Trust your gut.
How many times have you been told that in your life?
Maybe it was from your parents, maybe it was from a friend or a teacher.
But it usually turns out to be pretty good advice…and sometimes it even gets you out of some potentially dangerous situations.
Here are some pretty hair-raising stories from folks on AskReddit.
1. Burnt rubber.
“My dad is a truck driver and has always told me if you are on the interstate near a semi and smell burnt rubber get away from them because they are about to blow a tire.
One day driving to work I smell burnt rubber. There was a semi next to me so I sped up to get ahead of him. Next thing I know I see a huge crash in my rear view with one car going airborne and flipping. I called the accident in to 911 and then watched the news and papers the rest of the day.
Thankfully no fatalities but it was nasty. The semi blew a tire and the car next to it in the middle lane swerved to avoid the tire fragment and hit the car in the far lane causing it to flip. I would have been right in the middle of it all.”
2. Alone at the bus station.
“Greyhound left me in Santa Ana at 3:00 am told me to wait four hours alone for the next bus.
Normally I’m very selective on when I call ubers but for some reason, something told me I needed to leave right away. I find out my hotel is only about 15 minutes away (wow a four-hour wait???) So I call an uber.
Uber driver picks me up, I get in the car tell him something along the lines of “Man they wanted me to wait four hours and the station is closed wtf.” He says he’s glad I called him instead of waiting for the next bus.
I ask why he says it’s a dangerous area and a few weeks ago another girl decided to wait for the next bus and they r*ped and robbed her. Nobody found her until the station opened up again the next day.
Now I always travel with pepper spray.”
3. The storm.
“What just seemed like a bad storm had started, my ex then decided to play with the dog out in the back yard in the rain. I got a weird feeling about how strong the winds were and despite being called crazy I told my ex she and the dog needed to go down into the basement for shelter with me.
Within 15 minutes half my roof was gone. Apparently the storm was a derecho, which I’d not even heard of before that.”
4. Collapsed wall.
“I was riding my bike during a huge storm when I was 10. There was this huge, recently built brick/concrete wall right beside the sidewalk where I was using as a “race track”.
I was having a good time and suddenly I felt that “get the f*ck out of here”. Which I did.
The next morning as I passed by the place I was playing previously, the entire wall had collapsed!”
5. Bad vibes.
“A couple years ago, I was walking home from the bar at 1 am. I’m a young woman in her 20s, so this was instantly stupid, but I wanted to save money avoiding an Uber.
I’m walking down a main but dark street, and then a pickup truck driving by slows down next to me. Two men look at me and the passenger asks, “Hey, do you need a ride?” I lie and say “no thanks” because I’m expecting one in a moment.
They said alright and drove off. I watched them drive down the street and then, a ways down, I saw their brake lights light up. There was no stop sign or stoplight, so I just assumed the worst and thought, “I’ve got to get out of here.”
I ran into a tiny parking lot to my right and hid behind an outdoor vending machine. Moments later, the two men pulled into the lot and circled it, clearly looking for me.
When they couldn’t find me, they drove away. I waited a few moments until I decided to call an Uber.”
6. Spiked drink.
“I was getting a beer with a friend and he brought along his friend. When we left I felt very drunk despite only having two drinks.
They wanted me to come to their hotel as they were getting ready to go to a concert that night but I made the excuse that I needed to get home because I think I left my oven on. My beer was 100% tampered with.
My vision felt like I was in a tunnel. I got home in an Uber and immediately threw up and continued to do so for the rest of the night.”
7. Hell no.
“When I was 19 and travelling solo in Europe I met this Australian girl in Spain who was also around 18 and we went to Italy together. We are both short, petite girls and were very clearly in need of a place to stay.
We missed our first ferry out of Barcelona so we had to take the next one. When we arrived in Italy, our train was hours late and we didn’t get into Rome until around 1-2am. We navigated the sketchy streets by the Termini train station and finally found our hostel.
The check-in lobby was in a small dingy room that appeared to be a closet. The man working reception looked us up and down and told us there was no room for us there anymore (since we were late) but suggested we stay in their sister hostel. Desperate, we agreed.
He took us downstairs back to the alleyway where we were greeted by a large man in dirty clothing. They spoke to each other in a language other than English/Italian and led us outside. We walked down a couple alleyways until we got to an unmarked door on the side of a building.
One of the men made a phone call, again speaking in a different language. We found it odd since everyone could speak English but they chose to speak in a language we didn’t understand. A man cracked the door open just enough to poke his head outside, and upon seeing the other men fully opened the door and let us in.
We walked down the stairs into the sunken room which was lit by black lights. At this point it was me, my friend, and three large men. The “reception” was a dirty room containing a couch with some dirty sheets laid over it. They told us the rooms were in the basement and to follow them.
We walked down a set of stairs: one man in front followed by my friend followed by another man behind her followed by myself and the last man behind me. We went down one flight of stairs to find that there was yet another flight of stairs going down to a closed door.
At this point I lost it and my friend and I pushed past the men and scrambled back upstairs. The men kept shouting at us that the rooms were downstairs but the scenario seemed way too wild.
We eventually found an Australian couple on the street who brought us to their expensive hotel where we booked a room. The next day we searched the internet for the “sister hostel” they brought us to (can’t remember the name they gave us). We found the hostel online, but it was very clear that this wasn’t where they brought us.
The hostel boasted beautiful views of the city (so clearly a few levels above ground), and was immaculate. We were definitely in some weird black-lit, dirty basement. We thought for sure that we were going to get kidnapped and sold into the s*x trade that night.”
8. Creeper.
“Took my friend out for a drink, first time she had been out since having her daughter 12 weeks earlier, had a round then I went to the restroom, came back to find her having shots at a table with this random dude.
Random dude looked at me and I felt flayed alive, nothing in his eyes but malice. I grabbed my friends hand, said loudly “WE ARE LEAVING, NOW”. We left immediately.
I went back the next day to pay the tab we walked out on and the bartender told me that same man was arrested for attacking a woman outside of the bar.”
9. Close call.
“One morning, it was really, really foggy out. I started to cross the street and as I was almost across, someone turned their headlights on bright and it blinded me.
Instead of going forward, I stopped and started walked backwards, towards my house. As my eyes adjusted, I could see that the man who’d been watching me was standing next to his car, with the trunk popped open. I noped out of there and went home. I never jogged there again. I reported it to the police (my bf’s step dad insisted) but they didn’t seem to care.
Two years later, a 16-year-old girl was kidnapped, stuffed into a trunk, then driven out to the countryside. She was beaten, r*ped, and left there naked.
By the description of the man and the car, I knew it was done by the same guy who watched me jog. They never caught him.”
10. A bad idea.
“I’m 19. Buying weed with a friend.
We go to some seedy apartment in the Bronx with a third guy. Third guy wasn’t really my friend, kinda like a childhood bully. We get to the building and walk up a few flights and there’s 3 guys in the stairwell smoking crack. These are our dealers. I’m uncomfortable as hell.
One of the crackheads tells me to stop being such a little b*tch. Third guy chimes in and says if I’m going to be a little b*tch I can leave. So I leave. Friend comes with me. Days later we find out the crackheads jumped the third guy.
Took his wallet and phone. Beat him up pretty bad. Needed his jaw wired for a few months. I’m a little b*tch, but I still have my phone and teeth.”
11. Sketchy stuff.
“We were hiking and geocaching up in Northern Michigan, where it’s pretty rednecky in spots. We were at a designated trail with a small parking lot off on some weird side road, but we decided to check it out anyway.
About 5 minutes into the trail we noticed a game camera, but there was no ID on it (game cameras on public land need to have ID info), and we thought that was really strange. We kept walking a bit, but I just didn’t feel right about the camera or walking on this trail, so we turned around and went back to the truck instead of walking the last mile of the trail.
When we got back to the truck, this beater pulls up with a couple in it; the guy was just a regular redneck but the girl in his passenger seat 100% had the nods and was struggling to keep her head up. He looked surprised when we walked out of the trail and they sat in the lot for a second and then left. Pretty sure they weren’t looking to go for a hike.
My guess is that was their camera and they get the notifications when people are on the trail so they can break into their cars. It happened to us on a family trip in Kentucky years ago so maybe I’m just a little suspicious, but we decided no more backwoods hidden nature trails for us.”
12. Creepy.
“I’ve had a few, but one of the most prevalent that comes to mind is when my older sister and I were kids. I was 8 and she was either 10 or had just turned 11.
My dad had just bought a new house that wasn’t finished being built yet, so we were staying at my grandpas house for about a month while our new house was being constructed.
My sister and I were playing outside when I saw this weird van pull around the corner. I had been taught about creepy white vans in school, so when I saw it, I paid attention and took in the details. Everything except the windshield was tinted. The driver saw us and started to speed up, and I just told my sister we need to get inside.
Right as my sister got up, I looked back at the van and saw a guy open the side sliding door and stare straight at us.
We made it inside and locked the door. I peeked through the window and saw the van go slowly by while the guy who opened the side door was scanning the yard.
I told my mom when she got home about an hour later, and while she said were right to play it safe, and we always should, I heard her tell my dad later that it was probably nothing and we let our imaginations scare us. It was a new place in a neighborhood we weren’t comfortable in, so that must be it, according to my mom.
The next morning, my grandpa woke me and my sister up and told us that there were cops down the street and that a little girl had been abducted, and the police wanted us to tell them about the van we saw
Security cameras from a couple houses down saw the van too… and my grandpas next door neighbor also had security cameras that showed the van drive by with the side door open and a guy hanging out and looking in our yard.
We moved into our new house before we got an update, but my grandpa went to church with the couple whose daughter was abducted. The van was found, along with the clothes the daughter had been wearing. Her body was found in the wetlands a few months later.
If we hadn’t trusted my gut, that would have been my sister and I.”
13. Mom’s intuition.
“My mom’s bad feeling might’ve saved me as an infant. She was walking with me in a stroller, down her suburban neighborhood street.
She says she started to feel a tingling feeling like she was being watched, so she decided to turn around and head back home. A few streets later she noticed a car driving slowly behind her, the driver, a man, starting at her and me.
She starts walking a bit faster and notices he drives a bit faster to keep up, so she gets really scared. Before she can start running – this is the 90s and she didn’t have a cellphone – he rolls down the window and tells her not to run or stop, because she’s being stalked by a coyote.
He saw her safely to our doorstep and then pointed out the coyote, who had followed us half a mile and looked rangy and desperate. It had been slipping from brush to brush looking for an opening. So glad for her intuition and the stranger’s help!”
How about you?
Have you ever had any close calls like this?
If so, please tell us your stories in the comments. Thanks!
