Have you ever been truly frightened? Like actually scared for your life?

Even if you’ve never had an experience like that, I think you’ll agree that these 18 true stories from AskReddit will make you shiver.

1. Saved by the dog

When I was around 14 years old, I really liked to go for runs with my shepherd x lab. I lived in a fairly quiet, clean suburban neighborhood that was situated beside a broad expanse of pasture used by about ten horses (I would say it was roughly 40 acres).

Anyway, a bike path ran between the pasture and my neighborhood and I generally ran down the path. One night I decided to go with my pup around 10:00 pm. May not seem like the smartest decision, but I had spent many nights with my group of friends biking/rollerblading around the neighborhood so I thought nothing of the late hour. I was running down the bike path with my dog, who is a a big pup yet the friendliest guy you’ll meet. As we ran I noticed a dark lump a little ways ahead, and because it was nearly pitch black I could barely see it. I dismissed it as a garbage bag.

As we drew closer, my dog perked up his ears and his hackles went up and he started to growl…which he rarely ever does. He loves basically everything. I stopped running and stared as the ‘garbage bag’ started to move. 14 year old me still didn’t really know what the heck I was looking at, and it wasn’t until the supposed garbage stood up that I realized it was a man…who then started to run towards us!

My dog then turned around and, I kid you not, started to run and yanked me along behind him. We reached a street, he darted down it, then pulled me into a dark alley, onto another street, then another alley, then another street, until we somehow lost the guy. My dog saved my life, I’m pretty sure. The guy may not have been an axe murderer but it turns out some creepy ex felon was arrested in our neighborhood about two days later. I love my dog <3

2. Proposition

I was walking home from the beach one day around noon and a guy driving down the street in a Ford Escape slows down and in slightly broken English asks me how much, I tell him to fuck off and he tells me $200 for an hour.

At this point I’m walking faster and his car is keeping pace with me, he crosses two lanes and parks in a driveway in front of me and opens his door and a passenger door opens as well.

Another guy steps out and walks towards me, I start screaming my head off and cussing them out trying to draw attention on this busy street while fishing my knife out of my bag. I walked into the street and around the car, call my boyfriend and tell them its the cops.

I give my boyfriend their license plate number and almost run to his house because it was about a block away. They followed me for another minute and then drove past me really fast while calling me a ‘fucking cunt’. I was 16 at the time and I really wish I had called the cops because as an adult I am 100% sure I was about to be kidnapped and raped.

3. Almost Snatched

Didn’t realize until years later that I was almost snatched.

Grew up in a small town. Out playing in the yard with my 2 younger siblings like every other summer day. Guy pulls up alongside the yard in a truck, calls me over. Asks my name, if I’m having a good summer. He says he could really use my help, he’s out looking for his lost puppy. He can show me a photo of the puppy if I come closer. No, closer. The picture is small, can I please help him? I yelled to my brother on the other side of the yard “Daaaaaan, come help us find a puppy!”

I have to assume he thought I yelled ‘dad’ because he noped / screeched out of there without another word.

I remember being really worried about that puppy…until we had an assembly at our primary school about things strangers might say to lure you into their vehicles.

4. Holy BALLS

Rented a cabin for a week with my SO – first night there we had spent the day visiting her family (the actual reason for our trip), had dinner, she got pretty wasted. Get back to the cabin, carry my SO inside – to find all our bags opened/dumped onto the floor. This set me into panic mode.

I hadn’t been drinking and I routinely carry, so I pull out my gun and sweep the house – I check every room, closets, even under the bed – nothing. My SO is still fast asleep, so I check our stuff over and there’s nothing missing. It had just been dumped onto the floor. So I look around some more, all the windows are locked, the backdoor was even dead bolted.

It just really bothered me that there was no sign of break in. I know I locked the place before I left, so either someone else had a key to my cabin, or whoever it was was still inside the cabin. Either way, I didn’t think I’d do much sleeping.

It was too late to make other arrangements, and considering that most likely there wasn’t anything to worry about really. We had been gone all day, from 9am – midnight. So odds whoever it was did it was probably way earlier. But still… I couldn’t shake it. I went in and covered up my SO, used the bathroom, set up a rocking chair facing the front door – my hand on my gun on my lap, I started watch.

I felt pretty silly sitting there, but I couldn’t not sit there either. And some time around 3-4am, I fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning around 7am, sun shining through. I actually half scared myself because I hadn’t meant to fall asleep – which then scared me again because I wasn’t holding my gun. I start looking around, and on the couch is my gun. I’m like What… then I look – the front door is wide open. I’m like.. NO FUCKING WAY. I jump up and start running to check on my SO – thank God she was still there, untouched. I go back out into the living room and pick up my gun, all my bullets are missing.

I go outside and look around, car and everything is still there – no signs of anybody. I walk back inside, look in the far corner of the living room and I see the corner of the main living room rug lifted up. I investigate – it’s covering the opening to the crawlspace.

That means this guy was IN MY CABIN THE ENTIRE TIME. I must have pulled up and caught the guy in the act, he thought fast and hid in the crawlspace. Then some time during the night, crawled out, DISARMED ME, and walked right out the front door.

5. Crazy Family

It was 1990 and I was 13 years old. It was a Friday night and my parents went out for the evening. They were visiting an aunts house which was about 45 mins away. My best friend was staying the night and we were upstairs chilling in my room. Now, the bedroom I was in and previously been my sisters just a few weeks prior. She moved in with a friend so I jumped on the chance to get the big room. It was on the second floor with two windows. One on the front of the house and another on the side, right next to the chimney.

My back was to the side window when she screamed a horrible scream. I turn and look and she’s yelling that there was a man in the window. She saw his face and he had his hands on the window sill. I question what she saw because, hello, we’re on the second floor.

About 10 seconds later my dog starts going off down stairs. Our house was positioned weird. We were right around a bend in the road on a very steep hill with a thick forest about 20 feet from the back of the house. There was a large deck that ran the stretch of the house with a door to the kitchen on one end and a set of French doors going into the family room on the other. We got a lot of animals on the deck so I tried to write his barking off on a possum. No dice. He is running back and forth across the back of the house chasing something. It’s pitch black and I am not going downstairs to turn the outside light on. Then it didn’t matter, the dog was at the front door, freaking out. So I did the stupidest thing you can imagine. I went for my dads gun that he kept in his sock drawer.

It wasn’t there.

I was afraid to call the police because if it was a false alarm my dad would have literally beat the shit out of me. So I called my neighbor. He was an FBI agent and for some reason I thought that made him coplike. I told him the brief rundown and that we were home alone. A span of about 5 minutes had passed and I finally realized I need to call my parents. No one answered so we made arrangements for my friends mom to get us so I could stay over there. I was not staying in the house alone.

A few minutes later my neighbor knocks on the door. He said that as he was walking into the yard a car peeled out right around the bend. There was no street parking so whomever it was didn’t live nearby (there was also a parking lot across from where they were). He said he would talk to my parent when they got home and would look around the yard the next day.

Finally my friends mom arrived about 20 minutes later. I left a note, loved my dog, locked up and took off.

The next day my dad was pissed. He said my friend made it up for attention and I blew it out of proportion. He was such a nice guy. The neighbor came back over and looked around. He mentioned some holes that were under the window next to the chimney. Finally my dad starts taking it seriously. He immediately starts inventoring belonging and we start inspecting the house thoroughly. I found pry marks on the front door (we seldom used it so we wouldn’t have noticed right away), but little else.

Now, I didn’t tell him about the gun because I assumed he moved it and if he knew I went looking for it he’d beat my ass. Well, he didn’t know it was missing and flipped his lid (understanding). He then went through his important paperwork and discovered that several credit cards were missing as well as some collectibles that were stashed in his closet.

We inventoried our belongings. My mom was missing some jewelry and I was missing (sob) all my Z Cavarichi clothes as well as some knickknacks.

Cops were called and a report was filed. It took a few days, but he was able to get info on charges made on one of the cards. It took over a week to get all the statements. There were charges for jewlery, clothing, alcohol, and the one that stood out, lots of baby supplies including a crib.

All of the clues led to one person. An old friend of my sisters that she had recently started hanging out with again. She was pregnant.

There’s a family meeting and my sister says that she lent her car to the girl a few times while she was at work. Our dad had her call the girl and tell her that if she confessed to what she did he wouldn’t press charges against her. She admits to copying the house and car key when she borrowed the car. While everyone was gone her and some friends came in and took things. She didn’t know about the gun or that something happened that one night. It seems her friends were coming back without her.

I’m trying to remember if she got in trouble or not, but I know a few of her friends got arrested. They changed the locks, added a keypad on the garage and my dad started setting booby traps. The worst trap was a series of razor blades that he duct taped around the doorknobs. That one almost caught me sneaking in one night.

6. Mental Hospital

My father was a supervisor of a now defunct inpatient mental health hospital. He supervised the children’s unit. These were kids, mostly boys, that had done some terrible shit. Or they came from terrible families and through no fault of their own, ended up there. One day a group outing had been planned for some of the kids on his unit. Two boys decided it would be a good time to start a fight right as they were about to leave. My dad decided that their behavior didn’t warrant a trip (I forgot where they were going, but it was somewhere really fun I believe). He kept them back at the facility that day. I was six at the time. Later that night my dad gets a phone call from home – it’s the police. Two boys had managed to slip past a psych tech sleeping on night shift at the facility and were found blocks from our house with duct tape and knives in their backpacks.

Apparently they hadn’t taken kindly to being left behind and waited until they knew the night crew would be distracted doing rounds or tending to patients. They had found my dad’s home address by breaking into his office and saw a picture of me on his desk. Needless to say they confessed to my dad’s face later that night they had planned to rape and murder me. The cops picked them up because they were too young (I believe they were 14 or 15) to be out as late as they were. My dad quit a few weeks later and we moved cross country.