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.
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!
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 :).
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!
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…
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.
-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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.”
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!
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.