What is the most scared you've ever been?

[Lady Venom]

The most scared I've ever been is crossing train tracks in my Grandfather's Cadillac and looking to the left and seeing a train hurtling towards me. Apparently the signals weren't working. As my rear bumper cleared the tracks the train went by, going VERY fast. I had to pull over and be sick. I literally saw my life flash before my eyes. I was bawling when I got home and told my Grandfather. He freaked and called the Town the next day. Wow, he was MAD!

A different kind of scared...

My then boyfriend (now ex-husband) and I had gone to his parents place for Thanksgiving dinner. We got back to his house where he lived with his grandparents and was told to call home. I was raised by my grandparents as well and found it odd that my dad had answered the phone. I was told to come home right away and I thought I was in trouble. I was 17. I went home and found that my grandmother had collapsed from a brain anurysm and was, for all intents and purposes, dead. We lived a good 45 minutes from the hospital and I was SO scared that I wouldn't get there in time to say goodbye.

So, what is the most scared you've been?

[Kalhoun]

I thought I lost my son at a picnic when he was about 4. There was a stream there, and I was thinking he fell in and drown. He was fine (and not under water!). We had a search party looking for him. Really frightening!

[Cisco]

Mountain climbing. I'm extremely afraid of heights and mountain climbing does it to me worse than anything, it's the most terrible feeling in the world.

The funny thing is, I've been at least 5 times that I can think of right off hand, and at least 3 of them were without a rope. And it's not that I'm pulling some noble "I'm going to face my fears" thing everytime I go, it's just that I always get invited and I think "I won't be scared this, I won't be scared this time" then everyone starts laughing at me when we're 6 feet off the ground and my legs are already shaking :).

[stellar7]

I guess the most scared I've ever been also involved my child. He was about 4 and walked out of his bedroom on Christmas Day night years ago and couldn't breathe. Luckily, my SIL was his physician and told us to bring him to her house right away. From all of the excitement of the day and the fact that he already was suffering from a cold, he had developed asthmatic bronchitis and it had blocked his bronchial tubes. Thank goodness she had inhalers to break the spasm and he was fine.

I can also relate to the mountain climbing thing. When I first met my husband, he took me hiking. I LOVE to hike, but was not counting on this particular hike..... There was a rock face we had to climb that was really high. I was scared to death! My husband made it to the top first and took a picture of me as I crested the top -- that picture is hilarious. The look on my face is of sheer terror! :)

[OpalCat]

Probably the time when I was hitchhiking with my boyfriend (yes, we were stupid) and got picked up by a drunk guy with Mexico license plates. We didn't realize he was drunk until we were already going. He kept trying to grab me while we were all squeezed into the front seat of his station wagon. Then he offered my boyfriend money for me. Then he pulled out an unrolled condom from his pocket and said we could use it.

We just wanted to get out of the car, so when he said he wanted to stop at the store and pick up a beer, we were happy. Except that he pulled in behind the convenience store, which just backed into desert. It was very dark. He told us we could use his backseat for sex, and said not to go anywhere. Of course the minute he went into the store, we ran. We went across the stret behind another building, and then out to the road. We saw his car in the left turn lane but he saw us and swerved out of it and came down our way.

We ran across the street but he turned around. We took off into the desert and he pulled his car over, got out, and started chasing us across the desert. I was expecting a bullet through the spine at any second.

We got to another road and ran across, and kept running. It was a vacant lot. We looked behind us and saw his car again. He started driving across the lot toward us. We climbed over a chain link fence into a mobile home sales lot, and ran out to the main road. Whew, we thought...we were safe.

But then we looked over our shoulder and saw his car creeping toward us down the bike lane. Fortunately, the road had a median, so we sprinted across and ran into the McDonald's on the other side. We ran to the windows and watched his car. We saw him turn around at the next light, but then we lost him because of some things obstructing our view.

...he didn't go by. We waited for 15 minutes and he never went by. Finally about 20-25 minutes he drove by. He'd apparently been up the road, waiting for us.

I have no idea what he would have done if he had caught us, but I was so scared...

[welby]

Probably when I was hitchhiking. I hitched from Tallahassee, FL to Maine, then back down to VA for a couple of months on the AT, then a trip to visit friends in AL and GA, then home.

The scariest ride I got was coming out of Mobile, AL. I was picked up by a guy in a VW rabbit. The car was filled with Guns and Ammo and other survivalist mags, and the entire car was plastered with bible quotations. The guy proeached at me the whole time, ranting about how I was a sinner, but that he'd convert me, etc. etc. And the whole time he was telling me that I'd have to stay at his place for taking the ride. I bolted from the car at the light at an off ramp. He followed me to the on ramp and tried to convince me to get int he car, but I was having none of it.

[Bearflag70]

-The California Bar Exam

-Also, when I ran away from home as a child and then came back, my Mom took me to the church. She and the priest duped me into believeing that she was going to give me away to the church since I didn't want to live at home. I didn't run away again.

[belladonna]

I think the sick/lost kid will be a popular answer in this thread.
I know for me, the most scared I've ever been was last summer. I left my son--then about 15 mos old--on the front porch with his tricycle while I popped inside to answer the phone. I came back out two minutes later and he was gone, the front gate hanging wide open. That leaden, burning, just-ate-a-sack-of-nails feeling in my guts was instantaneous. I started calling his name, running up and down the street and couldn't find him anywhere. Nearly 10 minutes went by and I was about to call the police, certain someone must have snatched him, when I saw him on a porch half-way down the street. The occupants had stopped him as he walked down the sidewalk, and had been trying to figure out who he belonged to. That was the WORST ten minutes of my life, and when they handed him back all I could do was blubber. They probably thought I was a horrible mother--hell, I thought so too--but I certainly learned my lesson about not underestimating his wandering ways. And I bought a big shiny lock for the front gate the very next day.

Opal--your story reminds me of a road trip I took with some friends to Niagra our senior year in high school. Two guys, two girls (not couples though)--one of the guys was wandering around our seedy motel trying to find someone who'd buy us some beers. This creepy guy agreed and came to the room and chatted about the beer run for a minute but then basically made it clear that he would only do it if the guys let him "use the women". :eek: Not nearly so menacing as your experience, but ICK!

[Silver Fire]

Eh, it's a toss up, but it's really two different kinds of "scared".

A) I was robbed at knifepoint at the convenience where I worked just before my 17 birthday.

B) When my mom was real sick and we planned her funeral together. She's okay now though.

[1ofthegulls]

Tornado, April 9, 1998. I sat in my closet as I heard metal tearing away from the rest of the structure. Thinking there is no longer an "upstairs". Cell phone battery went dead (always picked the best times). I kept trying to get ahold of my family. Had the song "Trying to get a message to you" playing over and over in my head.....Loved those Gibb Bros.

Was on the Red Cross "missing persons list" for 48 hours till the firemen (oooh baby) found me covered in blood and broken glass. I was in shock, didn't even know I was hurt. Even going on the 5 year anniversary, the sky can turn a certain shade or a smell in the air and I have problems. I used to love a good thunderstorm, but no more.

[PoorYorick]

- Nothing is scarier than the monster in the bedroom closest when the lights go out when you're seven years old. I forget as I get older how real those monsters were, and the rituals I'd use to keep the monsters at bay. I'd pretend my blanket was a magic blanket, and nothing could get me as long as no part of my body wasn't covered. But if even one little finger stuck out from under the blanket, I was fair game. Reason takes a back seat when the lights go out (at least when you're seven).

- The scariest single event was when my car did about 6 360's over an ice covered bridge. I'd just driven through about 500 miles of blizzard through New Mexico on my way home to Oklahoma from Arizona. It cleared up in Texas and I wanted to make time, so I drove about 80 mph. As I started to cross one of those high Interstate overpasses in Amarillo at about 4 AM, I realized that it was covered in ice. I realized this by the centrifugal forces create by the car spinning like the Magic Teacup ride in Disneyland. I was pasted to one side of the car, and I remember wondering what side of the car I should be on if it flew off the bridge. After about the third spin or so, I could feel this totally involutary scream trying to force its way through my throat, but it came out as more of a deep whimper. I was also trying to claw at anything in the car to hold on to.

The car finally stopped spinning when it struck a post toward the end of the bridge and blew a tire. I was still whimpering as I changed the tire.

I have much sympathy now with people who have phobias. For months, I'd feel myself tensing whenever I crossed a bridge, and I actively avoided them. I would know the bridge was dry and I was safe, but some little monkey-brain part of me started whimpering again, "We're gonna die, we're gonna die . . ." I can drive over bridges just fine now (it's been about 12 years), but I still don't like the tall steep bridge I have to cross over the Mississippi whenever I drive to New Orleans.

Probably the hardest part of the experience was having to accept the fact that I was not the kind of guy who faced death stoically, but with a whimper.

[Suspenderzzz]

Right now. We have an unelected, war-mongering douche-bag of a redneck-cowboy-on-an-ego-trip in the White House who is so obsessed with "finishing" his daddy's mission from a dozen years ago that he will walk over dead bodies to do so. He will ultimately destroy the world at worst; place us all in in unjustified danger at best. I cannot even express what I think about W right now because I might lose my ladylike composure. Nuff said. :mad:

[Gundy]

Holy shit, Opal, your story scared me.

All of my scared stories have to do with my son. Criminy, I'm a terrible mom. There was the time at the beach -- he went to play with his cousins while I set up the blanket, and they wandered off and left him behind. They came back a few minutes later without him and I started running around like a chicken with its head cut off. I found him a few minutes later with a lifeguard. Or the time he hid from me in a rack of clothes at a department store and then walked out of the store looking for me. OR the time my mom went to pick him up at his summer camp and called to tell me someone had already signed him out. I jumped in a cab and got down there in five minutes flat to find that my son was in the playground where my mom couldn't see him, and someone had simply signed their child out on the wrong line. Oh, does after the fact count? When my son was 3, he walked out of our apartment at 11:30 at night looking for me (I decided to shower while he was sleeping, so I didn't hear him leave, and he didn't look in the bathroom, only my bedroom). I got out of the shower to hear the doorbell ringing and ran up to find my neighbor holding my terrified and hysterical baby. I was so scared for him, even when I was holding him. Thank goodness for my neighbor.

God. It's horrible, the thoughts that go through your head at times like those. I'm going to try to forget about all that for now so I can eat lunch.

[lieu]

Cliffjumping from 75 feet into a lake. My friend behind me laughed his fool head off at my noisy attempts to take in a breath on the way down.... "Uuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhh.... uuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhh."

[whiterabbit]

The more recent one was during the Northridge earthquake in '94. I could not move or make a sound. I honestly thought the ceiling was going to fall on me and kill me, and I was almost hoping it would just so I wouldn't be so scared anymore. I don't live anywhere near an earthquake zone these days but when a truck goes by or something and the house shakes, you bet I notice.

Previously was just shy of my tenth birthday when I was taken in for serious back surgery. This was a military hospital. They didn't even sedate me before taking me in. I remember looking at all that HORRIBLE equipment. I'd think I'd be even more scared about it now!

[japatlgt]

Probably climbing the wrong side of Stone Mountain, in Georgia, on my hands and knees (no, this was not a planned climb) when I was 15 because of an idiot idea from my cousin. "Oh, yeah! I've done it before. It's easy!" After about 40 feet you were trapped and could not figure out how to go back down so up we went. A few hours later we crawled under an industrial sized barricade with skull and crossbones warning signs everywhere "DO NOT GO BEYOND THIS POINT!!!" and I could have easily choked my cousin if I'd had any strength left. I'm not fond of heights.

Then there was the time, the same year now that I think of it, where a jolly group of us toodled out into the Gulf of Mexico in three small craft and returned hours later in one. The unexpected tropical storm was headline news the next day.

And THEN there was that time when a buddy of mine and I decided to explore the supposedly haunted, medevil church over in the English countryside, at midnight of course. "It was a daaarrk, foggy night out on the fen..." I'm sure my hair stood straight out. My continence was severely tested that evening.
That was easily my worst "spook."

[CRorex]

I was learning how to scuba dive at Cancun... I breathe through my nose 99% of the time, so learning to breath through my mouth with the respirator was fairly difficult. I finally got over my panic reflex that I was going to drown when my head was underwater...

But only just.

So I go out on one of the drive trips. There are 4 groups of 5 people, each group his its own dive leader. NATURALLY, my asshole dive leader was the first one to go out. And he decided to send me out FIRST.
He was supposed to check my gear before I hit the water, but just waved at me.

So I jump in and swim down to the dive bar and wait, my dad was going to be the next person down. So I'm sitting there looking up, waiting for my dad to come down. After a few min, I realize that bubbles are rising above me when I'm inhaling :/ THen I find out why, my BC line isn't connected and I dumping air. Now, since I'm down here alone and totally freaked out I break for the surface. I've set some reccord times at swim meets so I can swim pretty damn fast even in 130 lbs of sucba gear (I can't sink) I 'surface' in the middle of the bottom of the boat. I knock myself silly, lose my mask and respirator and start to blackout. Somehow I get my respirator back, stay awake and get to the surface.

Long story short, I spent 5 min arguing with the dive leader (treading water in 130 lbs of gear since my BC won't work) before he stops trying to drag me underwater.


The _absolutely_ scariest thing that ever happened to me was that night around midnight I was poking around that castle in scottland that is supposed to be haunted by the 'elemental'. Something I never saw spent 3 hrs stalking me through the old basement/dungeon and around that castle.

[dwc1970]

The scariest moment I had was when I was 17. A couple of friends and I went down into a cave to explore it. We must have gone about 500, maybe a thousand feet into the cave where the cavern became so narrow that I was afraid of getting stuck. My two friends wanted to keep going, but I wanted to head back. They had a big, bright lantern with them, but all I had to take back with me was one of those cheapie disposable flashlights. After I parted ways and was on my own the flashlight suddenly stopped working without any warning (it wasn't gradually getting dimmer as if the battery was running out). I desperately beat on it several times to revive it, but it wouldn't come back on. I shouted for help to the other two guys, but they must have been out of hearing range since they didn't answer. Meanwhile, I was stranded in the darkest blackness I have ever been in, unable to see where I was going. I hollered in the other direction for help, hoping that some other amateur spelunkers may be coming my way, but I was alone. At this point I had to either grope my way towards the entrance and hope I don't bump my head or trip on the way, or stay put and wait for the other two to return. I continued beating on the flashlight. Eventually it came back to life. I didn't take my chances at this point and I hurried the hell out of there as quickly as I could, knowing that the flashlight may fail on me again. How glad I was to see the light of day as I returned to the entrance (the exit, whatever).

Another scary moment happened when I was 10. My dad was driving and my mom and I were in the front seat with him, while my sister was sprawled out asleep in the back seat. Seat belt laws in my state weren't in effect then (1980) and we weren't wearing them. We were on a two-lane highway, speed limit 55. Up ahead we suddenly see a car driving on the wrong side of the road. My dad didn't have much time to react by the time he realized the danger. As he tried to dodge the oncoming car the driver switched over to the same side my dad was on and then back again. The other car ended up side-swiping our car, hitting the side I was sitting on. It's a miracle I wasn't hurt in spite of being thrown into my mother's lap. My sister surely got a rude awakening, but fortunately she wasn't hurt, either. It turned out the other guy was very drunk and had a history of alcolism and DUIs. He was an old man who died a few months after this happened.

[CRorex]

Oh yeah a few:

My first time doing a blood prep in the BSL-3 when I accidently splashed a drop of blood that sprayed on my suit. Yeah that freaked me out.

Or when I learned there had been a serious biocontainment breach nobody was told about.

Or shortly after the anthrax letters when a suspicious package showed up at work.

[Biggirl]

Twice I was sure I was in mortal danger. Once, before a surgery. They didn't explain to me the effects of general anesthesia. "I can't breath!" I managed to gasp before the anesthesiologist shoved a tube down my throat. My last thought before losing conciousness was "I'm going to die."

The second time was when I had pnemonia and didn't know it. I live in a fourth floor walk up. Got to the top, opened the door and told my husband that I didn't feel well. That I felt really, really. . . and then I collapsed onto the floor. I was awake the whole time the paramedics were there, just so weak and again not knowing what was happening to me.

Yessiree, I was pretty scared both those times.

[whiterabbit]

Biggirl, they intubated you before you were out? That's just flat out mean! (I know there are times when they have to, but I STILL think it's mean.) After my back surgery I woke up with the tube, but they took it out after I woke up and seemed generally okay.

Oh, and signing a consent form for surgery that mentioned the possibility of my death was pretty scary...

[DeVena]

A similar thing happened to me, Biggirl

I've always been allergic to penicillin and when asked how it affects me, I just say I swell up, turn blue, and die.

Well I'm sedated for surgery. Totally out of it. They intubate me - and then start reading my chart out lout. At the word "Anaphalaxys" (swell blue die) I am awake. WITH A TUBE DOWN MY THROAT! and I can't breathe because of the tube. I'm immediately trying to pull the tube out. No body is telling me I can't breathe!! These little nurses are trying to hold me down, but I'm having none of it! Somebody comes in and puts a syringe in the IV hand (the only hand tied down).

Next thing I know, I'm in post-op - trussed up like a turkey. Never doubt the power of a scared woman!!

[Caricci]

I would have to say it was during my C-Section. First of all, it was so cold in the OR that I was shivering so much I was convinced I was having a seizure. Then I became terrified and hysterical that I would be able to feel pain during the procedure so they sedated me. THEN I became terrified of how the sedation felt and I was convinced that I was slipping into a coma or death, so they knocked me out. Which was just as well because I was near hysteria over the suspense of whether my baby was okay. Jeez, what a freaking mess I was!

[BoBettie]

Most scared ever was the moment I was driven to the crash site where my husband was sprawled in the middle of the road after having been hit by a truck on his motorcycle. I was postive he was dead. It was as horrible in that moment (and for years later) as if he really had been. (He was alive)

Prior to that it was the moment I was wheeled into surgery- alone, scared, and wondering if I was going to come out alive and walking.

Prior to that it was when a car I was in was hit by a tractor trailer on the highway. How we EVER got out alive I don't know, but we did. The moments while the car was spinning and hitting the truck were absolutely unreal scary.

[Lamar Mundane]

A few months ago, I was home alone when I suddenly started getting dizzy. Not dizzy as in losing my balance or anything, but more like waves of unsteadyness and wooziness. Sometimes it felt like it does when you lose altitude really quickly in a plane. I was completely sober. Sitting down didn't help, nor did laying down. In fact it made things worse.

I finally went to a neighbors house and got him to take me to the emergency room. I was near tears, thinking that I must have a brain tumor or something equivalently nasty. They checked my blood pressure, gave me an EKG and a CT scan. All the while I was sure I was dying. Everything came back negative. I was eventually diagnosed with viral labarynthitis, a virus of the inner ear. They're even sure it is a virus, but apparantly it happens in clusters, and I was in the middle of one. Luckily, my doc had seen others recently.

All I can say is pray you never get this. Holy crap, was I scared.

[beckwall]

"Mechanical failure" on a flight from SF to Maui. I was, of course, travelling alone. The lady next to me probably still has fingernail marks on her from me gripping her for the 45 minutes it took us to return to SF. The return was horrendous. Dropping altitude like crazy. Dumping fuel. People screaming. They wouldn't tell us what was wrong. This was long before 9/11. The idea of a bomb never crossed my mind. But we had to land about as far from the terminal (I think we were closer to Oakland at that point)
at SFO as possible, and all the firetrucks were out to meet us.

Amazingly, I got on the plane next day and made my trip. It just took me a night of hotel living (including room service and a porn flick) to recover. And I still love to fly. Maybe just not on that particular airline.

[rowrrbazzle]

1. I woke up late on 9/11 and the very first thing I heard on the TV was that "O'Hare airport [only a couple of miles from my place] is closed because of the terrorist attacks." I became a tiny bit less fearful a few seconds later when I found out that O'Hare itself had not been attacked.

2. What the next terrorist attack might be.

3. My first earthquake. It was "only" a 5.3, but I froze and said my prayers.

[UncleBill]

I've had that, too Larry. Not nice. I sat up in bed and fell over.

[Cyn]

My algebra final---if I didn't pass, I wouldn't be allowed to take chemistry, wouldn't get into the nursing program, was doomed to a life of working retail for minimun wage forever. I was so scared I forgot to breathe and when Mr. H put that white sheet of paper in front of me, my mind went blank for minutes. I just sat there and stared at the sheet, didn't turn it over, just sat frozen. I tore my eyes away from the evil paper, looked up at the clock and saw I had 50 minutes to change my life. I got an A.
Cyn RN

[racer72]

This happened the day after Christmas, 1986. I had bought a 66 Charger to use as a race car. The son of the guy I bought the car from picked me up and was going to take me to the car. We were in a 1976 Datsun pickup, one of the cheap tinny trucks popular back then. We were in the right hand land of a 4 lane road that also had a center turn lane. As we approached an intersection, I saw a white Cadillac approaching the intersection from the cross street. It was going way to fast to stop. I hollered at the kid to watch out but it was too late. It was one of those instances when you have about half a second of sheer terror. The Caddy hit the passenger side of the Datsun just behind the cab. The inpact sent the truck spinning across all 4 lanes and we stopped when the truck hit a fire hydrant. The impact knocked the passenger door open but the seat belt kept me in the truck. When the truck hit the fire hydrant I was thrown to the left and hit my head on the steering wheel. The kid driving the truck was not wearing a seat belt. His head broke the back window and he was thrown against me. He was thrown against the door when the truck hit the hydrant.

My injuries included a broken tooth and assorted internal injuries. I spent 3 days in the hospital. The kid suffered a concussion, broke his right leg (it wrapped around the shifter from the impact), broke both arms, and assorted internal injuries including a torn spleen. He spent 3 months in the hospital. The guy driving the Caddy was not injured, his wife had just served divorce papers on him and he was upset.

On the day I left the hospital, the mother of the Caddy driver came to talk to me. To protect her son, she made an offer of paying all medical bills I incurred for 2 years and a one time cash payment of 2 years my salary. When I told her I made about $45,000 that year, she said that sounded fine and wrote out a check for $90,000. When you see your life flash before your eyes like that, I think the Caddy driver got off cheap.

[Honey]

1988, I was working for Eastern Airlines. My co-worker/best friend and traveling companion Dennis and I were bumped off our flight from Quito, Ecuador to Boston. We instead took a flight from Quito to Lima in order to catch the next flight from Lima to Miami to Boston.

After a 10 hour lay-over in Lima which included being mugged, by the way, we finally were on our way home to Boston. After flying for about an hour we hit some really bad weather. Now, I love flying and have never been afraid on an airplane. As a matter of fact I happen to also like a bit of turbulence during a flight.

I remember seeing a flash, like lightning and the plane started dropping like a stone. The flight attendants, white as a sheet, strapped themselves into the jump seats, people were screaming and praying in Spanish, Dennis was frozen and gripping the armrests. This went on for perhaps 2 minutes but, it seemed like an eternity. The plane eventually leveled off. No announcement was ever made from the pilot. I bet there was not a single drop of liquor left on the plane when we landed in Miami. I always wondered what people felt who were in a plane crash. The funny thing is that after about 20 seconds of terror a strange, calm, peaceful feeling came over me. I would hope this is what it really feels like for those who aren't as fortunate.

When we landed in Miami to catch our connecting flight. I actually kissed the ground.

[Baker]

I was alone in the house at night(husband was working third shift) Thought I heard a noise in the living room, got up to look, and there was an intruder there. I won't go into detail of the next few minutes, except to say that even when he threatened me with a knife if I made a sound, I still tried to scream. Didn't help though. I've been divorced for many years now, but the thing that keeps me from thinking my ex was a total heel, is that he never blamed me for what happened(I'd left the front door unlocked) and that he was gentle and understanding of the mood swings I had for several weeks after. That was the most scared I have ever been.

[porcupine]

There was a fire in my building last May. My dog started barking, I woke up out of a sound sleep at 2am, heard someone pounding on my door, and opened it to see the hallway filled smoke. There was no smoke in my condo yet, and the alarm in the hall wasn't loud enough to wake me. If it weren't for the dog, I probably. wouldn't have gotten out til the firemen go there. When I was standing outside with the dog, I could see flames above the roofline on the opposite side of the building.

[peri]

I woke up to a fire in my friend's apartment. The living room and hallway were blazing. The bedroom door was smoldering but was not yet in flames. We were on the third floor and the only way out was through the bedroom window. Three floors down to concrete.

My snapshot memories:

"WAKE UP! THE GODDAMNED HOUSE IS ON FIRE!" Stand up, collapse on the floor because I cannot breathe. Crawl to window, "Open, open, PLEASE OPEN." Ahhhhh, air. Three of us hanging out that window. Black smoke pouring out above our heads. Look down and see neighbors staring up at us. Hear shouts of , "Don't jump!" See friend's roommate down there with his burned hands in the air as if he were pleading with his God. How did he get out? Why he is wearing a brocade kimono? Overwhelming roaring behind us, sirens screaming everywhere.

I don't recall being afraid until the firefighters started blasting water through the front windows and the steam rolled over our backs. Great big clouds of suffocating steam. Feeling the blisters form on the backs of my legs. That was the point I knew I was going to die.

[Gorsnak]

So I'm planting trees in the British Columbia interior. We're camped out in the middle of nowhere. I'm just coming back from my morning visit to the small tent with the hole dug beneath it, and a fellow planter starts shouting to me from way across the camp, probably a 100 yards away. I can't make out anything except that it's something about 'behind the truck'. I shrug and continue on my way to the dry tent (10' x 10' tent with lines strung to hang wet clothes, and a small wood heater) to get my boots. As I get to the corner of the tent, what should appear from between the other corner of the tent and the truck beside it but a grizzly, humped back and all, precisely 10 feet away (I know this because that's the size of the tent). Not a huge one, probably just a yearling, about 3 1/2' tall at the shoulder. It looks towards me, waves a paw at me, and growls.

I do exactly the wrong thing.

In my defense, the thing had caught me unawares, and was way inside my flight or fight radius, but still, I never behaved this way in any other bear encounters. I bolt. About 5 seconds after seeing the bear, I'm 25 yards away and on top of a trailer. I would have left Carl Lewis in the dust. Of course, the bear could have had me in about 4 steps, so it's fortunate for me it didn't give chase.

It was at least 10 minutes later before I realized that Val had been yelling that there was a bear behind the truck.

[cichlidiot]

Most scared I've ever been and probably the most angry.

It was my 28th birthday and I didn't have to work. I thought it'd be nice to bring lunch to my SO at work. When I returned home I saw a car backed up to our house and our television sitting beside it. I knew immediately we were in the process of being robbed, and though I didn't have a cell phone I knew I should get to a phone quickly to call the police.

As I sat in my car looking at the neighbors's houses to see who looked like they'd be home, I saw a guy walking out of the house carrying part of our stereo. I don't know how he didn't see me, my car was a bright red, but he set the stereo in his car and turned around to go back in the house for more. I became so angry, I pulled my car up to his car blocking it in, and then jumped out of my car and ran into the house. I asked him what the fuck he thought he was doing and grabbed my phone and called 911.

It turns out he was our new neighbor! He was trying to calm me down explaining how someone had stolen drugs from the trunk of his car, he thought it must be us, and he was taking our belongings (even our freaking Christmas gifts) as compensation. I was still scared, knew I was stupid for even confronting him, but I was so angry at seeing our things in his car and him just waltzing around. Then his pitiful reasoning. I just started screaming over him to put our stuff back and no I won't calm down, etc. He ended up carrying all of our stuff back in with me watching (he even plugged the television set back in).

I think he expected me to be grateful and tell the police it was a mistake or something? When the police showed up he took off and his loser g/f picked him up in the road. He was eventually caught and jailed.

[SteveSteve]

Locked in attic/crawl space for 1 hour when 5.

Arrested at gun point, on acid when 17.

Jumped out of plane when 25.

Becoming father when 30.


All about the same fear level.

[Tripler]

I'm really not trying to drag up any bad memories, but bear with me here. . .

11 Sep 01, I was in Kuwait. What your 8:AM was, was our 3:PM. We honestly thought SCUDs were inbound. . .

Tripler
I can't think of anything scarier than losing my Mom, and meeting her in the afterlife before my father met us. . .

[kalex]

I'm a broadcaster in Washington DC, my office is on the 15th floor just north of the District line. It was 9/11. You could see the smoke rising from the Pentagon. In the midst of the chaos at about 10:30, the fire alarm went off, and the recorded announcement came on for us to immediately evacuate. We all made it down those 15 flights in a _flash_, I can assure you.
The next day, my legs hurt so bad I could barely walk, and all I could think of was all those people who had to walk down almost 100 flights.
It still gives me a bad, bad feeling.

[tsarina]

Scariest moment: When I was in the tenth grade my chemistry teacher collapsed in front of our class. He was an acquaintance of my dad's, so I knew he'd had heart problems in the past; the day it happened, he said he wasn't feeling well, gave us a quiz, and then sat at the front bench with his head buried in his arms. He literally turned green (and I'd always thought that was just an expression), and out of the corner of my eye I saw him slowly slipping, and then he collapsed onto the floor. Everyone rushed to him but me; I just sat there, pencil in hand, and thought, "There isn't a single thing I can do right now." He was ice cold and barely breathing by the time the ambulance got there, but he made it, and retired from teaching when the year was over.

Second scariest: One night when I was in Germany, I was walking home after drinking at a friend's house. On the way to my house there was a park, with a path leading up to a small church on the top of the hill that wasn't very well-lit at night. Since it was a shortcut, I took it, and was stopped by a drunk guy about my age who wanted a cigarette. When I told him I didn't smoke, he started down the path, but then he turned around and yelled "Hey!" and ran back up to me - "Do you have a cigarette?" - "No, sorry, I don't..." and he grabbed me by the shoulders and started pushing me towards the bushes next to the church. I could NOT get away, and he kept leering at me, "Hast du eine Zig-a-ret-te? Hast du eine Zig-a-ret-te?" All of a sudden I remembered the cigarette machine at the end of my street, and thought "he wants money." I had about 10 marks in my pocket, so I managed to get them out of my pocket and shove them into his hand, and I started walking away. He yelled "Hey!" at me again, and I began to RUN, faster than I've ever run, back to my house, and I unlocked the door in record time and made it in safely, thank goodness.

Third scariest: A few months ago, I was at my boyfriend's apartment and went to boil some ramen noodles when I accidentally turned the wrong burner on. Unfortunately, my boyfriend had set a Tupperware container onto the burner, which burst into flames in a few seconds. I ran to get a towel to beat out the flames while he ran to get water, I was screaming at him, "DO NOT throw water on that!", but he did anyway and only made it worse. Finally he remembered that there was a small fire extinguisher hidden under some junk, and he was able to put it out. We would have gotten out safely, but I felt terrible that I'd almost burned the entire building down.

[MentalGuy]

First one:
Driving home from a day trip on the interstate. It looks like a storm may come up but we have not been listening to the radio all day and do not know there is a tornado watch. Some hail starts to hit our car. It is not too bad, but I do plan to get off at the next exit (About a mile away) to get out of it. The hail starts getting larger. It gets a bit larger than golf balls and starts cracking our windows. One stone cracks severely a side window by where our two-year-old son is sitting and then another smaller stone shoots through it like a bullet. One of the small glass pieces caused some slight scratches on my son. The hail continues with golf ball size being the norm but more than a few baseball size stones as well. My son has unbuckled himself and climbed out of his carseat crying. I can hardly see to drive through the cracked windshield and the hail, so I pull over and put my body to cover my son until it is finished. A couple of hail stones are about the size of a softball. Once the hailstorm is finished we make it to the exit where we call my in-laws to come get us and we have the van towed home. There was about 6 thousand dollars worth of damage to it but no one was injured (my son's scratches were very minor).

Second one (also weather related):
I was working at a school a couple of counties away from where we live. Right as I get out of a meeting to go home we have a tornado warning. As soon as the warning is over I watch the TV to find out where the storm is going. After a while they announce "we have a tornado confirmed on the ground at X Street and Y Road". This sends a chill through my spine when I realize that my sons are at the babysitters less than a block from X Street. I try to call my wife, the babysitter, my inlaws. I cannot get through to anyone. As I am driving home the radio station (which is now broadcasting on generator power) is asking everyone to stay out of town because things are such a mess. I continue trying to call people and am not able to reach anyone for about another two hours. I am finally able to get through to my wife at work. She has left with her father, but I do find out that the kids are okay. There was still some nervousness because I could not reach anyone else to talk to them and it took them about 10 times longer than normal to get home, but I have never felt as relieved as when I found out the kids were okay.

[WortMeWorry]

On the beach in Mexico. The waves all week have been so bad noone else will go in. My SIL has road rash from being slammed into the beach and dragged by a wave. There is no sand, only small rocks. I,m out in 4 feet of water when a wave rolls over me.
Suddenly I'm cartwheeling towards the beach, literally tumbling head over heels. I'm suddenly aware that I could hit the sand head first. Visions of returning from vacation in a wheelchair run through my head. I stick my hands above my head. The next thing I know I've hit the beach feet first ,and my ankle's a little tender. We went to a different beach the next day.

[Cessandra]

This was two and a half years ago, when I was still living with my now-ex-fiance. We'd been arguing a lot, and we were in the middle of a big one. I think this was the first time that I realized I was going to leave him, and I said so.

He immediately ran into the bathroom, and pretended that he was trying to kill himself. I was scared to death. I was pounding on the door, screaming at him to come out. He grabbed my razor from the shower and stuck it under the door so that I could see the blood on it. (Later I found out that he had only cut a wart off of his hand.)

Our housemates came to see what was wrong, she tried to comfort me, and he tried to break the door down. I just remember screaming and screaming.

I ended up leaving that night. I don't remember if he came out before I left. My housemate drove me to my best friend's house. Meanwhile, the ex cleared out our bank account, unbeknownst to me. Stupid me, I also went back home with him that night, flinching when I looked at the bandage he'd smeared with blood and wrapped around his wrist.

Did I mention that at the time I already had a phobic fear of accidently cutting myself and bleeding to death? Especially of cutting my wrist with my shaving razor? I couldn't shave my legs for months. :(

[TVGuy]

There was the time when I was single-handing my Dad's 32 foot sailboat and got caught in a nasty squall. I had headed out earlier in the day with a good weather forecast and no warnings on the weather radio all day long. I was about 15 miles offshore when it started getting overcast and I could see the squall line riding a cold front barrelling toward me. I started to head for shore, but got caught in the squall. For a good 90 minutes or so, I fought that boat through 25 foot seas under a heavily reefed jib and extreme weather helm. I couldn't leave the cockpit logn enough to rig a sea anchor or do anything else to ease the hammering I was taking. There were several points during that hour and a half when I was absolutely certain that the boat was going down and I was done for in 45 degree water - and it was now a good hour past sunset.

The squall passed, I managed to get the boat in good stead again and tucked myself in to a small harbor behind an island about two hours later. The next morning was dead flat calm and foggy with about 50 yards visibility - I motored all the way back to home port.

But, the worst I was ever scared and was the most certain that I was about to die was September 1, 2001. It was 4:10 AM Pacific Daylight Time. I was on the last day of a coast-to-coast-to-coast road trip that had taken me over 7000 miles from Oregon through Canada to Maine and back through the midwest. I was on I-90 in Idaho, having just passed over the Montana / Idaho border on my way from Missoula to Portland. I was passing an eighteen wheeler on a portion of I-90 that's in the hills and curvy. I was in the left lane with a concrete jersey barrier to my left and that eighteen wheeler to my right. I was in my Jeep Wrangler. I was doing about 75 MPH.

Suddenly, in the beam of my headlight, a shape appears in my lane. A BIG shape. I had just about 1/2 a second to slam on brakes and only hit the object at about 60 MPH. The object? - it was a full size, mounted and fully inflated semi-truck tire and wheel sitting quietly flat in the middle of the lane I was in.

As I smacked it, the whole right side of the Jeep went up in the air like I was one of the Joey Chitwood Thrill Team drivers. I was heading directly for the underside of the eighteen wheeler's trailer.

Then the rear differential hit the thing. That cause the other side of the Jeep to go up in the air, putting me almost straight on down the road again shortly thereafter. By now the semi next to me had gone on by and I spent the next 1/4 mile or so getting fully back under control and back in one lane.

Don't ask me why I'm still alive. At one point, I actually SAW an image of myself crumpled, bleeding and dead wrapped up in the wheels of that semi in the ditch by the side of the road. I actually SAW the ISP officer pulling my wallet out of the bloody mess to see who I was. I actually SAW my body parts strewn across the road like so much raccon or squirrel meat.

I stopped by the side of the road for a good half hour after that inspecting the Jeep and getting my mind to calm down again. The vehicle was not seriously damaged and neither was I. Heck, my shorts weren't even soiled. I made it home to Portland later that day.

Of all the "close calls" I've had in my life, The Great Idaho Truck Tire Incident of 2001 is without a doubt the one that has given me the worst fright of my tender life.

[Improv Geek]

I think the scariest thing I ever faced was the possible losing of my mother due to a rare blood disease. She has myelophibrosis (or some spelling near that) and it is not serious yet but before we knew this the threat weighed very heavily on me and the idea of losing her was perhaps the scariest thing in the world.

Next I would say when my family was in a car wreck and the seconds before we rear ended the car in front of us were pretty damn scary.

[leechbabe]

1. Finding out I was pregnant, took me over a month to get used to the idea of being a parent (now I'm really looking forward to it, still scared but not longer terrified).

2. Hearing on the radio that a security guard had been fatally shot in the suburb where leechboy was working security that day. I don't think my heart started beating again until I got him on the phone.

[Thaumaturge]

Flying into Kuwait after 9/11 on a C-17, when suddenly the lights went out, the engines started making a funny noise, and we dropped out of the sky like a rock. Had a few moments of sheer terror as my seatbelt was the only thing keeping me from rising out of my seat, or so it felt. My imagination made me think we were dodging missiles or we had lost power or something.

Turns out that they did that on purpose, in order to drop in under Iraqi radar. Also turns out that the loadmaster had explained everything to us a few minutes before they began the manouver. However, if you have ever been on a military aircraft, you'd know that soundproofing isn't something the designers seem to have heard of....maybe because they spent too much time in military aircraft! :p Therefore I did not hear the warning over the rush of wind and roar of engines. ( I liken the military flying experience to strapping a vacuum cleaner to your head for 8 hours. Sure I had hearing protection, it's still loud.)


Equally scary were the 3 times I've nearly drowned, I no longer go in water that is over my head, I swim like a block of cement.

[BadBaby]

When I was about seven or eight years old, I was in the backyard swimming when an earthquake hit. No ordinary temblor, it went on forever; the power was out for a couple of days and school was cancelled. The scary part was being caught in the waves, knocked around and pulled under, while getting closer to the edge of the pool. Our dog was suddenly in the pool with me and we smashed into each other once or twice, then against the side of the pool. I just barely managed to pull myself out when an aftershock hit and was certain I was going to end up in the water again.
Then there was the time my friends and I were driving home after a football game and got caught in a storm so bad I had to simply stop where I was, couldn't even see the side of the road in order to pull over (no traffic thank goodness). The worst part was seeing the lightening strikes get closer and closer, trying to convince myself there was no way one of them would hit us. Then by gum, one of the strikes hit so close I could have reached out and touched it. I can still remember the smell, the feel of the air and the indescribable sound, a noise so great it was mixed with silence. Suddenly I could hear properly again, everybody was screaming, but I calmly started the car and drove home.
The most recent scary incident happened somewhere on Pacific Coast Highway in northern California a couple of years back. I was driving along when some idiot pulled onto the road right in front of me as I rounded a curve and I slammed on the brakes but couldn't do anything else because of oncoming traffic and complete lack of railing, grade, anything but air to my right. The bed of my truck came around to say howdy as I spun at least twice and came to a stop. I looked out my window, looked down and saw the ocean umpteen million feet below me. I was sort of tilted, not really sliding but not stable either, partly off the road but still with enough of my tires in the dirt to make it onto the road again. Pretty sure I was an idiot to even try to drive out of that tricky spot, but I was definitely not thinking well at that point.

[pilot141]

Two types of scared: Instantaneous and (I'll call it) intellectual.

Instantaneous: Waking up early in the morning to go to work and turning on the light in the bathroom. The main lightswitch controls five lights that are above the mirror. When I turn on the switch one of the light bulbs begin sparking, smoking and spewing sparks onto the mirror and the countertop. Having only been awake for 30 seconds I can tell you that if I didn't suffer a heart attack then than I am immune to them, because I jumped, danced and screamed my damn fool head off before I figured out what was going on and turned the switch off.

Intellectual: I was flying (up front, as a crewmember) on Sept 11th. We left El Salvador bound for Miami before anything had happened. 15 minutes after takeoff we get a message to "be vigilant....confirmed hijacking in NY area". I call the company on the HF radio and ask what is happening...they tell me "we have a confirmed hijacking with a loss of life." I feel sick to my stomach...then we are told to turn around: US airspace is closed. Every aircraft bound for the US must turn around. We turn around and head back to El Salvador. The captain makes a PA about what we are doing (we don't know what has happened, and expect to be on our way shortly). Five minutes later a flight attendant calls up front and says that a man is running around the cabin saying that the airplane has been hijacked, everyone is going to die, and to not listen to anything that the pilots say.

At this point I looked out the window and honestly wished that I would turn back and find a "rewind" button for my life, because I did not like where this was going.

To finish...we land and it turns out the guy is just drunk, but I did have to go back and put the flexcuffs on him (that will never happen today). We are relieved to find that our guy is just drunk, and we walk into the airport to find another airlines' crew watching the TV and saying "We just watched one of our airplanes fly into the WTC". As we turn to the TVs the second tower collapses....now I REALLY want a rewind button on my life.

[danceswithcats]

My most scary moment was on a mountain bike.

A steep downgrade followed by an equally steep upgrade, I wanted momentum. Partway down, I felt uneasy as I was skipping along the surface of the road, and was losing control. In rural areas it is called 'tar and chip' surface. Somehow I knew it would not work out well.

I exited the roadway, over a guiderail and decelerated using shrubs, rocks and other solid objects. Physics is a dependable science.

Once I'd looked **looked** at my tibia, I decided to orient the splintered leg uphill, and call my neighbor on my cell phone. I thought he'd come pick me up, we'd go get a walking cast on my leg and call it a day.

He wasn't home.

I felt like a wussy boy calling 911 for a broken leg. Shortly after I had been found, I heard a helicopter. They don't spin birds for broken legs.

Partway to trauma, after administration of drugs better than those you could buy at a rock concert, I went to the land of lost left sox. Three weeks later, I awakened.

Injury assessment was quad jaw fracture (compound) closed skull trauma, collapsed left lung, compression fracture C5-7, and T6-8. My tibia/fibula was all but shattered below the knee.

My scary moment was when I awakened, my tongue in side my mouth touching the interdental wiring, telling me I'd fractured my jaw, and feeling the clamshell brace on my torso, identification of spinal fracture.

Gingerly lifting the sheet, I saw thankfully a leg, but without sutures. Time had been stolen.

That was the real beginning of fear.

[Cruktar]

Wow. OpalCat, your story has me seriously creeped out.

A couple of weeks ago, I was staying the night at my Dad's office with my friend Andrew. (There's a cable connection there. We had a stack of DVDs and were away from parents, so we were happy.) Around 2 a.m., I happened to wander towards the glass front of the building. By chance I pulled on the front door...and found it unlocked. That would have been fine, but it was the kind of deadbolt that requires a key from both side, so we couldn't re-lock it. We shoved a big metal desk in front of the door and forgot about it, until we heard what sounded very much like gunshots in the alley next to the building. We checked to make sure the desk was in place, turned off the lights, and hunkered down for a bit before checking the parking lot in the back. Nothing ever came of it, but it crossed over pretty far into "Eeek" territory there for awhile.

Much scarier was an accident I was involved in over the summer a year ago. I was on vacation with my parents, riding in the backseat of a rental car in Vermont. I was reading (Terry Pratchett, if anyone cares) and felt the car slow down. We started to make a left turn, and I heard my dad say something along the lines of "Well, shit." A split-second later a Toyota SUV hit about six inches behind my door, at 50 mph. I remember feeling weirdly buffeted around as the car spun 180 degrees into a gas station parking lot, then taking mental inventory of myself to make sure nothing was poking out where it shouldn't have been. We were all fine, though my mom had some pretty badly pulled neck muscles. I got a fun ambulance ride out of the thing at least.

[eenerms]

Similar to HONEY's experience. Flying on airline with a less than stellar safety record, we were approaching Dubai International, when the plane dropped like a rock.:eek: Everyone screamed. The Pilot recovered and said, * A little wind shear, here we go again*.
Landed..
now I fly with the assistance of chemical induced sleep.

[DaToad]

There are definitely different kinds of fear. Fear for self and fear for others.
Crashing in a helicopter in Viet Nam. Pretty scary ride down and we went in at about 60 knots fwd airspeed. The first impact blew the skids off, on the second bounce the nose went in which caused both M/rotor blades to strike the ground, the third bounce was on the tail causing T/rotor blade strikes. What was left slid 30 or 40 yards. Thank God it didn’t flip or roll, and that where we went down there were no trees, just brush. (Everyone survived)

Searching for my lost 3 yr. old daughter after she got out of the yard. At the time I was a single dad and I lived in the mountains near two fast moving streams. She had climbed out onto a rock jutting into the larger stream and didn’t know how to get back. I was just ready to go back to the house to call the search and rescue team when I found her. 45 minutes of panic and she was less than 100 yards from the house. She couldn’t hear me yelling her name because of the noise of the stream. That was far more terrifying for me than the heli crash.

[NinjaChick]

Easily the most terrifying thing ever for me: This past summer, camping at a campground (with a group - 5 other hs students (from all over), 2 adults) in rural Kentucky (VERY rural). Sometime during the night one night, I was not sleeping at all (happens occasionally). I got up, decided to take a walk. Don't bother to bring a flashlight. It's a weeknight, so the campground is more or less empty. I get up into a very isolated area (I know it was dumb, in retrospect.) There'sa guy there. He's just wearing a dirty pair of white shorts. Radiating pure creepy vibes. He's leaning against the ampethetar stage wall, panting like a dog. He smells like pot and there are track marks on his arms. Slowly turns to me, and stares. Then he grins at me, lunges at me, and tries to get his hand under my shirt. I'm NOT a person who likes to be touched, at all, and this was scary. I swear my heart stopped, I think I kicked him, and ran like HELL.

[LouisB]

I once lived for a (short) while with an alcoholic uncle. I came home late one night, and when I entered the house, my uncle jumped out of his bedroom, went into the combat crouch and pointed his pistol at me. The range was about five feet and all I could do was stand and try to calmly talk him out of shooting me. It seemed to take forever, but he eventually lowered the gun, turned, and went back to bed. I should mention that he was an excellent marksman but that didn't really matter--drunk or sober, he couldn't have missed at the range. He never said a word about it afterwards, nor did I.

The real fear didn't hit me until a day or so later--it was like it took that long to really soak in that my uncle was a hair's breadth from killing me.

[beckwall]

Danceswithcats, sorry about your accident but had to say that you write a wicked-ass story.

BTW, my 50 year old BIL was mountain biking last summer and had a bad fall, broke his leg, and rode 5 miles back into town. Luckily, he was in a ski town and they have the best ortho people usually, so was in and out of surgery/hospital in a day. My sister wrote "never again" on his cast, and underneath that he wrote "next year!", so go figure.

[KarlGrenze]

The most scared? I was 15 years old, living in a ninth-floor apartment with my parents. It was September 21, 1998. They had given a hurricane warning (Hurricane Georges). My parents didn't have the money or time to completely seal the living room windows, so they did what they could, hoping it wasn't so strong. Fortunately I begged and begged and moved most of the living room furniture out of the way into the library room and the bedrooms. When the hurricane came, my parents disconnected everything, closed the balcony and laundry doors, closed the door connecting living room and kitchen, and put the dining room table vertically, blocking most of the entrance to the hall from the living room. Then we all took refuge in my bedroom, which was the only one with a door (see, I foresaw that part).

What I didn't foresee was that the winds would be strong enough to tear apart the wood panels my parents had used for the windows, and break all the crystal windows, and all the wind to enter my living room. And I didn't expect the winds to reach the room we were in, forcing us to close the door and push against the wind for hours. We pushed my bed against the door, and then dad and I, sat in the other border of the bed and pushed our legs against the wall, pushing the bed the other way. My legs were sore afterwards.

For hours we kept doing that, knowing that if we fail, the wind and water would come in the place we were, and not knowing what was happening outside the room, in the rest of the house. Oh, and only one radio station was working. It has been the longest (and only) time I've prayed the whole rosary with my father, all through that ordeal.

No, nothing happened, the damage wasn't too big, most of it is fixed already, and my parents congratulate me for my thinking.

[MaxTheVool]

Originally posted by Gundy
All of my scared stories have to do with my son. Criminy, I'm a terrible mom. There was the time at the beach --

Or the time he hid from me in a rack of clothes at a department store

Mom?


Seriously, I used to get lost all the time as a little kid, and hey, that always seemed kinda funny. I never really stopped to think about how gut-wrenching it must have been for my poor parents.


I don't have any kids myself, but I do have one story that kinda gives me some perspective on what parents must feel when their kids aren't there...

A few years back, I was on vacation in San Diego with a bunch of my cousins, some of my generation and some toddlers. So I went down to the beach with two cousins (my generation), and 3 of their sons (ages approximately 2, 3 and 5).

Important to this story is the fact that this beach was totally and completely empty except for us.

The 2-year old, Alonzo, started playing by himself, and the other 5 of us started playing whiffleball. We kind of got into the game, and then one of the other two grownups said "Where's Alonzo?"

What was so scary was that we could immediately see all the way up and down the beach, and he just was not there. There were no hiding places. There were no crowds of people he could be milling around in. There was just empty sand, and the ocean.


Turned out that he had gotten bored and wandered back up the path to where we were staying, but holy crap I was scared for a bit.

[norinew]

Three specific times come to mind: About 2 years ago, I was in the hospital for a kidney stone. The doc did a CAT-Scan to look at the stone, and after treating me for the stone, told me that there was something suspicious-looking on the Scan on my right kidney. I said "like what?", and he said, "I dunno, cancer?". It was a week before I could get a more thorough test, and I was terrified. I mean, I was 39 years old. I had 3 children. I didn't want to leave them (did I mention that almost everyone on my mother's side of my family has died of cancer, including my mother?). Turned out to be nothing.

Second time: Busch Gardens in Tampa Florida, and I lost track of my 2-year-old. Terrifying 15 minutes (she was fine, never knew she was lost).

Third time: a few months ago, I went to get my teenage daughter out of bed, and she was gone. Didn't take us too long to realize she had run away. I couldn't help thinking of all the terrible things that can happen to teenage girls who run away. Less than 4 hours after we found she was missing, she was located. Teens, a little hint: if you run away, don't go to your best friends' house. It's the first place your folks will look (d'uh!)

[The_Stranger]

December 1992.
Baidoa, Somalia. (known to the Somali's as the "City of Death"
Operation "Restore Hope"

A small Somali child with a Russian made RPG-7 rocket launcher...
Pointed at MY vehicle.

He couldn't get it to fire, dropped it and ran.

(This was a few weeks prior to the Army Rangers getting killed while going in after the downed Blackhawk)


Stranger OUT

[OpalCat]

Because I was very bored, I made a map of the chase from my post:

http://fff.fathom.org/pages/opalcat/hitchhiking-chase.jpg

[Improv Geek]

danceswithcats - That was almost poetic, I can definitely understand having that happen would bring a bit of fear.

I had some emotional fear just a few nights ago. I spilled my soul to my best friend, telling her how I felt about her and just basically expounding stuff I'd been keeping inside so as to not rock the boat of our friendship. But I finally spilled it all, and suddenly was gripped by the fear that this would affect our close friendship and I would lose someone who I cared deeply for. I had a restless night and a long day until we talked again. I shouldn't have been so scared but I truly was terrified I could lose my best friend.

[PunditLisa]

At an amusement park. My youngest is 8 and was ~3 inches too short for one virtual reality ride, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. She's also very slim. My dad's nickname for her is Tiny. Anyway, a dude with the stick saw her and let her pass with a shrug. I ask, "Does this ride have cages for kids?" (A lot of the rides have "cages" where you can put young kids or people who freak out at the last minute while you ride.) He says he thinks so. So we go in, thinking we'll put her in the cage.

The "ride" is a series of preliminary movies and such where you enter a room and they basically give you a backstory. Yawn. Finally, we get to the actual ride and we look around. There's no cage! A dude is in the room we just exited from and I go to talk to him but they close the doors right as I get near. The exit doors are closed. So instead of doing what I should have done (banged on the door until someone let me out), we went ahead and strapped WeePundit in. I'm envisioning this "ride" to be like Terminator 3D at Universal - scary but fairly innocuous in terms of physical danger.

HA! Almost immediately you are flipped upside down in your seat. The only thing holding you in is a shoulder harness that locks to a pelvic harness. Great for someone of my size. Not so great if you're little and have narrow shoulders. There's a real possibility (in my mind, at least) that a teeny person could slip out through the shoulder harness. Which is probably why there's a height restriction! I holler at my husband to hold WeePundit's hand and to NOT LET HER GO. I'm envisioning her being thrown out of the ride at 60mph and just laying in a heap.

Everyone was screaming as the ride flipped you up and down and backwards and forwards and I knew there was nothing I could do but wait for the ride to be over. At one part they hang you upside down, suspended, over a (pretend) fire pit. The heat is rushing up at your face and I'm just praying that WeePundit doesn't slip through and land in the hot pit! I could hear myself saying, "Oh God, oh God, oh God."

Mercifully, the ride was short but I'll never forget the ice cold fear that went through my veins.

She's going to be 12 before I let her on another ride.

[Terrorcotta]

Well, I was chased by UFOs in the last 70s through the backwoods of Tennessee. I was going from Atlanta to Memphis by way of Nashville, but there is a small backroad that cuts off an hour or so.
We came up to the lip of a valley and saw a 'shooting star' so we made a wish and kept going, then we noticed that the 'shooting star' stopped dead and performed a 90 degree turn before dissapearing over the other side of the valley.
That took some of the wonder out of seeing a rare natural phenomena.
We drive out of the valley and things are dull, it's 9:00pm on a Wednesday evening in November and it's cold. Then the silver saucer shape with orange and aqua colored lights starts to peek out over trees and houses. Not only that, but there are two funny silver colored eleptical shapes with lights around the middle flying low to the north towards Nashville.
Initially, it's hard to panic when you don't believe what you are seeing. As we drove along, the sauce got closer and closer and was tracking us, veering off when we passed houses or other oncoming cars.
Now, I am beginning to worry. THAT'S a saucer and it is flying only 50 feet away and a few hundred feet over us. I don't have time for this! I am going to graduate next week and I have no time to spend on Mars. (Hysteria induced fears are SO funny in retrospect).
My loosely Catholic roommate has begun the Hail Marys and I am flashing on every scifi story, book, novel, tv program and movie I have ever known. I know there is a medium small town up ahead but my imagination has made all the inhabitants puppets of the alien overloads who now operate out of this town.
The other two ships keep buzzing around but the main saucer sticks to us. I slow down, they slow, I speed up, they speed up. I am all but caught.
The lights of the town are starting to show and our saucer has veered off. We stop in town and decide we lost them so we will continue and if we see them again, we turn around and go to the police but I am not stopping for anything 'til I am back in civilization.
So, back out on the road out of time, we are starting to feel pretty cocky for having had such a grand adventure that ended so well! Ha Ha Ha! All's well! We are only 3 hours or so out from Memphis!
That's when the saucer came from behind and passed over us. Uh-oh. They're baaaaccccckkkkk!
So, another 20 minutes of hide and seek. Panic builds. Another shallow valley and no saucer. We come over the lip of the valley and the saucer has landed! On the road ahead of us! A solid band of non-glare white light covers the road from side to side and we are blocked, trapped and screwed.
I slam the brakes and yank the wheel and we are off on a free wheeling trip through a sheared corn field in pitch dark except for the gentle glow from the craft behind us.
We made it back to town and got a police escort to the interstate (no small trick, they thought we were doped up chicks on a toot) and as soon as we could get to a gas station with Very Bright Lights I hit the restroom and relieved every orifice I had. Repeatedly.
Couldn't sleep for days and couldn't go outside without an escort to check the sky for almost a year.
To this day, that is my yardstick for panic and fear. Few things have come close. Thankfully!

'Course, nowdays I figure they were just alien teens out for a night of joyriding with daddy's saucer and harrassing the earth girls.

[Evil Death]

Originally posted by whiterabbit
Biggirl, they intubated you before you were out? That's just flat out mean!

Try having an apical chest drain inserted without anaesthesia - now that's mean...



Oh, and signing a consent form for surgery that mentioned the possibility of my death was pretty scary...

Been there, done that, and been asked to donate my remains to science at the same time. Having admitted myself to hospital to be told that my left lung had completely collapsed and my right lung was at 50% capacity (which is apparently a record for self-admitted patients), they then couldn't reinflate either lung. Describing exactly what they were going to do to me and then giving me a bunch of release forms ... not the happiest day of my life.

[Feynn]

The worst words I have ever heard were...

"Lola was in a car accident and she's been taken to the hospital"

She was 8 months pregnant with our youngest daughter, who just happened to turn three last week.

It was pure terror.

[Flowerchild]

I think one of the scariestmoments of my life was taking this math final I had in 7th grade, my parents had convinced me that I had to pass this to live and I had to pass it to pass 7th grade (Which i did). I basicly thought "If I have to repeat 7th grade, thats it, I'll be a year older than everyone, I'll never get into a college, my parents will beat me untill the cows come home". I got a B on it.

I think the second time I ever felt really scared was when I was about 8 , I was absolutley terrified of the dark, I still am. Well, while I was in the shower, the power went out. I felt totally trapped in that little room in that dark and I started screaming like I was being murdered. I think my parents set the short distance running record when they heard that scream,they were there in less than a second.

Number 3 would have to be when I was about 13 and my parents let my sister and I stay home alone as usual, while they went to the store.It was winter and there was a firew in the fireplace, my parents knew they could trust us with it. while I waswatching TV, a spark jumped out of the fireplae and hit some newspapers spread out on the hearth. I saw the whole hearth go up in flames, and instead of "911" i thought "water", so I threw as much water as I could on that hearth until the fire went out, and by then my parents were home. One thing that really creeped me out was when my dad told me "If the fire had hit the carpet you'd have been goners". I didnt know if he was right, but I was damn thankful the fire didnt hit the carpet.

[Gaijin]

So there I am, 17 years old, lying in bed at 11:30 pm or so, having just achieved that floating middle state of consciousness that allows me to transition from waking to sleep. Everyone else in the house is also in bed. I can hear the television on in my parents' room, and an anchor for the local news is, as usual, reporting to two dozing bodies who are at this point so used to her drone that it is required for them to fall asleep.

Then my dog, downstairs, locked in her cage in the back room, begins to bark. Loudly.

My dog, by the way, doesn't bark. Not when she's in her cage. The only circumstances under which she does is when she is able to look out the window and see another canine. But she is not by a window, and there's certainly no way that she can detect another domesticated animal. My spider sense is tingling.

I call to my father, across the hallway.

"Dad."

"Rmph," he responds. Still awake. Good.

"The dog's barking."

"Yep." Apparently the significance of this event has not yet struck him.

"She doesn't bark, Dad."

An annoyed groan answers me, followed by a grunted, "Go check it out."

Thanks alot, Dad. You're about 40 and have a hefty life insurance policy that would really help me pay for college later. I've got about $400 dollars in a student account.

So I amble out of bed, put on my robe, stumble into the bathroom, take about two minutes putting in my contact lenses, and grab the Really Big Stick that I keep in my room for situations such as this. My dog has not stopped barking.

I turn on the upstairs hall light, and shoot down the stairs, purposefully being loud, trying to sound heavier than I am, trying to scare the bejeesus out of any possible intruder, hoping that, if someone is poking around our home, they'll panic at the noise and reveal their location. No such luck.

So I have to do it the hard way. Slowly but surely, room by room, I peek around each corner, slice the pie, flick on the lights, and inspect every shadowed corner. Adrenaline is pumping like crazy, and I keep tensing my arms around my Really Big Stick, even though my Mad Phat Ninja Skills keep telling me that I need to be relaxed if I want to get all the power behind my strike and take someone's head off. Finally I reach the back room, where my dog is. She has stopped barking, but she's standing upright, her snout sticking out of the cage, ears back, as tense as she can appear for something immersed in as much fat as she is.

Turn on the backyard lights, take a peek outside. See our second dog happily trotting about. If someone was out there, he'd have taken their leg off. Turn off lights, close door, lock door.

Turn on porch light, peek outside. Nothing is amiss. Turn off lights, close door, lock door.

Relieved, I start turning off all the lights. I pass through the kitchen, on the way to the stairs, eager to get back to bed.

Then I notice the basement door.

The basement door is unlocked. The bolt is off. The bolt is never off. With exclusion to December, when we drag the Christmas tree upstairs, that door remains locked.

I just stand there staring at the doorknob, holding my Really Big Stick like a katana blade, poised to strike. I stood there for at least five minutes, waiting, listening, trying my damndest to hear anything over the pulsing of my jugular vein. I keep thinking I do, then keep telling myself I'm only hearing someone because I'm trying to hear someone.

I have to make a decision. Should I check it out? Should I open the door and put an end to this standoff? I've got to. It's the only place I haven't checked. If someone's inside the house, they're in the basement. Slowly, carefully, gingerly, fearfully, I reach my hand toward the door.....























... and lock the damn bolt. If someone's in there, they can friggin starve or tunnel out. I went back to bed.

Probably, nobody was there. But I still don't know for sure, and it still freaks me out.

[Superdude]

Mugged in Miami at knifepoint at 17. Thrown against a wall and the knife was sticking in my ear. No one knew where I was. I'd lied to my parents about where I was going to be, and went to Florida on Spring Break.

[Jessity]

Mine are fairly tame:

A couple years ago, I woke up to the phone ringing and someone telling me my parents had been in a wreck. My 'common' (ha!) sense told me that if either of my parents were okay, one of them would have called me themselves. It was neither of my parents on the other end. I ran around grabbing clothes and getting dressed, crying and shaking and thinking they were dead. When I finally got to where they'd wrecked, I saw several ambulances and neither of my parents. Finally, somebody pointed me toward a police officer's car, and both of my parents were inside, with nary a scratch. A truck had pulled out in front of them at the intersection of two busy highways and my father had clipped the back end with their truck.

The entire drive there, though. . . I kept thinking I would have to tell my brother that our parents were dead, and how in the HELL would I take care of a 16 year old boy? I don't ever remember being that terrified at any other point in my life.

One other time, I left a friend's house in the middle of the night to find a guy sitting in my car, flipping through my CD case. I pretty much went batshit and started screaming for him to get out of my car. He jumped out and ran down the street. . . and I chased him. That thought in itself is hysterical. It wasn't until afterwards that I was scared, and then I was pretty shaken up. He made off with my wallet and some CDs. A week later, he was caught and I had to go identify him. I thought I'd see something like on television, you know, a lineup of people. Instead, I was taken to a room to pick up my stolen stuff, and there the guy sat, smoking a cigarette, not even cuffed. That was certainly weird, although not really scary. Everything he'd taken from me was returned, except for the actual leather wallet my credit cards and checkbook had been in, so I told the officer that. The guy then looked at me and said, "Yeah, if I find that I'll give you a call and get it back to you." :eek:

[Tripler]

Originally posted by The_Stranger
A small Somali child with a Russian made RPG-7 rocket launcher...
Pointed at MY vehicle.


WHOA!!!

Thank God the Soviets sucked. . .

Tripler
:eek:

[Pammipoo]

I've posted about this before, but it was still the most terrifying experience of my life.

I made the mistake of meeting a guy I'd met on the internet. 95% of the people I talk to online, I know from real life first.I'm not real big on the chatting with random strangers thing. So he wanted to meet, out of careless stupidity, I agreed. I drove up to where he was staying, about 45 minutes away. We met, he took me back to his hotel room. We were getting along good, he appeared to be normal. He kissed me, I kissed back. And then he hit the insanity point. He grabbed my arms, tied them behind me, and tied my feet to the chair legs. I was kicking and protesting, but he was a lot stronger than me. He shoved his dick in my mouth, and forced me to give him a blowjob. He told me he'd kill me if I didn't cooperate. I was sobbing. When he went to rape me, he put a bag over my head, because apparently lack of oxygen makes orgasms stronger or something. I couldn't breathe, I was so terrified he'd leave me for dead in that cheap motel room, and no one would ever find me, or know where I was. He finally took the bag off, after 5 minutes or so. During the 5 minutes, he would open the bag briefly, to give me a few gasps of air before tightening the bag again. He moved me to the bed, tied me to the bedpost, and proceeded to jerk himself off on top of me. When he came, he covered my face, my chest, and my hair. He took pictures. I was begging him not to leave me for dead, he just laughed,and finally untied me. I threw my clothes on halfway, grabbed my stuff, and ran for my car.

Driving home, I was sobbing, and I had no idea where I was. So I pulled into a gas station, and asked the attendant for directions. She kept asking if I was okay, and I said yes. I went in the bathroom, and looked in the mirror, and almost screamed. My bra was hanging out of my tank top, my shorts were barely on. My hair was a mess. Dried cum covered my face, and my eye was slowly becoming infected. Plus, my face was all splotchy from the crying. I looked like shit. I had to stop for directions 3 more times before I finally figured out how to get home. Once I did, I just stayed in my room and cryed. When my mom asked what was wrong, I told her I broke up with my boyfriend. To this day, she still doesn't know what happened, although several of my close friends know the story. For the most part, they were very supportive, and I couldn't have made it through that ordeal without any of them. But when they pushed me to press charges, I just couldn't do it. I just wanted to forget it ever happened, and they couldn't accept that.

That was almost 3 years ago. It took me a long time to move on afterwards, even now I'm still not completely better. I haven't had a normal relationship since, I'm terrified of getting involved with people I don't know real well.

The fear that I felt when he put that bag over my head...I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Nobody deserves to have to go through that. Nobody.

[OpalCat]

I just remembered another one. I got a call from someone at AOL/Digital Cities saying that my husband was being taken by ambulance to the hospital. We were new to the area (AOL had just moved us to VA from AZ) and knew almost no one. I got a neighbor that had kids that I'd gotten to know a tiny bit to watch Dominic while I set off to try to find the hospital (I didn't know the area at all), wondering what condition he would be in.

He was awake when I got there. He'd had a seizure. No one knows why he had a seizure. He'd never had one before, and he has never had another one. He had CAT scans and everything. He was out for a few minutes and really freaked out his co-workers. He says he doesn't remember most of the ambulance ride.

[Deadly Nightlight]

Gaijin- You are the veritable bomb!
Your story made me laugh til I cried

[Rick]

Several in no particular order.
1981 my car is down for service and I am driving a buddies '74 Civic (way smaller than the current models) Hollywood Freeway going about 50 mph, all cars about 3 car lengths apart. the pickup infront of me makes a quick lane change and I am lookng at the front end of a full size Ford sedan. At first I think the guy has spun out, then I realize HE'S DRIVING THE WRONG WAY ON THE FREEWAY!
I flip a quick glance over my shoulder and make a lane change to the right. He passes the side of my car close enough that I could have reached out and touched it. Stopped called the cops on a call box. Every customer I saw that day said I looked white as a ghost.

Driving my buddies Porsche home one night I go to make a lane change to the right just before a ramp from freeway to freeway. Anyway the pickup/camper in front of me jams on his brakes, just as I am making the lane change. I jerk the wheel to make sure I clear him. This unbalances the car and when I go to straighten out in the new lane the back end comes around. So here I am at 75 facing the traffic in the left lane with a left hand sweeper approaching. Correct with wheel, and Now I am looking at the trees on the other side of the guardrail. Correct again and now I am only about 45 degrees out of phase. Once more and I am straight and down to 35. Drop it into 2nd and get out of dodge. Turn to wife and ask if she is OK. She replies with a quote that I will never forget "I promised myself I wouldn't scream unless we got backwards" I love this lady.

Went to an oral surgeon for serveral teeth when I was a teenager. They gave me a general. Did I mention that this was an early AM apointment? Did I mention that the window in the room where I was faced East? At this point I am sure you can guess that the blinds were open. So I start to come out from the general. Mind is working, body is not. All I can see is bright redish light (inside of my eyelids with lots of sunlight on them) Mouth full of blood. then I can kind open my eyes, but can't focus, and can't move. I am sure they have screwed up the drugs and I will be a veggie the rest of my life. Scream for the nurse, nobody shows. Keep screaming still nobody shows. Finally a nurse shows up and then proceeds to ream me out cause I am distrubing the other patients. Asshat.

[Gaijin]

Deadly Nightlight - I appreciate the sentiment, but I didn't think it was funny at the time. ;)

Pammipoo, reading your story made me want to be sick and punch through my window. If I had known you when this happened, I can't honestly say I wouldn't have attempted to murder that ... man.

Another story- Two pals and I, living in our small, boring town, suddenly get the idea to go ghost hunting. There's a forested park not too far away that was supposedly haunted, so we grab a video camera, a couple of flashlights, and mosy on down there.

It's about 10:00 pm at the time, and the park has been closed since sundown. We, of course, were far too BRAVE to venture along the paved pathways where we had very little chance of spraining an ankle- no, we had to just amble randomly through trees and bushes.

Then we try to turn on the video camera, so as to have irrefutable evidence of the ghost we're going to valiantly pursue. The battery has died. No worries, we've still got a photographic camera (you know, the ones you take photos with). So we get ourselves pretty deep into the forest, and then, one by one, all within a space of a minute and a half, our flash light batteries all die.

:(

We turn around and begin stumbling back in the general direction we came from. Our conversation went something like this:

Pal 1: "Dude, something just touched me! Something just touched me!"

Pal 2: "Is it still touching you?"

Pal 1: "Uh.. no, no, I'm ok, I'm ok."

Pal 2: "Holy crap! I just saw somethin'! I swear I just saw somethin'!"

Gaijin: "What did you see?"

Pal 2: "I'm not sure, but it's over there!"

Pal 1: "Over where?"

Pal 2: "Over there, I'm pointing at it!"

Gaijin: "We can't see where you're pointing, you dork!"

Pal 2: "Oh, doesn't matter, I think it's gone."

Gaijin: "Gah!" *thump*

Pal 1: "Shit, man! The ghost just got 'im! The ghost just got him!"

Pal 2: "Where are you, Gaijin? Are you okay?"

Gaijin: "I just tripped, I'm fine."

*twig snapping*

Gaijin: "Sweet Jesus! What the hell was that?"

Pal 1: "I don't know man, but I think it's getting closer!"

Pal 2: "Listen!"

We all spend about two minutes, listening to nothing and for everything.

Pal 2: "Where is it? I can't see it!"

Gaijin: " 'Four meters, man! Four meters! It's on top of us!' " (allusion to a scene from 'Aliens')

All: *nervous chuckling*

We march onward.

Pal 1: "It's somebody else's turn to take the front, man!"

Gaijin: "It's somebody else's turn to take the back! If anyone's gonna get whacked first, it's whoever's gonna be in the back!"

Pal 1: "Then why would one of us switch with you?"

Gaijin : "Well we've got to shift somehow."

Pal 2: *safely from the middle* "Why don't you two just switch?"

*A few swishes are heard as Pal 1 and I blindly attempt to slap Pal 2. We make contact a few times*

Pal 1: "Guys, did I ever tell you about the time I saw the monster that lives in my backyard?"

*more slapping noises*

Gaijin and Pal 2: "Is this really the best time- " "You stupid motherfu-" "To tell us about your freaking monst- " "Idiot poopscoop! I'm scared enough as it is!"

We eventually made it out of there, drove home, and fought over the privileges to use the restroom first. We eventually rolled dice for it. I was last.

[Insecta]

All my scary moments are largely due to an unhealthy lack of respect for my own being. In fact, the only reason that I’m not yet dead is probably out of courtesy for my parents. But even though I wasn’t exactly acting in a safe manner when these events occurred, they were still frightening. These are all in the instantaneous fear category.

1: Skiing: At the time I was a pretty awful skier, and I’d be worse if I tried it now because I switched to snowboarding after this accident. I was with a ski school in St. Moritz, and the visibility must have been between two and three metres. I was at the back of the train of novice skiers and lost sight of the person in front of me. Suddenly, on my right I catch sight of the whole group standing together. I go to turn towards them, but another skier comes on my right. I’m forced to go straight and head over the lip of a fairly steep hill. In no time I’m going too fast to control myself, can’t see anything further away than two metres and know of only one way to stop at this speed – falling over. This I did, badly damaging something in my shoulder that required me to be carted off the mountain and still prevents me from doing push-ups four years later. It wasn’t the injury that was scary though, more the experience of being totally out of control and the words of my old ski teacher - “If you ever start going too fast, just fall over” looping in my head.

2: Diving: This incident wasn’t more creepy than scary, but I’ll retell it anyway. My friends had managed to convince me to attempt a forward flip off a five metre (sixteen feet) diving platform. I took the run up, jumped and spun forward. Now, if there’s one place where you could really do without Déjà Vu, it’s when you’re upside down and five metres above a swimming pool. But here I am, spinning mid-air, and the only thing I can think of is “Wow… I’m sure I’ve done this before… Maybe in a dream?”. Next thing I know, I’ve spun too much and landed on my chest giving me something like whiplash for a week or two. I haven’t done this since, and now I am always wary of getting strange flashbacks in extreme situations.

3: Cycling: Unlike the other two events I chronicled, this one could have easily killed me. I was cycling about as fast as I could down Bahnhofstrasse, Zürich’s main shopping (and banking) street. Down the middle of this street, there are two tram tracks. It is better to cycle between the two grooves that make up a tramline, but then you have to be vigilant to avoid your wheels falling into either of the gaps. Of course, if you’re cycling on a tram track, then you have the added danger of a tram coming up behind you. As I cycle along, I quickly look back to make sure none of these mechanical street beasts have suddenly snuck up. There’s nothing there, but as I look forward again I see an old woman has stepped out into the road and is about two metres in front of me. Fearing for her life, I just slam on both brakes which of course flips my bike over the front wheel and leaves me landing square on my head. Before that day I hadn’t been very good at wearing a helmet, but have always worn one since. Because I wore one that day, I got away with nothing more than a cracked helmet and a white face, instead of a cracked skull and brain damage.

4: Roller-Blading: I don’t roller blade to do tricks, I roller blade to get places, and the most efficient way of getting somewhere is to go fast. This is precisely what I was doing as I hurtled down a sidewalk beside a road on a hill leading down to Zürich (Waldburg to Rehalp). I had done this many times before, and soaring across tarmac at about 21mph was something I assumed I could control. On this particular occasion, my right roller blade unexpectedly started shaking back and forth. Fear striking through my heart, I lifted it up to try and get rid of the wobble. As I put the blade back onto the ground again, I lost control completely and went rolling into the road. Luckily there were no cars around, otherwise it could have been much worse. The pain was immense at first, but I quickly discovered I was lucky enough to escape with nothing but grazes on my arm and a demolished watch. I still roller blade, but find myself far too tense on steep hills these days.

This leaves snowboarding as the only non-team sport I do where I haven’t yet had a bad accident. Watch this space? I hope not, as all the incidents I talked about above, and numerous less significant accidents have turned me into a much more careful person. I am certainly not of the ‘I’m invincible’ teenager category, at least not anymore.

[Rhum Runner]

Anyone rememeber the tornado in Nashville in, was it spring of 98? Got caught outside in that. It sucked. I remember getting knocked to the ground by a blast of wind, thinking, shit that was some strong wind, and then running like hell to get inside.

Second time, I went out on a 12' sailboat on Lake Michigan, in late October. I was doing fine, surfing in on waves and then beating back out, but on one tack I went out too far, and cleared a point that had been sheltering me from the wind. All of a sudden, the wind went from too strong to really scary. Problem was with only one sail on the little boat the wheather helm was so strong that I couldn't get the thing to come around and run off down wind. There wasn't a jib to back or anything. So I got stuck, head on into the waves which were probably 8-9' with an occasional big one, and it was getting dark. All I could think was that eventually one of these waves is going to roll me, and I won't be able to get the boat back up, and even though I had a wetsuit on, the water was damn cold.

After being stuck like that and being blown further off shore, eventually I got "lucky" and a big swell broke over the boat and almost knocked it over, but instead just pushed the bow around far enough that I could run off down wind and reach into shore. It really wasn't until I hauled my ass onto the beach that I got scared.

[arachnidlove]

Waking up from dead sleep and finding my bed shaking. I wonder wtf? Realize its my boyfriend who is shaking and that he's having a seizure. He's an epileptic, but during the 7 years I've known him I've never seen him have a seizure. I flip out and call his mom. She says call an ambulance. I do. She comes over before they do because he lives like 3 blocks away. After the seizure he can't talk. He looks confused and keeps grunting. I didn't know what to do..all i wanted was for him to smile and be his normal self again.

Little did i know I'd see him go through a series of grand mal's later on that day. I hated seeing him like that. I hated seeing him in pain and having no control over it.

My other incident is too long to describe but I can shorten it by saying a deranged gangster and his posse chased after me and a friend telling us they were going to kill us and rape us. I sped across down a bunch of streets and saw 2 cop cars. I pulled up next to them and the gangsters dissapeared. I then asked the cops to follow me home to make sure I wasn't being followed. They were nice and did. But when this all started I was so certain that I was going to die.

[Cisco]

Jesus Pammipoo, that's a horrible, horrible story. Is there any way you could still find the guy, if you wanted to? I ask because of this:


Originally posted by Pammipoo
The fear that I felt when he put that bag over my head...I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. Nobody deserves to have to go through that. Nobody.


I don't want to sound critical or condescending or mean so read this to yourself in a nice, calm voice: By not pressing charges you wished it on a lot of people.

"People" like this guy make me absolutely sick. It's horrible that so many people are falsely accused and imprisoned for rape while subhumans like this who genuinely scar people and deserve the worst possible punishment still walk free. Again, no offense to you Pammipoo, because I can't possibly put myself in your shoes, it's just frustrating to know that this guy is probably still out there.

[phamton]

We had been under a tornado warning in Amarillo. Watches and warnings are not too unusual there but when we got the warning my husband and I grabbed the kids and took them to our private business that had a basement. We waited in the basement there until the warning was called off. My husband drove the van with the kids and I followed in my smaller car to go home. About 10 blocks from home, I hit some flooding on the road that I couldn't see until I was in it. My little car started floating. I jumped out and waded to the van. We drove home and put the kids to bed. We have 5 kids, whose ages at the time were 6 months, 2 years, twins age 7, and oldest daughter age 13 years. We got all the younger kids to bed and asked our oldest to babysit while we went down the road to push my car out of the road. We figured we'd be back in about 15 minutes.

We got to my car and pushed it out of the road and heard tornado sirens going off. We rushed into the 7-11 store by my car and they said a tornado just hit our subdivision. Then the rain started pouring down. We could not drive the 10 blocks to our house because the road was now completely flooded and other cars were floating. We tried to go a different way which took us over 45 minutes to get home. We drove in from the backside of our subdivision. There were already police blockades and they weren't letting anyone in. We frantically explained that our 5 kids were alone so they gave us a pass to go in.

The house behind us was flattened and the whole area was a mess. We ran in and found all of our kids hiding in the laundry room. My daughter had heard the tornado and grabbed the baby, told the twins to get the toddler, and they ran into the laundry room. Everyone was fine but scared. The kids were afraid that the tornado had gotten us.

Later we heard from the neighbors that they watched the tornado come right down almost on top of our house and then dipped down and got the house across the alley from us. (No one was home there.) Many homes were destroyed but no one was killed or even seriously injured. I gained a healthy respect for tornadoes that day. I had seen numerous tornadoes while growing up in West Texas and later in the panhandle of Texas. I even watched twin tornadoes from my front yard as a teenager. I never really feared them until that day.

Bev Hamilton

Hey, my first post!

[Pammipoo]

His AOL name has since been disabled, or what I think was his AOL name anyways.

Right after it happened, several of my good friends really pushed for me to press charges. I had convinced myself that it was my fault, because I agreed to meet him in the first place. I didn't want to subject myself to the complications of pressing charges, and the emotional hell I was sure would follow. I spent weeks tearing myself apart over it, and finally decided I just couldn't do it. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life...

I'm so weary of meeting people I don't know now...I don't meet anyone looking for just sex, and I only meet anyone else after I've talked to them online for a long, long time, or they're part of a wellknown group of people. For example, I would meet a doper if they had been on the boards for awhile, and regularly went to deopefests, etc. I wouldn't meet someone with 3 posts to their name, who had just stumbled onto the website. It may be a wasted effort, but it makes me feel a whole lot better to know they're prolly not complete psychos.

[Horrifying Howler Monkey]

This happened one summer when I was about 9 years old. Our family was having a birthday party for my aunt. This happens every summer and these are big parties, about half of the people who own cottages on this lake are in someway related to her. One of my cousins had put an outboard motor on his dock. It's a big dock, there were probably about 30 really drunk people on it, and he decides he wants to drive it across the lake back to his place. I was on the front part with my brother, who was about 7 at the time. I fell in the water wearing all my clothes (actually I suspect my brother pushed me). I was a fairly decent swimmer, but the clothes were really pulling me down, and I couldn't get out of the way of the dock, and it ran me over. So I was under the dock, under water, unable to breath, and I knew I had to get out of the way or I was going to get chewed up by the motor. I was sure I was goint to drown, but I managed to push my way out from under it, and watched it carry on. No one noticed I was gone...except my brother but he didn't say anything to anyone. So I had to swim back to shore, which took forever (or so it seemed at the time), and had to walk back to the cottage where the rest of the party was.
I never told me family about that.

[whiterabbit]

Originally posted by Evil Death
[B]Try having an apical chest drain inserted without anaesthesia - now that's mean...[B]

I've heard about that. I believe you. Egad.

[Cosmopolitan]

Toss-up:

1) When I was a child (age 8 & younger) I had to have a good many orthopaedic surgeries. The doctors sedated me before the surgeries, but didn't knock me out completely before they put the mask on my face. It was big & black - the anesthesia was thick & sickly sweet & inescapable. Horrible for anyone, especially a small child.

2) Another surgery one: When I was 13 going on 14, I needed to have a very severe back surgery - I was under for roughly eight hours. When I awoke in the recovery room I didn't have my eyeglasses, so I couldn't see anything. I couldn't speak a word, was in intense pain, & could barely lift my fingers - it was the worst time in recovery that I could remember.

A recovery room nurse came over to say hello to me, tell me that I was done, etc. I tried to ask her to hold my hand, but no sound came out of my mouth.... She walked away, & I remember being absolutely terrified & just wanting someone to hold my hand, unable to communicate.

Whenever I think of either of the above, I get teary & even a bit panicky.

[chique]

When I was 10 our Holstein bull tried to kill me.

When I was 19 a Wyoming sleet storm conspired with a semi and both tried to kill me.

When I was 22 Hurricane Andrew tried to kill me.

[Mirror Image egamI rorriM]

During a severe ice storm, my dad and I took a walk around our neighborhood. Trees were cracking and breaking and pulling down power lines all over the place. Just as we were under the one power line that we had to go past to get home, the tree above it started to make cracking and groaning sounds. We just grabbed each other and ran. I didn't even think until we were a good twenty feet away. And then it was, "Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!"

We went home right after that.

[user_hostile]

** Six years old and happy to be at my Grandparents farm for an extended summer vacation. So much to do and see on a dairy farm! My Dad decides to move the hay wagon across the field with the International Harvester tractor. I ask my Dad if I can ride in the hay wagon (empty at the time). He say's okay , picks me up and tells me to stand up and hold the restraining bar. I believing myself to be much smarter (grasping the concept that being smart and being wise would take another 25 years.) sat down and held on to the bar. We start out and 25 yards later we hit a large bump and I go flying into the air. God knows how I manage to grab on to the tow bar (warning: cliché ahead) and hold on for dear life. I was dragged about 10 yards screaming and noticing my feet were inches from the front wheels. My Dad turned around finally and stop the tractor in a skid. I figured at this point I was going to get a spanking. He didn't--he just held me and asked if I was okay; he was really quiet. I said I was and he just got off the tractor and walked me back to the farmhouse.

I asked him 35 years later about it. He said it was the most aging experience up to that point in his life. The absolute helplessness and the guilt knowing that he should have known better scared him far worse than me. Had I been injured or died, he would have had to live with it.

* Bicycling down hill at 40 mph with newly installed toe clips, looking down trying to get my feet in and looking up to see a concrete embankment on a bridge and a 30 foot drop into a pile of broken concrete, swerving just enough to avoid hitting the abutment.

* Riding a bicycle with hand brakes for the first time and almost slamming head on into a school bus because I normally used the foot activated coaster brakes instead.

[Moonchild]

I was delivering some papers or something to this guy while I was working as a production assistant for a TV show. The guy lived in a treehouse and I was given instructions to go into the backyard and deliver them.

I tiptoed into the yard not even sure I had the right house and don't see no treehouse but I do notice a LARGE ROTTWEILER locked in on my gaze. What I remember most--besides the insta-terror--is my face going slackjawed, like, paralyzed, the edges of my mouth suddenly turning downward. Suddenly, it's coming at me and there is positively no cover. Instead of run or make a defensive pose, all I could do was unconsciously raised my arms over my head, I guess so he couldn't bite my hands or something. And so it takes off and starts to jump...

Silly me, they forgot to mention at the office that when you raise your arms above your head the dude's dog interprets that as wanting to play. He was friendly. Thanks, guys, for the heads-up.

[Moonchild]

Greatest psychological fear came when I got stoned for the first time at the tender young age of 31. My softball teammates,many of them total potheads, had been egging me on like, forever to try it. Well, one night I give in to their jibes and the last thing I said before going to Never-neverland was, "I better be careful; I heard smoking pot can make you gay."

So, I get some instruction and take about four hits, each a bit deeper than the previous. I can hold my breath abnormally long, so by the fourth hit, I'm doing my best Michael Hutchence imitation.

"I don't feel anything."

"Some people just aren't affected by it," says Brian, our centerfielder. BTW, the guy with the pot is a small-time drug dealer who gets stoned so often he could probably smoke out a Reggae band, so he only smokes prime stuff.

Didja know that when you get stoned it doesn't hit you for a few seconds, say 30? It's true. You could look it up.

The best description I can make is to imagine your head as a small cottage and then you open up a previously unnoticed back door and you discover there's a mansion attached. Un-f'-ing-believable.

So, my mind is suddenly in the fast lane, coming up with (what I think are) incredible philisophical tidbits of inspiration, none of which I can remember for long enough to say it all in a complete sentence, and then I look over at Brian who's positively loving the moment, and he's looking at me in a way that suggests, well, he enjoyed those group hugs after winning big games more than most.

And I get scared. Uh, a little.

Did you know that you can sometimes get paranoid when you smoke pot? No, really, you can.

Suddenly, I get this tingly feeling "down there" which is really just momentary nervousness, but I'm thinking suddenly... OH, NO, I'M... THIS CANNOT BE! I bolted from the room in near hysterics praying to God to please take me out of this drug-induced Kodak moment.

No such luck. I spent the next 3 hours walking the Valley thinking with great intensity, "Am I or aren't I? Maybe I am." Did you know that you can get really analytical when you're stoned?

My belief is that we're all a little of everything, a microcosm of the Macrocosm and that everything that exists exists within us. But I really wasn't ready for such metaphysical hoo-ha on that night.

***

I would like to say I'm extremely thankful to have avoided *real* scary moments like some of you have endured and that I will keep a very close eye at all times on our little Seth or Emily who's due in September (our first).

[Lorenzo]

Crossing a Teamsters picket line by myself in a Chevy Beretta

Almost ten years ago, the Teamsters who delivered new cars to the dealership where I was working went on a strike which lasted a lot longer than either side anticipated and was beginning to impact the dealerships financially.

The local dealer principals decided that bunches of employees would ride to the hub in passenger vans, cross the picket line and then individually deliver the cars allocated to the dealership, crossing the picket line again, but the second time alone.

It was pretty scary until I was first in line, the gate opened and there was nothing but scary looking Teamsters between me and where I needed to go. I crawled forward, they surrounded the car, I prayed to God to be saved from any personal injury and kept crawling until the car was past them at which point I nailed the gas and left quite a smoking black patch of tire rubber on the pavement, much to the dismay of the poor guy who had to go next.

When I got back to the dealership I felt pretty unsettled and confused about the whole ordeal and refused the forty pieces of silver they offered me as additional compensation. Not sure that changed anything, though.

[Grelby]

A few come to mind.

The first was this past December, driving home from a friend's house on I-495 in MA through heavy, heavy rain and high winds. I have never been so terrified while behind the wheel. I could barely see, and staying in my own lane was a challenge. The buffeting got really bad when a semi changed into my lane ahead of me. I had a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel for all 20 or so minutes I was on that highway. I am now far more worried about driving in a windy rainstorm than in snow.

Another driving incident happened when I was learning to drive. I was driving, with my mother in the passenger seat and my brother sitting behind us. We were stopped at an intersection, first in line, when a semi turned right onto our street, headed RIGHT at us. He didn't even do it slowly; he practically floored it as he came around the turn. We thought we were going to be smashed, and there was nothing we could do. The truck swung into his own lane at what felt like about five feet from hitting us, but was probably more like 15 or so. That was extremely scary.

My most recent emergency room experience was also extremely scary. I was admitted to the ER at about 11:30 PM on November 30, 2001 with severe right flank pain and nausea.
Our immediate fear was appedicitis or something similar. I didn't care. I was in pain and scared, because I did not know what was wrong with me! I think that when you get right down to it, the scariest thing about a medical emergency is not knowing what the problem is.

Anyway, to bring this story to a close, several X-Rays, a blood test, a CAT scan and a Motrin pill large enough to choke a horse later, they had determined that they were pretty sure that they weren't exactly sure what was wrong with me (and believe me, that is NOT a reassuring thing to hear), but they thought it was most likely a serious infection of my right kidney. But, they needed to transfer me to Boston so an expert could verify that I did, indeed, have a kidney infection. That was scary.

This led to some other scary experiences. These included some fun tests that determined that my right kidney was at about 20% of function because of a fairly common problem known as UPJ obstruction. The back pain that I had felt for about three years in the region was a result of this problem, not because of the soccer injury I associated it with. What it amounted to was that I had had not just one or two but probably over a dozen more minor infections, which I had shrugged off as back pain. Considering that the cumulative effect of the blockage and these infections had been to reduce my kidney function by 80%, my doctors were impressed by my constitution. So was I!

Scary as my tests results were (and I was actually pretty calm about it, for some reason) the surgery was worse. I did pretty well on my pre-op tests and information briefings, despite being a bit nervous, but really started to lose it a bit once we got into the pre-op area and I was being prepped. I was informed that I would have to remain conscious while they inserted this epidural thing into my spine, and THAT freaked me out. Luckily, I was on a sedative and really in la-la land by the time they did that; I have no memory of the experience.

But the absolute scariest part of the whole experience was waking up in recovery. I have no visual memory of it; I think I kept my eyes closed, I was in so much pain. So it was dark. I was sore. There was confusion all around me, and I was cold. So very, very cold. I just wanted it to end. If that meant death, so be it. THAT was scarier, in retrospect, than anything I'd been through prior to that.

And then I was wheeled into my room. Or post-op, I'm not sure which. And then I heard my mother's voice, and she might have been holding my hand, but I'm not sure. But that's when I knew it was alright. I was still cold, I still couldn't see (because my eyes were mostly closed), I was still very, very sore, but Mom was there, and Dad, and it was going to be alright.

That's the good part. That feeling of relief.

Um, yikes. That's all.

[Jervoise]

Wow, what great stories. Some are a little distressing to read, but uplifting at the same time -- because we're all still here to tell our tales!

Most scared I've ever been was when I was in my early teens. My mother's cancer had come out of remission. To a kid, few things are as scary as hearing your parents cry and scream at the unfairness. To know that there are some things that even they cannot face without collapsing into helpless self-pity and fear is a truly frightning thing.

The time when I realised that she actually might die was another intensely scary time. I still vividly remember that snatches of time from those years.

Regarding bodily fear, I don't have anything approaching the stories above. The one car accident I was in happened too quickly for me to be scared; and during my one run-in with gun-toting drug dealers (long story short: my friends and I foolishly accepted a lift home, which turned out to be a longer trip that that), I was too drunk to be scared. :rolleyes:

I did, however, come home once to find the house being burgled. It took me a little while to figure out why the VCR was unplugged and lying on the lounge room floor, but I soon noticed the broken ensuite window. I took a knife from the kitchen and crept from room to room -- positively buzzing with fear and adrenaline -- but they must have heard my keys in the lock and run.

[The Calculus of Logic]

Originally posted by Pammipoo

I'm so weary of meeting people I don't know now...I don't meet anyone looking for just sex, and I only meet anyone else after I've talked to them online for a long, long time, or they're part of a wellknown group of people. For example, I would meet a doper if they had been on the boards for awhile, and regularly went to deopefests, etc. I wouldn't meet someone with 3 posts to their name, who had just stumbled onto the website. It may be a wasted effort, but it makes me feel a whole lot better to know they're prolly not complete psychos.


AOL might be able to track his identity, if you still remember his name.

If you meet someone, you should meet them in a well lit, public area like a mall.

You might want to look into self defense classes or classes on minor weaponry. They might provide you with a mildly better sense of safety.





Back to the original topic, its too embarassing to say because i used to suffer from a mental illness and the nature of the situation is too embarassing & esoteric to describe over the internet. I don't think i've ever told someone about it in its entirety. Suffice it to say, it was the worst experience i've ever had. So much emotional pain you pass out, only to wake up again and do it over again.

[Woeg]

I've had more than my share of terrifying moments. The worst of them all was dying by electrocution. Obviously, I was revived, but my heart stopped, and I was dead, at least for a little while. Not so unusual, if it weren't for the fact that I had been dead twice before. Ah well. I figure I have 6 lives left.

The scariest conscious moment I have ever had was after I had been slipped something at a party as a teenager. I don't know what it was, save that it was hallucinogenic, and since I had never been on anything like that before, I was absolutely terrified of what was happening to me. It was the worst experience, and I have never touched drugs because of it.

[FranticMad]

Being surrounded by a large roving gang in the downtown of a certain third-world country. My accent saved me. Spoke to them with respect. Bought my way out.