People Are Sharing The Most Terrifying Things They've Witnessed, And A Lot Of Them Are Heartbreaking
Note: This post contains mentions of violence, drug use, death, child abuse, gore, and attempted suicide.
Part of the human experience is witnessing events we wish we'd never seen. It's important to talk about them though, or else these tragedies will go untold. So when u/relaxito27 asked people about the scariest thing they've ever witnessed firsthand, I stepped out of my comfort zone to read them.
ABC / Via giphy.com
If I'm being honest, I wasn't prepared.
Here are some of the unfortunately horrifying responses:
1."At a job I used to work at, my boss had a heart attack in his office and died in the middle of the shift. The office lights were motion-activated so we thought he left to go do something as it was dark. I went into the office to get a new radio and there he was, leaned back in his chair with his eyes wide open. Scariest thing I've ever seen."
2."In late May 2013, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Moore, Oklahoma. Two days later, a tornado warning was sent out. We saw the clouds get darker as time went on, and then I saw a blockage of cloud touch the ground. I watched as that thing grew and came toward town, with the sirens blaring all around. It was simultaneously the most horrifying, yet most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my entire life. I stood there for about a minute before I got pulled away and brought down to the storm cellar."
"When we came back up, all that was left was the foundation of the house."
3."When I was 9 years old, I was in Florida at this arcade/pizza joint. I went to the bathroom and saw on a stall wall a boy's name and that it said he was there. Fast-forward to me back in Indiana, when I was sitting in front of the TV watching Unsolved Mysteries. They began to talk about an abducted boy for whom the only clue they had was that bathroom stall and his name written in it. It gave me chills and then nightmares for weeks where I saw his name carved out in the stall."
4."I arrived at an accident about 30 seconds after it occurred. It involved a friend of mine. She was driving, rolled the car, and wasn't wearing a seatbelt. She was thrown clear from the car and hit a tree. I found her. I did first aid and helped the paramedics lift her onto the stretcher and into the ambulance."
"Her body stopped functioning about a week later. I think she died on site from massive brain trauma and it just took a while for the end."
5."Two drunk guys who were homeless started fighting and one got pushed down onto the Miami Metrorail tracks, with a train visible in the distance. He wasn’t able to stand on his own and nobody was helping. I jumped down and forced him back up as someone else pulled him onto the platform. I made it back up with only, like, 20 seconds before the train came."
"I was afraid I would be electrocuted or wouldn’t have been able to get him back up in time and would’ve had to leave him."
6."I hit the local bar to get some carryout and a growler. I saw a friend outside and chatted for maybe three minutes when another guy took a step, tripped, and face-planted hard into a 'stepped' area of concrete. He began convulsing and vomiting uncontrollably, could not speak, and was bleeding profusely from his head, nose, and ears. In the blink of an eye, this guy was within minutes of dying. He hit the concrete so hard that his nose was shattered and his skull split open across his forehead. The EMTs were stunned when they got there and got him out of there as fast as possible. The scariest part was the speed at which it happened. People were standing so close to this guy, but he went down so fast and hard that there wasn’t time to react and catch him."
"The bartender came out and washed more blood and vomit than I’ve ever seen from the pavement with buckets of hot bleach water. The violence of the impact was shocking."
7."I saw someone slip and fall from the top of Half Dome in Yosemite. I'm a first responder and have seen bad things, but I have control for the most part in those situations. Watching someone tumbling to their death and knowing nothing can be done was hard."
"Certainly didn't help my fear of heights either."
8."When I was maybe 7 years old, my cousin and I were playing outside. We went into the front yard and saw my brother in his car with his friend. Their eyes were closed, heads back against the headrests, windows rolled up on a hot summer day. Then, they started making these odd jerking movements with their arms and heads. Being kids, my cousin and I thought they were just being silly and messing with us. But when we noticed the drool and that they weren’t responding, we got scared and got my parents. We didn’t know at the time but we were watching my brother and his friend overdose."
"I don’t know what they took. I probably never will. My parents sent us in the house while they took care of them. They thankfully survived, but that image of them passed out in the blue, '90s Toyota will stick with me forever."
9."I was doing maintenance work in a mortuary alone and heard a death rattle, which occurs when the gasses in a corpse expand and make a lifelike noise, from a body bag that the mortician had just wheeled in."
10."I was working the graveyard shift at a convenience store and was in the back office, stoned, playing Medieval II: Total War, when the door chime rang. I looked over at the CCTV monitor. A guy with a ski mask and gun had just walked in. I jumped up and slammed the office door shut and locked it. The guy took two steps toward the office, paused, then jogged out the front door. Usually these things end up okay but I’ve always had the feeling that if I had been out front, I wouldn’t have survived."
11."I saw an old man slip and die at a bus stop in Portland early in the morning when I was a teenager. It was sad, but what really shook me was the aftermath: He was picked up by an ambulance, the sidewalk was washed off, the washers left, and within 15 minutes, people were occupying that space waiting for a bus. It was like it had never happened."
"Saw the aftermath of a teenager who fell at a skate rink and hit her head on a concrete step that surrounded the skating surface. Dead right there. Ambulance came and carted her off. Then, everyone started skating again. Was so strange."
12."I remember one time when we were camping, my family was hiking around on this big rock and it starting getting cloudy. My dad and siblings climbed up to the top of the rock, but my mom and I decided it was too steep for us. My dad reached up into the air and said he could feel static on his fingers. My little sister's hair started standing up a little and my dad was just standing there with my brother, laughing at the staticky feeling he got when he reached up. My mom and I tried to convince him to come down but he wouldn’t. I was terrified watching my little sister's hair stand up and my dad not doing anything about it."
"Eventually, he ended up getting down and no one was hurt. He’s a good dad, but sometimes he can be a moron. He didn’t think the situation was that serious, even with my mom and I freaking out."
13."I'm a healthcare provider here and I was in my second year of school and on clinical rounds for the summer. Next to my last day, I visited a cancer patient who wanted to leave against medical advice to go home, see his cat again, and die in peace. No problem, homie. I literally want you to go see your cat. So I continued rounds until we heard a code called. I rushed back to find him literally spewing blood onto his bed and the floor. The guy’s tumor in his lungs had ruptured. He went unresponsive and I watched him go through 10 minutes of CPR before we called it. I had never watched someone die before that."
14."I saw a person fall out of the back of a pickup going 65 mph. He hit the ground and rolled, then stood up. His baseball cap did not fall off. The truck he was in did not stop. I almost ran over him because he fell into my lane. It was clear he was in a little shock, so I walked him over to the side of the road and called 911. He only had a mild case of road rash since he was wearing short sleeves."
"I can't imagine what happened when the people got to their house before someone said, 'Where's Bill?'"
15."I saw a dead body whose skin was literally moving because of all the maggots under it."
16."I was driving on the highway and a truck hauling a bunch of lumber almost went off the shoulder, swerved into my lane coming right for me, then swerved back into its lane and tipped over and went into the ditch. I pulled over and puked because I was so scared."
"A guy behind me went and helped the driver out and called EMS and everything. Everyone was alright but it was very frightening."
17."I was about 8 years old. My mom and I had just pulled into the McDonald's parking lot. A man came out, dragging his son by the collar. The kid was about 13 years old. He was crying. The man grabbed the boy by the throat and slammed his head against the wall. I distinctly remember the boy's choked-off screaming. The man pinned him against the wall and hit him with a closed fist. My mom immediately called 911 and stepped out of the car to yell at the man, telling him to stop. He called my mom a bitch and told her to mind her own business. The cops came and they interviewed me and my mom, then the boy and his father. Then, they let the man go home with his boy. The cops said they didn't see anything so they couldn't prove anything. I begged them to stop the man. They ignored me, got in their car, and left. It was the most scared I'd ever been up until that moment, watching the cops drive away and the black pickup with the dad and his son drive away as well."
I remember being frantic, terrified. I will never forget that kid or how scared I was seeing him hurt, then seeing people just let him get hurt more."
18."I was a 25-year-old tram driver. I almost hit a group of teenagers who ignored all the warning signs, causing me to hit the emergency brakes and injure four of the passengers in my tram, who fell to the floor due to the sudden stop of the tram. I swear, in that moment I saw those kids, I just hit the brakes, closed my eyes, and prayed I didn't feel an impact."
"That was by far the scariest thing in my life so far. I was traumatized for two weeks and needed to take off work to go to therapy."
19."I was working at a chemical plant and saw a guy in a forklift truck make a turn too fast. He wasn't wearing his seatbelt and the top of the cage landed on his head. I froze for a moment. It was so horrifying. I then ran over and killed the ignition. Some other workers came and we lifted the cage up high enough to pull him out, but it was obviously too late. I can still remember his blood running down a nearby drain."
20."While in college, I took my girlfriend climbing in a wildlife management area. At her request, we camped overnight. It was my first time doing so. About midnight, the place came alive with people on ATVs shooting guns at who knows what. I told my girlfriend that we should leave and she thought that I am overreacting. After about an hour or so, people were driving right past our tent, and we were camped back in the middle of nowhere — the place is over 10,000 acres. So I told her we were leaving. About 2 a.m., I get out of the tent and there were two grown men, both probably in their 40s, standing against a tree staring at me. They didn’t have a car or ATV anywhere nearby. They had walked up on us very quietly. I was immediately freaked out. One looked right at me and said, 'We were just wondering what your girlfriend’s name is.' At this point, I was about to shit my pants and I had a small pistol in my pocket. So I pulled it out and aimed it at the two men."
"They immediately started acting like normal people, apologizing their asses off, and acted like I was overreacting. I told the two guys to start walking down the dirt road away from our campsite. That’s when one of them reached down. I realized that there were two rifles leaned against the tree behind them. I told them to leave the guns and that I'd drop them off at the station at the main gate. We argued for a few seconds and I had to cock my pistol to convince them to leave. Those assholes finally start walking off and I had their flashlights and guns.
I could see them in the moonlight walking down the road, and I was sure that one or both still had pistols on them. I yelled for my girlfriend to get in my truck, but she was hysterical and refused to leave the tent. We started arguing because I didn't want to take my eyes off of the two guys who were now 400 feet down the road and just standing there, staring back toward us. I finally ran over to the tent, got her, and we jumped in my truck. We left everything at the campsite, other than the guns and her sleeping bag, which she had wrapped around her."
21."War. I'm a frontline Army veteran and was deployed to Iraq in 2003. War is hell."
22."My mom called me at midnight asking me to go check on my dad. She was worried about him but didn't say exactly why. I found him drunk in the woods behind the house, sitting on a stump with a pistol in his mouth. I spent the next 40 minutes sitting there talking him down. He eventually gave me the gun and went to bed. I'll never get over it."
23."I was diving in the Florida Keys on a very popular reef, about 30 feet deep, just kind of exploring. I came around this one corner of the reef, and about 10 feet from me was the biggest bull shark I had ever seen. It was just coming toward me. This thing was at least 9–10 feet long. I’ve never pulled my dive knife out faster."
"Thankfully, it just went on its way and swam right past me. I did run my hand along it as it swam by, which was awesome."
24."I saw a car accident between a motorcyclist and a car. The cyclist's head rolled to the sidewalk near me."
25."I watched both World Trade Center towers come down from a few blocks away. I had serious PTSD for about 15 years."
26."Holding my dad's hand and watching him flatline, then die after pulling him off the machines."
27."I live in Myanmar. During the 2020 election, Aung San Suu Kyi's party won by a landslide. The military accused Suu Kyi's government of voter fraud, overthrew the government, and started a bloody campaign against anti-coup protesters and random civilians. There are videos of protesters getting shot. I remember clearly two civilians just minding their own business on a motorbike, only to get killed by a drive-by and loaded onto a pickup truck. Over 1,400 people were killed by the Myanmar military."
"Many civilians, especially young people, have turned to guerrilla warfare across the country since May 2021."
28."I saw a head-on collision between two SUVs on a remote road, 100 km from the closet hospital. I was first on the scene. I pulled bodies from burning vehicles after breaking windows. My shirt caught on fire pulling people out. Me and two other people attempted CPR on four of the six people, until they died in our arms. Many of them were missing body parts or CPR was not possible due to severe facial injuries. One man kept reaching up to me, asking if he was going to die. He told me he couldn’t breathe, and his lungs were perforated. I told him he was loved and was with people who cared for him. The vehicles caught on fire, causing a forest fire all around us that had to be put out with a helicopter hours later. I found a baby lying facedown on the road and placed it on whom I thought was the mom while doing CPR. In the end, the baby and mother were the only ones of all eight who lived. So many people's lives were destroyed that day. I still have PTSD from the experience."
"During the hour that it took for EMS to get to the scene, a bear walked through the scene, probably due to the smell of blood, and we had to constantly scare it away. I watched two people burn to death because I could not reach them through the fire. I tried to save them. I was covered in blood, body fluids, and bone chips. I found a tooth in my pocket after.
The smells, sounds, and textures were all so vivid that I often get flashbacks. I’m emotional writing this. Since then, I have had many horrifying dreams, but the dreams that stand out most are dreams of meeting the people who died. In the dreams, they tell me positive words of encouragement and appreciation. They even laugh and joke about life. It’s weird. I tried everything I could do to help, I promise. I tried."
29."I've seen gang drive-by shooting happen right in front of my home. When I was 12 years old, a large group of people tried to kill this guy on our front yard. We got him inside and his attackers tried to get into our house to kill him and my family. My dad handed me a knife and told me, 'Whatever happens, whoever comes in, you fight for your life.' The cops didn't pick up the phone when we called over and over. We had to call a friend to call for us. I was fully prepared to kill whoever I had to to survive that night."
30."I was a skydiving instructor for a couple years. There was a really cocky kid who went through our program. He was bad at listening and barely tested into the solo jump phase. I didn’t have the authority to kick him out. His first jump, he had a poor free fall (not uncommon), but not terrible canopy work. During his second jump, he didn’t follow radio directions. He turned without looking, and his parachute wrapped around another student's, obstructing that student’s vision and mobility. At this point, with the first kid hanging by a collapsed canopy wrapped around the second kid at 1,000 feet off the ground, they're trained to ride it down since neither is moving at a dangerous speed. But the cocky kid didn't follow our radio directions. He cut away his first parachute, to go back into free fall and allow his reserve to deploy. Watching from the tower that day, I thought I'd witness him bounce off the ground. Fortunately, the reserve deployed immediately."
"Fortunately, we had some of the best riggers in the country working for us. Almost right after the reserve fully deployed, that kid touched down on the ground. He couldn’t have cut it any closer. Suffice to say, this kid didn’t get to jump again."
31."I hit a priest who was riding a bicycle with my car when I was a teenager in the '90s. I remember his head breaking my windshield and thinking he was dead. Luckily, he had a helmet and did not get very injured besides a few bruises."
32."I worked for an equipment assembly company back in the '70s, in the machine shop on day shift. I usually went in early so I could have a smoke and a cup of coffee before I started my shift. There was a woman who ran the turret lathe on third shift, and I always took over after her. I didn’t know her well, just that she was pretty and had long silky hair. One morning, I heard a scream, then people scrambling and lots of shouting. I ran over to the source of the noise. It was that woman. Her long hair had gotten tangled on the piece of bar stock she had been working with."
"It had grabbed her hair and ripped her scalp off, from the back of her head to the tip of her nose. When I got there, it was still spinning around. I’ll never forget that wet slapping sound it made. I hit the emergency stop. Somebody had grabbed towels and stuff and wrapped her head and was trying to keep her calm, but she was hysterical. It was bad. Real bad."
33."Sept. 12, 2001. I drove into DC after 9/11. The major highway leading in was void of all cars, except mine. Instead, there was a storm of trash and debris blowing around."
34."I worked with a lady with dementia. Weird things happened often, but creepy things often do in others' homes. But once, I was sitting on her bed, doing her nails, and she asked, 'Who’s that man?' and pointed to the foot of her bed. I looked, prepping my normal response, when I saw an indentation at the edge of the bed rise like someone just stood up. She followed him with her finger."
35."Me and my friends were climbing up and jumping off of a partially collapsed dam. The side with deep water was probably a 15-foot drop and you had to climb up the slick concrete to jump off again. The left half of the damn was whole, and you could walk along the top. The right half was collapsed and had about an inch of water over it. The collapsed part was rubble with rebar and all kinds of sharp metal sticking out. I was climbing on the corner, partially over water, partially over the collapsed part, when I slipped about one foot from the top. My friend at the top grabbed the back of my life jacket at the last second and held me. For a few seconds, I was fully suspended over a 60-foot drop with bad shit at the bottom."
"I managed to get a hold of the damn wall again and climb back up. I owe that guy my life."
The National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline is 1-888-950-6264 (NAMI) and provides information and referral services; GoodTherapy.org is an association of mental health professionals from more than 25 countries who support efforts to reduce harm in therapy.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org. You can also text TALK to 741741 for free, anonymous 24/7 crisis support in the US and UK from the Crisis Text Line.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
#29 in this article has been updated to add in context of the user's original story — it previously omitted "I've seen gang drive-by shooting happen right in front of my home."
