When I was a kid, about 8 or 9 I guess, we had a bunch of relatives in from out of town for some reason and we wound up with odd sleeping assignments to accommodate the crowd. My Mom and I, oddly enough, wound up sleeping in the same room, separate beds.
Pitch black room and about an hour in my Mom has some sort of nightmare and lets out this ghastly howl like some madman had just started hacking her head off. “BROOOOWW!!!” Scared the pee out of me
This will not scare you, but it’s honestly the most terrified I’ve ever been in my whole life.
It was a beautiful day on the Deerfield River in MA. I was sitting in my kayak, just chilling out in an eddy. All of a sudden, a half a dead trout floated up beside me. I freaked. I started screaming “DEAD FISH! DEAD FISH! DEAD FISH!” I hightailed it out of there so fast I almost flipped my boat. I rode down the wave train still hollering “dead fish!” over and over. When I got to a calm pool, I was like “WTF was that all about? 
It was just a dead fish.”
I’m still wondering WTF that was all about.
Maybe your subconscious picked up on the likelihood that there was a bear in the immediate vicinity, that had just devoured half the trout?
When my eldest son (now ten) was about 3 years old, he came wandering from his bedroom into the living room with a weird expression on his face. He had been running a pretty high fever, and so I thought he was about to get sick and hurried over to him, asking him if he was ok and if he needed anything. I knelt down, my hands on his shoulders, and tried to look him in the eyes to make sure he understood me…when suddenly, he looks over my shoulder and begins screaming this horrible, loud, heart-wrenching scream…his eyes grow wider then I have ever seen a persons eyes go, his pupils dilate till his eyes look black with just an edge of color, and his mouth is like a weird parody of a human scream it’s so distorted. He stumbles backwards into the wall, and is clawing the wall behind him trying to get away from whatever it is he sees over my shoulder.
I kid you not, I have never, EVER been so damned terrified in my life - not just from the “holy shit what the hell is behind me” fear, but from the fear of seeing my child in that state of panic. Then, just as suddenly as it started, he was fine, and coherent, and couldn’t remember a thing. That was the first of numerous night terrors he had as a young child (they eventually went away), and it was by far one of the scariest things I have ever witnessed.
Another swimming one.
I lived alone across the street from the ocean for about 3 years and just loved swimming in it as often as I could. Attempts at body surfing were an ongoing experiment and the bigger the waves the more enticed I was to go out.
I got home from work one day and the skys were overcast and there must have been big storms off shore cause the waves were massive.
I threw caution to the wind and took off to the abandoned beach and jumped right in. The currents and undertow were insane. I played around in the waves for a while and decided they were just too rough to attempt any body surfing on them. I also noticed I was getting pushed away from shore. Not a rip current but just the way the waves were crashing that day.
I made several attempts to swim back to shore but it just wasn’t happening. Swim-swim-swim-swim-swim and nothing, no closer to the beach. I took rests between attempts but I was wearing myself down quickly. Then the dread of “what the hell am I going to do? I’m totally screwed” set in. Scanning the shore there was no a soul in sight. I took a long rest treading water thinking about how they’ll find my body washed up somewhere then they’ll contact my work who’ll contact my family then thought “well this is it, all or nothing”. I swam as hard as I could non-stop at the shore for a good 15 minutes and finally broke through and collapsed on the empty beach exhausted. I manged to lift myself back home across the street, wrapped myself in a towel and sat in the quiet shaking. I didn’t swim for a good month after that and never by myself.
Is this even scientifically plausible?
Maybe. Most people don’t know it but lightening often comes up from the ground as well as down from the sky and the two streams meet. A lot of people that have gotten hit by lightening said they sensed odd things right before it hit.
I was alone at home at night, my husband working the third shift. Wake up from sleep to some kind of noise, discover it’s a guy who has broken into the house. Very scared, he threatened to kill me by stabbing me. Yes, bone-chillingly scared.
boggles Holy schmoly!!! What happened???
Indeed. That’s the kind of thing that’s actually scary, like when I read about scary stories on CreepyPasta or wherever. Because it could happen. Not to me now because I live in an apartment with a doorman so it’s pretty unlikely, but if you were out in a house all alone. I mean, it’s really unlikely that a serial killer or whoever is going to try to get into the house…but…you never know. Ever.
You’re asking me to do your research for you; I’m feeling generous, so I’ll oblige.
“Humming, crackling, hissing, or buzzing noises like the sounds you
heard from your ice axe, and the fact that your friend’s hair was
standing on end, may indeed have meant that a lightning strike was
imminent.”
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/248659.html
“the warning will be a fizzing sound with your hair standing on end the strike will either be extremley close to you or it will hit you.”
"If you feel your hair standing on end, lightning may be about to strike. Crouch immediately or, if a building or car is nearby, jump into it. "
“If you feel your hair standing on end, and/or hear “crackling noises” - you are in lightning’s electric field. If caught outside during close-in lightning, immediately remove metal objects (including baseball cap), place your feet together, duck your head, and crouch down low in baseball catcher’s stance with hands on knees.”
http://www.lightningsafety.com/nlsi_pls/ncaa.html
The floor at the top of my staircase squeaks. Both my children were supposed to be in bed asleep, and it was 1:30 am. I was awake, reading, with the lamp on my nightstand lit.
I heard the floor squeaking, as if someone were standing there, shifting their weight. I called my daughter’s name, thinking she was going downstairs, or maybe coming up to bed. As soon as I called her name, the squeaking stopped, and I never heard footsteps, or a door open or close (her door squeaks as well, so it’s easy to tell when she opens or closes it). Just silence. I looked at the door for 15 solid minutes, but heard nothing else the rest of the night.
Well, I googled and found a bunch of stuff like the wiki answers, but they looked a bit dicey.
My college roommate Sean had a weird story.
About twenty years ago, Sean’s sister Gillian went to do a Master’s at Trinity College in Dublin, and when she’d got accommodation sorted, she sent her mother a letter with her new address.
Sean was there when his mother opened the envelope, and when she read the letter, she went white. “The address. What does it say?” she said as she dropped to a chair. She handed the letter to Sean, who confirmed the address.
His mother then sat at the kitchen table and worriedly explained that ten years before, Sean’s cousin had lived in Dublin too. She had started having weird stuff happen in the house - at first it was electronics turning on and off, but then it was taps suddenly running, and curtains opening and shutting. Finally, after a few weeks of stuff just appearing in the state they hadn’t been left in, the housemates started actually seeing this stuff happen. Chairs moved, books fell off bookcases, doors shut with nobody there to do it.
After enduring this for a few more weeks, and getting increasingly upset, Gillian contacted a priest. The priest visited, observed some of the phenomena, and then told them that he believed the house to be haunted. They asked him for an exorcism, and he initially refused because the church rarely performs such rituals these days. But he called a few days later and said he would undertake one unofficially, as he felt so strongly that there was a malevolent presence.
So he came round at the appointed time, and did the chanting and holy water thing, and as soon as he’d finished, everything untoward stopped happening. The cousin graduated, and the story passed into family legend.
And now here was Sean’s mother looking at a letter from her daughter, bearing the address of the exact same house that the cousin had rented.
She decided not to tell Gillian, and asked Sean not to either. If anything weird happened, she said, Gillian would be bound to tell her, but until then there was no point in worrying her.
All this sunk in and was largely forgotten over the next few months, and Gillian was happy in her house.
One night about a year after she’d moved in, Sean had been out drinking in Dublin, and had missed the last train home. He called Gillian up and slurringly asked if he could crash at hers. She agreed, and he set out for the house.
When opened the door to him, rather the worse for wear, she sent him up to her attic room and told him she’d sleep on the couch, but she wanted to stay up now with her friends, and didn’t want his drunken self staggering around the place. He agreed humbly and stumbled up to her bed, and fell into a coma.
He awoke in the half-light of early dawn, thinking he’d get up for a piss. Her room was the kind of attic room with no skylight, just a panel of glass in the door for natural light. He turned over and there, in the glass window in the door, was a man staring back in at him.
He froze.
He would have got up and approached the guy and asked what the hell he was doing, but the more he looked the more he realised the face was not of this place. Weird, wearing an old-fashioned hat, unworldly, disembodied, with jet black eyes set in a too-pale face, just staring and staring at him.
He could not take his eyes off it.
Then he remembered his cousin, and the exorcism, and he began, imperceptibly, to shake.
He became concerned that if he took his eyes off the malignant being, something appalling would happen to him. So he just kept staring, and the face kept staring back.
They were locked in this state for the next two hours. Sean paralysed with fear, the figure outside the door just staring in.
Eventually the dawn was light became enough to give him more confidence, and to think about charging the figure, or at least getting up and hiding from it while he worked out what to do. Slowly, slowly he turned in the bed, never taking his eyes off the face, put his feet on the floor, got up, and ran at the door.
He looked through the glass, and saw this, taped to the wall opposite.
I have two. I was inches from being killed and eaten both times. I think.
When I was 12, my grandparents and I were camping in the Okefenokee swamp in south Georgia. As happens at campgrounds, the kids find each other and go off exploring or searching for some entertainment. They had a nature trail cut through the woods on the other side of the boat basin where a huge alligatorlived, and we decided to check it out.
As we walked around the basin, we spied an alligator lying still, facing the bank, about 2 feet out. The bank was elevated about 3 feet above the water, but sloped gently for a few feet. Geniuses that we were, we threw pebbles, sticks, and other small items to get a response from him, but no luck. Deciding to continue our trek, we started to leave, but not before I spit in his direction. My spit landed right by his eye, and he exploded out of the water, mouth gaping, and attacked. I turned to run, but my foot slipped and I fell to my knees right there in front of the gator. It was at that moment that I realized I would die an awful death that my grandfather had warned me about not 20 minutes earlier. “You see a gator, you walk the other way and leave him be”.
I did my best Roadrunner feet-spinning, high-speed getaway and avoided being eaten. I didn’t know then ( I wasn’t looking) but he wasn’t chasing us/me. He was just doing what annoyed alligators do. They may call it a bluff charge, but I totally bought it!
You would think a few more years of life experience would make me smarter, but this is not the case.
At age 20 or so, I was in Cancun with friends, and staying at a hotel on the lagoon. One afternoon I had some time alone, so I decided to go snorkeling in the lagoon. I’m a SCUBA diver and strong swimmer, so snorkeling in 12 feet of water alone didn’t seem problematic at the time. I was heading back in, but probably 200 yards from shore when barracuda 1 showed up. No biggie. I’ve seen them before, and they generally show no interest in divers. I splashed at him & he left. He brought back barracuda 2 and 3 to see the foolish tourist.
I splashed and yelled at them and they left, being the big sissies that they are.
It wasn’t long before the gang showed up again, with re-inforcements.
They all just kept pace with me, getting within inches now and then, but would run when I made noises and splashes.
For about 20 seconds. Then they came back. By the time I was 50 yards from the beach, I had about 7 or 8 barracuda with me, some of them much larger than me, and I was full-on crying like a baby in my mask. I couldn’t believe my stupid luck; I knew with 100% certainty that one of them would take a plug out of me at any second, and that would be that. I would die from blood loss (or worse) within sight of my room in 12 feet of water with no one around to see or hear me.
Damn it!
Somehow I was spared, and made it to the beach, crying as I pulled myself onto the sand.
Both events brought me the absolute knowledge that I would be savagely and painfully attacked, and that my death was only seconds away, and that my friends, scares the ever-living Jeebus out of anyone!
heh. Hey GB, my son (almost 16 y.o.) dumped his kayak when a beaver surfaced right next to him. He was flailing around in the water, and I had to reassure him that the beaver was long gone.
He is old enough that I have been able to kid him about how he was “afraid of a lil beaver”.
You want a real threat or an imaginary one?
I was going camping with friends. Our usual camping/party site was adjacent to a wildlife refuge, and in fact kind of blended in with the wildlife refuge.
I had a late seminar and another friend had to work, so everybody else headed down early Friday afternoon and David and I went later.
We got there just at sundown, and drover around to the typical camping places looking for our friends, and then suddenly it was dark and we knew we’d never find them. So we found a likely spot and threw our sleeping bags on the ground and crashed.
The next morning we woke to the wound of the ground shaking. I poked my head out of my sleeping bag and there, about three feet from me, was a GIANT BUFFALO. Watching me as she tore mouthfuls of grass out of the ground. Her head was the approximate size of my car (a Corvair).
My lord she was big. BIG. And she had several friends with her, although they were not as close.
I mean BIG. And curious. When I stuck my head out she came one step closer.
I was trying to figure out how to (a) put my clothes on without getting out of the sleeping bag, and (b) get to my car, which was not that far away, also without getting out of the sleeping bag. And also thinking © about just going back to sleep because maybe it was a dream. A bad dream.
Then David suggested that we not make any fast moves. So that meant it probably was not a dream.
And the next thing I knew I had died of fright.
Okay, probably I lived. Somehow we got to my car. I couldn’t drive. I could only sit there and look at those buffalo, or they may have been bison. Anyway they were magnificent creatures. Kinda smelly, and awfully BIG, but the cow closest to me, the one I’d looked in the eye–she really had kind of innocent eyes. She didn’t mean us any harm. We were just lying on her grass.
We found our friends who thought it was hilarious that we had just thrown down our sleeping bags in a wildlife refuge and been surprised to wake up among buffalo.
In my last year of university, I was sitting in lecture when several of my fellow students got calls from their friends with breaking news that a gunman was at the edge of campus and that part of the school was on standby. The professor ended our lecture early, and we all headed back to our apartments/dorms. As I was walking back, I half expected to be hit by a bullet at any minute or to hear screams and see dead bodies. Every shadow or movement could have been the gunman, in my mind. I had flashbacks of the school shootings I had seen on national television, and I experienced cold chills and a pounding heart when I imagined that it was going to turn into another Virginia Tech or Columbine tragedy.
As it turns out, the information that traveled like wildfire got all distorted. There wasn’t really a gunman, just some stupid kid carrying a giant bow and arrow - huge relief, but it caused enough stir to make it to the evening news.
Wow, great stories everyone! Mine isn’t nearly as entertaining (buffalo!)nor is it of the eerie variety, but many years ago when I was a reckless teen and I was out partying with a couple of equally reckless friends we were driving around a twisty mountain road (Palos Verdes Peninsula, for anyone familiar with SoCal) and my friend drove us straight into a guard rail. The feeling of certain impending death is so horrifying as to be surreal. I don’t know that my life flashed before my eyes in the sense of my past, but I was trying to imagine about how it was gonna feel when we busted through the railing and were falling through midair, what the impact would feel like, how our mangled bodies would look, my parents’ reactions, the reactions’ of all our other friends, what the article in the paper would say, on and on . . . obviously all these thoughts took a fraction of a second but I have such a vivid memory of them I tend to picture the whole thing in slow motion. Anyway, that guardrail was pretty darn sturdy and kept us from our doom but we were all pretty hysterical for quite a little while.
When I was buried alive in a landslide at age 12.
