We've all got those stories that require a pre-emptive "Okay, I know this doesn't sound true, but believe me it is." Well, these people take those kinds of stories to a whole new level. Thanks to our awesome contributors!
1. I hardly ever tell this story unless someone that knows me very well is with me to confirm it. Here it is anyway:
It was Thanksgiving night in 2006, and I had driven home from our family dinner early so I could hang out with friends. For one reason or another I had decided that I was going to destroy my liver and any other organs standing in the way of me and about a liter of whiskey. I got to my friend's apartment and started drinking Weller's like there was no tomorrow. Another friend of mine showed up with a liter of Seagram's 7 and I started to dip my toes into it as well. Within an hour I had consumed more alcohol than I usually do today in an entire night of hitting it hard.
It is at this point that I decide to drive myself home, which was only around 7 or 8 blocks because I grew up in a tiny town. I walk down to my car and my friend walks with me. He fights with me for awhile about driving but after repeating how short the distance was to him a million times, he buckled and let me drive. I started my rotary engine, I drove a beat up Rx-7, and began the journey home. Two blocks from the start I hit a parked car. This is where my memory gets really fuzzy. I felt as if I had woken up from a dream, there was some drunk bastard on my hood screaming at me to get out of my car. At this moment in time, I was so messed up that I thought I had hit an actual person. I started apologizing frantically and asked the guy what happened. He was a drunk redneck that just wanted insurance money and wouldn't talk to me other than to scream at me to stay put and wait for cops. Had I known I didn't hurt anyone I would've just ran right there and dealt with that bullcrap in the morning.
The cops show up and I know the arresting officer decently from my older brothers always getting into trouble. I walk right up to him and tell him that I'm too drunk to walk, much less drive. He makes me take a field sobriety test anyway and I quickly fail. He then takes me back to the station. I do not remember the drive there nor do I remember being processed. From here on I am in and out but I'll use info others have told me that were there. I know I blew a .234 on the breathalizer because it was on my paperwork. After being processed, some stranger takes me into a room and starts asking me questions and then typing my answers into a computer. I still don't know what that was all about. After some time passes he stands up and tells me to wait where I am and that he will be right back. I am unaware at this point that my mother has already been contacted and is on her way to pick me up from the jail. All I know is that the I am alone in a jail and my booze-brain thinks that if I somehow make it out of there that I will be in the clear.
So the man had stood up and left me on my own. I noticed that when he left the room he went to the right. I waited a few seconds and quietly left the room and went left. At the end of the hallway there was an exit sign and a door. I bolted. I remember getting out the door, running through the gravel parking lot in the back and falling a time or two while trying to make quick turns around the jail. This jail by the way was on the outskirts of town and, as a crow flies, about a mile and a half from my parents' house.
The sprint home is almost completely black. I do remember laying down in grass while a cop car spotlighted the area around me, and then my next memory is being back at the police station, being told how lucky I was that the arresting officer decided not to charge me with a felony for evading the police.
My mom's point of view: Gets a call to pick up her hammered son after having Thanksgiving dinner, remember this was only about 2 hours after I had left, and I left early. When she arrives, the officer tells my mom that I, uhhh, wasn't there anymore. So she loads up my older brothers and starts searching as well. They call me several times, I remember none of this, and they said I answered once and said that I'd be okay and I kept calling my brother "doggy" which I never do. After giving up on the search for a while and leaving it to the cops, they return home. Shortly after, my drunk self stumbles in and they throw me in the car and rush me back to the jail to plead for mercy. The next day I wake up in my underwear on the couch, home alone, with a tapping on the door. It's a police officer looking for my brother because he was trying to fight the drunk redneck that turned me in.
NOTE: Drunk driving is extremely dangerous and I do not do it anymore. I paid a hefty price and was punished for my actions in more than one way. I deserved my punishments and I learned my lesson. I am so lucky that no one was hurt during this whole ordeal.
2. Im a living witness to something known as the McMasterVille Explosion. CIL, the paint company, made explosives. Their explosives factory, which was a giant factory on the same grounds as the paint making factory.
One night the whole thing blew up. I was looking right at it when it went. Not just the explosives but (continued)
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Not just explosives but thousands of gallons of flammable liquids from other parts of the factory all went up at once. It was estimated to have the power of a one kiloton explosion.
I lived on the side of a mountain called Mt St Hilaire a little over a mile away looking down at the factory site. When you see an explosion like that from a distance the land ripples like water, like when you drop a stone in water. I was riding a bike, the ground shook me first then the air blast knocked me on my butt.
The factory was deliberately sunk into the ground and surrounded by a high trench wall in case it ever blew up so the nearby town of Beloil wouldnt get leveled. So the explosive force got punched into the gound and the factory was blown straight up in the air. Tons of wreckage rained down for miles, no one I know of was hit by anything but many small fires were started all over the place. My next door neighbor found a train wheel in his back yard and it was red hot when he found it.
3. That my father was arrested for stealing 100K worth of Hershey Kisses and during his time in jail I found out that he was not my biological father. My biological father owned a chain of restaurants that I frequented as a kid and teenager.
I found this all out a few weeks after my 18th birthday.
4. I was 6 years old, and my parents took my family down to Disneyworld. Yay! On the flight down, the pilot made an announcement that if you looked out the window, you could see the space shuttle launching! It was kind of far away, but I could definitely see it in a plume of smoke. Very cool.
We land in Orlando, and everyone is dead silent, glued to the TVs. It was the Challenger, and it exploded on launch. I saw the Challenger explode.
5. I faked playing a xylophone for 2 years so I could go to China once. Here's what happened:
I played trombone for 8 years through middle and high school, and I knew a few people at my college before I went there. They convinced me to join marching band, but were always complaining that the band director wrote impossible drills (10 counts to move 30 yards in some instances, run through the bass drums, that sort of crap). I, being the genius that I was, figured "Well, I played keyboard in a ska band for a couple years; how hard could xylphone be?" Xylophones don't march, after all. Answer: Xylophone is pretty damn hard, and I'd never played one in my life before the first day of band camp, which is when the auditions were. The guy doing the auditions was the percussion instructor for the college of music and after my audition he told me to "Put the mallets down, step back, and never play a xylophone again." Which, to be fair, I did butcher the hell out of "Hot Cross Buns". Due to some sort of administrative mess up, they never got around to actually kicking me out that year, and I hung around and pretended to play the xylophone.
Now, every two years, my college's marching band takes a big trip somewhere overseas to perform and yadda yadda yadda, and I had entered on an off year. The second year, I show up and do the same thing, except the percussion instructor had been fired (I never really dealt with him beyond offending him with my ability to mess up xylophone music, but to my understanding he was a general douche and the music department had been wanting to chuck him out for years, so they made a big stink about him doing some paperwork incorrectly or something). So, it was left to our section leaders to audition the section, and being good friends with the section leader, he just said "Jenkins, hit something every now and again, but not very hard, and make it look like you're playing." So that's what I did. Found the softest mallets in the place, barely tapped the keys, wham, bam, goin to China. Everything would have worked out peachy.
Except our band director also (Continued)
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Except our band director also didn't pay any attention to the orchestra pit, so when he was doling out the parts for the music we were gonna play in China, he assigned me to concert bells. Like, that little tiny 50 pound xylophone that has a sound that would cut through an aerial bombardment. Not only that, I had a solo at the beginning of "The Moon Represents My Heart," which as it was explained to me is basically "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" for Chinese people. Everybody knows the song, it's a cultural treasure, and not something you wanna mess up at national landmarks cause folks will notice.
So I busted my butt actually learning how to play that bit over the span of a couple months, and managed to avoid pissing off people in Shanghai and Beijing. (Not all the people, though. A group of Chinese youths caught me urinating into a bush in Shanghai's club district, and I had to duck into a place called "Club Highway 3" with my dick still hanging out to get away from them.) Got to play a set of concert bells on the Great Wall and see a whole bunch of stuff in China, though.
6. When I was 19, some friends and I were visiting New York City. After picking them up from the airport, we decided it would be fun to drive down Broadway at night and see it all lit up. It was fun, we got some good pictures from the car, and around 8:30, we decided to drive home.
Going northbound on the West Henry Hudson, we were talking and listening to some Journey, when someone hopped the highway divider and ran right out in front of my car, stopped, and looked right at us. There was no time to stop, no time to swerve, and at 50 miles per hour he came crashing straight through the front windshield, hitting my best friend directly in the face. Immediately, I pulled over and called the police, then went to look to see if there was any slim chance the man might still be alive. I saw his leg, severed roughly four to six inches above the knee, on the road near where my car had stopped.
My friend in the backseat was crying her eyes out, and my buddy was amped on adrenaline and shock in the front seat waiting for the police to arrive and remove him from the car. Walking further back, I saw a bunch of people who had stopped to help crowded around the man, I saw his head caved in and a dark pool underneath him before a kind old gentleman turned me away, saying "You don't need to see this". In almost no time at all, the fire department was there helping my friend (who had a broken nose and shards of glass embedded in his eyes and face) out of the car. When the ambulance arrived, they tried to put him in with the man I had hit, which made him freak out and refuse, and wait for another ambulance.
The cops on the scene took down my story and ran a breathalyzer on me, but I hadn't been drinking (at this time in my life, I didn't drink), then put my friend from the backseat and I in the back of a car to try to calm us down while they waited for the investigators to arrive. I had called my mom, who lived outside the city, to tell her I had been in an accident and that she should come for support.
After about an hour, the investigators arrived, took time marking off the scene, and interviewed us again about what had happened (the police were very nice, and all of us were in shock). After interviewing me, I asked the investigator where I could go to the bathroom. He nodded to the trees on the side of the highway, and said to have at it. So I stood on the dimly lit bloody highway near the trees, and under the watchful eye of the 50 block traffic jam I had created, let forth a piss I had been holding in for hours.
Afterwards, they took us back to the local precinct to finish paperwork and meet up with my mom and sisters who were waiting there (after having left my stepbrother with my friend who had been taken to the hospital. They had gotten lost and caught in the same traffic I caused, which is why they didn't meet us at the scene). With the paperwork done, my mom asked what had happened to the man. The officer looked at my little sisters and then asked my mom and I to step outside. "He was DOA. He had been released from prison that morning". I was shocked when he extended his hand to me and thanked me for helping to "clean up the city".
After going to the hospital to get my friend and stepbrother, we went home for the evening. The next day, when we picked up my car from the auto shop, I saw in the meager sunlight the after-image of what had transpired: blood and brain matter all over the front of my car, an imploded front windshield, and, entering the car to take it to a place to get the glass repaired, a large chunk of bloody skull in the passenger's seat next to me, hidden under some napkins.
My friend who had been in the passenger's seat wandered over, and I told him not to look inside, but he wouldn't listen and did anyway. I think that is when the reality of what had happened sunk in for him, because his eyes grew large and he turned around silently to go sit in my mom's car. The entire experience was completely surreal, especially during the drive to get the windshield repaired, when alone, I drove the car to the shop, the wind whistling through the broken glass.
7. I opened my wallet to show some friends I had no money, and a moth flew out.
8. I actually don't tell anyone in real life, but now that this is anonymous... I won millions of dollars in the lottery about 15 years ago & kept it secret. I didn't change my lifestyle much except to (Continued)
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I didn't change my lifestyle much except to buy a modest house and new (used) car. I waited a few years to quit my job. I did not tell a single soul that that I'd won, including family. The only people who know are my accountant & lawyer. A few people noticed I had a little more money than usual, but I told them I inherited a small nest egg.
9. When I was about 5 years old I drove from Mass to Virginia with my family. Upon arrival, my legs just wouldn't work. Eventually my parents took me to the hospital. I went through various testing before being diagnosed with a flesh-eating bacteria. They wanted to amputate. Not sure if the procedure was ever scheduled, but my legs healed magically over night. Turns out my blood sample got contaminated. What really happened was I had sat on my legs the whole car ride there. 15 years later and I've retained all appendages thus far.
10. My brother and I made a fake earthquake video and convinced several tv stations of its authenticity.
I had just gotten home from work and was wasting time on the computer. I felt a rumble like a dump truck driving nearby, but it continued for a while and became even more intense. Nothing crazy, I don't live in an area of the world with a lot of seismic activity, but it was strong for the area. Maybe a 6.2. Of course my brother runs out of his room to ask me if I had felt it, and in passing said it was too bad he didn't catch it on video.
My brother at this point was obsessed with YouTube videos. He had his own channel with his small amount of followers, and was always recording himself or anything else. Then I came up with the brilliant idea of faking it. We started recording one of his typical videos, I shook the camera slightly (nothing crazy, just enough to be convincing). He then said something like "what's that?!", runs to grab the camera, and runs outside. All while the camera shake of simply walking was more than enough. We added some earthquake sound-effects we found online, posted it on YouTube, and then it exploded.
We would refresh the page, and almost instantly it maxed out at about 330 views. Then the phone started ringing. It was the weather network. It was CTV. It was tv stations in the city and out. It was the CBC! They were all asking for permission to use the video, to which we very enthusiastically agreed.
Then the interviews started.
My brother chickened out doing an over-the-phone interview with the weather network, so I impersonated him over the phone. They actually made a comment about re-calculating the length of the earthquake based on our video, as what we had seemed to be a few seconds longer than what they had thought had actually happened.
CTV simply ran the video without an interview.
CBC requested an in-person interview that night, so with convincing (and lots of it) my brother and I bused it down to the CBC building downtown, and my brother did an interview with "Connect with Mark Kelly". It was a quick (and awkward) interview, but was worth it. We had officially trolled one of the biggest news broadcasters in the country.
Oh, and the video got about a third of a million views, and very briefly appeared first on the "Most Viewed" page. This was a few years back though, so I don't know if that many views would get to #1 any more.
To answer a few questions:
How did they get our number? No idea. Our last name was on Nathan's account (nathan is my brother, the person you see in the video) so no doubt they tracked us down with that.
Why was he so awkward? He was reluctant to do the interview in the first place. I BEGGED him to do it, since when would we ever get the chance again?! When CBC called, Nathan refused to take the call, so I was the one to do the pre-interview. They asked all the same questions again in person, but Nathan didn't know what to expect.
Where is the original video? It got about 300,000 views (Nathan made a little over $100 from ads) and then he deleted his whole account. I was furious. It was internet history! (for us at least). As others will point out below, there are other videos that used his footage, if you're desperate to watch it.
Are we still in Ottawa? Yeppers.
Something else that was pretty cool that I forgot to mention. Nathan was recognized in public a few times after that. Nothing crazy, but still pretty fun at the time.
11. Around the age of 12 I was diagnosed with severe OCD. I struggled with it so much that (Continued)
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I struggled with it so much thatI had psychiatrists say they could do no more for me, a therapist that made house calls and I've even participated in studies. (Evaluated on the other side of a one way mirror kinda stuff.) Perhaps in desperation, my parents eventually sent me to a psychiatric hospital half way across the country which specialized in the treatment of OCD. I was there for three months until my insurance ran out.
Now I'm 22 years old and I've overcome it so much that nobody (besides family) even realizes anything is/was ever wrong with me. With all these people running around saying "I'm soooo OCD! I eat my M&M's one color at a time!", and them not knowing me back then, I don't even bother divulging a part of my life they would be unable to comprehend the severity of.
12. My story is a bit spooky, hopefully someone will find it a good read.
My mum and I moved into a completely normal/average house when I was about 15. Everything was fine, we loved it. One day I was home "sick" from school and I was messing around on the computer when I heard our garage door open. I freaked out and went down the hall to get my mobile phone and saw the hallway door that connects to the garage opening, I panicked and yelled "get out!!!" and two young boys slammed the door and ran off. I stared crying and called my mum (I don't know why I didn't call the police first) who told me to go next door to my neighbours and she was going to come home from work. When she got home she was speaking to my neighbour for a bit. She (the neighbour) ended up telling us that she thought it was probably the young boy that lived in the house before us... Apparently he sometimes goes around to everyone's houses and "breaks in" and eats their food and watches TV and stuff... And for what ever reason, they were all OK with that. Apparently he came from some sort of broken home and they all felt sorry for him so they didn't call the police. Mum and I were completely unsettled by that and put new locks on all the doors that week. We didn't care if the other neighors were OK with that... We weren't.
A few months pass and nothing ever happens again, we figure he knows we're not cool with his weirdness and doesn't try to break in again. A week or so later I'm in bed asleep and I wake up in the middle of night for no reason at all. I'm not hot or cold, I don't need to pee, I didn't have a nightmare... I just woke up. I had this incredibly uneasy and weird feeling wash over me. I felt like something or someone was watching me and I got completely freaked out. I went into my mum's room and slept in her bed that night. It kept happening a few nights and I thought I was just having nightmares or was getting scared of the dark for some reason. I ended up sleeping in my mums bed for about a week because I was so legit scared of the dark now. I finally worked up the courage to sleep in my own bed one night, but I could barely sleep. I felt totally uneasy and nervous/scared. I got to sleep for a bit but then I woke up again. I looked outside my window and I could SWEAR I saw face/figure of someone standing there. Obviously, I nope'd the hell out and ran back to my mum.
One of the nights I was back in her bed, we were all asleep and feeling fine when I wake up to my dog on the end of the bed, growling. Now, our dog is an old golden retriever and has never growled or barked at ANYTHING. She is a huge wuss and completely placid, she has no problem with strangers, even if someone knocks on the door and comes in, she couldn't care less. So I wake up, all dazed, confused and half asleep. I hear the dog growling and I'm asking her "what's wrong...?". I look up from the bed and I kid you not - there is a (Continued)
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there is a man standing in the door way... With a knife. I screamed like a banshee and the dog started barking at this point. Mum woke up and saw the man too... He went running down the hallway and out the back door. I'm crying my eyes out, the dog is barking her face off and mum is frantically trying to call the police. An HOUR later they finally get here and of course, the dude is gone. Morning comes and we go outside to see that the back gate has had its lock cut with bolt cutters, and the door leading into the house had been smashed in. The cops come in and dust for prints and leave stuff everywhere but at the end of the day, they can't and don't do anything.
We moved out that same day and went to live with my grandma and grampa until we found a new house. Pretty much no one in the family believed us, or thought we were just making it up for attention. (my family are jerks) A few weeks later we get a call from the police and we were shocked to hear that they managed to match the prints to some teenager who just got arrested for breaking into another house.
It's the same guy that was breaking into all the houses in the neighbourhood and used to live in the house we were in. So mum's talking to the cops and some of the neighbours when suddenly someone tells us, completely casually, "Oh yeah, that's the Milat kid." Wait... Did they just say, MILAT? Yeahhhh... Pretty much any Australian will know this last name... Ivan Milat. The serial killer. His NEPHEW was breaking into people's homes... And our home. While we were sleeping. WITH A KNIFE. And people were OK with that.
...So anyway, we move into a new house and forget all about it... Until about a year ago.
Milat nephew gets 43-year jail sentence - NEWS
He and his friend murdered another teenager in the same place his uncle dumped all those bodies. ...WTF!?
So... The guy that broke into our house, watched me while I was asleep and stood in our bedroom doorway with a knife while we were sleeping actually MURDERED another teenager a few years later. Mum and I nearly fell over when we heard about it. No one really believes us... Which pisses me off. But it really happened.
Sometimes when I think back on what could've happened if I slept in my own bed that night, or if the dog didn't bark, or if we never woke up... It really freaks me out. It's also left me with a huge fear of the dark. I get really uneasy if I have to go outside at night by myself or if I wake up in the middle of the night.
