My friend and I were ghost hunting in an abandoned ghost town in OR. We were there pretty late in the night and literally heard so many whispers and she swear she saw a man following us so that’s was our queue to leave ASAP.

Everyone’s hair started levitating. I freaked out and insisted we all leave the mountain top lookout immediately.

Massive bolt hit our prior location about a minute later.

When I was 16, I took the city bus to school and we had bus tickets that you could buy at the local corner store. The corner store was a 3 block walk from my house, and I was going there one day to buy a sheet of tickets. As I set out walking, a man in a white van slowed down to whistle/shout sexual things, which is sadly something that teen girls experience regularly - that occurrence was just another usual day.

But then, the man started circling the block over and over as a method to follow me. When I hit the Main Street he pulled into a gas station to pause and see which business would go into. And when I entered the convenience store, he parked the white van in front and stood on the front steps smoking and blocking all exit points.

I asked the convenience store clerk if he had a back exit I could run away through. He did not, but the man went to the front steps and yelled at the man and got him to leave. He parked across the street still watching, so I waited in the store until I saw ANY bus coming to the nearby stop and immediately got on. I took that to a crowded shopping mall and passed enough time until I felt that I could get back to what I was planning to do that day.

Life is disgusting for teen girls.

Not very exciting, but loved hanging out on beaches on the west coast. This one went from a dock to a nice sandy beach that was bordered by a clay cliff. Well, a friend and I roll up and run quite a distance (ah, youthful energy!) exploring along the clay cliffs when the waves get weirdly big and loud. I guess the tide was actually coming in, not going out, and the cliffs weren’t climbable. Only way safely out was off the beach and back to the dock. The stretch we were on wasn’t even accesible at high tide, totally underwater. My friend was a big fella, but he tucked it in and ran with me like Ive never seen him run before. We were fine, but I remember feeling that realization strike.

This is bending the prompt somewhat, but I was once almost struck by lightning. I was walking home through a park, and based on how soon I had been hearing the thunder after each flash of lightning, the storm was basically right on top of me. I was feeling pretty nervous, and tried to take a route with minimal tall trees, but I was a teenager and didn’t know what else to do but to keep heading home

All of a sudden, I was filled with a sense of foreboding, and I felt an overwhelming instinct to get away from where I currently was. It was so strong that I dove off to the side, before I heard one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard. Based on where the lightning had seemed to hit, I was very lucky, as it looked like I would have been caught in it had I been standing where I was a moment before. I assume that the wrongness I was feeling before I jumped aside was subconsciously recognising the electric charge buildup in the air or something. I don’t know.

Either way, I’m glad I jumped. In an alternate timeline, I’d have dove and felt very silly after nothing at all happened. Or alternatively, I might have jumped aside and still been affected. Who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I served a mission for the Mormon church in Russia. One of my companions (the other teenager who is assigned to you as a stranger and must stay within earshot of you at all times for the next few weeks or months) was really enamored with the idea of tracting, or going door to door asking people if they want to talk about Joesph Smith. He had watched too many Mormon missionary movies and was very disappointed to discover the Russian Federation has made tracting illegal. But he really wanted to do it, so we rang a random apartment and claimed to be a postman and snuck into an apartment building to knock doors.

Things started off okay. Russians generally have two doors, a normal wooden door on the inside, and a thick, metal fire door with five deadbolts (three in the wall, and one in the door and ceiling). Mostly, folks would open the inner door, ask what we wanted and then tell us to go away (fair, considering what we were doing was as rude as it was illegal).

But then we got a nibble! A single man invited into his home. The first thing that seemed kinda strange was that he locked and bolted the fire door. This was a little strange — usually people would leave the fire door ajar when they had guests and only lock the inner door — but not enough to really spook me. He led us into the kitchen and made a quick pot of tea and we launched into the first discussion.

The discussions are pretty well rehearsed. The first one, if I recall, has eight parts, and we would give them in sequence — I would do the first part, then say the handover phrase and look significantly at my companion, and he would do the second, then hand it back until either the investigator got bored or we got to the call to action, where we issued some thing we wanted them to do — come to church, pray, read the Book of Mormon, what have you. My companion was starting this round, and was pretty invested in preaching so I don’t think he really noticed as our investigator lit a cigarette, put out the match in a tumbler, filled the tumbler with vodka, and shot the vodka and match together. He made the handoff, though, so at least I could start to figure out a way out of the situation.

Pretty quickly into my segment, the investigator derailed the conversation. Turns out his wife had just given birth to twins, and the prognosis was poor — he was worried they wouldn’t make it. He grasped a kitchen knife and he told me that if god was going to take his newborns from him, he intended to take us from god. I don’t think I ever in my life spoken better Russian, beautiful, flowing, eloquent, explaining it wouldn’t help his suffering and offering prayers and blessings on his children’s behalf. He had this gleam in his eye that really unnerved me, and I really felt I was pleading for my life.

Until my companion finished his tea, and the investigator seemed to forget the whole line of questioning in his haste to be a good host. I quickly made some excuse, but apparently my companion had completely tuned out because he launched into the next part of the discussion as if nothing had happened! I cut him off pretty quick and told him we needed to go, now. When we finally got out of the apartment, I sat down on the top step and began to sob, and my companion looked down at me, amazed, and asked what happened — apparently he had no idea we were ever in any danger.

In any event, I’ve never gone door-to-door soliciting ever again.

It wasn’t an immediate turn heel, and leave moment, but my wife and I had talked about moving out of Texas for a while. Mainly driven by our son with special needs. We had been paying tens of thousands dollars a year for therapy and constantly fighting with his school to get the services he needed. Then last year things went downhill fast. We ended up pulling him out of school because one of the teachers told us they found him in the parking lot laying under a car. Not surprised he would do that, he is opposed with cars and especially exhaust systems, but he was supposed to have a paraprofessional with him all day, so we really wondered how he got away like. Unfortunately, he has communication problems, so he couldn’t tell us. We had already been in talks with a lawyer about bringing a lawsuit to challenge the services they were offering. But his IEP already said he was supposed to have a para with him. When the lawyer told us it would cost $10-15k just to bring a lawsuit to force them to do what they are already legally required to do, we decided that was it. We were leaving Texas.

We ended up in Connecticut and it was the best decision we ever made. There are so many services here for him. He is truly thriving. My wife and I don’t immediately tense up when we see the school calling. I broke into tears during my first meeting with them because it was all about what they could do for him. Versus every meeting ever in Texas where they made us feel like he was a burden on the school.

My wife and I were on vacation at a beach town in Europe with lots of really cool old things to see. A local said he knew of a cool thing off the beaten path a little. Like idiots we followed him for a little bit until we realized by off the beaten path a little, he meant completely away from everyone. We noped out of that before he got us completely isolated so he and his friends could likely jump us.

Nowhere near as high-stakes as some of the others here, but…

When I was 16 or so, I was hanging out with a few friends and one of them pulled out a joint and a bottle of some kind of liquor, and started passing it around. I got a really bad feeling about it and bailed on it.

Found out the next day that after I’d left, they’d gotten pretty drunk and/or high, and had decided it would be a good idea to take one of their mother’s minivan for a drive around their property. They scraped the side of it on something, took off a huge bit of paint, and then decided the best course of action would be to use some spray paint they found in the garage to try and cover it up.

They were all grounded for quite a long time, a fate I managed to avoid by leaving when I did.

Here’s one of mine.

‘04 some friends and I had planned a trip to Canada. We left right before Charley is hitting and really churning up the atmosphere. We made our way up the east coast seeing people we know along the way. Now it’s time to go through the Poconos. It was my vehicle but I wasn’t driving. So I’m watching the clouds and I’m like that looks bad. But we keep driving. I keep watching and finally I’m like no we have to get off now. So we exit and pull into a fast food place as it starts dumping hail on us. We run to the door and people were looking up. We were like what the heck. They said a tornado was spotted and headed this way.

We never saw the actual tornado but yeah that was fun.

Till reading a couple of the posts, I’d forgotten about this:

I was about 22, and living with my first roommate. He was a decent enough guy, but got rowdy when he drank with friends. I don’t drink, but as an introvert who was trying to fit in with “normal” people, I went along with the following.

He had some friends over, they were drinking, but not a lot. One of them speaks up about a woman, his manager at work, who they all seemed to know somehow, and hated. They know where she lives, and that she’s not home, so off we all go. I’m just following along, because I want to fit in, and I’m stupid. They break into her house, I go in with them, thinking they might just fuck around and maybe steal some booze, or something. That’s all that’s going on for a few minutes, then someone says, “I’m going to piss on her bed.”, and another one adds, “I’ll shit on her bed.” That was bad enough, in my mind, but someone else ups the threat and says, “We should kill her cat, where is it?”

‘Ugh, what the fuck am I doing here?’, I think. So, I tell my roommate, who wasn’t making stupid threats, but seemed likely to go along with it, that I was leaving. Fortunately, I had driven my own car, because I learned that lesson long before this incident.

According to my roommate when he got home, they did piss on her bed, but did not kill the cat. I moved out soon after that.

I was smoking weed in an alleyway and some homeless dude (HD1) drew a knife on another homeless dude (hd2) and demanded that HD2 let HD1 buy HD2 some meth.

Sucked because it was behind my apartment so getting out was just going inside.

Getting onto a train in Stuttgart, Southern Germany.
A strong smell of beer and cigarettes hits me.
Everyone in the train carriage in front of me wears blue and white football jerseys.
And everyone behind me wears white and red.

And they’ve already started singing songs at each other.

Hiking along through tree covered mountains. Days from civilization no cell service. Other side of the country from anyone I know. Dead tired end of a 26+ mile day. Come around a corner and get a view of a massive wildfire off in the distance just the entire horizon ablaze. Bushwhacked through the rough route of a long abandoned and overgrown side trail just trying to lose elevation roughly following a small river. This is why I lug a compass for when things go sideways. Had managed to reach the father of the only local hiker joining on this impromptu bail out route via my satellite messenger. The wildfire smoke was like chain smoking light cigarettes. We eventually found a ride out of there with the father on dirt fireroad we reached after another days worth of hiking to reach it.

In high school in the late 90s, my friends and I were big mallrats. One time one of the workers invited us to a party that night. We didn’t have anything to do, so we went. Turns out there’s were maybe 20 people there counting us, and the 2 girls that came with me were the only girls there. To make it worse, they were watching hentai on the big screen. And this was the 90s. They had to order that shit somewhere. Anyway, we bailed quick.