We are all living out the human journey together, through the good, the bad, and the scary.
Unfortunately, the scary can sometimes be a pretty big part of the whole thing. The world is a strange place. It can easily pit us against each other, and we can make the experience scary for each other. And these brave people have survived such situations.
u/BootsmaBoy asked:
What is the scariest encounter with another human you have ever experienced?
Here were some of those stories.
Adults Are Honestly The Worst
Giphy
My cousin who was like 14 was babysitting us (9 year old me, 4 year old brother), her dad called coming down from I wanna say crack? Heroin? Idk something real bad, he called and screamed at her to tell him where her piggy bank was, she told him to f*ck off and hung up.
He called back, she didn't pick up, and he left a voice message which played as he was leaving it saying basically he was gonna come down there and f*cking murder all of us, with a knife
He was full of sh*t but we were terrified. Can you imagine the pure fear a 9 year old feels when a grown man who sounds crazy says he's going to murder her with a knife? So we prepared. We blocked out the windows, locked everything, put heavy furniture in front of the doors. My brother was asleep in his room, my cousin told me just leave him, but I couldnt stand the thought of him being alone in there so I covert style belly crawled, heart beating out of my chest, across the kitchen, through the living room to his room, scooped him up, and brought him back to my moms room, which we then barricaded ourselves into.
I got no sleep that night and my mom and my aunt came back the next morning like "What the f*ck did you kids do?!" But I was honestly just happy to be alive and that my mom was home again.
The worst part of the whole thing is when she got home her dad had sold all of her belongings. I mean everything, her bed, her dresser, tv, it was all gone. It was just an empty room.
He's clean now but I still hate his f*cking guts. F*ck you uncle donald.
I Could Die Today
When I was 15, I regularly was at home by myself since both of my parents worked full time and my brother had moved away to college. Well one day during the summer i was just relaxing at home, when all of a sudden someone knocks on the front door. I get up and check the peephole, and see two guys just standing in the driveway just off the porch. One of them wearing a suit, the other wearing sweatpants and a hoodie, but facing away from the house like he's playing lookout. I decide to ignore them, cause they'll go away, right?
Wrong.
They continue knocking, knocking, knocking but getting progressively louder and more aggressive. Finally, I decide to call the sheriff's department and ask for a non emergency check since they're trespassing. My dumbass decides to yell through the door that I had called, and before I can even realize how dumb it is, the guy starts kicking the front door. I freak the fuck out, run back toward the center of the house and realize that there's a third guy trying to kick in the back door as well. At this point I call 911 and start screaming about these three guys trying to break into my house.
Notoriously, it took the sheriff's deputies longer to get there than anyone would imagine, and they see the guys walking down the road later. Stopped them to question, but no arrest.
MYOB
I was driving through a somewhat rough neighborhood at night (late after a movie) and while sitting at a light we saw this guy in a beat up car take a bump of coke next to us. We make eye contact. As the light turns green he merged behind us and then proceeds to follow us around flashing his lights and honking his horn for several blocks. We pull up to another red light he pulls up next to us yelling at us to roll down the window.
Turns out he just wanted to let us know we had a tail light out and then drove away.
This Is What We Call Stranger Danger
When I was 13, I just got dropped off from the school bus, so I had a bit of ways to walk home. As I get close to the corner of my street, some guy in a dark blue car rolls up and asked where I was headed.
Told him I was going home. The guy the excruciatingly slowed his car down to match my walk and asked if I wanted a ride home. I told him no thanks I'm almost home. Then he continued to ask where I live and if I still wanted a ride home.
Luckily I had a phone at this age, and pulled out my Nokia phone (idk why I remember this) and pretend to call my mom (she wouldn't have picked up the phone and I was almost home).
The guy saw what I was doing and sped off like crazy.
From the age of 13, I started carrying pepper spray.
Bad Practices
Giphy
Late 80s, was running errands in town with my mum and two sisters. Back then it wasn't uncommon to leave your kids in the car while you ran inside the store.
We are sitting in the car waiting, and then I see an older guy walking towards our car. I just get a really bad feeling and start yelling at my sisters to lock the doors, while I lock the two on my side.
He comes over and spends the next couple of minutes trying to open all the doors on the car while we are cowering in our seats. Eventually he gave up and left.
We were all 8 and under in age at the time. I just knew that if he got in the car he would take one of us.
Prophetic Dreams
In our mid twenties, my husband and I lived in a townhome without a yard in a pretty nice area of town. We knew we were purchasing a house soon, so we went ahead and got our first puppy! I'm a morning person, whilst my husband is not, so I would usually get up around 5am and take the puppy out to the little patch of grass across the street from out townhome (still inside the entire complex, mind you). Did this for several months, no big deal.
Well one morning while out waiting on the puppy, an old Ford van, all beat up with no windows, slowly drives by and goes back behind another building. A few minutes later as I'm getting ready to cross the street and go back inside, the van comes back up the road to where I was getting ready to cross, stops in the middle of the road and turns off its lights. I waved them on in front of me and at that point, both doors of the van started to open. All I remember was seeing someone start to get out before both the dog and I felt the undeniable urge to run across the street and inside as fast as possible. Once inside, the van sped off and disappeared.
The creepiest part of this whole thing was when I went upstairs to wake my husband, only to find out he was in the middle of a dream where I'd been kidnapped.....
To this day, I refuse to run outside or go on walks alone, even on our quiet country roads. And big old vans still creep me out.
Why Do People Be Like This
I was about 14/15. School had just ended so the bus home was packed with other school kids too. We were a couple stops away from where everyone got on when this guy with a huge jacket, hood up and mask on (we were in the middle of a heatwave so super odd) got on the bus, stormed upstairs past me and my friends and threw down this huge bag he was carrying. He screamed "THIS IS A BOMB" and ran off the bus.
It took everyone a few seconds to process what just happened, but after those few seconds I experienced the most crazy panic I've ever seen. Everyone bolted downstairs and tried to get out, but the doors were closed. I remember this huge black dude just punched the glass out of the door like it was nothing and people were just dragging themselves through it. When I got to the door I hit the emergency release to make it easier to jump off.
Once we were out we sprinted at least 500m down the road and crouched for the explosion. Except there was no explosion. It was just a hoax. Turns out that the guy that did it was someone from my school that had previously been expelled.
Close Call (TW: Blood)
Me and my boyfriend came back at like 2 am from a night out. We were both quite drunk and stumbled into the hallway to the elevator when we see drops of something on the floor. It definitely was blood. Fresh and wet. The elevator button and door were covered in bloody hand prints aswell.
My boyfriend called the elevator, pushing me aside not knowing what would be in it. Luckily nothing except for a puddle of blood.
The elevator came from the 5th floor. So we went investigating. The trail of blood ended at a door with huge hand smears of blood on the door.
It took all our courage to ring (not the nicest place to live, robbery??) But I am so glad we did. An elderly man opened the door. He looked like straight out of a horror movie. Covered in blood from head to toe. His grey sweater was red. His hair was wet. His shoes were filled with blood.
We immediately sobered up. I called an ambulance which arrived in 2 minutes. My bf went inside the flat helping the man sit down. There was so much blood I have never seen that in my life.
We didn't know what happened to him until we met him yesterday properly for the first time. Recognized my bfs glasses. He was drunk, wanted to ride his bike home, crashed somehow and got a huge cut on his head. He takes heart medicine which thins his blood that's why he lost so much.
If we wouldn't have rung the doorbell he would have bled to death.
He actually gifted us money and a super expensive bottle of champagne for something completely self explanatory
Campus Fear
Was walking through campus after a night class, around 9 or 9:30pm. It's a BIG campus (UCF) and pretty empty at this point. The shuttle I took was at the other end of campus so it was a pretty long walk. At one point I'm walking through a swampy area with a raised boardwalk. There are two girls a ways ahead of me walking together, I see them reach the end of the boardwalk and go into the next building.
As I reach the end of the boardwalk, this guy kinda hops up out of nowhere/the surrounding woods. Takes my hand and starts telling me how beautiful I am, what's my name, what year am I at uni, what am I doing tonight, where do I live? I ask him why he wants to know and he says "I'm taking a survey". I'm literally in such shock that it takes me a second to realize he's even touching me/has my hand. Everything he was asking me sounded really unauthentic and like it was scripted, like he was in a rush to get everything out. He also had this really weird, unsettling vibe that he was giving off that instantly freaked me out, but it was DARK outside, and I was ALL ALONE at this point.
Thankfully, a minute or two later a guy walks out through the building , and I use that moment to break my hand away from the weirdo and tell him "I have to go". I've never walked so fast to my shuttle and looking over my shoulder the whole time. I couldn't stop shaking the whole ride home. Something about that guy was OFF and I was sure if that man hadn't have come out when he did that something bad would've happened to me. Exactly what, I don't want to think about. Keep in mind there had been a group of 2 girls walking ahead of me and he hadn't approached them. He was looking for a girl by herself.
The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions, Right?
Giphy
My first apartment was part of a complex that was U shaped with a large grassy area in the middle. The neighborhood kids would run around and play in the grass a lot. One day I was sitting on my stoop talking on the phone when one of the kids fell over, grabbed his foot and started crying. He was maybe 5 or 6. He had stepped on a bottle cap and sliced open his foot. I took him inside, had him sit on the edge of the tub, washed his cut and put some neosporin on it and a bandaid and sent him on his way.
A few hours later there is a knock on my my door. When I answered, a massive skinhead with a tattoo of a pentagram on his neck was standing there with his chest out. The boy was peeking around one of his giant thighs pointing at me. He stuck his finger in my chest and yelled, "Did you take my boy in your f*ckin house? That's my son. Did you give him a f*ckin bath?"
"Look at his foot!" I shrieked. "He cut his foot. I washed the cut."
He inspected the kids foot then asked me.what exactly happened. I stumbled through the story. Then he just said, "Alright then." He shook my hand with a vice grip and I never saw him or his son again.
It's Always People In Vans
This happened when I was about 9 or 10. It was around 8:30 on a Tuesday or Thursday. My parents and I were watching TV when there was a knock at the door. My dad got up and answered it, to see a man standing there, with a white van behind him. He looked like he was in his early 30s. My dad went outside to talk to him as I hid behind the TV stand and waited for him to leave. It was hard for me to hear what they were saying but I could hear my dad say, "No thanks" and "We're good". When my dad got back inside, I saw the van leave and asked my dad what had happened. The had guy asked him if he could come inside to do a security system estimate, because he was a door to door salesman. My dad said he could see a bunch of other guys inside the van staring at them. When they left, my mom called the neighbor to ask her what was going on, apparently they had asked almost everyone on our street the same question. My neighbor called the police and started to follow the van. The guys caught on, and when my neighbor turned around to go home they started following her, she eventually lost them but the whole ordeal was still scary nonetheless.
note - I know about my neighbor following them/being followed because my mom was on the phone with her the whole time
Thank Goodness He Wasn't The Joker After All
I used to work as a cashier in a middle eastern restaurant and we'd get a lot of interesting people coming in.
One day while the manager and cooks are busy, a pretty "normal" looking guy comes in and asks for water. No biggie. Then he starts asking questions about what ethnicity the owner's are and if I'm related to them and while those questions aren't inherently threatening, he spoke the same way The Joker does. Like he's about to do something bad to you and you can't escape it because he's already set up a trap.
He leaves. He returns less than a minute later with a black duffel bag and another guy who looked homeless blocking the doorway.
I legitimately thought he was about to pull out a gun and try to rob the place or shoot me. Instead, he tells me to tell the owner exactly what he's been asking me and he leaves. Nothing bad really happened but I was terrified that he'd come back and I eventually left the place because of it.
A Hitch-yikes-er
Giphy
I got a lift with a semi driver into the Rockies via the old 99. Once we got into the long stretches after Squamish he started talking about how his wife got a restraining order against him because of an ongoing murder investigation. It's okay though because he was acquitted of the last murder accusation. I was having serious flashbacks to Wolf Creek with this guy before he started with the small talk.
Neighbors Are No Help
I got chased down by the neighborhood delinquent teen with a gun when I was walking home from the bus stop with friends. I was 10, my friends were 10/11 years old too. We ran to a house for help, a middle aged woman answered and refused to let us in or help us. She said it could be a prank, we told her it wasn't but she was convinced we were trying to get in her house and rob her. We ran farther to my friends house, her mom happened to be off work early and was home. She called the police. I got to ride in a cop car and watch two cops take down this 17 year old piece of sh*t into the pavement.
I had a friend who seemed a really nice guy. He was my boss/friend's partner and was very supportive as her partner and of the people who worked for her. But as her friend, she started to tell me some of his less fine moments, such as his hitting her, and when they went "on a break" as a result he cheated on her. She told me that when he drank he turned into a completely different person, and she'd told him he should completely stop drinking.
They'd been together a long time but as they got serious thinking about marriage and babies she realised she couldnt deal wtih his lying, cheating and drinking. She realised she couldn't marry him, and dumped him. We went out with some other friends for a drink, to a pub we never usually went for safety. He got drunk somewhere and phoned to say he was coming to "get" us.
In his culture, she was practically considered his. They'd been together long enough to be considered husband and wife despite never marrying. So he and the other men in the city viewed her as his property pretty much. She couldn't just dump him and find a new man, that would be cheating and only men can get away with cheating. So men who knew them and saw which pub she'd gone to, told him where we were.
He turned up with a machete and attacked her date, luckily he hit first with his hand before drawing the machete, but he still did a lot of damage with just that one hit to the ear. Her date and the rest of our friends managed to escape, I've never seen anyone run so fast. He attacked her new car when he couldn't get her new man. When we tried to talk to him he threatened me with the machete.
So my friend pepper sprayed him which incapacitated him (and got me too ouch). When the police arrived my friend got in trouble for using pepper spray. No charges were brought against her ex.
There Is No Justifiable Amount Of Nope
At a party when I was in my late teens. Friend of a friend is there and he's kind of strange. Whatever. No big. I know lots of strange people. We ended up alone in a room next to each other on a couch. He says "you look nice tonight" and I notice he has a knife in his hand. I immediately freeze in terror. At that very moment my friend comes in, and i use the distraction to get up and get out of the room immediately and leave the party.
I have no idea what would have happened if my friend hadn't come into the room.
When I next talked to my friend he "explained" that the guy was on heart medication. Ah okay. Yeah. That explains it. Except. You know. Not at all. I stopped associating with that friend.
The old wives' tales.
They are the stories of legend.
I think we all need a big DEEP Google dive though.
Where did they originate?
WHO ARE THE OLD WIVES!
You don't hear about them as much anymore.
It's like science and logic are suddenly a thing.
But they sure are a good way to keep your kids and their behavior in line.
Redditor the_spring_goddess wanted to discuss the tall tales we've all been fed through life, so they asked:
"What is an old wives tale that people still believe?"
"Wait an hour to swim after eating."
What a crock!
So many summer hours wasted.
I want revenge for that one.
Say Nothing
Giphy
"An undercover cop has to tell you he's a cop if you ask him."
LonelyMail5115
"Pretty much most advice when it comes to cops are old wives tales. I’m not even a cop but most of the advice you hear is pretty off."
I_AM_AN_A**HOLE_AMA
Say Something
"That you have to wait 24 hours to report someone missing."
Severe_Airport1426
"I really think this one is important and should be the top regardless. As it’s a piece of advice that needs to be relearned and the only way to do that is through awareness."
crappycurtains
"This used to be true. I think they changed it after some guy named Brandon went missing back in the '80s or '70s. You used to have to wait 24 hours if the missing person was an adult because they had 'a right to be missing' and then everyone realized that was stupid and stopped doing it."
AlbinoShavedGorilla
Body Temps
"That drinking ice cold water after eating oily foods will solidify the oil and permanently remain in your body. I informed my coworker that if your body temperature ever reached that point, you’d have bigger problems than weight gain."
chriseo22
"Oh, I have a cousin who 100% believed this. One of those guys who believed every early 2000s internet rumor and old wives tale. One night I chugged a big glass of ice water after dinner and he started freaking out and saying my guts were gonna harden."
"I sarcastically told him to drive me to the hospital if that happened. Obviously, nothing happened and the next morning I said something like 'Thanks for being on standby in case my guts filled with hardened oil.' He just walked off muttering under his breath."
apocalypticradish
Arms Down
"When I was pregnant, I was told by young and old alike that I should NOT raise my arms above my head or exert myself in such a manner because it could cause cord strangulation to my unborn sons and daughters."
Fatmouse84
10 Years Actually
Unimpressed Uh Huh GIF by Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Giphy
"Chewing gum stays in your stomach for 7 years."
"I remember accidentally swallowing a piece of gum when I was a kid in like 1995 and just accepting my fate like welp, gonna have this in my stomach til high school I guess."
Gecko-911
I was so afraid to sallow my gum when I was young.
This tale is haunting.
High/Low
Hungry Debra Messing GIF by Will & Grace
Giphy
"You can tell the sex of the baby by how you carry."
LeastFormal9366
"Pregnancy certainly wins awards for the most old wives tales. So much absolute BS was repeated to us by everyone we talked to."
IllIIIlIllIlIIlIllI
The Cursed
"If you’re a woman and you wear opal jewelry but opal is not your birthstone (October), you’ll never be able to have children, or will be widowed, or just generally have bad luck or something. You can counteract this by having a diamond in the same piece of jewelry as the opal, though."
"I have a nice opal ring that my parents gave me years ago, and I’ve had other women give me this 'advice' unprompted more than once when I’ve worn it. I have absolutely no idea where it started, but I’m pretty sure this little chunk of silicate rock has no concept of what month I was born in, let alone of how my reproductive organs work."
SmoreOfBabylon
Stay In
"Going outside with wet hair will make you get pneumonia. Or an earache. Or maybe arthritis. Depends on which old wife you listen to."
"Jokes on them - I haven't blow-dried my hair in decades and usually leave the house with wet hair in the morning. On winter mornings, the tips of my hair get frozen. No ear infections or pneumonia or arthritis yet."
worldbound0514
Dreams and Facts
"You never make anyone up in your dreams you've seen everyone in your dreams somewhere else before and never make anyone up entirely."
"How would you possibly prove that to be true? My partner adamantly believes this and tells me this 'fact' whenever I have a dream about someone I've never met before."
mattshonestreddit
"My late wife used to tell me that before she met me she would have dreams of standing at an alter on her wedding day but could never see the guy's face, no matter how hard she tried. After meeting me the face was filled in with mine. Don't know if it's true but one of those things I like thinking of every now and then when I miss her."
Darthdemented
Cracked
Getting Ready Episode 2 GIF by The Office
Giphy
"Some people still believe cracking knuckles causes arthritis."
Choice-Grapefruit-44
"There's a doctor (Donald Unger) that cracked his knuckles a couple of times a day for 60 years, but only on one hand, just to prove it. Both hands remained exactly the same."
MacyTmcterry
I love my knuckles.
Do you have any tall tales to add to the list? Let us know in the comments below.
