The scariest moment of your life.

What was it? Why was it scary?

Mine was almost a decade ago. I was seventeen. I had a buddy over and we had a girl over (I was hoping to get lucky, but no such luck). We stayed up all night. When we finally got to sleep, we were woken up twenty minutes later by the girl who said she needed to go home. So we hop in my van, the three of us. I drop her off, and then my buddy (still my best friend to this day) asked me if I could drop him off since we were already out. He only lived a town over, so I said fuck it. Sure.

Well, I obviously didn't get enough sleep. On my way home from dropping him off, I fell asleep. I don't even remember where I passed out. But I sure as shit remember waking up to the loudest boom I've ever heard. Both vehicles totaled. The first thing I noticed was the hole in the windshield, then my blackened and mangled hand. Then I felt the blood trickling down the back of my neck from where my head got split open (left me with a good three inch scar across the back of my head).

I was certain I was going to die.

Pictures (no gore):

When I first woke up in the wreckage, I experienced a visual hallucination. My best friend that I just dropped off, I clearly saw him sitting in the passenger seat, being thrown into the dashboard and collapsing onto the floorboard. I was certsin that I just killed my best friend.

I immediately began shouting, "BRIAN! BRIIIAAAAN! I'M SORRY MAN PLEASE DON'T DIE!"

At that moment a passerby approached my van and goes, "Son! Son! There's nobody over there. You're alone." I looked over and felt relief when I didn't see my buddy's dead body.

This was back in highschool, so it was either 2011 or 2012. I started getting these criptic SMS messages on my phone, saying stuff like "think about your sins". I got like 6 of these during class, until I got fed up and replied with something like "You got the wrong number, buddy". Then they replied, calling me by my full name. At that moment my heart sunk to the floor. Then to drive the point home, the next message told me to not take the bus I usually took home, but to take another one instead. By now, I thought they had already murdered everyone in my house, or that I was going to be taken for ransom, or have my organs harvested or something. I have never been more scared in my whole life. I almost told my father about it, because he's a cop. Thankfully, I didn't, because it was just a prank all along. This guy that I knew, somehow got my number. We were only casual friends, so I have no idea how he got my number. Through the whole day, he was asking me how things were going, the smart ass, but I just kept my composture like nothing was happening, and he thought that was funny. I told him I almost got the police involved and threatened to kick his ass, which made him realise how serious the situation was. Ultimately we remained friends though.

HorrorMovieGuy said:

I almost told my father about it, because he's a cop.

Heh, my dad's a retired cop. Did you have a cool childhood, too?

A few months ago, I ingested Syrian rue extract with 3g of shrooms, resulting in some 9 hours of intense auditory/visual/cognitive hallucinations and deep fractal introspection. At the end of the night, I smoked some reefer, and seconds later the dying trip blossomed again. I became blinded by brilliant concentric rainbows and heavenly geometry. It was so overwhelming that I tripped on my loose pant leg and fell down, my head slamming down on the hard kitchen tile.

I remained motionless, trying to put together what just happened. I had the sensation of dying and being born at the same time, and could almost see the Giger-like tendrils of the Otherness flowing around me. My friend told me I was bleeding from my eyebrow. The pain was dulled by the trip and I proceeded to vomit in his sink. I started vomiting again, this time on my clothes, and began choking on my vomit. My friend cradled me in his arms and asked if I was with him.

It took a long time, and I could tell I was struggling to breathe, but I eventually let him know I was fine. The entire time I was tripping really hard, and spent a short period in what felt like the afterlife. I didn't stop tripping for another hour, at which point I was being taken home. The lesson? Don't smoke reefer after eating mushrooms unless you're already sitting down, because you'll lose your balance.

The scariest moment in my life was back when I was 13 years old. I was just staying in my flat doing my usual business. Suddenly someone knocked on the door. I ignored it, because I don't answer to strangers and my parents always have keys. But the stranger continued knocking. So I came close to door and asked "Who?". The stranger replied with a very drunk voice and said something like "Open!". I looked through the peephole (or whatever it's called) and saw an alcoholic, who was drunk as shit. I said something like "Fuck you! Go away!". And I really shouldn't have said that, because he got extremely angry and began smashing my door repeatedly. Not knocking, but smashing with his fists like if he wanted to destroy the door (and he probably wanted). He was smashing and smashing, and eventually even began kicking the door with his legs, and this lasted for almost half an hour, and while he was beating the shit out of my door, he was constantly cursing. And among his profanity, I remember I heard him saying that he wanted to kill me.
That was really scary, because I didn't know what to do and he couldn't stop. His constant knocking almost drove me to insanity. Eventually he lost interest, stopped and went away.
The question is: why did he choose knocking in my door? There are a lot of neighbors nearby, and he wasn't irritating any of them! I didn't deserve it!

ChekaAgent said:

The scariest moment in my life was back when I was 13 years old. I was just staying in my flat doing my usual business. Suddenly someone knocked on the door. I ignored it, because I don't answer to strangers and my parents always have keys. But the stranger continued knocking. So I came close to door and asked "Who?". The stranger replied with a very drunk voice and said something like "Open!". I looked through the peephole (or whatever it's called) and saw an alcoholic, who was drunk as shit. I said something like "Fuck you! Go away!". And I really shouldn't have said that, because he got extremely angry and began smashing my door repeatedly. Not knocking, but smashing with his fists like if he wanted to destroy the door (and he probably wanted). He was smashing and smashing, and eventually even began kicking the door with his legs, and this lasted for almost half an hour, and while he was beating the shit out of my door, he was constantly cursing. And among his profanity, I remember I heard him saying that he wanted to kill me.
That was really scary, because I didn't know what to do and he couldn't stop. His constant knocking almost drove me to insanity. Eventually he lost interest, stopped and went away.
The question is: why did he choose knocking in my door? There are a lot of neighbors nearby, and he wasn't irritating any of them! I didn't deserve it!

I've never had to deal with anyhing like that. Hell, I can't imagine how frightened I would have been at that age. I didn't really get my balls till I was about twenty.

ChekaAgent said:

Aggressive Drunk Story

Why didn't you call the Police? Or at least threaten to do so?

Anyway I have no story that remotely compares to anyone. I can't even say it's true fear. But it was the day Highway Patrol knocked on my door to bust me for doing dangerous speeds on a road (I was testing out my new exhaust). This happened a couple months after the speeding incident. My two Brothers were home to see me get in trouble and since my car was technically owned by my Father they already contacted him prior to visiting me.

It may not be scary in the eyes of many but in my house hold we are all good kids with very emotional wog (Italian) parents. The Idea of losing my license for so long, going to court, having my car impounded and facing my parents was a very terrifying reality to comprehend.

TraceOfSpades said:

Heh, my dad's a retired cop. Did you have a cool childhood, too?

Yeah, it was alright. He let me shoot his gun once, which is something most people around here never do, because gun ownership for civilians isn't a thing where I live.

Chezza said:

Why didn't you call the Police? Or at least threaten to do so?

Well, I wanted to call the parents but didn't for some reason.
Unfortunately, in the shithole where I live drunks and drug addicts are really common. Even now, on my way from home to university I frequently encounter some drunk/homeless/drunk&homeless guy who asks for a cigarette or some money. I'm not scared of them anymore, but they're very annoying.

Time for sincerely? Ok ok.
Two moments:
First is just fuckin screamer. I was young - 13 years. That shit is became popular and my brother got that Flash application.
Simple script and story - the program asked you what is wrong with that simple room? Of fuckin course there is nothing wrong there in that simple room but I kept looked for something and guessed what is wrong... And then... BAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.... YOu son of su...c eb... That was the most shocking shit in my life.

Second is simillar to first: I still god damn it remember when i asked what is happening with people who watched that cassette in film: "The ring". And of course dream showed me what happens to you after your death. I remember that in dream that scream was so loud that I even jump out of my bed and smashed my head.
I'm really glad that I can keep live my life without fearing screamers so much as I did it 7 years ago. I remember that every loud sound scares me as fuck.

Trace and I talked about this briefly on the forums about a year ago, but I was in a similar but not as severe accident to him. Thankfully no other cars were involved and the Mrs and I were unharmed, but the scariest thing about it was cars turning a blind corner towards our wreckage at about 60kph.. Even after we survived the crash the worry of being flattened hung over us til this awesome dude stopped his car about 30m up and turned his hazards on to keep us safe. What a legend. Some stupid cunt actually honked at our wreckage before he (and shortly after, the cops) showed up.. Rofl.

Edit: I accidentally set a bin on fire at school with a cigarette butt, but before I got in legal trouble, I moved to Australia. There was only about 2 months between the initial incident and the plane ride. I'd only been here about a month when my brother emailed me that the cops were looking for me. Those few months of my life had some scary moments, mainly just overwhelming worry, but I escaped :)

I used to be a clueless kid and had an abusive teenage cousin (now he's an adult), I flew with him and my parents to my origin country to visit all my relatives there.
Everytime we were alone (that was a super-common situation) he would pull a prank on me, it would either be something violent as a punch and a threat for the future, or something sexual as pulling down my pants or show me his dick for some freaky reason.
I eventually told my parents that he's being an asshole and does all kinds of fucked up shit to me, but that didn't do anything; my parents kept on leaving me with him alone countless times, they didn't become anymore protective than they were, they just told him off.
And his pranks became more critical and more frequent, he began punching me harder, started kicking. I told my parents about how it only becomes worse with him and that they should keep me closer at their hands; but no, they told my cousin off again and they even left me alone with him while they were shopping and he forced me to play hide and seek and pull more pranks on me while I was counting to ten.

And then my parents left me again with him, but this time to force me to buy some groceries with him, my cousin wanted to go cheap and try to make me illegaly hop into the bus (without paying), but I didn't want to do that because I don't want to pay a fine if I get cought by an inspector, and get my parents mad at me.
He kept trying to convince me to hack into the bus, but I kept refusing, eventually the bus left and my cousin got angry and started dragging me behind the station and beat the shit out of me, I thought he'd kill me, but he didn't as you can see, I was bruised, he threatened me that if I told my parents that he beat me up; he would break my bones, then he drove off.
I got back home, bruised up, my parents asked me what happened and I told all of what happened because I thought that they would finally do something about it instead of just making it worse for me now that there are clues and I was clearly beaten up by no one else but him.

And finally some sense knocked up into my parents and they started being more careful with me when my cousin's around, they begun sticking to me and watching over me more frequently, the cousin had less time to bullshit, he could just whisper threats into my ear.

Lesson : Don't ever go to a trip or a sleepover with a hateful person, just deny ever going there even if it's a trip to a different country, you'd rather stay home with your dad.

That's atrocious, Joe. Sounds like your cousin needed (maybe still needs) a good smack.

Edit: What the fuck, I somehow forgot having a loaded rifle pulled on me and a 15 year old kid who I was training. Sick fucking cunts ran in and pointed it right at his young face, then at mine. Only got put away for a year and (big surprise) once they got out, 3 weeks later they were back in for armed robbery. Some dumbfucks just don't learn. Hopefully they get a deadly weapon pulled on them several times throughout the remainder of their lives.

joe-ilya said:

knocked up into my parents

I don't think that word choice means what you think it means.

Doomkid said:

That's atrocious, Joe. Sounds like your cousin needed (maybe still needs) a good smack.

Don't worry, he gets a good smack by his buff dad for disobeying him, or beating his own younger brother whose younger than me. Many people don't learn in this world.

I forgot to say that my uncle has a brother whom he does same things he did to me on the trip, his brother's life must be hell.

Sodaholic said:

I don't think that word choice means what you think it means.

Knocking some sense into someone's brain is not what I think it means? What does it mean?

Silly in the end but I was at a state park 3 years ago (during a very rough 2013) and one night I heard the most hideous snarling from some unseen creature near me outside the tent. Sounded like the Fiend from Quake. I saw talons come through and tear open some of the tent and to me at the time in the low light from my cellphone looked bigger than they actually were. It started pulling a plastic bag of food through the hole and I could hear its equally horrible bone-crunching chewing on whatever it got a hold of.

I very quietly and slowly called 911 and explained my situation, calm but scared as fuck. My mom was also in the tent asleep and her head was near the hole it had created, I was afraid she was going to wake up and freak out or it was going to attack her, so I had my pocket knife at the ready just in case. Thankfully it was content with what it got and it left. My mom had woken up during my phone call as well and I just told her to stay put and be very quiet because we were in danger and I was calling 911.

By the time the police showed up and the park rangers were going around looking for whatever it was, it was eventually figured that what I encountered was probably a large raccoon. Yeah. A raccoon scared the shit out of me and made me feel like my life was in total danger. It's funny now and I can chuckle thinking back to it, but at the time that was the last thing I needed to deal with in my situation. And so close to the end of my situation too.

In November 2014, I caught a cold, which usually affects my asthma pretty harshly.

But this time, instead of the symptoms slowly kicking in, within an hour I went from feeling mildly sick to finding it near-impossible to breathe. I went to the hospital, was treated, and hours later insisted I was okay enough to go home.

Not an hour after returning home, the symptoms came back much worse than before. I think the only thing keeping me conscious was the sheer speed my heart was racing from panic, and constant forceful breathing. Imagine only being able to breathe small mouthfuls of air at a time.

Went back to the hospital. Found that my lungs were leaking air into my chest cavity and being compressed. Thankfully it resolved itself during the week I was there and they never had to put in a chest tube.

The doctors made sure I knew that if I hadn't come back or had anyone watching me, I likely would have passed out, suffocated, and died.

I should never have left the hospital in the first place, and I take my respiratory health much more seriously now.

When I was very young (probably less than 7 years old) and couldn't swim yet, I was playing in a lake when suddenly the bottom disappeared and I began drowning. My granddad almost immediately noticed that and rescued me in just a few seconds, but still it left an impact and for a while kept haunting me. Sometimes I had troubles falling asleep because I couldn't stop thinking about it and relax. I think I'm still a bit afraid of deep underwater (deep = can't see the bottom and can't feel it with my legs).

In general I'm a very big pussy and even the dark can scare me sometimes. Like when I'm home alone, it's night and I need to take a piss, I might start imagining creepy monsters on my way to the bathroom. So I almost never watch scary movies.

All these posts are really interesting and many of them have me on the edge of my seat as I'm reading. Excellent idea for a thread!

When I got paraphimosis out of sudden and almost ended up getting my dick amputated. I couldn't walk straight for around 5 months afterwards. Top that.

Only after reading threads like these you start to realize just how utterly boring your life is and how you won't have any stories to tell your grandchildren, hee-hee.

I was almost crushed by a massive steel beam that had fallen off of a 4 story building. There was a a lot of wind that day, and it had blown it off the top of a construction site. Had I not looked up for what ever reason I did; I would have been killed. I probably would have been split in half.

There were a lot of people around me when it happened, and all they did was stare at me in disbelief. Then they just went about their business as if nothing had happened.

joe-ilya said:

Knocking some sense into someone's brain is not what I think it means? What does it mean?

"Knocked up" specifically means pregnant.

Also, really shitty situation, sounds like that guy's got some serious problems. It sucks that you had to get beaten up badly for your parents to take you seriously, but at least now they do.

GoatLord said:

The lesson? Don't smoke reefer after eating mushrooms unless you're already sitting down, because you'll lose your balance.

Yes, I'm sure that's the lesson to take away from that experience. :)

Doomkid said:

All these posts are really interesting and many of them have me on the edge of my seat as I'm reading. Excellent idea for a thread!

I'm glad I made it. This turned out much better than I expected.

Joe, send your shitty cousin to the Chicago area. I'm a 350 pound man and would love the opportunity to feed him his teeth.

Wow, there's a lot here that I couldn't even compare too in terms of scariest moments. It's fascinating to see the widely varied accounts of what has happened to this community.

The scariest thing that I can think of is during a road trip a couple of years ago. I flew down to Orlando to visit a good friend of mine and we drove from there down to North Miami to visit some friends for the weekend. On the trip back up the interstate, about 2.5 hours into the 4 hour trip going at about 75MPH, the front left tire blew out. Immediately I gripped the sides of the door and dashboard and just started literally freaking out at the situation while my friend worked to stabilize the car. He kept the wheel steady and let the car slow down naturally while doing his best not to run into cars zooming by while we heavily swerving left and right. My heart was beating out of my chest and I was literally frozen while gripping the interior of the car trying not to get swung around inside the car. Eventually my friend slowed the car down all the way and we pulled over to the side of the road. My friend took a lengthy cigarette break after that and I just kept thanking him for getting us to safety.

I'm lucky as hell my friend was driving - you are not supposed to hit the brakes and instead let the car slow down naturally while maintaining control. If I were driving that would've been the first time anything like that ever happened to me and I would've immediately hit the brakes, which could've made things a whole lot worse.

Here's a confession:

Despite my daunting stature and love of horror movies...I often go into panic attacks at night if I'm alone because of the exorcist. About twenty years ago my dad tricked me into watching it (I was like eight), and ever since then I can't get that haunted smiling face out of my mind. If the power goes out and I'm home alone...bam, I am freaking the hell out.

What really does it for me is the white demon face that subliminally shows up periodically, the demon's voice, and Linda Blair's face.

Absolutely horrifying.

But I can watch actual beheading footage and not be bothered.

I can also hold tarantulas with no problem but freak out if a small house spider crawls on the floor in the same room as me.

I make zero sense.

When I visited my grandpa's garden a while ago, I saw lots of weed there (I've even taken a photo of some, lol) and decided to grab some with me. It's really far away from our house, about 3 hours of driving, and I didn't know it smells so intensively. So, when we started driving back home, the entire car was filled with that sweet smell. I was really scared, since that was a drug storage thing, right? Thankfully, no one had paid attention. I've stashed it in my room, eventually forgot about it and it had rotten.

Two things.

- I was watching the movie around the middle part, and it was the... tv part. Yes, "The Ring" the only horror movie that scares the fuck out of me, literally (just writing gave me tears, shudders and sniffles, I'm serious)

- I was eating a slice of watermelon. I noticed it had some dry red colour around the places where the seeds are. I dismissed it and finished the melon. Minutes later, I had a severe asthma attack. But since I had these attacks before, I thought I could survive until the nebuliser arrives (we now have one for personal use, so instant treatment)... Next thing I know, I'm on a hospital bed, with one of my arms and legs tied down, and wearing nothing but this diaper. My mother was crying her eyes out. I was really confused at first. Then eventually, I managed to gather bits of information about what happened. Basically, my body was very-near death, due to the lack of oxygen. The attack was SO bad, the my heart FLATLINED. They said whenever they delivered the oxygen during the time, it would just come back out (my trachea was that small at the time). The doctors got the watermelon/poison out of my body by making me vomit when I was knocked out/dead.
My mother said my heart stayed dead for around 20 minutes, but she could be exaggerating.

Uh... that's quite a contrast in severity.