I really haven’t had many scary experiences but I would say when I was followed home by two lads in school , had to escape through a park near my home.
Back in my much younger days, I attempted a something that should have been left to the pros. I saw a video in which 3 cars were stacked on top of each other and the stunt driver drove a car through the stack knocking the middle car out and the top car landed on the bottom car. I convince the promoter of a local race track to let me do the same.
I picked the vehicles carefully, a large Buick station wagon on the bottom, an old Ford van in the middle and a Chevy Monza on the top. I had a 68 Rambler Rebel to used as the battering ram. I placed some plywood on top of the Buick to make sure the van would not get stuck. I also added some safety features to the Rambler, a heave metal screen filled the windshield opening and a couple uprights were bolted in floor to roof to protect me.
All I remember from the stunt was driving the car off the ramp. I have no memory of hitting the stack of cars or what happened for a few hours afterwards. Based on what I was told, I hit the stack of cars too low. The van in the middle tipped over dropping the Monza onto the roof of the Rambler. A couple paramedics helped me out of the car and checked me out and apparently decided I was okay.
I woke up the next morning in a fog. I have no idea how I got home but I must have driven myself, my truck was parked in the driveway. A couple of my cousins stopped by to help me gather up the cars from the race track and take them back to my father’s wrecking yard. By the following Wednesday I felt pretty good and drove my figure 8 car that night. I really didn’t look at the Rambler till a few months later. The roof was caved in between the supports and there was a dent in the roof from my helmet. That scared the hell out of me. 3 months later I gave up driving anything on a race track and don’t regret that decision one bit.
Waking up to a house full of smoke in the middle of the night, having to evacuate my wife and 2 small kids from a fire. We were staying with relatives who didn’t believe in smoke detectors. :rolleyes:
My mother, who was mentally unstable, supplied plenty of these. I’m going with the time she threatened to shoot me with the family shotgun. A close second would be the time she threatened to break a glass bottle over my head and, in her words, “send me to the hospital with a concussion.” I was genuinely terrified in both cases, somewhere between the ages of 13 and 15 I think. I don’t think my mother would intentionally kill me but she could have easily done so on accident. She just couldn’t control her rage. When I was 17 I left home, and my Mom told my Aunt that if I moved back home, she was afraid she might kill me. So, I didn’t go back home.
Her official explanation is that she had tried everything to get me not to talk back, so why not death threats? She claims she was only trying to scare me into behaving. It was a really effective tactic, in fact I remained scared for many years. I had really good treatment for it, so I no longer jump at my own shadow.
Waking up at gunpoint!
Helping a buddy move back home; we left after work on Friday; planned to get in about 2-3 am, sleep, pack up on Sat & drive back home on Sun morning.
Midnightish, he’s driving, I’m tired & the front seats of a Suburban aren’t the most comfortable (at least they weren’t in a 198x model). Since the seats are all laid flat as we plan on using it for cargo, I climb in the back, lay flat & catch some Zzzzz’s.
He gets pulled over, my body must have recognized the lack of motion so I sit up, groggily wiping my eyes when the first thing I focus on is a [del]trooper[/del] person, in stance, gun pointed at me. :eek: He never saw me lying there, below the door line & thought I was up to some nefarious deed. My hands went up, he calmed a bit, my explaniation made sense, gun was reholstered. He apologized at some point.
That first step off the edge when you are rappelling.
Having sharks circle you at decompression stops.
I’m afraid of heights to the extent that looking over a second story balcony is pushing the limits.
I did Half Dome
Three times.
I suppose for most people it would be something like the time a crazed coke dealer thought I was a narc and had gun pointed at my head. I wasn’t really that scared though. I think the scariest experience of my life was the first time I asked a girl out on a date.
Being attacked from behind in the street by a man. I fought him off, punching him in the mouth. I later found out he had a long criminal history record for attacking and raping women.
What I’ve been going through since October. I’m still not certain that I’ll ever be fully healthy again.
I’m glad you got away, so glad.
It didn’t happen for me. Woke up in the middle of the night, heard a noise, got up, was confronted by an intruder. Based on the (no names mentioned) article in the paper I think I was #4 of six total this guy attacked.
Mortar attack in Vietnam. My heart was going like a drum roll.
Airplane crash. Seeing the ground rush up at me and thinking “I’m going to die”.
Fortunately I didn’t, but still . . .
ETA: If I classified “raising children” as a single experience, that would have been rated scarier than the crash, however.
Sitting on the living room couch with my then wife, watching a movie. I’m engrossed in the movie, not paying any attention to anything else, when she suddenly shrinks away from me and screams “I see that look on your face, YOU HATE ME!” with this look of extreme terror on her face, tears streaming from her eyes.
I honestly reacted in shock and horror, doing the ‘eyes wide, slow turn of the head’ thing. I said “I’m just watching the movie” to no avail. She just keep shrieking and screaming at me.
Was one of the most terrifying moments of my life, to have my wife go from perfectly normal to that, right next to me. I literally had no idea what to do.
The absolute most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced was meeting this great big spider demon in a dream about 20 years ago. I woke up sitting up (I sleep on my side) in mid scream, drenched in sweat, my heart doing about 200.
Had never experienced anything like that before or since.
Probably as a kid, one of the first times I’d been allowed to stay at home, with a friend over, while my parents were at work. Age maybe 10. We got to playing dares, and she dared me to climb out of the window, 3 floors up, straight above the drive, and inch along to touch the wall. Nothing to hold on to, the ledge outside was about 3" of downward sloping tile, at least one of which I knew to be loose. I climbed out and touched the wall, as per terms of the dare, and we both realised how utterly stupid it was at the same time, so she made a grab for my legs to try and drag me back in and nearly knocked me off…
Never told my parents (I’m dumb, but not that dumb), but never played dares again either.
Oh, I forgot the ‘road rage’ incident.
I’m on the freeway, trying to move right to the exit. Suddenly the car in front of me brakes hard. I brake. The car behind me doesn’t seem to notice. In the car to my immediate right, the man is on his phone, not paying attention and crossing into my lane directly into me. Suddenly the entire road is screeching to a halt. I’m literally standing on my brakes, butt off the seat, thinking “This is it. We’re going to die or we’re going to be seriously injured.” Scared the piss out of me.
Suddenly my then wife is shrinking down in her seat screaming “YOU’RE ROAD RAGING!!! WAAAAHHHHH!!!”
If you want to ask how I stayed in that marriage, it lasted 9 months until I filed an Order for Protection against her, she attempted to file false charges against me, filed for divorce and told everyone, all our friends and her family, that I was the one who filed for divorce against her. 
Oh, and fortunately, miraculously, nobody hit anyone in that road incident, as scary as it was.
So what happened after that? And why did she suddenly go all crazy like that?
I’ve told this story in other threads, so I’ll reduce it to one sentence:
My rental car was teetering on the edge of a tall cliff on the island of Guadeloupe, and several Frenchmen saved my life.
Mine admittedly pales in comparison to many of these.
A friend and I were in the middle of a large lake on a pontoon boat when it started raining. Hard. Then lightning. Then we ran out of gas.
So here we were, in the middle of an electric storm (lightning was striking on all sides of us, the type of bolts that you see going all the way to the ground), out of gas, floating on an aluminum boat, with no cell phone/radio.
I was *this *close to diving overboard when the rain stopped, the clouds opened up, and the sun shone down upon us.
mmm
I don’t know if it’s training or if I’m just dead inside but I don’t react to situations like most have posted with fright. A situation like davidm had would scare the crap out of me. I guess my answer would be the time when my heart started to race and went into a-fib. Then it didn’t stop. I had very short bouts (usually seconds) of it in the past but nothing like this. I went to the hospital and they couldn’t figure out anything wrong with me. It lasted over 24 hours then stopped. That was 20 years ago and nothing like it has ever happened again. I don’t even get the short bouts of a-fib any more. That was scary.