Stephanie Barnes
We all have those “gut feelings” we get when something isn’t quite right around us. But there are some people who are so intuitive that their bodies can almost always immediately tell when things are wonky.
In a recent Reddit thread, these people are answering the question: What was your scariest “something’s not right” moment?
The answers are absolutely chilling. There are people explaining how their intuition and quick thinking saved their own lives, while others retell stories of saving the lives of loved ones.
Here are 20 of the scariest “something’s not right” moments, according to Redditors.
1. The moment she realized she was being followed.
One day I was in a parking garage across the street from a courthouse after filing a document (I’m a paralegal). As I’m me, I get off the elevator where I THINK my car is parked and it’s nowhere to be found. This is not unusual so, I start wondering around pushing the button for it to beep. After about a minute of wondering I notice a guy walking around too. He doesn’t appear to be following me but, he’s giving me the creeps anyway so, I keep an eye on him. There is no one else on that level except him and me.
Finally I determine that my car must not be on that level and get in the elevator to go down a level. I get off the elevator and keep an eye on it for a second. The guy doesn’t appear so I brush it off as my paranoia. I start walking around pushing the button again. Then, as I turn the corner, there’s the guy again. So, this time I KNOW he’s following me. I head for the elevators, then I notice that he’s heading that way too and is on par to cut me off and I start to panic. Again, we’re alone on the level.
Just then the elevator doors open and two guys in suits get off. I run up to them and say “THERE you guys are. I’ve been looking for you all over this level and the one above. Where the hell did you guys park?” and I laugh. The guys kind of look at me weird but, to their credit, they don’t even blink and one of them responds with “Oh, sorry, we’re on this level but we brought Tom’s car instead of mine and I forgot to tell you. We’re parked over here” and they lead me away. I see the guy that had been following me stop, stare, then start down the stairs beside the elevator. Once he leaves I tell the guys what had happened and they helped me find my car (it was on the first level, I just never got close enough to hear it beep) and I was safe. To this day I know that guy was waiting for me to find my car so he could do something nefarious.
I avoid parking garages at all costs now. If I’m forced to park in one, I take a picture of where I park so I don’t get lost anymore. I also carry pepper spray on my keychain.
2. Lingering fear…
Late at night, I was sitting in my car waiting for my boyfriend to finish his shift. A guy walks past and we make eye contact. I feel this sense of danger but figure I’m overreacting. A few minutes pass and the fear won’t go away. I finally decide to move my car away from the edge of the parking lot to the front of the restaurant in the customer parking area. I start up my car and just as I’m putting it into drive, the guy rushes out from behind and tries to yank open my door, pulling on it really hard. I hit the gas and he trails me for a second, then hits my window with a rock. I keep going, and he throws the rock at me then runs away. I was shaking so badly, I could barely steer. Pretty sure he was sneaking up on me just as I decided to start my engine.
3. Lightning strike
I was working on a radio system in the local water tower of a pretty remote outback town. It was a beautiful late spring day in October when I got there. But after about two hours, the bird noises stopped. The breeze stopped. I took my equipment out of standby and set it up as a live test, because I had the weirdest feeling I didn’t have time to fully test it. Then I went outside to sit in the car. About 90 seconds later, there was a direct lightning strike on the tower I’d just left — it measured at the highest point of 200 Km.
4. Robbery attempt
I was home alone and someone rang my doorbell. It was dark and I could see a person, but I couldn’t see his face, only a shadow. I asked who it was. I didn’t open the door because he never answered and went back to playing games. However, my dog would look straight at the door like he knew something was not right. After, like, two hours, my parents arrived and told me there were two police cars on our street. Apparently, that person was a burglar and he knocked out one of my neighbor’s windows and stole from their house.
5. Creepy grandma
I was walking to school in middle school and this lady with a car pulled over next to me and called me Linda. That’s not my name, but was close enough I looked up.
She apologized and explained she thought I was her grandkid. Then she offered me a ride to school. Except that I was already standing on the school grounds. I had a half block walk before I needed to turn to walk into the building.
When I said no she tried to demand I get into the car. I said no thanks and took off running. It occured to me much later that she probably had no intention of dropping me off at school.
6. Be careful who you drink with.
I used to have this drinking buddy. He was a regular at the cafe I worked at. Asked if I wanted to grab drinks, okay sure and hence began our drinking friendship. During this time, I was a heavy drinker. Like my roommate and I would usually take five shots to get tipsy kind of thing and then continue drinking throughout the night.
One night this guy asks me to come out with his friends to this pub. I get my own drink first, and then the second drink he offers to buy. I suppose I trusted him at this point, so I didn’t go up to the bar when he went. He comes back and I drink the drink.
I knew something was wrong within minutes. My head started swirling, I was slurring and I felt f–ked up and drunk. Right away I knew I had to leave. He was very vocal about me staying, but I just pushed past him. He followed me outside. Now this is when Uber first started up, so I called Uber from my phone. I was trying to close the door, he was still trying to argue for me to stay. Or perhaps he should come with me to make sure I got home alright. F–k that, I left.
The next day I was asleep all day, I couldn’t really move or get up. I was in and out of consciousness. F-king weird. And why do I think it was him that drugged me? I had put all my cards and my ID into a pocket on the inside of my jacket that was zipped up. They were all gone, and guess who had them? That guy. He went into my f–king jacket and took all my shit so I wouldn’t be able to pay a cab. Jokes on him that Uber had just become a thing.
7. “Sometimes anxiety can be a lifesaving gift.”
During the first lockdown, I hadn’t seen my dad (who lives alone) for three months but we spoke on the phone every day. One night while I was drifting off to sleep at 2 a.m., I suddenly started feeling overwhelming anxiety. I was sweating and just felt like something was off. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I decided to ring my dad since he’s a night owl and would pick up… But to my surprise, no answer. I woke my partner and told him something was really off and my dad hadn’t answered his phone, which had my anxiety running tenfold at this point. He suggested if he still hadn’t answered the phone in the morning, we would drive over and check on him. Still, I couldn’t shake this feeling so at 3 a.m., my partner and I got in the car and drove 3 hours to my dad’s home. When we arrived at my dad’s house, I walked in to find my dad staring at the wall… He was gray and yellow in color.
He was slurring his words and utterly confused about where he was. I immediately called an ambulance. He spent the next four weeks in hospital with acute kidney failure from undiagnosed end-stage liver cirrhosis. The doctor told me if I’d arrived at his home a few hours later, I would have been calling an undertaker and not an ambulance. Sometimes anxiety can be a lifesaving gift.
8. This person just knew…
I had plans to visit my dad one afternoon. I called him in the morning to ask if he needed anything because I was about to go to the store and could easily pick up some things for him. He didn’t answer. A little weird for him but not uncommon. But I had this weird feeling in the back of my head. So I tried again 30 minutes later. Again, nothing. Neither landline nor mobile. I decided to drive over there early and check. I can’t really explain but I just knew that something had happened.
I found him dead in his house. He fell and cracked his head open. To this day, I don’t know what was worse: finding him like that or the 30-minute long drive where the feeling grew that I was going to walk into something like that.
9. The next day
I was driving past a small park close to my home when I noticed two older couples on the sidewalk looking into the park. The women seemed distraught and the men were trying to calm them down from the looks of things. I slowed down a bit and for a second I debated stopping to see if everything was alright, but decided against it and kept on driving. The following day I found out a young person from the area had hanged themselves from a tree in the park and I assume those two elderly couples were the unfortunate ones to make the discovery.
10. Surviving a fire
I was living about five hours away from my parents and spent Easter with them. The plan was to take Monday off work and drive back that day, but for some reason, I decided to go back on Sunday night.
Woke up about three to a weird noise and hit the touch lamp next to my bed. It made a loud popping sound and turned off. Thinking hm, something isn’t right here, I got up and grabbed the bedroom door handle. It was so hot that I immediately pulled my hand back. As it turned out, my entire apartment was in flames.
My living room caught fire from a faulty electric outlet and it spread to the dining room by the time I got up. The only ways out were through the living room to the front door or through the dining room and kitchen to the back door.
I used whatever strength I had to shove my headboard away from the window, broke the window out with my glass, and just screamed. My landlord was letting a guy illegally live in a storage room. He heard me and ran right down the block to the fire station. They actually got me through the window and then put out the fire.
I was hours away from my family, had no money or ID, lost my cell phone and car keys in the fire, and it was only like four am. I ended up losing pretty much everything. My neighbor was nice enough to let me shower at her place and give me some clothes until my parents made the drive.
11. “It wasn’t me that noticed somethings not right…”
Once a woman came up to me on a train that I had gotten on and said “I just wanted you to know that man there is following you” and he was. He followed me (in a quiet way) when I changed trains and I ended up asking a cop to walk me home. It was one of the creepiest experiences of my life. In hindsight I shouldn’t even have gone home. I’m pretty sure he stopped following me when I spoke with the police officer. But still.
12. “I got home from work and as soon as I stepped out of my car, something felt off…”
My upstairs neighbor left his dog out, which wasn’t super uncommon but she was acting strange. That just added to my weird intuition. Normally, she’s super excited to greet me but that day, she just sat by his door. About 20 minutes passed and I still couldn’t shake the feeling. I decided to go to his door and invite him over for a drink. As I approached, I noticed his dog made it inside but now she’s barking nonstop. I knocked and knocked until I was pounding on his door. I jiggled the handle. It’s locked.
I ran down and through my house to a back stairwell that connects our residences. I opened the door to his apartment and he’s convulsing on the ground, struggling to breathe. He had overdosed on Percocet. The paramedics said if they’d been called 10 minutes later, he might not have survived.
13. “One of the dumbest things I have ever done.“
I was tripping on shrooms once with a friend in the dead of winter in Chicago. We were wandering around in the snow because snow is magnificent while tripping. We ended up on the beach near the Planetarium and we just kept walking, not paying attention and focusing on the crunching of the snow and other sights and sounds. I noticed this cool thing that looked like a frozen bubble below me and started stomping on it. Suddenly, I realized why there was a frozen bubble. We were standing on a frozen lake…like, 50 yards out. I called to my friend and told him to not move. We were on the lake and shit was cracking.
We walked back via our footprint trail and made it back safely. Hell of a rush. We could have died by being a bunch of tripping idiots. One of the dumbest things I have ever done.
14. ‘Twas a miracle
I took a class on lighting in a theater. One day, I was using a single-person lift to put myself 20 meters above the floor to change one tiny thing on one light. As I raised the lift closer to the light, I had this strange feeling that got progressively worse. When I inspected it, literally every single safety thing that could be wrong on this very heavy light 20 meters above the crossroads of multiple walkways was wrong and about as wrong as it could be. It was a miracle this light hadn’t fallen off and killed someone yet, because it was about to.
Whichever idiot had managed to screw it up this badly also managed to touch the power coupling to the crazy hot light. The power coupling was melted and somehow still functional. It was a miracle the entire auditorium hadn’t burned down whenever this idiot did this.
It was extremely scary to me as I’d been doing extracurriculars in that auditorium for nine years then and I don’t think that light was touched in that entire time. So every one of the thousands of times I had used that path, my life had been in danger. Every other light in the auditorium was perfectly fine.
15. Parent intuition
I caught some creepy guy trying to expose himself to my 11- year-old daughter. It was a gut feeling to go check on her. I was in another part of a store and walked up just in time. Always follow your instincts and trust your gut.
16. Car troubles
I was driving my car and I started noticing that my steering wheel felt very stiff. I tried to keep driving, thinking it might be low on power steering fluid. After a few minutes though, it became clear something was very wrong, and so I started to pull over. As soon as I turned the wheel, my car lurched to one side and I completely lost steering. I also quickly realized that my breaks didn’t seem to be working and that since I was trying to pull over, my car’s path was leading onto the sidewalk. Thankfully, there was no one on the sidewalk, as my car skidded up onto the curb and stopped just a few feet from a business’s front window.
17. Thank goodness for nosy neighbors, right?
My brother was walking home when he was about 7 or 8 when a man pulled up, demanding to take my brother to the hospital — he was limping since he previously had foot surgery. The man was starting to push my brother into the car when our neighbor, whose kids we used to play with, suspected something was up. She yelled at the man and took my brother inside her house. The police didn’t catch the guy but years later, the guy and his car matched the description of the man who kidnapped Steven Stayner a short time later, which was a famous incident in our parts. Life could have been very different if our neighbor hadn’t been paying attention.
18. Even while asleep, this user realized something was wrong.
I woke up an hour and a half before my alarm and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I got up to make my partner’s lunch. I got up and the front door was cracked open and the living room light was on. My mom was staying with me and had her dog so I assumed she took her outside, but the air around me felt really weird. So I started making the lunch and realized she still hadn’t come in. I opened the door to look outside and saw my mom at the bottom of the porch steps lying in a pool of blood.
19. Her senses were on high alert…
I accepted a ride home from a party from a male friend. We were from a small town. Everyone knows everyone, and my boyfriend had left the party early. My friend said he’d be happy to take me home and I thought nothing of it. Hours later and I am very drunk. He started driving me home. I was playing with the radio and chatting a mile a minute. Some time went by on that 35-minute drive home and it occurred to me he had stopped talking. Something came over me and my senses were on high alert. I was suddenly clearheaded. I noticed we were on a rural road. We lived in the country with all rural roads but this was certainly not our direct route home. And then I looked at his face. He was not there. He was up in his headspace…and I just felt terror.
