My family has a bizarre history of felonies committed against us but we always win.
My father went into a convenience store and got back into a car when a man rose out of the back seat with a butcher knife and ordered him to drive around until they found his lover and he planned on executing them together but it was a case a mistaken identity. They drove around all night long until my father was forced to make a phone call to her on an old style pay-phone. He finally got sick of it and pretended to talk on the phone and then just slammed it into the man’s head and broke away. He was so mad that he came back and beat the hell out of him. The police had been looking for him all night long because of witness accounts and the serial felon in question got life imprisonment but he vowed on the stand to kill my father if he ever got out.
My grandfather and his wife were held hostage in there own home by a felon and tied to chairs and duct taped while he could pillage the place. He was shot and killed by police a few hours later.
My grandmother had her front door broken in during the middle of the night by someone that was obviously mentally ill and high on drugs. She had a gun but decided not to use it instead you sung him to sleep and ran at the first opportunity. The newspapers referred to her as the “Grandmother Whisperer”.
My own was being grabbed by two felons who had just gotten out of prison outside of my upscale Boston apartment. I just knocked the hell out of one of one of them as soon as they pulled out their weapons and ran. They went on to accost several other people in the next two hours and that case fallowed me around for a few years. One pled guilty and got three years maximum security and the other five years.
My younger brother got assaulted by a man in a highway rest stop and jammed his keys into one of his eyes and broke away. I saw the blood on the key but the police couldn’t find him in any emergency room.
The U.S. isn’t that dangerous in general but my family tends to have bad luck (or maybe good luck) with that stuff. It does make you scared after a while.
We needed a third roommate for our apartment in college. Guy seemed like a slacker but no big deal really. He told us he needed to get some things in order the next day before he guaranteed he could move in, but said he had no place to sleep so asked if he could crash on our couch. We said we didn’t mind.
Well, later that night I get a call from an old friend (who I’d have trusted with my life). Evidently he knew the guy’s GF and his message was, “DANGER!” Turns out he was having to get his GF to sign the lease due to him failing credit checks and having two evictions on his record. He also had a criminal history including theft. All things he wasn’t at all open with us about.
So after confirming I had to tell him the deal was off and he needed to get out the next day. What made matters worse was that my roommate and I were both leaving for Thanksgiving break and had classes to attend.
After the shouting match ended I actually sat in my room just staring at the door waiting for him to bust through. The next day I fully expected to come home and find all my stuff ruined, door kicked in, computer trashed, fish tank shattered, etc. I actually locked myself out of my own room so he couldn’t wander in.
I later learned he walked on my roommate and his GF having sex that morning (:D, she wasn’t too happy about it though). Just walked into my roommate’s room without knocking or permission or anything. He was just going to invite himself in and check his E-mail on my roommate’s computer. We dodged a bullet there…narrowly.
In between undergrad and graduate school, I moved in with my mother for a year to save up some money. She had to go to San Diego one week for some training (we lived in New Hampshire). She had an early flight, and left around 4:30 in the morning. She woke me up to say goodbye, got in her car and drove to the airport (I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t drive her so she could avoid a week’s worth of parking fees, but that neither here nor there). I watched her pull out of the driveway, and went back to sleep.
I was dreaming about something that I don’t really remember (except it started with headlights in the driveway), when I was woken up suddenly by the sound of the slider in the next room slamming shut. At least, I thought that’s what it was: I was asleep when it happened, so I couldn’t really be sure. My mother was obviously gone, and no one else lived there, so the slider slamming shut couldn’t be a good thing (she lives in the middle of the woods on top of a mountain, and never locks her doors).
Still not sure what had woken me up, I lay very still in bed listening for anything that could give me a clue what was going on. After a couple of minutes of hearing nothing, I began to relax, than heard the creak of a footstep upstairs (my bedroom was downstairs). I slowly lifted my head and looked out at the driveway, where I saw two cars, headlights blazing, neither of them my mother’s returning to pick up something she forgot. Scared now, I crept over to the phone to call the cops. The phone was not precisely dead; instead, it seemed that somebody had called a number from another phone to tie up the line. This meant, of course, that whoever was in the house knew I was there and might try to call out. At this point, I more or less figured I was dead, as there was no way for me to get out of the house without someone seeing me.
As the panic overtook me, I woke up. Again.
A couple of years ago, late at night as we were falling asleep, my wife and I were both awakened by the unmistakable sound of a toddler babbling from what sounded like inside the house. The problem, of course, is that we don’t have kids. We both jumped out of bed in shock, and ran out of the bedroom. The babbling abruptly stopped. I looked outside to make sure that some kid hadn’t wandered up to our door (or been left on our doorstep). Nothing. I tentatively searched the house, and the basement, still finding nothing. We started having visions of being haunted by some sort of demon child.
We finally came to the conclusion that it was the cat, despite never having heard anything like that from a cat’s throat.
Since then, she’s done it a handful more times, generally just before she throws up. I guess she’s just possessed by a demon child.
The most scared I’ve ever been (not counting a couple of spectacularly vivid nightmares when I was a kid) was when I was out hiking by myself at 19 or so, lost the trail up from the Rio Grande up over the lip of White Rock canyon…saw a likely pathway to scramble out, got to within 20 feet of OUT but that last 20 feet was mostly sheer ledge. The surface itself was hard basalt and full of cracks fissures and textures and I convinced myself I’d find toeholds and handholds, or, if not, well, I’d back down and try somewhere else.
Well, when I got to the place where I decided “umm, NOT!”, the problem was that I could not see down to leg level to do a retreat. Handhold for handhold and toehold for toehold, it was just plain easier to go UP than to go DOWN. Except for here. Going the rest of the way was going to involve not only going straight up but actually out over a protruding bump so that “straight down” was gonna be behind my back and behind my head at least briefly, with my weight pretty much suspended over freaking nothin’. So I stayed poised there and contemplated my options. Realized I was going to get tired if I stayed poised there contemplating my options. Fuck! Did I mention that the surface just down below the 20 foot sheer part was pretty damn steep itself, so if I slipped and fell backwards… OK. This is how I die, isn’t it? The only way I get to not die is to start moving now but moments after I do I’m probably going to fall and die, right?
It was surprisingly easy once I started moving. I probably could have climbed oiled glass in that condition. When I came up onto flat ground my body felt like it weighed 2 lbs 3 ounces and my skin was glowing and I was ready to pick up large trucks and small trees and fling them into the sky while snarling and giggling and peeing my pants.
Sleep paralysis combined with sleep apnea is pretty damned terrifying. You wake up and you can’t move, or breath either. To get out of it, you have to find a single muscle you can move, usually a pinky finger and work your way up from there one muscle at at time. If you can’t do it fast enough, you will eventually run out of air and the panic will allow you to move again but it often ends up with you being thrown off the bed to the floor. I haven’t had those in a couple of years but it is pretty horrible.
I’ve been in lots of dangerous situations, and I was scared during every single one. Despite the pucker factor, it wasn’t TOO bad, because it goes with the territory. When you’re in a dangerous situation, you expect to be scared.
The one time I was most terrified, though, was in my own house about six year ago.
I’d gone to sleep with my wife in our bedroom. The next morning, she found me sleeping on the couch. It was one of only two times in my life (that I know of) that I’d sleepwalked. She woke me up and nothing was as I remembered it when I went to bed. Wrong room, wrong everything. I sat there gasping in horror for a good five seconds before the world reoriented itself in my mind and I was able to calm down.
I guess that’s what they mean when they tell you not to wake someone who’s having a sleep walking episode. It freaks them right the hell out.
#1) My story isn’t so bad. Once, living with a roommate, I got home late and when coming into the house I thought it was strange that her cat was sitting in the living room, usually the cat was in her room at night. Then I hear someone walking in her room, which is strange since she went camping for the week-end. I go upstairs, the door to her room is ajar and the lights are off. I poke my head into her room without turning on the light and an arm comes out from behind the door and grabs me. There really was someone in there, someone up to no good! The rest is kind of boring (the guy eventually ran away after I locked myself in the bathroom) but that one moment was scary.
#2) Those of you who know So. Cal. freeways know how the traffic can suddenly come to a complete stop. Once I was driving home in the middle of the afternoon after a long hike with friends and a heavy lunch afterwards. I nodded off while driving, and when I open my eyes, the lanes in front of me are at a complete stop, and I’m still going about 75 miles/hr - the car stopped in front of me is so close that there is no way I can stop in time.
I managed to cause a huge traffic jam that day, let me tell you.
Yes I did call the police. I was in a panic and also called my girlfriend and asked her to come over with her dog. I had some gouges in my face from the mystery man’s fingernails. And there were fingerprints on one of the windows on the ground floor which I pointed out to the police. As soon as the police left I left too and spent the rest of the night at my girlfriend’s house. The man was just wearing shorts, no shirt, so I’m thinking he was probably a rapist and it’s lucky that my roommate wasn’t home that week-end. Or maybe the modern cat burglar outfit is to be bare-chested?
That’s so scary. And I agree–that is a good thing it wasn’t your roommate home alone, if he was in fact a rapist. Not that I’m downplaying what happened to you but at least this wasn’t an even worse story.
Looking back, mine is a little silly, but at the time, I was terrified.
I had a 10 gallon aquarium with 3 fire-bellied toads in it, and it was sitting on a table behind me, on my right side. I turned around to look at the toads, and reflected in the glass of the aquarium, there was a man walking toward me. It was night time, the room was fairly dark, and I live alone.
I literally could not draw a full breath. I kept trying, gasping with that huh-huh-huhhhh through the mouth. My heart was threatening to pound right through my chest.
That’s when I realized that the ‘man’ was a reflection of the TV on the other side of the room.
I’ve had a pretty cush life, all around. I’ve had fleeting moments of all-out terror, but they’ve been brief and have worked out just fine (like car accidents that seemed certain but I somehow avoided, that sort of thing).
The only times I remember being really, really scared both involved the same bully who lived across the street from me when I was a little kid. John Bruce, if you’re out there, fuck you. Still.
The first was when I was around 6 or 7. Some friends of my parents were visiting from out of state, and their son and I were allowed to camp in a tent in the back yard. It was very exciting. In the middle of the night, the bully and some of his friends came into yard and began harrassing us, first by tearing up clods of grass and dirt and throwing them at the tent. That escalated to pine cones and rocks, and then they unzipped the tent and dragged us, in our sleeping bags, out of the tent. At that point we utterly freaked out (screaming), the bullies ran away, and us kids ran inside to tell our parents. Mom said I was shaking like a leaf. For whatever reason, Mark and I decided to finish out the night in the tent, but we each got loud whistles to blow if they came back. They didn’t. I believe the adults confronted the John’s parents immediately.
The second was swimming at the neighborhood pool. They had these bricks covered in rubber that you could dive for, and I was playing with one in the deep end of the pool. The brick was heavy to me at the time, and the deep end was (I think) 12 feet or so. I’d thrown the brick into the deepest part and was able to make it down and back with a lot of work, always SUPER out of breath when I got to the surface. I’d just about made it to the surface and expelled all my air for a new breath, when John Bruce grabbed my head and shoved it back down and took away the brick. He held me down for a little while, and I absolutely panicked. Not being able to breathe is such a visceral terror. He got kicked out of the pool for that one.
Dude also egged our house and blew out his own living room window by throwing a lit M-80 through it at 2 a.m. His parents were cool, but he was a bad seed.
My wilderness first-aid book mentions the up-thread warning signs of an imminent lightning strike. It also mentions some grounded objects will seem to have a glow (St. Elmo’s fire) due to the ionization of the air and that it’s a good idea to go somewhere else if the atmosphere is getting so “electric fieldy” on you.
I appreciate the effort, Hampshire. But he was one of those kids with two first names, I left off his last name. And he would have been born somewhere in the late 60s. But if I ever do run across him, I shall kick him soundly in the shin.
When I was a tiny kid, I don’t remember it being explicitly said, but it was understood that after tuck-in time, I was on my own. The scaredest I got was when I was lying in my bed near the window and managed to convince myself that there were dogs on the roof of the back porch, which was right outside that window. I had a real fear of dogs and was sure what were shadows were actually a pack of them, gray and ready to attack.
I envy kids who feel free to go see their parents when something scares them at night.
Back in junior year of high school, my mom was out of town for the night (it was just us two) so obviously I had a handful of friends over. We were chilling in my room, smoking a certain illicit substance and listening to music. One of my friends, John, was trying to freak us out, making up shit about ghosts and what not, and all of a sudden there’s a loud THUD and I let loose a throat and chest rumbling banshee-like howl and nearly need to go change my panties. Of course, right after I screamed bloody murder, I realized what it was: my bed is very high, the kind with drawers, and at the end there’s a little door for storage underneath. It’s broken off the hinges, so it just leans against the bed. It teetered and fell back against the bedframe. :smack: Okay, whatever. That’s not the scary part.
The scary part was waiting for the squealing sirens and the SWAT team busting down the door when the neighbors called the police to report that a large hairy man was being murdered with an axe next door. Of course they never came.
I still wonder how a 16 year old 100 lb. pathetically weak little girl like me could produce such a hellish scream. Paranoia is a bitch.
