I’ve told this before but.

Once while camping alone with my dog, we had a long event less day of hiking, fell asleep soundly for a while until around 4am.

My dog laid on top of me, and lowly growled waking me up. I calmed her down thinking she just had a bad dream or something, but then something rustled near our tent.

I peaked out of the side window of the tent and, in the faint full moon light I saw a black blob, not the size of a bear but more like a hog. I have never been near one but I have heard horror stories about hogs

Only thing I could do was lay down and keep my dog calm so she wouldn’t bark, I’ve heard if you startle a hog it’s more likely to charge than run away. We must have laid there for half an hour or so when I finally felt sure enough the hog had moved along.

I spent about 3 minutes quietly unzipping the door one tooth at a time, once it was fully open I picked up my dog and booked it to the truck, tossed her into the passenger side, ran to the driver’s side and slammed myself in.

Turned on the truck and headlights and there they were. About 4-5 hogs at the edge of the brush staring back at me, the sudden light made them all book out out of there. We slept in the truck until sun up, struck the camp site and went home.

Being on the receiving end of mortar fire.

When I confronted my now ex-wife about my suspicions of her cheating. The fears were justified.

I was once on the 17th floor of a building on fire (5 alarms and multiple deaths), and the fire happened to start directly across the hall from me. I thought I was going to die, but that fear was nothing compared to the thought of the person I love doing that to me.

Took too many mushrooms one night and I have tripped a couple hundred times. But these were particularly strong bois and I started to believe I was having a heart attack, it was only a panic attack, but I seriously thought I was dying from a heart attack. I was begging my wife who had taken two times as many as I had to call 911. She did her best to stay calm and remind me that I was just tripping on mushrooms and I told her I knew that I was tripping on mushrooms but something was wrong with my heart because I was freaking out and I could tell my heart was beating too fast. At one point she even stuck a Fitbit on my wrist and told me to look at my heart rate, and when I looked at it of course I couldn’t read it because everything was just pixelated and swirling fractals. But somehow she was able to read it and said your heart rate is only 118 which I was able to confirm the next day from the data on my phone. I was crying and holding my chest and I kept throwing myself in a cold shower trying to calm myself down but time was all fucked up and moments were happening out of order and all I could think about was how my daughter was going to wake up in the morning without her father. I kept running through the house completely naked and freezing wet. Trying desperately to grasp onto something to send me back to reality. But everywhere I went it didn’t matter because I knew I was dying from a heart attack and my wife who I couldn’t believe at the time refuse to call 911 and save me. In retrospect, I’m so glad she did not lol. I haven’t taken mushroom since. I’m too scared. They are not to be fucked with if you’re not in the right state of mind. I really appreciate that trip though, it really made me appreciate life a whole lot more when I woke up the next day. I’ve never been more scared my entire life and I’m pretty sure I know exactly what it’s going to be like when I actually do die. It was somewhat peaceful but it was taking too long in the moment and especially because time was not flowing correctly and everything was happening out of order It made me really panic. It just seemed like it was taking way too long. I suppose when I actually die time won’t do that because presumably I won’t be tripping when it happens lol.

When I was working the graveyard shift at a service station and a junkie put a knife to my throat and suggested that the money in the register should really be in his pocket.

Holding my limp child in my arms. She was fine, but it was the worst 30 seconds of my life.

I was out for a drive with 4 other friends packed into a tiny car, decades ago when we were all early twenties. I was driving, and we were just cruising the streets, turning this way and that, high spirits and chatting and laughing away. We came down off a hill joining one suburb to another, and turned off into a side street. It was a dead end street, in a pretty dark and deserted industrial area. We knew the street well, as it was short, but you wouldn’t go down it if you didn’t need to, as it only led to factories and such. It was late, perhaps a little after midnight. As we got about 50 metres or so in (maybe halfway), we all instantly stopped talking simultaneously, and every one of us, including myself, froze in what I can only describe as pure terror. I hit the brakes, and stopped in the middle of the road for a second, before slamming the car in reverse and stamping on the accelerator full tit in reverse, without even turning around, I couldn’t even turn my head. To this day it’s hard to describe why, in the normal light of day. My current wife (then just a friend) was in the car too, and she hates it if I even bring it up. All I can say is we sensed such a darkness, a dense evil beyond comprehension, right outside the car. A sense of an abysmal vanta-black presence in front and to the left of the car. Nothing visible to the naked eye, but with perfect post-event unified description by all 5 people in the car. None of us spoke for a good 20 minutes afterwards, and the night of fun was over. It was horrifying, and I will never go into that street again. A vague sense of some atrocious tortuous event that occurred there in the past maybe, don’t know? And we were all very stable regular young people, no alcohol or drugs etc involved. I know spooky stuff probably wasn’t on the menu, but that’s sure it for me

When I was in my early twenties, I lived with my brothers in my oldest brother’s house. It was a new construction home in a fairly ritzy suburb of a large city in the US.

During this time, I was attending college and working part time at Gamestop. One of my brothers was working at Chipotle at the time, so there were some afternoons that we’d both have off and we’d be chillin at the house together. One afternoon while my oldest brother and his wife were at work, my brother and I were in the living room playing Diablo 3. All of the sudden I hear this weird old song playing from the loft and I instantly whipped my head around towards the loft, trying to figure out what tf it was. It wasn’t a song or a tune I’ve ever heard in my life before. The thing is, my brother whipped his heads towards the loft the exact second I did because he heard it too. We looked at each other for a second, and decided to investigate. Everything in the upstairs area was ours, too - we moved in right when my oldest brother and his wife bought the house, and they left that whole area for us. We both knew we didn’t own anything that could’ve played the little song we heard. Haven’t heard it since.

Not too long afterwards, while i was still living with my brothers in the same house, another incident occurred. I was upstairs in my room, and it was probably around midnight. I had turned off my Xbox and TV, and was just laying in bed on my phone in the dark, when my pup started lightly growling. My dog is pretty smart, friendly, and really perceptive. He doesn’t growl at anything unless he perceives a threat. He is always chill and silent throughout the night. But that night, he went from chillin’ in bed with me with his head on my chest, to instantly sitting upright, intently staring and growling at a spot on the wall to my right. I didn’t think much of it right away, and just tried to calm him down, but he just got more rigid and starting growling a little louder, still stating at the one spot. I sat upright, turned on my lamp, and looked around the wall to see if I saw a bug or a small critter, but there was nothing. He suddenly starts darting his eyes around that same wall as if he was following something that was moving quickly. All of the sudden, he whips his head and darts his eyes to a spot maybe 5 ft above my head. I look immediately above me, and see nothing at all. I felt an insane feeling of dread, grabbed my dog and ran to my brothers room across the hall, and asked if I could spend the night with him. I was way too fucking scared to go back to my room that night. Nothing like that ever happened again.

Not sure what either of those, and things like that don’t normally happen to me. Which is probably why it’s so scary to me. I don’t think I believe in ghosts or demons or anything like that, but idk what to think of these instances. Could’ve been nothing, or could’ve been something I can’t see/perceive. The thought of the latter scares me.

24 February 2022.

Getting beat up by a group of Nazis. When they started kicking my head I thought I was going to die.

Two times, but both are similar incidents:

The first was when my oldest was nearly 1. He was running a fever and we called the doctor to see what to do. The doctor suggested a lukewarm bath to bring his temperature down. This seemed to help and my wife went to get a towel. As she came back, my son looked up at her, but it was like he was looking through her. Then, his eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp.

I grabbed my son and shouted his name. There was no response and he was turning blue. My wife called 911 and her parents as I put him on the bed. The only thing that came to mind was “stop him from swallowing his tongue.” (This isn’t a thing I later found out, but I was panicking.) The emergency crews came as he started breathing again.

At the hospital, they said it was a febrile seizure and it can happen with infants/young kids. It’s harmless most times, but very scary.

The second incident was with my younger son. He started running a fever and the doctor recommended a lukewarm bath. I think you can see where this is going and so did I at the time. I told my wife to get the towel beforehand. She also called her parents and they came over before we put him in the bath.

Sure enough, our younger son was fine until he stopped responding. Only he didn’t turn blue. He turned grey. And he didn’t start breathing again on his own. We called 911 and my mother-in-law did rescue breaths on him.

I was running from the front door, looking for the ambulance, to the bedroom - watching my mother-in-law trying to help my lifeless son breathe. My father-in-law told me that I didn’t need to run back and forth. He said he’d look for the ambulance. I told him that I couldn’t just watch my son lifeless like that. I needed to DO something. Even if it was completely useless, I needed to be doing something.

My younger son finally started breathing on his own and was fine. He went on to have many more febrile seizures until he (FINALLY) grew out of them. (He also had a tendency to fall and hit his head thanks to a hip issue. I swear that half of my grey hairs are thanks to him!)

I got the tiniest glimpse of what losing a child might feel like and it was scarier than I could handle. Even writing this out is raising my anxiety. I never want to feel that way ever again.

Ran out of gas in the wee hours, was walking to a house with lights on to call for help, got noticed and chased by a pack of stray dogs, ran back to my car, fumbled and dropped keys, barely got in and shut the door before the car rocked with the force of several snarling bodies hitting it.

Either hearing cougars screaming near my tent, or — in the same place — getting lost in the woods and hearing tree-shaking sounds that were probably bears.

I’ve not gone through anything too wild, but here’s a few…

1. When my parents were getting a divorce, my mom moved us out into an apartment. My dad came by, enraged. There was a bit of an argument and he pulled her outside the front door and pressed her up against it. Since the door opened outward and he was pushing her into the door with his full body weight, I wasn’t able to open the door. I started screaming at him because I was afraid he was going to kill her and I couldn’t get to her. I was trapped inside not sure if I was about to watch my mom die. Thankfully he didn’t and he eventually let her go, but I had no idea in that moment what he was capable of. She has been divorced from him for I think almost 10 years now which is good!

2. Some other time there was a lot of turbulence on a plane ride and I’m a bit of a wuss lol.

Faced a loose Pitbull when walking the streets on my own. It wasn’t until then that I realised a dog is completely capable of killing me and there would be nothing I could do to stop it.

Fortunately, it turned out to be quite friendly, and the owners came looking for it a few minutes later.