What is the most scared you've ever been?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

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.

42

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.

43

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. :frowning:

44

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.

45

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.

46

  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.

47

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! :stuck_out_tongue: 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.

48

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.

49

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.

50

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.

51

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.

52

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.

53

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.

54

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.

55

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.

56

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.

57

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.

58

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.

59

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!)

60

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