I am terrified of electricity.
An ancient piece of equipment at work had a loose power connection. Wary of getting zapped, I *very carefully * took hold of the cord to wiggle it a little. At that exact moment the pager on my waist vibrated. I’m told that my shriek and acrobatic retreat were extremely entertaining. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to urinating on myself.
My boss and coworkers witnessed this display-- three years ago-- and I’m still trying to live it down.
Back when I was about 15, I’d got a day off school (cough, cough). At the time my parents had just been divorced so our house which used to have 6 of us living in there only had me and my Dad. So it got pretty empty. Dad went off to work and I pootled round for a bit.
I then remembered an old computer device which stopped working, so I thought I’d plug away at that and use my day wisely.
So, about 30 minutes later I’m in the back bedroom of a large empty house looking at this PCB and suddenly I’m grabbed by the shoulders and shaken as hard as I have ever been. I’m swinging back and forth and my head is like a rag-doll. Really swinging.
In that nano-second, my brain processes that somebody has broken in and they’re going to try and kill me. So, it’s me or them. I roar, and I mean ROAR. I throw what I was holding (clue here) and leap up, ready to kick some burglar butt. I somehow managed to actually leap up onto the chair I was sitting on, so I’m spinning round looking for the punk so I can deliver some justice! But there is nobody there! I ROAR once more then the sane part of my brain kicks in.
Trying to figure out whats going on, I notice that my hands are tingly, not adrenaline tingly but weird tingly. It reminds me of that time I got that nasty electric shock…
Inside my brain, a series of chungs and thunks as everything slides into place. The object I dropped was the a power supply. It was unplugged, but it did have some very meaty capacitors on it. I then recall wondering about some charred part of the board that I was scraping at just before the “burglar” tried to “throttle me”. Looking at my thumbs, I have nicely cooked white bumps on both where the capacitor discharged itself through me.
The resultant muscle spasms DID feel just like I was being shaken to death but of course they stopped when I launched the PCB (it was actually partially embedded in the wall). One of the funniest and scariest memories 
Both thumbs? I thought a shock that went across your body like that would be sure to kill you. Glad it didn’t of course, but I’m just wondering if I had been misinformed.
Electrical Storm’s post reminds me of an incident that happened to my hubby, one night shortly after we’d moved house.
Our bedroom had a full-length mirror next to the door (you can see where this is going, can’t you?). Hubby got up in the middle of the night to go to the toilet and, mistaking the mirror for the door, SEES THIS NAKED GUY WALKING INTO OUR BEDROOM! He yells, punches “the guy” (himself in the mirror) and instead punches the mirror, bashing his knuckles, but luckily not breaking the mirror. I wake up in terror wondering what’s happening, and turn the light on, illuminating a very embarrassed hubby…
Og, what a night…I laughed until I cried…
beowulff, great story and great thread.
A few weeks ago, I was home alone (the wife and the kids at my in-laws beach house, I stayed home to watch the F1 race early in the morning). Our bedroom is pitch black, the windows are metal louvres and the doors were closed because of the AC, The baby monitor was off (the only source of light we normally have).
I had been reading in bed and fell asleep sideways. At some point through the night, I woke up to pee. Being sideways meant I got off the bed on the wrong side. I went to the bathroom door and it wasn’t there!. I felt the wall looking for it and nothing, the door had disappeared. Where was I, why couldn’t I see? After a long 4 seconds, I found a window and figured out what had happened. It took me a while to fall back asleep.
This has happened to me a couple of times. But always away from home in a very dark hotel room, thinking you are actually home. It’s terribly frightening. You feel along a wall searching for anything remotely familiar.
One of the scariest times for me was when my brother stuck a CAT D4 that I had rented. No danger involved really. But this was 20,000 pounds and about $60,000 dollars of rented equipment stuck on my property. Winter was on it’s way, It was starting to snow and freezing at night. If the ground froze around it, we would be in a real pickle.
Bulldozers are what you use to get OTHER equipment unstuck, and my rented bulldozer is sinking in a bog.
What a mess. It took us 8 hours of digging and slowly making the dozer lift itself with the blade and ripper to get it out.
I live alone so I scare the hell out of myself all the damn time. The best was one night I went to bed and listened to the beginnings of a light rain as I fell asleep. I woke up at 2am to hear metal thunking and clanging - I thought someone was rattling my flyscreen doors trying to get in. I grabbed my MagLite and patrolled - checked the front and back doors, heart racing. Then I listened properly and heard the water swirling down the drainpipes in the heavy rain, rattling the drainpipe against the house…
When I graduated from college and got my first job that paid worth a damn I decided it was time to move out of my parents house. I found a cute 1 bedroom apartment and moved in ASAP. It was cozy. It was cute. I was happy. Until about 1 am on a Friday night. I was laying in bed, slowly drifting to sleep when I felt something hit my face and scurry away. I start screaming and freaking out, as any normal person would do when something like this happens, and I discover that it was a gecko that had been crawling across my ceiling and fell directly above my face.
The obvious solution to this (after a shower and screaming of course) was to get a cat. A cuddly, fuzzy, gecko eating cat. So I did. I got a kitten and he was soooo cute and soooo playful! He ate bugs that he found so I figured he would also eat geckos and I slept more soundly after that. Sure he always wanted to be in the shower with me and climb into my pants when I went to the bathroom, but a small price to pay for kitten goodness.
Then about 3 months later I was in the shower and I leaned over to pick up a bottle of shampoo off of the edge of the tub when I hear this lound “GONG” sound. It startled me so much I slipped momentarily and banged my head against the shower wall. I stood up, jerking my head around to try and see what kind of hideous monster or unfunny burglar would make such a sound to try to make me give myself a concussion in the shower. I am panicked now because not only am I aware that I AM NOT ALONE IN THE HOUSE but I damned near fell to my wet, naked death and I have always been afraid of dying in an unusual or embarrassing situation, and this would qualify as both. I am weilding my shampoo like a weapon and wiping the steam from the shower door to better see my attacker when I look down and see the cat sitting in front of the door, pawing at it and trying to open it so he can come in and join me. I put 2 + 2 together and realized that the loud gonging came from the cat leaping at the clear shower door, trying to jump into the tub.
After my lease was up there I decided I needed a roommate so that should I ever knock myself out in the shower there would be someone who would hopefully find me before I died.
One year in the 1980s while in university I lived alone in a little bachelor apartment created out of half a single garage. Very tiny, but all mine. I was in the habit of watching David Letterman while in bed on a small, portable black and white television set that sat right next to the bed. I usually fell asleep listening to Late Night, so I’d reach over when sleepiness hit, turn the volume down a bit, take off my glasses, and then turn the contrast and darkness waaaay down to make it dark. Voila–instant radio.
One fateful evening I woke up in the black heart of night, and faced dread of the worst kind. Something had roused me. Something utterly ghastly.
In the blackness, I heard a voice, speaking in the dark, close to my bed. It spoke in a strange, unfamiliar accent, and it was talking about the end of the world, it was talking about demons, it was talking about a Beast…
I was paralysed with complete, utter terror. Scary movies don’t really scare me much–except when you bring in a bit of demonic stuff. That triggers a base, reptilian fear in me that rationality has never completely erased.
I lay in the dark, with the demon talking to me from the depths, more frightened than I’d ever been in my entire life. I knew at any second, it would come closer, it would touch me… and I would die. There was nothing I could do but pray. I was an atheist by then, but just in case… I prayed. And waited.
Until it broke for a commercial.
I fumbled for my glasses and turned on the little light on top of the little television. I adjusted brightness and contrast. The program resumed.
One of those middle-of-the-night oddball religious shows. With a guest minister. From Africa, judging by his colour, which was pretty black on the ol’ black and white. With an African accent I wasn’t familiar with.
Reading some especially juicy stuff from Revelations.
Probably not the worst, but definately the stupidest:
My husband and son usually go to bed a couple of hours before I do. So, I try not to turn on many lights if I have to do something around the house.
One night, I was gathering up clothes to be washed the next day. I remembered seeing one of my husband’s shirts on the bench in our bedroom. The bedroom was dark, but we keep the door ajar for the pets, and there was a little light coming in from the living room.
I bent over to pick up the shirt, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw the door slowly start to close. I knew it wasn’t the critters because the cat was asleep in the livingroom and I could hear the dog snoring at the foot of the bed. When I looked directly at the door, it appeared to be opened the same amount it had been before. Again, I bent over to get the shirt, and again the door started closing. The next time, I kept my head turned toward the door as I bent down. That’s when I felt *my hair slide across my face. * :smack:
I don’t know about you guys but The Ring scared the poop out of this normally hard shelled lobster. Something about little girl demon babies. Children are scary. Anyways, I couldn’t sleep for days thinking that any moment my television would turn on by itself. Well when you turn on my tv without turning on the black box buttons thing under it (its not my job to know the name of electronics) the tv just goes to static. You can see where this is going. Anyways, I’m in bed and I’m actually thinking about this movie and from the other room in the middle of the night I hear my tv snap on and go to LOUD static. I swear to god I almost had a stroke. I sat straight up and was like I DONT WANT THAT NUT BITCH IN MY APARTMENT!!! turns out my dog stepped on the remote on the way to his water dish.
I was on a school trip to Big Bend National Park and we decided to do the Window Trail for sunset. Except we mis-judged and it was after sunset before we made it to the end, and was getting a bit dark. I had a bad ankle twist a few days before and I didn’t trust it, so just before we got to the end of the trail, where the stream crossing is, I stopped. My ankle did not feel strong enough to jump around on the rocks to get over it, and I didn’t feel like hiking back in wet boots, so I said I’d wait while the others went down to the Window…
…in the dark, with the high rock ledges in the narrow canyon, crippled, all I could think about was mountain lions. I had my headlamp and kept scanning the high ledges until the rest of the hikers got back.
Long story short, during a motorcycle race I rode off an embankment of a dry river bed and inpacted on the opposite side.
Totally involuntary, I shreiked like a little girl, about 4 octaves higher than any sound I’ve ever heard! :eek:
I got up and immediatly looked around to see if anyone had heard me. :smack: Only then did I bother to see if I was hurt and check the bike.
I think it was because the capacitors had partially discharged. The circuit would have had the capacitors running through a resistor so would dimish over time. Plus, the current would have been relatively low, and my understanding is the current is the killer, not the voltage.
Damn scary though!
LOL very, very hard !!!
Worst ever for me was driving from my parents’ home to my own home in far east San Diego county. The road there is a windy, two lane country road with very little traffic and stretches of ten miles where there are simply no other people.
It was night, I was tired, and I was driving too fast. At one point, I leaned over to change the radio station, and I took my eyes off the road for a second too long. When I straightened up, my car was about to go on the shoulder, which wasn’t a big deal. Except for the woman in a dark dress walking on the shoulder not twenty feet ahead of me.
I swerved to the left, crossed onto the wrong half of the road, corrected, and recovered, and by then, she was probably a good eighth of a mile behind me. It took a good ten minutes for my heart rate to recover, and I dropped my speed down to below the speed limit, which was where I should have been to begin with. There’s no doubt in my mind that if I’d hit her, I would have killed her. I didn’t have a cell phone on me to call for help. While there were a few trailers out in the hills, I had no idea where they were, and the nearest buildings I did know about were closed for the night.
I twitched for days after that and was much more careful driving that route afterwards.