"He Was A Serial Killer": People Are Sharing The Times They Narrowly Escaped A Bad Situation, And Some Of Them Are Terrifying

Note: This article contains mentions of sexual assault, drug use, and attempted kidnapping.

Ending up in situations that are unsafe is terrifying, especially when you remember how close you were to not escaping. I was reminded of this when u/Long-Jeweler-5845 asked folks on Reddit, "What’s your best 'I didn’t just dodge a bullet, but a tactical nuke' story?" And honestly, I wasn't prepared.

20th Century Studios / Via giphy.com

So many of the stories shared were nerve-racking. Here are just some of the responses that gave me goosebumps:

1."Roughly eight years ago, I applied for an opening at Theranos at a job fair. I asked tons of questions about their technology, both in person and in follow-up emails. I didn't get a follow-up interview. Thank goodness."

2."I was snowboarding in Breckinridge, Colorado, when I lost control on some ice and smoked a tree. I broke my femur in half, and the surgeon said if it had broken a centimeter to the left, it would’ve ruptured my femoral artery and I probably would’ve bled to death internally before ski patrol got to me."

—u/jg23101

3."My sailor great-grandfather was shipped out of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, days before the attack that left 2,400 people dead. And most of them were sailors."

4."When I was 16 years old, there was some guy in my city going around breaking into houses and watching women sleep, sometimes fondling them. One night, my mom was spending the night with her boyfriend, and I was home alone. It was 6 a.m. and I woke up for some reason. I was up for like one minute at this point. I couldn't see without my glasses, so I was just mindlessly staring out of my open window, when some guy just started climbing in! I screamed at him and he dropped back down, then ran away. By the time I got my glasses on, he was long gone. They caught him a few months later. I don't sleep with my windows open anymore."

5."I used to hook up with guys on Craigslist. I was going through a really self-destructive phase of my life. I was supposed to meet up with this one guy, and I was on the way to his motel room when I got a text from him. It was a picture of me and it said, 'I got a new toy for us this week.' The message was clearly meant for someone else. I don’t know who it was for, but we'd only talked about us two hooking up, and for that night. I left."

—u/cleaning-meaning

6."I was about 11 years old, and my dad wanted me to come along with him to pick up some furniture about 30 minutes away. I made a huge stink about it because I wanted to stay at home and play. He finally got fed up, told me he'd be back soon, and stormed out. About an hour later, he came home in a police car. He was shaken up and just reached over and hugged me hard. He'd been driving down the highway and traffic got busy. This semitruck in the lane over tried to stop too late and jackknifed. When it was coming to a stop from swerving all over the road, it fell over on the passenger side of my dad's car, right where I would have been if I had gone along with him. The car was totaled, with the entire passenger side crushed down flat. My dad was lucky he made it out alive. If I had been with him, I wouldn't have been."

7."When my dad was younger, he used to sell motorcycles for a living and frequently rode them as well. He never wore a helmet. One day, he decided to wear a helmet, for whatever reason. A car T-boned him that day. He went flying from his motorcycle and skidded across the road. His helmet was sanded down from the impact and subsequently skidded on the road. Despite the major back, shoulder, and hip problems he has to this day, without that helmet, he probably would've ended up as a red smear on the road."

8."I found out via Facebook that my ex-girlfriend got impregnated by and married her cousin about three months after we broke up."

—u/Bipolar_Bear505

9."One night when I was 9 years old, I was with my two brothers and my mom's friend's three kids. We were playing at a school playground near my mother's friend's house. It was probably 8 p.m. My brother was the oldest at 14 years old. We noticed a group of men in a white SUV watching us. They continued to drive back and forth from the playground we were at. Every time we tried to go back to my mother's friend's house, they would turn sharp and race in front of us. The house was probably 100 yards away. And every time we tried to turn the other way and run to other houses, they'd block us again. It happened for about 10 minutes straight. Eventually, we noticed one of the men jump out of the backseat. Legit 15 seconds later, my mother pulled up to the close side of the playground to pick us up to go home. We jumped in the car and raced home while most of us were crying from fear."

"Then we made s'mores. Definitely a memory."

—u/letmegetthatshib

10."I was driving on an old bridge on a country road in Missouri. I was the last person to cross before it fell. I looked in my rearview to see what the noise was, only to see open air where there should have been road, and horrified people who were just about to cross as well. The pillars beneath the bridge were gone."

11."I've been into superhero movies since Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. I dated a movie buff in high school, and after a few years, we got into the habit of just going to see them when they came out in theaters at midnight. The night we were supposed to see The Dark Knight Rises, I had just worked overtime at the office supply store I'd been working at for years, just a few miles from the nearest theater. When my boyfriend picked me up, I was so exhausted that we skipped the movie and just slept. The next morning, I woke up to 30 missed calls from my mom, and the neighbor banging our door down. My boyfriend had already left for work, so I was home alone. Everyone assumed we went to the midnight premiere, because we always did. If I hadn't taken on the closing shift and worn myself out, I would have been sitting right in the center of one of two theaters at Century 16, where someone dressed in riot gear had walked in and opened fire on the theater."

12."In March 2020, I was backpacking in South America. My return ticket from Santiago, Chile, back to Toronto was for March 17. I was aware of what was happening in Wuhan, China, with COVID-19, and tracking its spread. A week before my flight, my husband back in Canada suggested extending my trip, since things were apparently better in South America. It was hard to reach Air Canada, so we were taking turns calling to change the date on my ticket. Then the atmosphere suddenly changed in Santiago. It was very weird. It went from 'Meh, we're fine' to 'Crap, we're in trouble too.' I called my husband and told him I had to be on the March 17 plane. The last few days in Santiago were hectic, and I was one of the lucky few with a return ticket right before flight cancellation and border closures. I'm glad I didn't change my ticket."

—u/Xiaozhu

13."I sold my townhouse. About two weeks after the closing date, I got an email from the condo board saying that all residents of those townhouse condos needed to pay the board $10,000 for roof repairs and other various expenditures."

Comedy Centrall

—u/Dude_Bro_88

14."When I was a young child, I was outside playing with the hose by myself. A man stopped at my fence and asked me to come over. I walked over; he leaned down and picked me up. I started kicking at him and he dropped me almost immediately, then just walked away. I ran inside, hid in my closet, and never told a single person. I'd almost forgotten about it, or thought I had imagined it, until years later when my mom was telling me about how they recently solved a cold case of a man who kidnapped and murdered a girl around my age at the time from our neighborhood, and left her body in a field a few miles from our house."

15."There were a few days where all my appliances were breaking down. First the clothes washer, then the air conditioner, then the dishwasher. Then one morning, before I left for work, the refrigerator stopped cooling. I was in a terrible mood on my commute to work, and then I had a flat tire in the middle of rush hour traffic. I pulled over to the shoulder breakdown lane. Normally I would have gotten out immediately and started changing it, because I can change a tire in five minutes. But everything breaking in the days leading up to that flat had me defeated. I rested my head on the steering wheel for a few seconds and said out loud, 'Why me?' Almost as an answer, a car hit me from behind. Traffic slowed, and an ambulance decided to go around the traffic by driving in the breakdown lane, crashing right into me. I would have been taking my jack and spare out at that moment and been crushed between my car and the ambulance."

16."A boy I dated ghosted me. It hurt, but I turned out okay. Two years later, I saw his picture in the newspaper — he'd been arrested for sexually assaulting underage girls."

—u/initforthegoss

17."Back around 2000, I worked at a sandwich shop at a mall. A coworker and I talked about rolling on Ecstasy, but she was out of my league, and I wasn't sure if she was serious. I finally got hooked up with some Ecstasy, so we set up a night to take it together at her house, just us two. A couple of nights before then, we closed the store together. Three guys she said were her brothers were waiting for her at the mall entrance. I went to go back into the store and saw her give them a suspicious nod, and she high-fived the bigger guy before they walked out. This raised major red flags. The night of, I told her that I might not come because I was tired. She convinced me, out of what felt like panic on her part, to still come. She confirmed everything again over landline, since this was before I had a cellphone, and I headed over. The directions put me out in the middle of nowhere to a dirt road that led into the mountains. A mile from the house, I started to freak out."

18."I met this one guy who was a mutual friend when I was a young adult. I thought he was cute. I gave him my social media info, and we chatted back and forth for a little bit. I moved away from the area not long after we met. After I moved, he messaged me constantly, asking me to come to his house, attend parties with him, visit his area so he could buy me a drink, and so on. I politely declined every time. This went on for literally a year. Eventually, I entered into a committed relationship. Shortly after, he asked if I had a boyfriend; I said yes, and he proceeded to send me a bunch of pictures of his penis. I instantly blocked him. Two years later, I found out through mutual's friends that he had been accused of drugging and sexually assaulting several women."

19."I went to Boston University and lived less than a mile from the finish line of the Boston Marathon. In 2013, my friends and I had decided that we were going to walk down to the finish line to see the end of the race, after a 'light' 9 a.m. drink, as was tradition for college students on that marathon Monday. We got way too drunk and decided to go to McDonald's instead. Because of that, we avoided being at the site of the Boston Marathon bombing."

20."When my dad was a young boy, he was approached by a man who wanted some change to make a phone call. My father gave the guy some money, and the guy said it was too much and that he wanted to give my father some change. My father got in the car with him so that they could go and get some change. While driving, something seemed off. Freaked out, my father jumped out of the car at a stop sign and ran away. He didn’t think about it again until years later when he saw the same guy on TV. It was John Wayne Gacy."

—u/mattibbals

21."I used to go to raves in the late '90s. One weekend, my friends went to a rave, and I had to stay home to watch my little sister. About a dozen people in my friend group went and ended up buying what they trusted was Ecstasy. It wasn't. It was para-methoxy-methamphetamine (PMMA). Half a dozen of them had seizures or convulsions and ended up in the hospital. One of them I am still in touch with has severe kidney issues to this day as a result."

22."A long time ago when he was younger, my dad was trying to hitchhike back to his house. Some young adults, visibly drunk, pulled over to pick him up. Whenever he'd reach for the handle, they would drive off. They kept doing that until they eventually just sped off down the road, went airborne over the next hill, and crashed their car. They all died."

—u/medkitjohnson

23."My family and I were in Texas, leaving Six Flags, when this huge storm hit. I was in a wheelchair because I'd hurt my foot, so I almost always sat in the passenger seat. We’d had a disappointing day at the park and I just wanted to get home, but my younger sister just had to get a funnel cake. So I was already very annoyed with her when she asked me for the front seat. I was going to say no, but it was already such a bad day, and I didn’t want the hassle of arguing. So I sat in the middle row with my other younger cousins. Fifteen minutes later in the pouring rain, we hydroplaned on the highway. We slammed into a concrete railing so hard that the car flipped twice in the air and landed on the roof. Everyone was okay, and we all climbed out of a broken window. On the passenger-side door, the metal frame had caved in and missed my sister's head by half an inch. I’m 2 inches taller than she is. If I'd been sitting there, it would’ve caved in right on my skull."

Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.

If you or someone you know has experienced sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE, which routes the caller to their nearest sexual assault service provider. You can also search for your local center here.