds felt like a lifetime. The grenade went off and absolutely rocked me. But somehow, I was unscathed.
My squad leader came to check on me and rolled me over yelling my name. As I rolled over, I just looked and him and cussed. I honestly was shaken up for only like a minute and wanted to resume the range so I could shoot the big stuff. But since we had an accident, our range was shut down and we never got to go back the rest of deployment.
#99 A Rough Landing
I spent a few years skydiving every weekend. On jump 17 (I'm solo at this point but don't yet have my license) things were going well. My canopy deployed, and I started thinking about the landing pattern. I look down, and check the windsock on the ground to make my landing choice. Once I'm committed, I notice people landing in the opposite direction than I am going—you land into the wind to slow your speed—and I'm wondering why they're all doing it wrong … and then I realize. Uh-Oh. They're going the right way, I'm going the wrong way.
So, with the wind at my back, I look down and realize I am moving very fast. There is now no way I can run this out and even if I try rolling on the landing there's going to be a lot of momentum. I am going to wipe out. I look at the landing area and see a sandpit, say a prayer, and head for it. I drill myself into the sand. Nothing is broken. I'm a little bruised and very lucky to be alive.
And that's when the safety officer started shouting at me. I was in trouble. I didn't get grounded but was reamed out loudly and publicly—and again later at the club meeting.
#100 At Ease Soldier
My twin had recently joined the Navy and was at boot camp. I, on the other hand, was walking around the grocery store when a man came running up to me in a panic. He began to shout, "What in the hell are you doing here?! You're going to go to federal prison!" A bit shocked, I assumed it was just some crazy person, and started to back away but he followed.
So, I said, "Sir, I don't know what you're talking about." He then proceeded to say my twin's name and then I started laughing. Still very panicked and now angry, he asked why I thought this was funny. I explained I am such-and-such's twin. He didn't believe me until I finally pulled my ID out to prove I was who I said I was.
He then apologized and explained he was my brother's enlisting officer and was very concerned when he saw me.
#101 That’s Just Freaky
I'm a paramedic/volunteer fireman. We covered a town in the middle of nowhere. Get a call from "Woodchuck City" as we call it, which is a trailer park with all of the chaos you'd associate with a bad scene. The call was FNRP (Found Non-Responsive, with/weak Pulse), so we rushed out there. These are usually overdoses or strokes, so time was important.
I get there and when I come in there's four or five adults, all wearing their church clothes (black pants, white shirt, women in blue or grey gowns) which threw me off because it was about two in the morning on a weekday (their Sabbath is Saturday, I think). I kneel down next to her and feel her wrist. Cold as ice. This is where things start to get weird.
My guess is they're wearing their clothes because they knew she was dead, and the minister was on the way for last rites or something. Paramedic with me asks if we should defib, I shake my head and try to verify there aren't any vitals. Nothing. Their dog starts growling at me, and I'm thinking he doesn't like me touching her.
I ask them to get rid of the dog and he starts howling. Then the dog just stops. At the very moment the dog stops, a light blows out, and the "dead" person sits up, says "Make sure [victim's sister] gets the heck out of her place" and slowly lays down. My partner and I are freaked out, as I was CERTAIN that woman was dead, but nobody else is.
Partner starts going through, checking, to see if I screwed up. Nope, still dead, skin is getting a little change. We call in the coroner, who has to come out from the other part of the county, nearly 40 minutes away. Sheriff radios in and says they'll be a few minutes, as a tree has fallen on a cabin a few miles away.
Later find out they had called the sister and she hadn't taken two steps out of her place when a tree had fallen on her cabin, totally destroying the bedroom in which she slept. I don't know if it fell directly on the bed, but, at that point, I didn't want to know any more about anything that happened that night. It certainly wasn't normal what I saw.
#102 Lady, Get Over Him Already
I used to manage a group home for developmentally disabled adults. I was in charge of hiring the staff that we needed to make the house run properly. I saw a name come across my desk that I had to interview and I instantly looked them up. Turns out, this was a girl that had an obsessive crush on me from years ago and, based on her social media, she still did.
I was in a panic, because she was basically stalking everything I did, and I really couldn't back out because it was five minutes before the interview. She came in, and it was so weird... she acted normal. We interviewed in a professional manner for about 15 minutes, I showed her around, and I thought, "Wow, maybe she has done some maturing and just let it go."
Then we got back to my office. I started a sentence like, "Well, (name), it's been a pleasure having you here and I-......" She goes: "Oh, no no no, we aren't done yet. You think you can ignore everything like you don't know what's going on?! I know where you work, now. I know where you live, and I'm going to keep calling."
There was more she was saying along the lines of me telling her to kindly leave, but a phone call to the police, as well as a restraining order, kept her away from work and my life.
#103 Some Things Can’t Be Put Back
When I was in EMT school, we were told about a paramedic student (the instructor was a paramedic as well) who observed a stabbing call. They arrive at the bar and see a dude with a knife in his abdomen. Medic student takes lead and pulls the knife out, something you never do, as I’m sure you know. Senior medic loses his freaking mind at this dumbass, asking him what the heck he was thinking.
Student freaks out and, you guessed it, puts the freaking knife back in. The patient died as a result, the student lost any chance of having a good job (not even just in EMS) and was charged with the death of the patient (might’ve been manslaughter I don’t remember). His entire life was ruined because he freaked out and made a mistake on a call, not a rookie mistake or a common slip-up, but in about half a minute, he ruined his life.
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