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We tend to think of well-lit, populated places in the middle of the day as being fairly safe. We let our guards down, we assume nothing bad can happen in public…but listen.
Take it from the girl who watches tons of murder documentaries – that’s just not true.
If you don’t believe me, listen to these 16 people who had some pretty terrifying experiences just when they least expected it.
16. It’ll get your heartrate up.
I guess this qualifies… thunderstorm downdraft on a fully laden plane.
Your seatbelt is done up, but there’s fresh air between your butt & the seat as the plane drops.
15. Like someone stepped over your grave.
I was working a construction job a while back and I was told to wait on the ground floor for someone.
I bent down to retie my boots and a pallet full of mixing cement comes crashing down where I was just standing.
I clearly remember the foreman saying I would have been “stone cold dead” if my shoes were tied.
Broad daylight, nobody reported the accident (OSHA was different back then).
If anyone has seen the movie Grand Canyon, you’ll know how I felt.
14. What is wrong with people?
When I was twelve years old I was beaten up in a crowded bus station at rush hour by a boy several years older than me for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
It was a completely unprovoked attack and I was trapped against a one-way door.
The adults standing around waiting for their buses to go home from work did absolutely nothing to help me or to stop me from being attacked.
13. Future serial killer.
i was in a local swimming pool and a friend mentioned how he thought i could fit into the storage locker.
i jumped in and he locked it behind me. i learned a few things that day.
- 1 i can indeed fit into some storage lockers.
- 2 this person was not my friend.
- 3 strangers won’t help you if your friend says you are fine even if you are crying for help.
- 4 putting the vents at the bottom of a locker is real dumb.
12. I can feel his fear.
I accompanied my dad to the hospital while he was undergoing a routine procedure. They put him under for an hour to do a laryngoscopy. I kicked back in the cheery, well-lit lobby with my tablet, playing a game.
I was engrossed in the game, but about ten minutes later I realized the place had gone eerily silent. I looked up and there were no nurses or staff anywhere. I was the only person in what had been a room with a half-dozen people going back and forth. Looking around, I suddenly noticed a red light flashing over one of the doors.
My heart dropped out of my chest. My hands went icy and numb. I started counting the doors. The red light was flashing over my dad’s door. I walked slowly down the hallway, trying not to make a sound. I didn’t want to disturb anyone. I didn’t want to miss any sounds. I didn’t want to know what was happening in the room I was walking toward. I felt like a scared seven-year-old.
A nurse came out and he grabbed me on the shoulder. “Hey,” he said casually, “we’re working with your dad right now but I need to have you wait in the lobby right now, okay?”
“Okay. What’s going on?” My voice was small and timid and high and I hated hearing it, hated feeling helpless.
“Oh, we’ll be out to talk to you in just a second. Sorry, but I gotta go.” He slipped back into the room and the unearthly silence came back. So, I walked back to the lobby and sat down.
A chaplain came by a bit later, as I was sitting motionless. My dad had a heart attack while under. He went into a coma, but they got his heart beating again. As I went in to see him, nurses and doctors filtered out of the room. Blood spatters on the sheets and floor. My dad quiet, wired into a half-dozen machines. About 15 minutes later, when my mom arrived to answer my urgent texts and calls, the lobby had a couple of families in there chatting happily, and the staff was back to its business. We pulled his life support four days later, after learning he was irrevocably brain-dead.
The world can change so fast. Your life can get turned upside-down. Your life can end. And for the people around you, it can just be another day. They go on without even noticing the pain inside you. That was the moment in my life this truth was most starkly plain. Nothing has ever been more terrifying.
11. Classic 80s.
I was 10 or maybe 12 years old. My mom took me to the mall so she could go to the Target. There was a baseball card/comic book store right next to the Target and while she shopped I got to go look at the collectibles.
While I was looking at the cards in the case, a guy came in. He looked around for a minute, then approached me and asked if I liked baseball cards. I said that I did and he said he had a Babe Ruth card in his van and asked if I would like to see it. We were right at the counter and the clerk was right there, but I got a real creepy vibe from this guy.
I said no and left the store to go back to Target and find my mom. I looked behind me as I walked into Target and, sure enough, he was following me. I was starting to get a little scared, so I turned into the women’s underwear aisle, thinking he wouldn’t follow me. He kept after me until I finally found my mom.
I never told her about it because I didn’t want to scare her. At the time I thought maybe he wanted to steal my $10 but now I’m pretty sure he wanted more than $10.
10. Those kids will never be the same.
Fistula rupture of a patient in my hospital.
Blood everywhere.
Blood on the floor, ceiling, workers, and everywhere else you can imagine. Splurging everywhere.
Doctors and nurses worked on her for 45 minutes, but nothing they could do to save her.
It looked like someone had been slashed open with a sword in the room, and the worst part is that her 3 kids were there to see it.
9. Thank goodness for Mom.
When I was really young, a guy stopped me when I was leaving school and asked if I liked PlayStation and Nintendo.
I told him I did, and that I really liked final fantasy and he said “what a coincidence, I have that with a TV in my van. wanna come play?”
I told him I had to ask my mom first, and to stay here. I ran home and called my mom to ask, and she told me to lock the door, get in the basement, and don’t open the door for anyone. She explained what was happening to me when she got home and once I knew, I was pretty freaked out.
8. Some guys have all the luck.
It was well lit and populated as it was my workplace, i was a pourer in a foundry at the time. Due to a mistake in the metal, it had to be put back into the furnace instead of being poured, a job that is done by using a crane to take the ladle (big bucket full of molten metal) back to the furnace. The ladle is then manually rolled over and the metal poured back into the furnace.
I was the lucky guy to roll it in, and whilst rolling it the crane driver made a mistake and moved the ladle out of position. This resulted in a wave of 1600C (~3000f) metal flying toward me like water off a spoon in the sink. Due to the light coming from the molten metal I couldn’t gauge the depth of the wave at the time, but looked down to see nothing but orange light surrounding me from the waist up. This lasted a moment at most, but in that moment every possible injury that could come from that crossed my mind.
No injury came of that, like a spoon in the sink the wave was very thin and my gear was good enough. But I was genuinely terrified then.
7. Heart-in-your-throat scary.
I was followed. It wasn’t super populated where he saw me, but it was midday (the edges of the city centre), and we definitely weren’t the only people around. This guy started talking to me and getting too close, telling me that I was very beautiful and asking how old I was (a very young looking 18 – I told him I was 16, I think, in the hope that he would think that was creepy and go away. This guy was nearly middle aged). It was just kind of usual-creepy to start with, until it became obvious that he was following me beyond the point of just being a weird guy making conversation with a passerby. I told him I had to go, and flat out walked into traffic to get away from him, and he literally yelled “I’m following you!” after me, and ran up to me once the cars had passed.
Eventually I caught up with a bigger crowd of people, refusing to speak to him anymore. He was stupid enough to try and take hold of me. I yelled, and people turned around, so he ended up running away.
I also had someone yell “I hope you get raped” at me and my friends in London, and nobody turned around there. Londoners see more shit, I imagine.
6. I would have had no idea what to do as a kid.
I’m not sure it was the most terrifying thing that happened to me, but it was the most terrifying thing that happened to me at that point in my life.
I was about 11, in Cape Town – South Africa, visiting family.
My parents were walking in front of me, and I was walking with my little cousin directly behind them. We were in a shopping mall (Tyger Valley Center for any South Africans out there).
Anyway, I think my parents had stopped to get some money out of an ATM, and my and my cousin were just being silly, as you do at that age.
This guy, maybe in his mid-20s sat across from us on a bench, pointed at us, then my parents, and then dragged his finger along his neck. He then pulled open his jacket, and pulled a gun out of a pocket.
I don’t know if that was a real gun, and I didn’t care to find out. I told my parents immediately, and we kind of circulated the security personnel before eventually leaving.
Was a bit of an uncomfortable situation.
5. That’s not very much prison time.
i few years ago I was at a bowling center on a busy day.
When we were about to leave we heard a big bang.
A man had thrown the heaviest bowling ball on a woman’s head.
Later I read that he did it on purpose and the women had severe brain damage.
And was lucky to be alive.
The man got sentenced to 18 months in prison.
4. Oh heck no.
Was taking my kids for a walk in the park near our apartment once when a guy and a woman came out of the tree line suddenly and the guy said to give him my wallet and anything else in my pockets. He had some weird screwdriver / knife thing and I pushed my daughter, my eldest child, behind me. I was going to do the same for my son but the woman grabbed his other arm for some reason and my heart felt like it was going to explode for some reason, I suddenly forgot about self preservation and jumped forwards and broke the woman’s nose. I felt a sharp pain under my ribs and looked to see that the man had just shanked me, but at this point two other guys who had been jogging were running up and shouting.
The police that patrolled the park showed up not long after that. I was sitting and trying not to bleed to death, the man had ran off and his screwdriver was still in me. The woman was on the ground crying and shouting because I had also knocked the top front of her teeth loose / out. The two joggers were originally asking the woman if I was the assaulter but the situation cleared up soon. I got taken to the hospital and questioned about the incident, there was a while when it looked like I was going to be charged with battery for the woman since it turns out she actually had a decently well off family, was just an addict. They tried to sue me but it was thrown out and she was sentenced for attempted kidnapping.
I had a tube in my chest for two weeks after my surgery to remove the shank, but it all cleared up after that. Just glad my kids are safe.
3. He was just 13.
An addict wanted money from me down town, but I literally had nothing but my clothes on me. So I said sorry man, all out.
Dude lumbers towards me slowly, pushes me over, and stab me in the thigh with a Swiss Army knife.
I booked it to the hospital for stitches. Didn’t hurt until I actually looked at it. Adrenaline didn’t stop pumping for a very long time.
2. That will scar you for life.
In the second grade, around 7-8 years old, babysitter picked me up from a church ( I went to a catholic elementary school and was practicing to make my communion that sunday, I think this was a tuesday or thursday), and we were walking down the sidewalk when I saw a man breakdancing on the street (Circa 1992 in Queens, New York at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church/School) and thought cool… but at the same moment, my babysitter was pushing me against a metal fence alongside the sidewalk.
I didn’t hear anything but what I was witnessing was a NYPD (police officer) being shot multiple times by two criminals who had stolen a woman’s purse several blocks away (how stereotypical). One criminal was on one side, the officer in the middle, and the other criminal on the other side, so who knows who shot who, but the officer was shot many times (over 5), one criminal was shot in the head and died on the spot, the other criminal got away but was caught nearby.
F*cking hectic, I believe my mother saved the newspaper the next day, and I remember watching the news that night. Astoria circa 1991-1992. If anyone could find more info, it would be like tying up some loose ends in my life as it’s been something I’ve thought about many many many times before.
1. Well that’s terrifying.
Many years ago, I was just about to walk into the restaurant where I was the assistant manager, when I was approached by this huge guy who was all smiles and generally gave across this body language of being friendly, is a “sorry but I need to ask you something” kinda way.
Next thing I knew, he was screaming at me about some friend I hadn’t seen in a while. Turns out my friend had stolen some weed off this dodgy guy, and my name had come up for some reason.
Right there in the middle of a busy road in a busy city, he pulled out a Stanley Knife and told me he was going to cut my throat with it if I didn’t give him his £350 right there. I still don’t remember exactly what I said to him but he left, told me he was going to kill me if he ever saw me again and I went into work.
I do not like and also love these stories at the same time.
If you’ve got a similar one to share, please do so in the comments!
