Paranormal or explainable.
Two days after breaking up, I found out that my ex had lied to me about everything about himself, and had gotten out of prison for beating his mother to death shortly before we met. I met him because he had been a canvasser with a friend of mine (also concerning, tbh), and he just fit right into her friend group, and nobody had any information about his life before that. Once we started comparing stories after we found out, it all clicked into place.
Even worse, he killed his mom after she tried to give him some tough love (it sounded like normal, healthy parenting from the reports) about drinking too much and I broke up with him for the same reason. I was certain he was going to kill me for a while there, but that’s no longer a worry because I live in another country and he can’t get a passport.
The realisation about the person you were with would be awful by itself let alone worrying about possibly being in immediate danger, holy shit. I’m glad you’re safe now
Went to wake up my daughter like every morning, bed is empty, covers thrown to the side. Check around the house, nothing.
Everybody else is asleep, house is silent. Check the back, the swings, the rear deck, nothing.
Check bedroom again.
She was rolled up tight in her blanket, against the wall, from head to toe, making it look like the bed was empty.
Weak Knees Moment
I remember doing similar as a kid on the regular, I’d wake up to the sound of my mom calling my name because she had go l checked on me in the middle of the night, only instead of in my own bed I’d be under my sister’s bed, behind the couch, on another sister’s dresser, etc. I had a lot of sleep issues as a kid.
Hydroplaning on a motorcycle
Just ever so slightly losing grip on wet tarmac while taking a bend a little bit too fast and in your head you’re chanting “Lean, don’t break! Lean, don’t break!” to yourself…
Please tell me you’re not still riding one of those death machines.
Not currently. I’d have one again under the right circumstances.
I’ve personally known two people that have died in motorcycle accidents. These were dudes that were pretty safely oriented. Like wore all the gear all the time, rain or shine.
One of them took a spill and his bike pushed his femur through his hip and partly into his torso. He surprisingly lived through that accident. After he recovered he went back to riding as if nothing happened. He was fine for 7 years until he got involved in another accident and didn’t get lucky a second time.
If you have people that even remotely depend on you please just think carefully if it’s worth the risk. You’re actually about 4000% more likely to die on a motorcycle per mile traveled compared to a regular car. I’m not making that number up.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/810887.pdf
There’s a very good reason ER docs call them “donorcycles”
8 way skydive. Two friends were getting married and they wanted to do a formation skydive as part of their wedding ceremony. They were going to get married, then 8 of us would get into the plane and do an 8 way formation dive. Land and eat cake.
The problem was they were both low time jumpers, with about 70 jumps each. The other 6 jumpers were all highly experienced, so we tried to make it work. The jump in question was a practice jump about a month before the wedding.
The bride fell out of the formation and went low. Meaning she was below everyone else and was continuing to get even lower. People in a formation will fall more slowly than an individual.
The formation of 7 other jumpers gets to about 5000ft and she is about 500ft below us and just sitting there. She is making no moves to track out and it is becoming a very dangerous situation. Then she starts waving off, which is what you’re supposed to do right before deploying your parachute. We all see it, break the formation turn and burn. The jumper to my right videoed the whole thing. By happenstance I was the closest to her. The video shows me in a full track when she and her deploying main parachute come into frame. I might have missed her by about 20ft. Later she told me I sounded like a jet airplane passing by.
Everyone needed a change of underwear after that jump. I grounded her except for coached jumps, which I took on myself. I did about 15 jumps with her over the next month with increasing number of people until it clicked with her on how formation skydiving actually works.
We did not get to do the jump the day of the wedding unfortunately. Just after the nuptials were completed and we were to head to the airplane an intense thunderstorm blew in grounding the planes. We still held the reception in the hanger though and it was a good time. We did the wedding jump a couple of weeks later and sent the video to all the wedding guests.
But yeah, it was pretty fucking scary.
Heartbeat stopping in the night. Luckily, the heart has mechanisms to restart itself, and the last one finally kicked in. According to the doc, this only took five to ten seconds, but it felt longer than the complete last class on a Friday afternoon.
Roughly how old were you and were you awake when it happened or did you wake up because of it?
Somewhere in my mid-twenties. I probably woke up before when my circulation went down. This had happened a few times before, with one occasion where I measured 26BPM with the blood pressure meter.
Luckily, they found that the medication I had to take back then was the issue, and switched me to another one, which I take for 30+ years now without issues.
On a trip to Iceland, was hiking with my mom. I see a spot I want a photo in so I hand her my phone and trek out there. It was a small outcropping at the same height of the trail, overlooking some gulleys. Others had been out there because there was a worn path.
I’m standing out there for my photo, and some wind blows through. It picked me up off my feet. Like, I was weightless and severed from the ground for a few seconds.
I knew in that moment I was going to die. The wind would carry me over the edge and down to the gully below. Luckily, it didn’t last long enough to do that, and dropped me back on my feet, but I was so close to death, I could feel it.
People, the Icelandic wind is no joke. There was no uptick to warn me, no dirt or grass or whatever whipping around. It wasn’t A windy day. It was just no wind, then sudden wind strong enough able to pick up a 190lb woman clear off the earth.
I kept to the main trail after that.
Iceland has many crazy areas, and even where there signs (particularly on the beaches), people still venture onto the deadly rocks
Oh yeah, you have to not be stupid. I think the danger is that even when you’re not stupid, it’ll still getcha.
And yup, there were 4 people who walked right down to the waters edge after we were just warned that sneaker waves were not uncommon.
The time I was charged by a grizzly bear in western Alberta
TIL grizzly bears could be district attorneys.
Were you trying to take a selfie with it? We see a lot of that in AB.
No just wrong place wrong time
When I woke up blind from surgery. Years ago I had FFS. Mine involved significant reshaping of the brow bone among other things. And like any surgery, beforehand the surgeon makes sure you’re aware of the potential risks and complications. The rate of complications is low, but the risk isn’t zero. If you’re doing substantial work on your face, that can result in nerve damage, loss of feeling, loss of facial motor control, etc. The vast majority of people turn out just fine, but the risks are not zero and are always on your mind. Oh, and I did this in Buenos Aires cause I was a broke-ass 24 year-old not so long out of college. So add that to the fear of potential complications. I wasn’t just getting major surgery. I was getting discount major surgery.
So I go in for surgery. Put the gown on, lay on the hospital cart, the whole nine yards. They give me the gas and I quickly go off to nowhere. Several hours later, I slowly regained consciousness, the surgery complete. And to my horror, I saw…nothing. Absolute darkness. Nothing at all. Pitch blackness. I command my eyes to open, but still nothing. Absolute inky blackness. I’m still hopped up on pain killers, but I’m quickly jolted to heightened awareness. I was aware of the risk of potential loss of feeling, but this? Blinded? Complete blindness in both eyes? I was in complete panic. Absolute terror.
Thankfully however this state did not last too long. A nurse realized what was wrong and helped me out. My eyes or ocular nerves hadn’t somehow been damaged. My eyes were swollen shut. They were able to rinse out my eyes and help me to open them a bit, and it was clear that I would see just fine.
Ultimately, I didn’t have any nerve damage and made a complete recovery. But that moment remains one of the most terrifying I have ever experienced. Alone in foreign country, thousands of miles from home, and I woke blind.
Very currently scariest, the night before yesterday a neighbour almost got killed by her son. She’s in her 50s and he’s in his 30s, I woke up to half the apartment building being closed off and police everywhere. He had called SOS himself and told them he killed his mom, and they found him outside the building at 3am, he was covered in blood and barely there mentally. The entryway still had blood on the floor and the door to the apartment building is broken to shit. It’s still so recent that we haven’t heard anything more, she’s in hospital in critical but apparently stable condition.
Working up a radio tower that is on top of a hill where 2 quarries are slowly cutting their way into.
Everything was fine until I hear a large bang and rumbling noises. Then the entire tower starts vibrating with the shockwave of explosion.
I was about 20M up the tower that day.
Also we now know why our millimetre wave radios will sometimes have jitters in the signal strength.
What’s weird is how everyone reacts differently. Someone talked about spinning out in a car; once, my girlfriend was driving, in the winter, and we tried to pass someone on the freeway, going near freeway speeds. The roads were icy, and we spun around multiple times, and ended up coming to a stop on the other side of the freeway facing oncoming traffic. Throughout the entire episode, I remember only thinking, “Ok, this is happening.” I wasn’t afraid, my heart rate was normal, I was completely calm. I think I may have put my hand on the dashboard, as if that’d do anything. I think, for me, it was the utter inability to do anything about the situation that made me calm. I’ve lost control on ice while I’ve been driving, and that’s nerve-wracking. But that one time was the worst, and yet I had no fear. It’s really strange, isn’t it?
So, my answer is being up on the town hall tower in Rothenburg, Germany.
I know I’m acrophobic, but not pathologically, but I figured I’d be a little scared and that would be it, and I wanted to do it. So we climb about 800 floors of stairs and crawl through this little submarine-like hatch onto a mayor walkway around the tower literally wide enough for one person, as long as they’re not too fat. The railing is a metal bar about waist-high, and I am not joking, you didn’t have enough room to turn around. So you shuffle around the entire spire - there’s just a column behind you - until you make the circuit and can climb back in the man-hole. It was not great; I was already anxious, except that after I got out, people just kept coming out of the hole. It was literally impossible to go back - you had to make the circuit, and there were people on both sides of you. You shuffled as fast as everyone else was, which was slow, because you’d stop when someone would finish and climb back in the hole.
I was about three people out of the hole, and thinking about the warning sign about the walkway being rated for only 4 people at a time, and how by my count there were at least a dozen, and I panicked. It was one of two or three times in my life when I felt like my brain had run off and was doing its own thing, and I had no control. I didn’t make a scene, but internally, I was completely terrified, and probably wouldn’t have been able to move if I hadn’t been part of a press of people on both sides inexorably shifting around the walkway. I don’t think that utter loss of any rational control can be adequately described unless you’ve experienced it.
The view was, apparently, beautiful, but I have no memory of it; all I remember is that it took 6 hours and all I could think of the entire time was getting back inside.
I can relate with your story as a fellow acrophobic (relatively mild…), and it reminded me of a similar but very different situation I lived.
I was on a holiday with friends, we were planning to do some canyoning. I scouted the path beforehand just not to get stuck, and everywhere I read that there are always alternative paths to jumps. The day before we make a hike, 700m of climb over 5km, steep as hell and in the evening my legs were butter (not sure if the same is for you, but the more I don’t feel my body in control, the more fear takes over).
Next day, we go canyoning and I could legit barely walk. I start the course already thirsty, and after almost 1h we were barely halfway. Having to climb and jump (small stuff) made me sweaty AF, I was completely dehidrated. At some point we reach a place and I clearly realize there is no way back. I am the last one of the group, tired and thirsty as fuck, we are all tied on a rope, and we are on top of a big boulder. There are 2 ways down: jump 10m or go down with the rope.
I have spent close to 10min on top talking to the guide, asking completely moronic questions, and I have 8 of them on video because my friend was just before me and filmed.
I ended up jumping, I figured that with the energy I had left, I would rather do something that takes 2s rather that rope myself down. I probably managed to do that just because I was that dehydrated and almost in a delirious state. I remember looking down the water and just the memory makes me dizzy. But the feeling of not having an option B (or C) is what really gets you, this is why I could relate with your story even though this is a completely different situation.
Fun fact, I ended up being the only one in my group to jump 10 meters, and now the memory is a mixed bag of emotions, but I will always have brag rights with my friends.
Edit: I added a picture of the jump as seen from top. It’s a screenshot from the infamous video.
The view from below maybe is more realistic…
That’s an awesome story. The call of the void is certainly a thing, but having no control of what triggers the terror, for me at least.
That’s a long jump! Did you get your water, in the end?
It was! Yes, back to the base camp I think I have drank almost a liter in one go! That tap was the most delicious thing in my life!
Waking up to Trump’s day-one anti trans EO calling me an “anti American Ideology” and waging war on trans people. My partner and I made the decision then and there to escape.
Close second is choking on a piece of baked potato while home alone as a kid
Not affecting me, came back from a trip to find my friend nearly comatose on my couch. She had been watching the apartment. Her blood sugar was over 1000.
First time I had severe anaphylactic shock, only juuust got given adrenaline in time apparently, don’t rate.
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Paragliding, I was literally on the last step from the clif, the next step would be off the cliff. Right as I took that last solid step, I got a collapse (meaning my wing folded, this basically turns it from a parachute to a shopping bag in the sense of keeping you from falling to the ground)
Luckly I noticed, took a few steps back and started going “what the fuck was that???” Sat down for 15 minutes while figuring out what I did wrong. After the 15 minutes I took off again, this time safely.
I’m pretty good at handling scary and dangerous situations so even though I was a literal step away from probably death, definitely life long disability, I can’t really say that I was extremely scared.
