Spooky season is officially upon us!
!BOO!<
I’ve told this before but.
Once while camping alone with my dog, we had a long event less day of hiking, fell asleep soundly for a while until around 4am.
My dog laid on top of me, and lowly growled waking me up. I calmed her down thinking she just had a bad dream or something, but then something rustled near our tent.
I peaked out of the side window of the tent and, in the faint full moon light I saw a black blob, not the size of a bear but more like a hog. I have never been near one but I have heard horror stories about hogs
Only thing I could do was lay down and keep my dog calm so she wouldn’t bark, I’ve heard if you startle a hog it’s more likely to charge than run away. We must have laid there for half an hour or so when I finally felt sure enough the hog had moved along.
I spent about 3 minutes quietly unzipping the door one tooth at a time, once it was fully open I picked up my dog and booked it to the truck, tossed her into the passenger side, ran to the driver’s side and slammed myself in.
Turned on the truck and headlights and there they were. About 4-5 hogs at the edge of the brush staring back at me, the sudden light made them all book out out of there. We slept in the truck until sun up, struck the camp site and went home.
I’ve thought about camping with my great pyrenees mix before, but he’d immediately bark as loud as he could at those hogs, and would cause a stampede. I’ll just not camp.
When I confronted my now ex-wife about my suspicions of her cheating. The fears were justified.
I was once on the 17th floor of a building on fire (5 alarms and multiple deaths), and the fire happened to start directly across the hall from me. I thought I was going to die, but that fear was nothing compared to the thought of the person I love doing that to me.
Took too many mushrooms one night and I have tripped a couple hundred times. But these were particularly strong bois and I started to believe I was having a heart attack, it was only a panic attack, but I seriously thought I was dying from a heart attack. I was begging my wife who had taken two times as many as I had to call 911. She did her best to stay calm and remind me that I was just tripping on mushrooms and I told her I knew that I was tripping on mushrooms but something was wrong with my heart because I was freaking out and I could tell my heart was beating too fast. At one point she even stuck a Fitbit on my wrist and told me to look at my heart rate, and when I looked at it of course I couldn’t read it because everything was just pixelated and swirling fractals. But somehow she was able to read it and said your heart rate is only 118 which I was able to confirm the next day from the data on my phone. I was crying and holding my chest and I kept throwing myself in a cold shower trying to calm myself down but time was all fucked up and moments were happening out of order and all I could think about was how my daughter was going to wake up in the morning without her father. I kept running through the house completely naked and freezing wet. Trying desperately to grasp onto something to send me back to reality. But everywhere I went it didn’t matter because I knew I was dying from a heart attack and my wife who I couldn’t believe at the time refuse to call 911 and save me. In retrospect, I’m so glad she did not lol. I haven’t taken mushroom since. I’m too scared. They are not to be fucked with if you’re not in the right state of mind. I really appreciate that trip though, it really made me appreciate life a whole lot more when I woke up the next day. I’ve never been more scared my entire life and I’m pretty sure I know exactly what it’s going to be like when I actually do die. It was somewhat peaceful but it was taking too long in the moment and especially because time was not flowing correctly and everything was happening out of order It made me really panic. It just seemed like it was taking way too long. I suppose when I actually die time won’t do that because presumably I won’t be tripping when it happens lol.
Ah, this one hits close to home. Except for my insane mushroom trip, I didn’t think I was dying. I had something in my head telling me to kill myself - over and over again. I’m not normally suicidal. I mean, I’ve certainly had thoughts during particularly dark moments of my life, but never to the point of seriously considering it, i.e. making plans. But shit, I cannot explain the pure, raw despair and hopelessness I felt for idk how long. I am 100% certain that if I had been tripping alone, I would have done it. Fortunately, I was with my 2 older brothers and my now-husband, and ultimately what kinda “brought me back” was one of my brothers having a meltdown of his own. Kinda put me in care taker mode, and helped me get out of the woods. I’ve taken mushrooms since, but I insist on microdosing and never being alone, and only with people i truly trust. I’m terrified of letting that part of my brain take over again.
How can we be sure that you haven’t died? Maybe you’re in a coma and you’re just imagining everything? /s
Maybe we’re all just figments of their coma and if they wake up we stop existing. One moment, poof! The end.
I’ve actually considered that
When I was working the graveyard shift at a service station and a junkie put a knife to my throat and suggested that the money in the register should really be in his pocket.
What did you do?
Opened the register and gave them the money. Waited till they left and called the cops.
No pay rate, and certainly not what I was earning, is worth getting your throat cut protecting someone else’s cash.
Life is not an action movie.
I would do the same 👍
Holding my limp child in my arms. She was fine, but it was the worst 30 seconds of my life.
Jesus… As a dad myself, this is my recurring nightmare. May I ask what was wrong?
Fell off some playground equipment onto her head. “Only” knocked out cold, but in that moment, it seemed much worse.
Yeah, that’d do it.
Same. A few years ago my son went into the ER because he was having difficulty breathing. We live near Napa where the wildfires were happening and they gave him a breathing treatment. He was fast asleep and the treatment shot his heart rate up to 160 and NO ONE MENTIONED IT AS A SIDE EFFECT OF THE TREATMENT. I was panicking looking for a nurse but I also didn’t want to leave him. After awhile a nurse was spotted and said he was ok. They transferred him to another hospital for observation. But man, scary stuff. Never felt so helpless. He was only 5.
Some breathing treatments push the same buttons adrenaline does. Kids can have pretty fast heartbeats without it being bad, your “max” heart rate exercising etc. famously goes down as you age. Must’ve been scary, though.
That’s so awful. Glad they’re ok!
My youngest was born 2.5 months premature. After 10 weeks in neonatal we got them home.
The next day the community nurses were round checking their blood oxygen levels and it plummeted from 98% to 0%
The nurse grabbed them off me, placed them on the floor and started doing CPR while yelling at the other to call an ambulance.
My then wife melted to the floor in tears and I just sat on the sofa staring. I’m 100% sure they’d be dead if the nurses weren’t in.
If I sit in the dark on a sofa my mind drifts back there. I can see them on the floor and hear the beeping from the monitoring machine. I’ve lost hours to these flashbacks before.
I also can’t watch any TV shows with beeping hospital machines.
It’s getting easier after a year but thinking about it still makes me feel weird.
I was out for a drive with 4 other friends packed into a tiny car, decades ago when we were all early twenties. I was driving, and we were just cruising the streets, turning this way and that, high spirits and chatting and laughing away. We came down off a hill joining one suburb to another, and turned off into a side street. It was a dead end street, in a pretty dark and deserted industrial area. We knew the street well, as it was short, but you wouldn’t go down it if you didn’t need to, as it only led to factories and such. It was late, perhaps a little after midnight. As we got about 50 metres or so in (maybe halfway), we all instantly stopped talking simultaneously, and every one of us, including myself, froze in what I can only describe as pure terror. I hit the brakes, and stopped in the middle of the road for a second, before slamming the car in reverse and stamping on the accelerator full tit in reverse, without even turning around, I couldn’t even turn my head. To this day it’s hard to describe why, in the normal light of day. My current wife (then just a friend) was in the car too, and she hates it if I even bring it up. All I can say is we sensed such a darkness, a dense evil beyond comprehension, right outside the car. A sense of an abysmal vanta-black presence in front and to the left of the car. Nothing visible to the naked eye, but with perfect post-event unified description by all 5 people in the car. None of us spoke for a good 20 minutes afterwards, and the night of fun was over. It was horrifying, and I will never go into that street again. A vague sense of some atrocious tortuous event that occurred there in the past maybe, don’t know? And we were all very stable regular young people, no alcohol or drugs etc involved. I know spooky stuff probably wasn’t on the menu, but that’s sure it for me
When I was in my early twenties, I lived with my brothers in my oldest brother’s house. It was a new construction home in a fairly ritzy suburb of a large city in the US.
During this time, I was attending college and working part time at Gamestop. One of my brothers was working at Chipotle at the time, so there were some afternoons that we’d both have off and we’d be chillin at the house together. One afternoon while my oldest brother and his wife were at work, my brother and I were in the living room playing Diablo 3. All of the sudden I hear this weird old song playing from the loft and I instantly whipped my head around towards the loft, trying to figure out what tf it was. It wasn’t a song or a tune I’ve ever heard in my life before. The thing is, my brother whipped his heads towards the loft the exact second I did because he heard it too. We looked at each other for a second, and decided to investigate. Everything in the upstairs area was ours, too - we moved in right when my oldest brother and his wife bought the house, and they left that whole area for us. We both knew we didn’t own anything that could’ve played the little song we heard. Haven’t heard it since.
Not too long afterwards, while i was still living with my brothers in the same house, another incident occurred. I was upstairs in my room, and it was probably around midnight. I had turned off my Xbox and TV, and was just laying in bed on my phone in the dark, when my pup started lightly growling. My dog is pretty smart, friendly, and really perceptive. He doesn’t growl at anything unless he perceives a threat. He is always chill and silent throughout the night. But that night, he went from chillin’ in bed with me with his head on my chest, to instantly sitting upright, intently staring and growling at a spot on the wall to my right. I didn’t think much of it right away, and just tried to calm him down, but he just got more rigid and starting growling a little louder, still stating at the one spot. I sat upright, turned on my lamp, and looked around the wall to see if I saw a bug or a small critter, but there was nothing. He suddenly starts darting his eyes around that same wall as if he was following something that was moving quickly. All of the sudden, he whips his head and darts his eyes to a spot maybe 5 ft above my head. I look immediately above me, and see nothing at all. I felt an insane feeling of dread, grabbed my dog and ran to my brothers room across the hall, and asked if I could spend the night with him. I was way too fucking scared to go back to my room that night. Nothing like that ever happened again.
Not sure what either of those, and things like that don’t normally happen to me. Which is probably why it’s so scary to me. I don’t think I believe in ghosts or demons or anything like that, but idk what to think of these instances. Could’ve been nothing, or could’ve been something I can’t see/perceive. The thought of the latter scares me.
That’s freaky.
Two times, but both are similar incidents:
The first was when my oldest was nearly 1. He was running a fever and we called the doctor to see what to do. The doctor suggested a lukewarm bath to bring his temperature down. This seemed to help and my wife went to get a towel. As she came back, my son looked up at her, but it was like he was looking through her. Then, his eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp.
I grabbed my son and shouted his name. There was no response and he was turning blue. My wife called 911 and her parents as I put him on the bed. The only thing that came to mind was “stop him from swallowing his tongue.” (This isn’t a thing I later found out, but I was panicking.) The emergency crews came as he started breathing again.
At the hospital, they said it was a febrile seizure and it can happen with infants/young kids. It’s harmless most times, but very scary.
The second incident was with my younger son. He started running a fever and the doctor recommended a lukewarm bath. I think you can see where this is going and so did I at the time. I told my wife to get the towel beforehand. She also called her parents and they came over before we put him in the bath.
Sure enough, our younger son was fine until he stopped responding. Only he didn’t turn blue. He turned grey. And he didn’t start breathing again on his own. We called 911 and my mother-in-law did rescue breaths on him.
I was running from the front door, looking for the ambulance, to the bedroom - watching my mother-in-law trying to help my lifeless son breathe. My father-in-law told me that I didn’t need to run back and forth. He said he’d look for the ambulance. I told him that I couldn’t just watch my son lifeless like that. I needed to DO something. Even if it was completely useless, I needed to be doing something.
My younger son finally started breathing on his own and was fine. He went on to have many more febrile seizures until he (FINALLY) grew out of them. (He also had a tendency to fall and hit his head thanks to a hip issue. I swear that half of my grey hairs are thanks to him!)
I got the tiniest glimpse of what losing a child might feel like and it was scarier than I could handle. Even writing this out is raising my anxiety. I never want to feel that way ever again.
Dude, my youngest had febrile seizures (she called it “the fast thing” and was scared of it.)
Watching her blink out of reality into…somewhere else for a few seconds at a time was fucking horrible.
I feel you.
Wow, that sounds horrific. Glad that this was a temporary thing.
You made me think of a line from Sense and Sensibility, when Colonel Brandon is pacing outside the hall where the woman he lives is deathly ill and says to her sister, “Give me an occupation or I shall run mad.”
24 February 2022.
Any reason why?
The full-scale invasion was loud and unpredictable for mere citizens of Kyiv. The enemy was stopped right at the border of the city and a few squads were even taken out within the city. So there were citizens who saw ground fights right from their windows. This cannot pass without fear.
Are you Ukrainian?
Yes, I am from Kyiv, Ukraine.
Getting beat up by a group of Nazis. When they started kicking my head I thought I was going to die.
Ran out of gas in the wee hours, was walking to a house with lights on to call for help, got noticed and chased by a pack of stray dogs, ran back to my car, fumbled and dropped keys, barely got in and shut the door before the car rocked with the force of several snarling bodies hitting it.
Yikes. I was in Thailand for a bit and packs of wild dogs can be so scary!! I’m glad you I got away!!
Either hearing cougars screaming near my tent, or — in the same place — getting lost in the woods and hearing tree-shaking sounds that were probably bears.
Same here, cougar sniffing my tent. Another time one screaming and following me and my dogs for 3 miles. Taking a shit once and heard the trees rustle, bear 15ft from me with my pants at my ankles. Best stool softener
I’ve not gone through anything too wild, but here’s a few…
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When my parents were getting a divorce, my mom moved us out into an apartment. My dad came by, enraged. There was a bit of an argument and he pulled her outside the front door and pressed her up against it. Since the door opened outward and he was pushing her into the door with his full body weight, I wasn’t able to open the door. I started screaming at him because I was afraid he was going to kill her and I couldn’t get to her. I was trapped inside not sure if I was about to watch my mom die. Thankfully he didn’t and he eventually let her go, but I had no idea in that moment what he was capable of. She has been divorced from him for I think almost 10 years now which is good!
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Some other time there was a lot of turbulence on a plane ride and I’m a bit of a wuss lol.
For your second point, I’ve flown many times to the point where turbulence doesn’t bother me BUT I didn’t fly much for a 3-4 years. The last time I flew I drank a ton of coffee because it was an early morning flight (not a morning person) and let me tell you, every five seconds I thought we were going down.
Man fuck turbulance. My flight dropped what felt like 100 feet once but must have been less. I thought that was it
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I’ve been in an enclosure with a 15 foot King Cobra. Not that
Having a green tree viper on my head. Not that
Face down with a rabid monkey in Malaysia. Not that
Having a large scorpion crawl up my arm. Not that
Ending up riding on top of a shoplifters car hanging on for dear life while they tore round the carpark trying to shake me off. Not that
End over end rollover at over 100 kmh in my first car. Not that
Nearly drowning in a fast flowing river when I got dragged under. Close, but no cigar
Leaving my alcoholic ex. This was the scariest moment of my life
you need to write a damn memoir
Probably when a meth head tried to break into my ground floor apartment… doesn’t really hold a candle to some of the terrifying shit in this thread