It would be a toss-up between the rocket attack that took out five of our guys, and the mortar attack that had us bouncing around in the bunker like pingpong balls. Ah, good times.
After reading those stories I feel like I’ve led a blessed life.
My scariest moment took place at about 3000 feet above ground, my 13th skydive.
Total malfunction on the main (which was a bit scary) followed by a nasty malfunction on the reserve. That frightened the hell out of me and I’ve got to say that whoever wrote “There are no atheists in foxholes” knew what he was talking about.
Landed a partially open, spinning round reserve and walked away with bumps, sprains and a pretty good story.
I used to be a very large woman (250 lbs and growing at the time of this incident). My sense of balance was very poor and I had a low center of gravity. But I had been reading a book that had me all psyched up about doing things that I was afraid to do and I wanted to test my fearlessness.
Fall Creek Falls here in Middle Tennessee is narrow as waterfalls go, but it is rather high. I think it is around 256 feet. It is the highest waterfall east of the Mississippi. In 1985 I decided to walk the plank that was across the top of the falls.
I took two walking sticks and edged myself out sideways on the plank and crept inch by inch, keeping my balance with the sticks – which kept wanting to slip in the rushing water. I really don’t remember exactly how wide the falls are. Somewhere close to a gazillion feet, but my husband says thirty or forty feet.
When I reached the point of no return, I could see the falls dropping away. That’s how close I was to the edge. And I could see across from the falls people at a viewing point looking back at a crazy woman.
Finally, I got to the other side and was jumping up and down and hugging myself and celebrating my victory. That was short-lived. There was no way out except by the route that I took in getting there. I had to go back across the plank.
So I rested on some big rocks and marvelled at the beauty of the falls and the October sky. I cursed Tom Brown for writing wilderness survival books that made me want to be brave.
When I stopped shaking, I walked the plank again. It was strangely narrower this time – longer and more limber. My walking sticks weren’t as sturdy. The water was a raging torrent. My boots stuck like glue as I shuffled. One hour, two hours, five minutes? And I was on solid ground.
As I sat on the leaves recuperating and calming my castenet knees, a young girl no older than fourteen ran out of the woods barefooted and bounded across the plank without even slowing down. I glared at her when she looked back from the rocks.
Nevertheless, I was pretty high from the adrenaline rush the rest of the afternoon. It wasn’t until a few days later that I began to realize what a really stupid thing I had done. It would have been so easy for me to slip and go over the falls. There was really no point in being reckless. I wasn’t prepared and was a danger to myself.
The memory gives me the shudders now.
My scariest moment is utterly trivial in comparason to what some people are writing.
When I was about 14 years old my sweet mother took it into her head to hide in the hall closet and wait for someone to open the door. A key point is that this was utterly, utterly out of character for her. She had never pulled anything resembling a practical joke before, and, in general, was nothing but sweet and mom-like 24 hours a day.
So when I opened the closet to get my coat I was totally unprepared for the possibility that my kindly little mom might jump out and hiss at me while making claw-like motions with her hands. I screamed and leaped backwards crashing into the wall behind me. My heart felt like it was going to explode. It took me almost half an hour to recover.
She was very apologetic. And she never did it again. But now I know what she’s capable of … . 
The longest extended scare I ever had was paddling a canoe across an icy lake in Canada in a stiff wind. The sun was going down and we had to get back across the lake to our campsite before the temperatures dropped too low. I was very, very conscious of the fact that if the wind capsized the canoe my buddy and I would be dead from hypothermia before we could swim to shore.
Winterhawk’s story, about the handicapped boy in the window, reminds me of my story. When I was about 17 my bedroom was directly above the garage. My bed was near the window at the front of the house–directly over the garage doors, in other words. Sometime near dawn I was awakened by an extremely loud, house-rattling THUMP against the garage door beneath me.
I sat straight up, terrified at what I’d heard – or maybe thought I heard. We lived out of town – not in the deep country, but there were farms around us, and across two pastures, a river. So it was not inconceivable that a large animal could be prowling about. A bear? A wolf? A panther? What? Something trying to get in! I sat, paralyzed with fear. I peeped out and didn’t see anything. But I couldn’t see the garage door. What if it had knocked it in?
I sat there for several minutes, too scared to even go wake my parents. So I did the next-best thing. For some reason, where I lived the phone system had a “dial own” feature. You dialed a number and it rang your own house. It was a shortened ring, so we always knew when someone was using it. This was in the deep dark ages, before cell phones. Anyway, I dialed and my dad answered. “Something just knocked against the house!!” I squealed. The next thing I knew Dad was pounding down the hall, to rescue me, I suppose.
Story #2 – at the same house, my girlfriends and I were camping out at the top of the hill behind the house. We were in high school, and our guy friends and boyfriends knew all about it, and of course crashed our sleepover. Trouble was, they crashed it just as we were coming up the hill from a midnight potty run. So there we were, vulnerable teen girls, bravely climbing the dark winding path, with only dim flashlights to guide us … when suddenly we hear these horrific words: "GET OUT OF MY WOODS!!!
Every single Stephen King boogeyman that my subconscious had filed away rose up before me. I was certain our throats soon would be sliced by some crazed Madman of the Woods. :rolleyes: While the other girls are squealing and going, “oh you GUYS!” I am, literally, screaming loud enough to wake the dead. I am totally panic-stricken. I think it took me an hour to come off the adrenelin. Lenny, the one who intoned those words that flayed my poor girlish soul, the bastard, laughed at me for hours, God rest his soul.
For me, it was the first time I ever got high. It was insanely-powerful home-grown weed, and I smoked 2 bowls of it, and I was completely unprepared for it. Add to this the fact that I was all alone, in a totally unfamiliar environment, and you have a recipe for disaster. I was certain that I was going to die of a heart attack. I had to call my mom and have her come over and calm me down.
I thought I’d never smoke again after that happened. Boy, was I wrong.
I’ve got two: one my own, and one my grandma on my mom’s side.
First, mine: I was driving home at 3:30 AM one night all by myself. Stopped at a rest area, and there are like 3 cars in the lot, and one pickup truck pulled up between two rows of parking spots. He’s in the row closest to the door, so I pull into one of the spots. It could have been one he might have pulled into, maybe not. I wasn’t really paying attention since there were 50 other spots.
Man jumps out of his car and advances on me, yelling and screaming and calling me a total fucking bitch and how I took his spot and was I fucking blind that I couldn’t see that he was waiting for that spot. 
Anyway I was coming back to college after a weekend and had a ton of stuff in the car, plus I was a lonely female all alone - no one else was in the lot! So I just very politely kept nodding my head. “Yes, sir. I’m sorry sir.” I joke about this a lot but it was pretty terrifying at the time.
My grandmother’s - My grandparents basically had to flee Pakistan when the partition came into effect. My mom had two older brother. The way she tells the story, when they got off the train, each parent had a son in their arms and iin the confusion both thought the other had the baby girl. My mom was only 2 at the time. Anyway, she’d gone missing, and when they went to find her, some Muslim man had picked her up and was claiming she was his kid. My mom of course was screaming and yeling but that doesn’t mean much to a cop…my grandma had to pull out the papers proving the baby was hers before a cop would give the girl back. The Muslim guy wanted to raise the baby in the “correct” faith apparently.
I can imagine how terrified my grandmother must have been.
This may not be the most scared I’ve ever been, but it certainly ranks (and is probably the best story).
I was on the bus to go over to my boyfriend’s house after school one day. I was sitting in a single seat, and although the bus had gotten extremely crowded, I was pretty absorbed in my book. So I didn’t really notice when a figure started moving towards me. It was only when the person was FAR too close for it to be a usual trying-to-pass-people thing that I figured out the person was moving in to kiss me! And by that time, the figure was too close for me to see clearly. I did what any sane person would do, I screamed on the crowded bus and moved as far back as possible in my seat in terror.
As everyone turned towards me and the figure moved back, I could finally see that… it was my boyfriend. Who had stopped off for groceries and happened to catch the same bus as me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him get as many dirty looks, even after I started getting mad at him for scaring the living daylights out of me (while making it clear that I did, indeed, know him).
Donating a kidney.
In the spring of 2003, my sister’s husband lost renal function and the call went through the family for blood tests. I had the tests done like a good boy scout and without a thought to what might happened. A few weeks later I got the letter telling me that I matched.
How many kidneys one has doesn’t make a statistically significant difference in one’s longevity, but you couldn’t have convinced me if you tried. Several nights, I would jump out of bed and run into the front yard, gasping and trying to remember the words of Christ in the Garden of Gesethamine. It didn’t help that only two members of his own family volunteered for tests; I think that one didn’t match and the other backed out.
My BIL was in pretty bad shape, and the surgery kept getting pushed back farther on the calendar. At the time it seemed that, with a frightened donor and a weak recipient, the transplant hospital was dragging their feet to see if my brother would die and resolve the case. My CAT scan was accidentally dropped from the schedule, then they forgot to give me an antihistamine drip for my possible iodine allergy. It got to the point where I felt that I had to insist that they perform the tests on the day that they said they would do them. It didn’t help that the hospital was eighty miles away from home.
One year after the screening test, the surgey was finally scheduled. On my last day at work, a friend asked what I was doing over the weekend. I replied "I’m having strangers cut chunks of flesh out of me, Dan. What are you doing?
Physically, everything was fine after the surgery. Emotionally, I was completely spent for a few months and couldn’t quite handle the lack of resolution; life went on like nothing happened. I tried to help coach my son’t little league team, but I was afraid of getting hit in the remaining kidney by a line drive and I ended up just watering the fields. My wife was going through a rough time as well, and I wonder if the stress contributed to the breakup of our marriage.
That said, would I do it again if I could? Of course - family is family, but I would try a little counseling or something similar to help me handle it.
I have two scariest moments. The first is when I was about 14 years old and my family and I were out to dinner. My dad wasn’t feeling well and we decided to go home so he could get some rest since he was sick and at this point sweating pretty badly for someone in an air conditioned place. As we stood up to go, my father lost all the color in his face and fell backward, completely passed out. My mother immediately screams for someone to call 911 and she and I grab the glasses off the table, pouring ice into napkins to use as compresses in hopes of bringing down my father’s temperature (we could feel the heat radiating off of him without touching him). It felt like hours, but apparently a few moments later he opened his eyes and was able to respond to questions. Then I took my little brother, who was about 9, to another table where we could be out of the way while paramedics came in to help my dad.
The other is when I was 17 or 18 and working at the local movie theater. I was a concessionist and there were huge lines of people waiting for their popcorn and bucket sized cups of soda. The popcorn popper still worked but the bottom of the kettle had come off, exposing wires and various mechanical bits. The popcorn piled higher and higher as we continously loaded seeds and oil into the popper since the lines showed no sign of getting shorter anytime soon. Then it happened. I turned the popper over to dump the popcorn and it was too full, so it took a moment to empty it completely. When I put the popper back in place the popcorn below it had caught fire. The entire machine went up in flames in less than a minute and my manager, underestimating the fire, came down from his office with a small bucket of water. He dropped it and ran to the kitchen to grab the fire extinguisher while my coworkers and I threw cups of ice into the flames, hoping to prevent it from spreading. After my manager came back from the kitchen with the extinguisher the fire was put out very quickly but the theater had to be evacuated and people wouldn’t leave, insisting they paid to see a movie or standing to watch the concession stand pour smoke into the lobby.
I’m in the process of getting my private pilot’s license, so a few weeks ago I was getting ready to do my 3rd and final solo cross-country (to an airport 50 miles away and back). The plane I was meant to fly (a Cessna 152 - 2-seater, single engine dealy) was having radio problems, so I had to wait a couple of hours for it to be fixed. In the meantime, another student arrived from the airport I was gonna be going to, and told me it was a choppy ride, but nothing too bad. Well, I finally got up in the air and found out it was indeed a choppy ride. I almost certainly could’ve handled it, but I found at about 500 feet that something was amiss with the radio, very amiss. All I could hear was very very loud, distracting static, and nothing I did would get rid of it. Add to that the fact that I was trying to fly the plane in some pretty bouncy conditions (and in a small plane like that, it is NO fun). All of a sudden I was panicked and completely disoriented. I wasn’t sure if aircraft in the vicinity were able to hear me, which added to my distress. I wanted nothing more than to hand the flight controls over to someone more capable, but I knew I was gonna have to get 'er down one way or another. I turned right around to my home airport (damn near in tears) and was quite afraid I wasn’t even going to be able to land the aircraft. I did get down (performed a perfect cross-wind landing!), but dear lordy it scared the bejeezus outta me. Looking back I maybe should’ve taken the headset off as soon as I realized the static wasn’t going away (it was that disorienting), but I wanted to at least attempt to call in my pattern location, and hopefully hear anyone else in the pattern. Turns out my push-to-talk button wasn’t working and they weren’t able to hear me anyway.
A second scary moment was when I saw my brother crash a jetski into a dock (the dock was at ribcage-level). My mother there screaming her lungs out, brother being dragged to shore, barely conscious, asking if he was going to die… then having to be airlifted out. Yikes.
The moment the young woman from the Regional Center told me that my youngest son was autistic.
I have never been so scared in my life. I’m better now, but I doubt that anything will ever compare to that, and I’ve been in some very scary places, with very scary people, doing very scary things.
Before I tell my story, a bit of explanation. My mind automatically tends to use humor in stressful situations. Sometimes it helps, and sometimes it doesn’t.
It was at night, and two guys jumped me. They shoved me up against a car, and put a gun up to my face, at eye level. They got my wallet, but not my watch. (It was winter, and I had a heavy coat on; they must have missed it.)
The weird part was that the two muggers were black, and called me “nigger” several times. I am white.
I was scared to hell. However, at the same time my humor mechanism kicked in. I had to clamp down on the urge to point at myself and say to them:
“No, no. Honky . HON-KEE. Cracker. Ofay.”
I don’t think that they would have appreciated my helpful tip. In the end, they ran off. I didn’t get hurt, but they were never caught.
I was 16 and out on a big street waiting for a bus at about 2PM. Lots of men were driving by, slowing down, whistling, hooting, whatever. I would just roll my eyes and go back to playing on my cell phone.
But this one truck of guys was slowing WAY down- like to a crawl. Then they’d turn aroun and do it again. And again. And they weren’t hooting, they were just staring.
Finally, after about their 6th pass, the guys pull over to the side of the road I’m on, but about 100 feet up from where I am. There’s nothing but a wall there, so it’s not like they were stopping somewhere. Anyway, two of the guys get out and they both grab black things out of the back of their truck that fit in the palms of their hands. At this point, I was really scared and had 911 dialed in my phone, just waiting to hit send.
As they walked up, they were both just staring at me, all while sweating pretty profusely. When they were about 10 feet from me, one grabs the other and says, “Hey. It’s not worth it. We’ll get in so much trouble. Come on.” And they left.
I can’t remember if I’ve ever told this story here, but here goes. When my husband Joel and i were still dating, we took a trip to Reno with my sister Bonnie and her then-boyfriend Matt. One morning my sister and I were getting ready to take some laundry to the laundrymat while the guys were going to go swimming in the motel pool or something (I don’t remember). (Yeah, I know, nice vacation.) Anyway, my sister was in the car and the guys were walking away when this strange man came walking up from out of nowhere and started talking to me. I wasn’t in the car yet, but the door was open and he sort of trapped me between the door and the car. He starts out asking for money or something, like a handout, and then he said, “See, the thing is, this is my car.” I don’t know if you’d call this a real attempted car-jacking, since he didn’t pull a weapon or threaten me, but he was very insistant that he was the car’s rightful owner, and that I needed to give it to him. He had one hand on the roof of the car, and the other on the door, and when I tried to get in and pull the door shut, he forced it back open. So I did my best George McFly impersonation, and said, “Get your damn hands off my car!” To my utter shock and amazement, he did, and I hollered for the guys to get in the car (the guy didn’t seem to be armed, but I didn’t want to leave them alone with him just in case), and we left. I was afraid to go back to the motel for a few hours, but when we finally did, there was no sign of him, and we never encountered him again. I have no idea why we didn’t call the police. I was just too rattled. Still, even though it’s one of the scariest things to happen to me, I felt pretty brave. I’m just glad he didn’t have a weapon, or lay his hands on me.
Two moments.
The first was during the birth of Bricker Jr. My wife had been in labor for about ten hours, and they had a fetal monitor on the baby, and suddenly the fetal monitor started making a noise it hadn’t made before. This got the attention of the doc and she quickly got my wife to turn on her side, which apparently helped things a bit, but the decision was made pretty quickly that they were going to have to do a C-section. From the moment that fetal monitor started beeping to the moment both newborn son and wife were pronounced in excellent shape, I was both absolutely terrified and determined not to show it, because I didn’t want my wife to pick up on my worry and worry more herself.
The other moment also involves son and wife. Bricker Jr was about three. I had just given my wife, who is an amazing gourmet cook, a top-end knife – this one knife was about $100, heavy and ultra-sharp. She had just used it for the first time and it was on the kitchen countertop. My son, about two, toddled into the kitchen barefoot, and he reached up and tugged on a dishtowel that was hanging over the edge of the countertop. The towel pulled the knife over the edge and it headed right for his foot. It was an instant of utter terror; I was too far way to do a thing and I could see this cursed knife was not going to be even slowed much by his tiny bare toes.
The handle hit the floor to the left of his foot; the knife bounced over and clattered to the floor next to his right foot. Millimeters away, but not a scratch on him.
Of course, he screamed in terror as both my wife and I yanked him back, screaming and crying at the same time.
Never want to feel like that again.
6- The time I cracked my skull open playing in a neighbors yard & had to go home covered in blood. Only seven stitches, but I lost at least a quart of blood.
8- The time 5 HS kids beat me up on Halloween night and stole my candy. I was so ashamed, I trick or treated 3-4 more houses bruised & bleeding so I wouldn’t have to explain why I didn’t have any candy.
12- The time the local loser of my midde school put a knife with a 6 inch blade in my face. (It was to impress a girl, so it was ‘ok’ :dubious: )
16- The time another loser pulled a switchblade on me at a HS party.
19 - There was the drunk off-duty cop with the .38 leveled at my chest trying to feel up my date. That was scary.
20- There was the time at the ski cabin several of us had gone in on where GF and I were the only ones supposed to be there that weekend. 3AM rolls around and suddenly there were sounds from people downstairs. I grabbed the pair of nun-chucks under the bed and looked outside the bedroom door and saw a guy in his twenties walking towards me. I was just about to let fly and brain him when he called out my name and I suddenly realised it was the no-account friend of one of the other people who rented the house …and they’d given him a key.
22- The time my ‘boss’ got drunk at a bar after work and insisted that he drive me back to the office or I was fired. He knocked down a speedlimit sign on Rt 46, stopped to look at it, then got back in the car company car and kept driving. I quit soon after that.
39- There was the time my first-born’s fever exceeded 103 and I had to take him to the ER. I never felt so helpless.
40- There was the voicemail that my father had a major stroke and that I had to get to the hospital as fast as possible. (FTR, yes it is possible to do triple digit speed in a ford explorer with a 6 cyl engine. But I wouldn’t recomend it.)
As a kid, 7 years old, I was playing hide and go seek with some friends. Hiding beside a car in my neighbourhood, which was right next to my house. I lived in a small, safe town, and everyone in the neighbourhood knew each other.
Then someone, larger than me and the rest of us kids, came up behind me, covered my eyes and put a knife to my neck. :eek: I screamed and elbowed him in the leg, and he ran away and escaped into some bushes. He was wearing some sort of long black cloak thing and a hood!
We all thought it was just one of my brother’s friends playing a joke but the only person who was not present had no way of doing it and getting back home so fast. I still don’t know who it was for a fact. I think it was a joke somehow, though, because no one but my friends took me seriously (no parents believed me), but no one ever admitted to it. I still think that it must have been one of my brother’s friends.
Still I remember running to my neighbour’s doorstep and banging on the door yelling “Let me in, there’s a guy with a knife out here! I’m only 7! I’m too young to die!!!”, and my friend yelling “I’m only 10! I’m too young to die too!!!” Even though it may have been a joke it was a very scary one.
I am loving this thread, by the way. My story pales in comparison to some of yours, but they are interesting!
The time I had a door swing open to find a cracked out MBP/MM gang member jamming an AK into my face was probably the moment in my time I should have been most frightened, even though I wasn’t. The friends I were with were scared out of their minds (some started to take off running). I am frightened now though, looking back at my nonchalantness, and the ease of which that situation (and many others) could have turned ugly.
He was playing a joke on me.
When Whatsit Jr. was 1 month old, we took him to Children’s Hospital on the advice of an after-hours hotline nurse who listened to his breathing over the phone and told us to get him to the hospital immediately. (We were new parents and thought he just had a bad cold.) That night he was admitted, stopped breathing on his own, and had to be intubated.
That isn’t the scariest part, though.
A few days later, he’d been taken off the ventilator on a trial basis, and the next morning we got a call at home at 5:30 AM informing us that he had to go back on the vent as he’d experienced breathing difficulties again. We were sleeping at home at that point because we only lived 15 minutes from the hospital and the hospital staff had politely requested that we give up our sleeping room in order that families who were coming in from some distance could use it instead. We decided to go in to the hospital to see how our son was doing.
When we arrived and checked in at the NICU desk, instead of being waved on through as had happened every single other time we’d been there, we were asked to wait at the desk until a doctor could come and speak to us. My heart stopped. The doctor emerged and in a very hurried and impatient voice, which was highly atypical of the experience we’d had with the doctors at Children’s so far, told us that the re-ventilation had essentially blown a hole in Whatsit Jr.'s lung (there’s a medical term for this that I can’t remember right now) and that they had to perform surgery RIGHT AWAY to insert a chest tube and relieve the pressure on his heart and we could go see him for like a second but no more. I went in and kissed him on his forehead and then MrWhatsit and I spent the worst 90 minutes of our lives in the waiting room. (I was under the mistaken impression that the procedure would only take 15-20 minutes, which made the wait that much worse.)
I’d only had my son for a month and I was wondering if I would ever get to see him grow up. That overall experience was definitely the scariest of my life, with the scariest single moment being the one in which we were told we could not go in but instead had to wait for the doctors.
Whatsit Jr. is fine now. He has a tendency to wheeze a little when he has a bad cold and is physically active, but nothing an inhaler can’t fix. And I really feel like after having gone through that experience I could weather anything.