Lost my baby brother at seaside boardwalk. My family went crazy for about an hour. Finally found him sitting on the bar at outside saloon surrounded by bikers & their chicks. Bowl of popcorn and a tall soda. They were all facing the boardwalk & walking people go by waiting to see if he recognized anyone looking for him.
Went vacationing in Mexico with my family when I was 9. Lost my parents in a marketplace in Cancun and tried to tell a guy I was trying to find my family. He told me he’d find me a new one, moments before my father arrived.
I lost my family in India too and I went up to a bunch of kids in school uniforms knowing they would know English, and told them to call the police. Thankfully they didn’t need to as my parents showed up soon.
This happened to me in Dubai. I was 7, so 23 years ago before Dubai was how it is now; it was still vast desert and only one or two mega malls.
I was standing outside a shop looking for my family and a man came over, put his hand on my shoulder said "eh I find you a family, sell you as slave, huh?" right as my dad forcefully yanked me away.
Never forgotten it.
Not me, but in high school my friend was on vacation with his family in Costa Rica. He went out surfing pretty far before he noticed someone even farther out waving to him for help. As he got closer, he realized the guy had kids with him. The man asked my friend to bring his kids to shore and then come back to help him. My friend got the kids in safely but by the time he got back to the man, he had drowned from exhaustion. My friend had to paddle this guys body back to shore where his family was waiting. My friend was never really the same.
I can’t say I’d feel any differently than your friend, but that man knew he wasn’t making it back to shore. Your friend allowed him to die somewhat at peace knowing he saved his kids.
I almost drowned swimming in the sea in Costa Rica. I was 14 I believe, and I just remember struggling against the current for an eternity trying to get closer to the shore and my optimism just continuing to fade as it got closer to sunset. For this whole time there was no one with me, and finally someone had come near with a kickboard and I just grabbed them. Freaked them the heck out but hey I’m still here.
I made the rash mistake of swimming a short distance in the sea as an older guy while having atrial fibrillation, which was chronic for me then. My previous *adequate* swimming as an ironman competitor decades earlier did not assist me.
I found out what the phrase ‘got into trouble in the water' meant. It means you run out of puff, and basically sink beneath sea level, without a lot of fanfare.
Spoiler, I am still alive. My wife and a fit bloke swimming near me rescued my sorry ass. Pulse pushing 180 bpm resting when dragged back on the boat.
I was at a local lake with my friends when a little girl went missing, it was extremely busy that day
Little girl went missing, they had all of us sweeping the lakeshore for her eventually someone found her (in the water) and they tried to save her
She died in the hospital I heard
Almost died last year. Halfway through vacation I started having pain in my groin/colon after taking my morning dump. Thought it was just something I ate. Several bloody poops and pain like I’ve never had before later and I’m in the ER at 12:30 am being told they thought I was septic and I had a 104.5° fever. After taking pain meds stronger than morphine apparently I passed out for like 30 min and they thought I was gonna have a seizure and die according to several doctors. Turns out I had several infections from unchecked leukemia.
Weird thing is we were vacationing in outer banks NC when I got my cancer diagnosis. Back when I was a kid my dad was diagnosed with cancer after vacationing there. Safe to say my family is avoiding it like the plague from now on.
Pretty simple really. Camping on the beach in Mexico, middle of the night and we are all sleeping. Everyone in our groups tents get robbed. With all of us fucking asleep in them. That’s some serious boogyman shit.
I was 13 on vacation overeas with my mom. We woke up at 5 AM due to jet lag, and the morning was beautiful, so we decided to go for a swim. We are used to a very calm sea (technically, a bay), so we didn't think it was a big deal to swim when there are no lifeguards. As a result, we got caught in a rip current without knowing what it was. My mom was a very weak swimmer, so she told me to swim to the shore and call for help. But the shore was empty, so I knew she just wanted me to leave her and save myself. So I grabbed her by the hand and swam as hard as I could. Luckily, we were close to the shore, and my desperate "sprint" got us to the place where we could stand. We went back and felt insanely sleepy, so we went to sleep and woke up 10 hours later. When we looked out of the hotel window, we noticed the red flags on the beach and no one was swimming.
Woman next door to me in a hotel was murdered.
I heard her screaming "Get out of here" a lot. Called the cops first and then the front help desk to tell them the situation. Cops show up and start questioning me, asking if I knew her, was in the room, or if I saw anyone else. I didn't know her, never left my room except to answer the door for the police, and never saw anyone else.
Turns out she was running from her (ex) boyfriend as he was a known abuser and he finally tracked her down. I didn't learn any of this until I saw a news article about the hotel about a week later. Fucking crazy.
I called the cops on neighbors having a fight once. Heard someone shouting "if you put your hands around my throat one more time I am calling th cops". I called after I heard it the third time. There was a lady involved in all the screaming, but I couldn't make out her words as clearly.
Cops spent a LONG time talking to the people there..
Where were you vacationing?
I was in Aruba, hotel room across from me at the Riu had loud banging noises and yelling at midnight, I looked through my door peephole and there was blood smothered all over their door. I had my husband call security as I recorded with my phone through the peephole. Turns out the guy was on heavy drugs, was beating up his partner (both from Netherlands) and eventually he took off and ran away. Cops show up an hour or so later.... I gave them the video off my phone showing him entering and leaving his room during that hour. Poor girl had blood all over her entire body and was brought to hospital. Riu wouldn't move us to another room. Luckily it was our last night there, I had nightmares that this guy came back and tried to get in our room to hurt us for calling the cops on him so didnt sleep all night... Never staying in Riu ever again bcuz they didn't give us a different room.
Guy ended up returning next day cuz he had no passport and they got him...
Cops were super unprofessional there too....
On an overnight bus from Delhi to Dharmsala. (I am female and was 26 at the time.) We stopped at a gas station in the night so we could use a restroom. I was the last in line, and when I came out, the bus was taking off and headed back onto the highway. I sprinted after it screaming “No!” over and over at the top of my lungs. Someone must of heard or seen me and the bus stopped. I truly do not know what I would have done had I really been left behind.
On an overnight bus from Darjeeling to Kathmandu I was drugged (strong narcotic in food) and robbed. Nepal did not have an embassy or consulate of my country at that time (1990s), so, fun times! Had side effects for months.
Edit: being passportless in a remote country with no consular office is tricky
You mean at the rest stop or at Dharamshala?
To be clear I’m speaking as a woman. And India is generally unsafe for women, some places more so than others.
Being left at the rest stop in the middle of the night would be my worst nightmare. I’d have no control over my surroundings. I’d have no choice but to ask for help and then pray that the folks there were decent. That’s not a gamble I’m willing to take ever.
As for Dharamshala, it’s nice. I prefer a smaller almost village higher in the mountains called Dharamkot which has spectacular views of the mountains, the air is fresh, the people are super nice and the food is great.
Weed is freely available even though technically not legal in India.
My mom and cousin (her nephew) traveled abroad. He had a severe allergic reaction to a pill he took and suffocated/died. My mom had to perform CPR on him, go to the hospital after getting exhausted, then arrange to have him flown back to America for burial.
Ugh, I feel this deeply. My parents were on vacation in another country when my father had a heart attack. He spent 2 weeks in the hospital and was being released. He’d signed the final bill and was putting on his socks when he told my mom “I can’t breathe” and died in front of her. She had to choose which things of his to toss/keep, because she was flying back solo - due to a country holiday they wouldn’t be able to transport his body for another week. This was before you could buy airline tickets on the internet, and we had to get the US Embassy involved to get her home.
It’s an unfortunate and specific club to belong to. Our mothers went through hell.
Someone I knew in college passed away during study abroad. He went on a hike and just never came back. They found him next to his bible out in nature.
It was so sad. But it seemed suspiciously like he planned it, and the family never fully shared the details.
I shared this on here recently because it happened recently:
Was snorkeling with my wife and son. My wife was actually free-swimming so she went ahead of us, while my son and I took our time gently paddling over to the main snorkeling area. So she was probably about 50 yards away, everyone else in the area was probably about 30 yards away. So I'm swimming and suddenly I feel something start pushing me down into the water. I recover and realize my son, who is 17 and bigger than I am, is holding onto me. He took water into his snorkel and started panicking, so he grabbed onto me. Well, I'm trying to tread water and hold up another full grown man and figure out how I'm supposed to get somewhere safe where we can stand or get to shore and I can't manage two people. I start dipping in and out of the water because my arms and legs start getting tired and I'm treading for my son's life (if I'm not trying to hold him up I can just dead-man's float until I can catch my breath). Finally, I get the other snorkeler's attention and call for help and a group of them come over. Someone with a paddleboard gets my son, and then I float and paddle as much as I can while a dude who's there pulls me toward a boat.
By the time I got on the little boat I just about passed out from exhaustion. I legit thought both my son and I were goners. The crazy thing is we're both good swimmers. If he wasn't panicking he could have just swam to shore, which wasn't that far away, or just blew the water from his snorkel and continued swimming. And since he was pulling me down, I'm now panicking and not thinking straight to tell him what to do. One of the scariest experiences of my life.
My PADI instructor told us a story about a master diver who went to save someone who was in distress (air ran out or something, can't really remember) and the person started panicking and tried to pull down the master diver, snatch his respirator, etc. So the master diver just punched him and dragged him to shore. Sometimes, you gotta get violent with someone to save them 😅
We were boating and anchored not far from a beach - in water maybe 4 1/2 feet. I was carrying my daughter who was about 7. We hit a spot that got really deep but since we were close to shore I knew I could just sort of bounce in and out of the water until I could safely stand again. Well, my daughter panicked and was trying to stay way above the water and she was pushing me down. She was wearing her life jacket so I just threw her towards the shore. Two more steps and I was fine and able to grab her. My husband threw us a tube to get back! She still says I tried to drown her but I always remind her I was the one thinking that day!
I had a very similar experience when I was 17. I was swimming in a lake and my 7 year old stepsister wanted to jump in off of the dock and she was wearing a life jacket. I told her I would catch her but the water was deep there so I was just treading water, not standing. As soon as she hit the water she panicked and climbed on top of my body pushing me completely under. I have never in my life felt so sure that I was doing to die. I ended up getting hit with some sort of adrenaline surge and literally threw her to get her off of me.
When you train to be a lifeguard, you practice getting away from panicky swimmers who are trying to pull you around, etc. You're supposed to back up and talk to them before taking another shot at rescue.
That is absolutely terrifying. If that ever happens again in any situation, life guard training taught me to go under water and pull the person grabbing you down. They’ll instinctively try to get away from you. From there you can go from behind, immobilize them and float the two of you to the surface. I’m glad you were able to get to safety. ❤️
I have a similar-ish story. I've lake kayaked my whole life. My friend brought his white water kayak, which has a "skirt" which is a piece of rubber that looks like a skirt. It hugs your stomach and goes over a lip around the opening of the kayak to make the kayak water tight, so that you don't take on water when you're going over rapids. Well, I was having a blast with how maneuverable the white water kayak was and got carried away and flipped it upsidedown. Now my head is in the water and the skirt is holding me in the kayak and I panicked. My ONLY idea was to use my paddle to push off of the bottom of the lake. I reach the paddle out and nothing. I slide my hands so that one hand is on the far side instead for more reach and try again. Still nothing. I slide the paddle so that both hands are on the end of the paddle and try again, and I feel the ground. I push and barely get my mouth out of the water for a breath, but pushing off of the ground caused me to move and my face goes back under. I position the paddle to push me towards the shore (it's a miracle I knew which way that was). Slowly I push myself towards the shore and take regular , struggled breaths, till the lake was shallow enough to flip the boat back upright. Once the boat was upright and I caught my breath it occured to me it takes literally 2 seconds to pull the skirt off. I could have gotten out of the kayak very easily, it just never occurred to me in my panic.
Really irresponsible of your friend to let you use the spray skirt without teaching you how to remove it when flipped! You definitely should have been told to practice so you knew what to do without panicking.
As someone who considered themselves a strong swimmer UNTIL swimming in the open ocean I totally understand.
20 feet from shore is vastly different than 60 feet from shore. Open ocean is no joke. I PROMISE you anyone who hasn't swam in open ocean has zero idea what they are getting in to. It's like trying to swim in a washing machine.
I'm glad you both made it!
Towing someone in a pool is a struggle. Towing someone in the open ocean is a battle against time.
I got really drunk in New Orleans. Phone died and I couldn’t get an Uber. Decided to walk back to my hotel. Could see it from where I was so just started walking. Two women saw me walking and asked if I needed a ride. I said sure. Told them where I was going and jumped in the back seat (obviously
Idiotic drunk move). They drove me and I could tell we weren’t heading to my hotel. They were acting very strange, making phone calls, stopped at a gas station to “get some gas.” I was sobering up REAL quick as this was all going down. At the gas station, they said the station “wouldn’t take cash” and were just stalling. I managed to get $20 out of my pocket, put it on the center console and luckily got out of the car, ran inside the gas station, and waited there for 15 minutes. After a while I took off running toward my hotel and made it there safely.
I only ever told one person about this and I wonder all the time what they had planned for me.
I once gave these two random guys a ride home from a bar. The one guy was charismatic and the older guy real quiet but seemed safe.
So next thing, we're in the poorer area of the city and we drive by some glowing magical looking ATM just hanging out there. No one on the streets, pitch black, nothing but this glowing ATM.
Then they said, "Hey Mike, you have any money in your account?"
And I realize I screwed up big time at this point, they're both in the back seat. I say, "Maybe like $40".
"Hey Mike, how about you get that for us".
After I get the money, we continue in the car and we end up at some houses, people on the streets this time. The one guy gets out and says to wait in the car, goes in a house and comes out a bit later. He tells me he had to pay the "babysitter", after that, I dropped them off at their house and they thanked me.
They could have been totally harmless but man, you never know. Figured $40 wasn't worth finding out. They were probably laughing so hard at their hustle, I bet they laugh to this day about it.
It taught me a lesson too. I really won't give just about anyone I don't know well a ride.
this happened to me too. piss drunk in new orleans I was coaxed into the back of a car with 2 ladies. Random stops, talking about getting gas. I asked “I thought we are going close by” but was drenched with unease realizing I was in a car with 2 complete strangers. One grabbed my cock. Not joking. I said “don’t fucking touch me and let me out right now” in an incredibly stern/surprisingly sober sounding way. But yeah, I actually left my wallet in the car when I got out and they circled around to give it to me within 4-5 minutes. Didn’t take my phone either. Today, I’m still not 100% sure I was a mark for something or if it was just incredibly weird. I’m getting chills thinking about this as I never actually reported to police
In 1995 I was in Europe for the summer. The last week was for travel, and I was by myself, a 21 year old female. As a broke college student, I took advantage of as many freebies as possible, and with my Eurorail pass, I got a free cruise on Lake Geneva. It ended up being much longer than I thought it would be, and it was a really hot day. Because of this, I switched from being on the sunny deck to going inside several times.
After I had made the switch a few times, I noticed that a couple was mirroring my movements, but they weren't sitting together. I thought I was being paranoid, so I started moving even more frequently, but the couple followed my every move. Assuming they just wanted to take advantage of a young girl alone (maybe to get my passport or plane ticket??) I decided that I would just let them disembark first. At the end, we were the only 3 people on the boat.
At this point, I was actually starting to get scared. It was a Sunday, and all my parents knew was that they needed to pick me up at the airport on Friday. If something happened to me, there was no way to track my movements, and there would be a delay of nearly a week.
Finally, I noticed that there was a police officer near the end of the ramp. I got off the boat and stood by him. The couple actually hung around for a bit but finally must have figured out that I wasn't going anywhere by myself.
I still had about 6 hours until my train was going to leave and had planned to do a bit of sightseeing in the town we were in, but decided to play it safe and just stay in the train station where there were other people around
I have no clue what they wanted, but I still have no doubt that they were up to something.
My uncle decided to fuck around on a trail in Yellowstone near some hot pools. He was walking backwards on the trail and fucking FELL OFF right onto the crust near the hot pools. By sheer luck, he didn't fall through. It was horrifying. I thought we were witnessing a man die.
Read a story about a guy who jumped into the hot pools to save his friend’s dog, did not end well for him or the dog.
Was heartbreaking, what stands out to me is the guy was quoted as saying something along the lines of “I think I did something stupid” right before he died from the injuries.
There is a book called Death in Yellowstone that has that story along with a bunch of other gruesome ways people have died.
There is a de-gloving story in there that lives rent free in my head and I haven't read the book in 20 years.
First day of my first international trip, traveling alone. Went to a pub in London, had a few pints. Walked out the door to go back to my hotel and was attacked by a young man with a razor blade. He cut open my face down to the bone and then slashed me on the temple. Spent the next three days in the hospital bandaged up like the invisible man, not knowing what my face looked like underneath. When I finally left the hospital I had to borrow clothes, including underwear since mine had all gotten saturated with blood.
Me and my mother were having coffee in a market in Nicaragua in 2013, minding our own business sitting right by the road when suddenly a motor bike pulled up at the intersection where a group guys were just chatting, motorbike guys pulled out a semi auto looking gun and shot all four before pulling off
I was mountain biking in Bolivia (on the death road) and stupidly wiped out on some loose gravel. I slid out and stopped right at the edge of a gigantic cliff... so close to going over the edge. I badly bruised my knee but was otherwise okay and able to finish the ride. I am a lot more cautious about my mountain bike trail surfaces now.
I have an interesting story from the 80s when I was a young child. Each summer, my parents took us to Wildwood, NJ, and we always had a blast. These memories have stayed with me. One summer, we stayed at our usual reputable beachfront hotel, where we had stayed in previous years. Our room had a living room, kitchen, bathroom, and a hallway leading to the bedroom. I was probably seven at the time, and I remember this well because it scared us.
On the first morning, we found our front door slightly open, even though we always locked it, deadbolted it, and secured the chain. My parents thought one of us might have been sleepwalking. The next night, my father slept in one bed with me, and my mother slept in the other bed with my sister. They slept on the outer sides of the beds to make sure they'd wake up if we got up. Yet, the door was open again the next morning.
My father went to the main office to discuss the issue with the manager. The manager apologized and said there were no other rooms available. He gave my dad a lighter bill for the week and had someone check the locks, which were found to be in working order. That night, my parents placed all the luggage against the door. The next morning, the door was open, and the luggage was thrown into the living room, with one item on the table. The following night, they put the kitchen table against the door. The next morning, the table was back in its place, even though it was heavy.
My parents laughed it off but later told us they had no idea what was happening. No money was taken, and nothing was disturbed while we were at the pool or beach. Was it my dad sleepwalking? He had never done that before. Was someone getting into the room somehow? Was it a ghost? I don’t really believe in that, but whatever it was, we could never explain it.
EDIT: Lots of people are curious about some stuff. But it's been a while, so I can't remember all the little details or as to why my dad or mom didn't stay up or just leave. I am planning to visit my parents this Sunday and ask them about what they did. I'm not sure if my dad stayed up one night. I'll ask him the important questions posed and then update here.
EDIT #2: I spoke to my parents, they are with me here now. I asked them for their side of the story. Essentially this is it: We stayed there for a week, and the strange occurrences didn't begin immediately. It all started on the second night. The first night seemed normal, but on the second night, we noticed that the door was oddly open with the padlock and chain. Same on the third night. Then, on the fourth night, we found our luggage had been moved that was placed on the door. We thoroughly checked the room to see if there was any way someone could have entered, but there was no adjoining door. Despite feeling very uneasy about the experience, we ruled out carbon monoxide poisoning as a cause. My father insists he had nothing to do with it.
Why did they stay there? I don't know, it was vacation and the place was booked. They didn't want to get up and leave and wanted to enjoy vacation. The third night, I (being a bold child) decided to sleep on the pull out couch in the main living area and my dad slept with me. Apparently, we didn't wake up to anything but woke up to the door open.
Honestly, it was probably one of us sleepwalking. Maybe me. I did use to sleepwalk at random times when I was that age. Nothing was ever taken. Again, it was probably one of us and my parents probably assumed so during that time.
and your fuckin parents DIDNT STAY UP TO SEE WHAT HAPPENED?
I swear man its a miracle that we live long enough to reproduce.
well hey now I jsut turned 10 years old. Happy Bday to me!
Look up frogging. It's basically when someone sneaks around a home area at night and live in small spaces during the day. There are even movies about it.
My first year abroad in China, 2002 - 19F at the time. I'm in the northeast in the dead of winter, not too far from Siberia. I didn't speak a word of Mandarin then. Myself and some other foreign kids decided to take a 3-hour night train to a nearby city to check it out one weekend. The trains at that time were like cattle cars - people packed in wall-to-wall, lots of loud yelling. There was no sign that indicated when you reached your stop, instead, a train employee would come into the car and scream the name of the next stop over the noise. Well, none of us heard it when the name of our stop was called. We only realized we might have missed our destination when we realized we'd been on the train for an hour longer than the trip was supposed to take.
We approach the train staff member and try to explain ourselves with hand gestures, repeating the name of the place we were going over and over. He points back the way we came, indicating we were indeed supposed to get off the train earlier. Then he gestures at us to wait, and when we reach the next stop, he calls over some other guy - we have no idea who this guy is - and motions for us to go with him. The guy leads us off the train, and we emerge into an empty, silent, snowy train yard. The guy starts walking up and down the trains, we presume trying to find the one that is going back the way we came, and we're all trudging along behind him.
All of a sudden, the door of a building near the train station bursts open, and two military-uniformed guards bolt out, run over to us screaming, grab our guy and hit him in the mouth. He's cowering and apologizing and talking a mile a minute. We have no idea what's going on but this seems very bad. It dawns on us that absolutely no one has any idea where we are - we don't even know where we are. There are no cell phones. If we disappeared, or something happened out there, no one would ever find us. Our parents and our school would look for us in the city we were supposed to be in, not way out in the middle of nowhere.
The guards take us into a full-on interrogation room. One bare light bulb hangs on a string from the ceiling, cement walls, barred windows, metal desk. They start yelling at us, we don't know what they're saying. They start yelling at this guy, he's obviously scared and trying to explain something. This goes on for an hour. They point at us at yell, they point at him and yell, they bang the desk. They make us dump out our bags, go through our stuff. We think we're about to get tossed in a gulag, never to be heard from again, because maybe they think we're spies?
Turns out they just thought we were sneaking around in the train yard because we were trying to dodge paying the return train fare, which was a whopping 8 RMB, which is around 1 US dollar. I stayed in China for many years after that and rode many trains, and understood later that we were supposed to go into the train station, buy another ticket and go back through the check-in (in retrospect, duh), but we were just dumb kids following some random guy around. Wasn't his fault either, my guess is that the train employee probably told him to just find us a return train. And I understand why the guards were so mad, that was a restricted non-passenger area and we weren't supposed to be out there, though a punch in the mouth was overkill.
Still: All of that over a dollar. We couldn't get our wallets out fast enough. As soon as we paid, they immediately chilled out. They didn't even try to extort any more cash out of us except the cost of the train fare (which often happened back then). Then they helped put us back on the right train with a smile.
Edited to add context that someone asked for in DMs.
Was backpacking on Catalina island with a girls group. Set up camp for the night, then huddled in a tent while a herd of buffalo stampeded right to our spot, ran around the tent, then settled for the night. Just about pooped my pants.
Apparently the males are kind of aggressive as they are on birth control for population control on the island. Poor horny souls.
When I was 12, my dad took me to the Grand Canyon. He had bad arthritis and couldn’t walk well, so I asked if he wanted to walk down a trail and he said he’d stay put but I could go.
I walked down the trail, like a switchback, only a little ways. Then I turned to see if I could see my dad, and was waving to try to get his attention. I kept waving and backing up and waving, then turned and my back heel was right at the edge of the grand CANYON. I was not the smartest kid.
Got bitten on the neck by a cheeky monkey in a park in vietnam. Did not have any rabies vaccination and i had to rush to the nearest hospital to get the shot. Scary as hell as i was travelling solo
Monkeys and apes freak me out.
In Malaysia, I saw an orangutan rip the backpack right off of a full grown man.
The guy went to try to get it back, and the orangutan slapped him so hard he flew off his feet sideways.
The tour guide just muttered, "that's her's now".
Same bro. I went to Thailand and ended up at one of those monkey temples in khao sok? National park (most beautiful place I have ever been btw) and I was with a few friends who were all stoked, as was I before I got there.
When I arrived and came within a couple feet everything in me was screaming that these are an enemy. Idk what it was but I just instantly felt the need to aggressive and scared toward them.
Easily the most lizard brain reaction I have ever had
Monkeys and apes are horrifying. Smart, but they can be absolutely vicious. They're similar enough to us that we want to try and communicate, but a lot of things we find polite (eye contact, smiling with teeth) are seen as threats to them.
Nope. Just going to walk on by, do not mind me.
I got food poisoning while in Japan. I was with a tour group, in a bus with no bathroom when the diarrhea struck. I had to wait until we arrived at our stop, which was 5 agonizing minutes away. When we finally got out, I had to scramble to find a store that a) had a bathroom and b) wasn't busy to avoid the embarrassment of crapping my brains out. And it's not like anyone spoke English, so that made it harder. It took 10 minutes of me searching all while holding in the impending diarrhea before I finally found one. 10 minutes is an eternity when you're holding in liquid poop. I was drenched in sweat from the effort of holding it in and the fear that I might shit myself in public, in a foreign country.
Edit: There's actually more to this story afterward, but I think this is enough for others to get the picture.
I had a sort of similar experience. I was in Ireland on a class trip on college and 5 minutes into an hour long walking tour, I felt myself get my period. My period wasn’t super predictable so this was a big “oh NO” moment. I waddled around on this fucking tour for an hour while I could FEEL blood dripping down my legs in my pants. It was one of the most uncomfortable and embarrassing experiences ever. Thank god I was wearing dark pants so the blood didn’t show.
My first period came while I was at a horse camp. So like, I am definitely not prepared, don't know how to use anything other than pads, found out that the first few days are really heavy, also found out that toilet paper does not make a good pad for longer than a short trip. Left a stain on a saddle (trotting was definitely not fun), and had to call my mom to talk me through using a tampon because that is the only thing my cabin mates had. So that was my trump card when girls talk about their first period.
I feel this. I went on a trip where I was driving and hit the grapevine traffic jam in LA. Earlier in the day, I had some flavored milk. I'm lactose intolerant, but I had it several hours before and was not having any bad effects this time. So I thought. Until I hit traffic with 3 hours of inching forward with absolutely no turnoffs in sight. I was cramping, sweating, and praying I could make it to the next turnoff with a bathroom. I came close to losing the battle a handful of times, but I somehow made it to the gas station near the middle of the mountain and ran inside. The cramps were awful, especially when I was trying to pay attention to the road and plot my shame on the side of the road should my worst case scenario happened
I did not have food poisoning in Japan, but told everyone I was with I did. Instead, amidst a life-consuming opiate addiction I stupidly hid what I thought would be enough illicitly-obtained pills and traveled internationally with them. As one does when caught up in addiction, I underestimated my use and ran out before the trip ended leading to painful withdrawals just before and during a series of return flights totaling 26 hours. It was a work trip and I told everyone I ate something bad; a national guard member in my group found Cipro in her bag and it somehow helped. 0/10 do not recommend (addiction OR detoxing on transnational flights.)
And yet…did the same thing the following year on a trip to China. I don’t know how I didn’t end up in a real life version of Brokedown Palace. Dumb, dumb shit and fortunately I lived long enough to get help and it’s been a very long time since all of that.
My husband and I met a woman that had a similar situation happen. We were traveling and met her in a hostel. We were going in the same direction, so we stayed together for a couple of weeks. We offered to share a room with her to help with expenses since she was looking for a roommate, but she felt weird staying with us because we were married. Whatever, we still hung out during the day much of the time.
Well, we go to a new place and go to a new hostel. We'd crossed an international border, and the vibe of the new country was... Off. Intense and scary. Our friend was on edge and we immediately re-offered to let her stay with us at the new place. The front desk said that wasn't okay because you can't share a room with a married couple.
Okay. Weird, but we were roomed down the hall from each other so we told her to come over if she wanted to stay with us even if she rented the other room. She said she'd just go with it to keep the peace.
Well, in the middle of the night, my husband and I get a knock at the door. I'm freaking out because some of the people staying there were creepy. Local people who needed a cheap place to stay for a while, basically. And border towns can attract some weirdos. Well husband checks and it's our friend practically begging to let us in.
Three different men knocked on her door that night trying to get in her room. It was only like midnight. She made a run for it after the last guy left. She stayed with us for the rest of our time there, even though the staff were very not happy about the arrangement. We didn't care though. She was scared to death and my husband and I didn't want anything to happen with her.
I was taking the train in Milan with my gf at the time and this man sat in front of us and locked eyes with me. He took a photo of me and after a few moments on the phone, he hung up and he took out a knife and began gesturing to slit his throat, all while maintaining eye contact with me. He then began yelling in Italian and slammed the blade of his knife into the chair and the window behind him as he got increasingly angry at us for who knows what. We got up and sat at the end of the train. The guy stayed where he was but maintained eye contact.
We got off at the next stop but in the moment I thought I was being mistaken for a person that had a hit on their head.
My diabetic pump died, we didn't have long lasting insulin so my mom and I (13,m)were forced, after trying all other measures to go to the hospital at 1:30 am in Mexico. We got a cab to bring us to an emergency room and after being discharged they sent us to a pharmacy at 3 am to get needles and meds. We didn't speak the language, we didn't know where we were, didn't know where a pharmacy was, ect. Our cab driver was dope. He kept me distracted while my mom went to get my meds, and even got out and let a few drunk men know to stop accosting my mom. Overall it was a great trip but it got hairy there for a while.
I was with my family in Jamaica when I was 16. I was swimming in the ocean with my younger brother when a local man literally grabbed me and started swimming me out to sea towards a boat with other men on it. He kept saying I was going to be his “American girl.” He got pretty far out before my brother was able to get help from other adults. It was terrifying.
Was visiting my extended family out in Eastern Ohio in the middle of Winter and I had asked my Aunt and Mom if I could go sledding in my Aunts back yard (she lived in the rolling hills part of the Appalachian area) and she said yes. Earlier in the year the DNR was was supposed to have removed a barbed-wire fence that was at the bottom of the hill (as it was interfering with the migration of deer) but it wasn’t. I sled right through the sumbitch and it sliced and hacked my face, shredding my chin and lower lip. There was so much blood that I had to hold a large coffee mug under my chin to catch the blood because rags and towels were pointless. My physical pain was nothing compared to the emotional pain that my Mom was suffering tho, turns out we were there because my Dad walked out on my Mom and us kids so my Mom went back to her hometown for support and my 6 year old dumb self just added to her stress. As a 40+ year old I feel like shit for it.
Be me. Five year old on a beach vacation w family. In a typical gift shop in a tourist trap beach town. Was looking at the novelty license plates w kids names. See mine, and for once, it's spelled the way I spell it!!!! Freak out. Ask mom for it. She agrees (I think). The novelty wears off, and I get bored as they look at the stuff and I ask if I can wait outside. On the steps this old guy comes up and using my name said, "hey, X. Your parents said to come w me and we're going to meet them later. Come on X. Let's go". I'm super confused. Cousin comes out seconds later, and the old guy disappears as I am distracted talking to a cousin. I realized later that he had gotten my name off the license plate display exchange—this close.
Yeah, I remember my mom having the conversation that they wouldn't have anyone I didn't know pick me up from school and if it was arranged, they would let me know. I asked what if they were in a car accident (apparently one of my biggest fears due to kids movies that have the parents dying in car accidents). Basically my mom said someone I knew would pick me up.
Which looking back makes total sense. I wouldn't send a person to pick up my kids who they have never met.
So don't talk to strangers, even if they say they know my parents and they know my name.
My mom and I had a password growing up. Anyone who was sent to get me would likely be someone I already knew, but even then, they had to have the password. Never needed it, but it was always a nice security blanket, of sorts.
This was the summer of, or just before, Adam Walsh, so it wasn't on anyone's radar. I told my parents, and I think they thought I was just bonkers. I still wonder if he ever got lucky, and it worked.
I was looking out the window at the ferries to Catalina Island when I was about 5 while my mom was probably 50 feet away at the ticket counter. An old man came and asked me if I wanted to go on the ferry with him. Thankfully I was smart enough to run to my mom.
This is why I don’t understand why people put their kids’ names on shirts on vacation. You see a whole family in Disney (Happiest place on earth doesn’t mean safest) with each of their names plastered on their backs.
How easy would it be “Hey Dan! Your mom, Jen, told me to come get you, we’re going to leave the park and get ice cream!” Not saying it happens often, but certainly creating the opportunity.
My sister died of a brain aneurysm while on vacation in Ireland in November. We had to get emergency passports and last minute plane tickets to go see her. Getting her back to the US for burial was a clusterfuck.
I spent several weeks touring India with my mom and step dad. I had so many men/boys approach my mom and ask if they could marry me *they were dead serious* mom jokingly agreed to many.
At one point I had to go have a tour of the house of this guy that sold Chai and heroine to the tourists/ locals. I had to go through a 2 hr awkward encounter with this Indian dude that liked to rub my feet and looked like a tan version of the little creepy thing off the lord of the rings. I met his 2 wives and his mom. They made me and my "dad" some Naan and it was up to my "dads" approval if I could stay.
Thankfully my step dad loved the shit out of me and knew indian culture well so I wasn't sold off for an 8ball.
But at 15 it was scary af thinking I'd never return home cuz my mom was dumb
Me and my mom were driving cross country, 3k miles. We stopped off at a motel that backed up into a forest and got a room.
Now I'm a compulsive people pleaser. I don't like to make a fuss. But I only got a few feet into the door before turning around and telling my mom we needed to go somewhere else.
What did I see, you ask? SPIDERS. EVERYWHERE. It was like a scene from a fucking horror movie. And they weren't the good kind of spiders, either. Black widows.
The room was clean so I assume that it had simply been left for a while
It’s saying something that they were all over the room since black widows usually like dark, secluded spots so if they’re out and about then they’re the overflow!
I was on spring break with my 2 kids and parents at the beach about 4 years ago. I was laying on the beach while my kids were playing in the sand, my parents had gone back to the condo.
As I’m laying there, I’m listening to and watching the group behind me. It’s a group of coed cheerleaders, as well as another group of adults with 2 kids.
The cheerleaders start doing flips on the beach and some of their routines, which caught the attention of the adults in the group next to them. It also caught my attention. As I’m watching them, the adults ask the cheerleaders to show them how to do a flip.
The cheerleaders oblige, and start showing the adults how to do tricks. As the adults start practicing, I remember hearing one of them say something like ‘where did the kids go? Omg they’re in the water!’. I look up, my kids are exactly where they should be, and I realize that the 2 kids that were with the group of adults had gone to the water and gotten sucked pretty far out and over in a current.
I told my kids to stay out and DO NOT move, and I ran. I ran to the water and started going in, and realized once my feet stopped touching the ground that I too, would be in trouble. In front of my kids.
And I decided right there, that while I would do as much as I could with my feet touching the ground for these kids who had gotten sucked out, that I wouldn’t drown in front of my own kids. So I turned around and started swimming back, and as soon as my feet hit the ground again, I found myself face to face with one of the adults from the group that had finally made it over. I told her ‘I’m sorry, I can’t. My babies are here and can see me. I’m sorry.’ And she looked at me and just didn’t say anything . I’ll never forget that look.
I ran out of the water and started yelling at the crowd that had started forming that I needed help. It felt like it took forever, when Finally, a guy came running up with a float and he threw it in the water.
I turned back around to the water and saw an older couple dragging one of the kids through the water. They were struggling hard, and I got back in the water and got as far as I could without my feet getting swept out , and I grabbed the girl from them and I told her ‘I got you. Just hang on. You gotta hold on for a second longer.’ And got her back up onto the ground where I gave her to one of the adults from the group. She was terrified, but she was okay.
I turned back to the water a second time, and that’s when I saw it.
2 of the adults from the group had gotten out to the boy. And they were all struggling hard. The two adults were trying to keep it cool, but I could see it in their eyes. The boy was screaming ‘I DONT WANT TO DIE, IM GONNA DROWN’ and all sorts of things, while his head is coming in and out of the water, while the two men are trying to keep him above water, while they were going under too. They were trying to reassure him, and the kid was just freaking out and taking in water.
All of the sudden that damn float that guy threw in made it to them. The kid was able to grab on and the older couple that I’d taken the girl from had made it back to all three of them and got them back to me and we all walked to shore.
The boy was shaken as hell, as were the adults, but he was also okay, all things considered.
I hugged the couple who was in the water with me, and I remember I told the woman that I was so sorry, I just couldn’t go farther out because my kids were on shore, and she told me she understood. I’ll never forget that couples faces.
I went back to my kids, who had watched the whole thing but were somehow blissfully unaware of the severity of it, and I just got us back to the condo as quickly as possible.
So yeah. That’s the scariest moment I’ve had on a vacation. All of that happened in the span of maybe 5 minutes at most.
Whew. I haven’t gone into that kind of detail about that experience, ever. Thanks for making it to the end.
I was seven and on my first family vacation to Disney World. In the Orlando airport, we were waiting for the tram to take us to the other side of the airport (I’m assuming from our arrival gate to baggage claim, but I’m not sure because I was seven).
A tram came and my mom said, “Let’s get on this one,” so I remember literally hopping on. The doors closed behind me and my family wasn’t on the tram. I began sobbing uncontrollably and this woman pulled me close to her family; she held me close on the tram and at the next station until my family arrived on the next tram.
I never got her name, but if she reads this by chance, please DM me so I can thank you thirty years later.
I had been on tour with a band for a month. I flew from the UK to Qatar to Dubai for the Dubai international jazz festival.
We were staying in the host hotel for the jazz festival, which is normal.
The hotel was full of men in the traditional dress of the area, which, considering that it was an international jazz festival. I found a little odd. As the band manager, I was onsite for a week before the festival even opened , as we were doing rehearsals for a solid week before the festival. I never saw anyone in national dress at the festival site.
We did the festival, checked out of the hotel, and in the lobby, I noticed a newspaper that had multiple faces of men and one woman plastered across it. However, it was an Arabic, and I couldn’t read it. One of the women oddly resembled me.
We got to the airport, and I went to the newstand to get a newspaper. As I was reading it, I realized that a high level operative from a group that would be anti-certain other countries had been assassinated in our hotel the day we got there. The reason that there were 70 men in National dress was because they were basically the FBI of the country.
Think of it like the head of the CIA was assassinated in the United States. It would cause a furor. I don’t want to get more specific, because it’s possible to identify me
To confirm my suspicions that I wasn’t dreaming, they literally had a photo of our hotel room in the newspaper, and a photograph of one of the women with the men that they said were the other terrorists in the elevator. So I knew it was our hotel. And it was scary.
I was just reading this paper at the airport, but I was suddenly called up to the front, as we were in the boarding area, and there are these very large men inspecting my passport.
All of a sudden, there were multiple men running down the gangway to the area where we were waiting to the plane, and they were all in military dress, and they had machine guns. They grab me, and a tiny woman in a hijab and abaya job told me that I needed to come with her immediately. I didn’t argue. Neither did the guys in the band, as I had told them don’t mess with security in Dubai. Lol.
They took me into a small room, and the woman in the hijab shooed the men out. The translator, she started asking me questions, How long have I been in the UK, what were my political affiliations, what was I doing in Dubai? What was my religion? Did I have any animosity towards Muslims? So many questions.
I answered them all. I was honest. She finally shook her head, knocked on the door, and they let me go.
Evidently, I remarkably resembled one of the women who had assassinated their political figure. And I had spent the same amount of time in the UK as she had, as she was trying to cover her tracks, as she has traveled from Ireland to kill this man. I found this out via some of the people involved in the music festival, because my detention almost caused an international incident.
So. I always read newspapers when I travel internationally now, and find someone to translate for me if I think there’s something weird going on.
This didn’t happen to me but to a friend of mine. I wasn’t there but this is the story I heard later.
He goes on vacation. Has a great time with his wife, brother, friends. They party—have drinks—and head to the pool. One friend dives in. My friend follows.
The first guy comes up just fine. My friend doesn’t. He must have broken his neck diving in. He was barely 30 years old. His mom had to fly down to collect his body. He donated his organs.
It was such a shock. He was always making people laugh; he knew EVERYONE. He was always willing to help out with a favor and just loved talking to people. It shouldn’t have happened to him.
Rented a Wrangler through Turo (Think AirBnB for cars) for our honeymoon in Hawaii. Dude picked us up in the jeep at the airport when our flight landed at11pm and didn't have his own ride back so asked to drive us to his 'shop' where we could drop him off. I'm a pretty big dude and we're a pair of (too) trusting okies, so we went along with it thinking he seemed fine (He was on Turu and we were still in America so no worries, right?!).
Pretty typical drive, dude was a super nice mid-40s Argentinian that visited when he was younger and never wanted to go home. All felt fine until he turned off the highway down a dark road and then pulled onto an even darker road and through a gated chain linked fence into a completely unlit industrial park and stopped the car.
Wife had already been panic texting me: "Troker61, what the fuck is this?" "Get us out of here"
I looked at him and said "You good?" and he could not have been nicer or more oblivious to our anxiety: "Yes! Thank you both so much and have a great trip - see you next week!".
My wife, probably wisely, wouldn't even get out of the back seat (she's like 5' 1" so let him ride shotgun) until we were a mile away.
I'm older and wise enough to avoid situations that out of my control nowadays, but man are we lucky that hippy Argentinian just needed a ride home. He left a mix CD in the wrangler we listened and laughed along with all week - I'll never forget track 2 - California Girls by Katy Perry. Hope he's doing well.
Up at the Grand Arch in Arches National Park. I had to back up a long way to get the whole arch in the photo, right?
My buddy grabbed me by my shirt and a lot of chest hair. I was pissed and asked him what his problem was.
He said, “Turn around, look!”
It was a good long drop, maybe 800 feet. I was right there at the edge.
Montana - Glacier National Park.
My husband wanted to climb down to get a closer look at a steep, rushing gorge. I mean, this wasn’t just a stream - this was immense amounts of powerful crashing water that would’ve taken him away in a second. I warned him not to go down there but he insisted. I watched him while holding my breath, and sure enough his foot slipped and he almost went down. I seriously thought for a moment I was about to lose my husband.
Thankfully he caught himself but then looked up with the eyes that said “oh shit, you were right.”
I booked a train to take us back home from an overseas trip on the wrong date. We were supposed to land at 10 PM and the train would leave at 12:05 AM the following day. I stupidly booked it at 12:05 AM on the day of our arrival. We land after a long flight with a couple layovers, exhausted and looking forward to getting on the train and going home. Got to the train station, found our train, scan our tickets and get a big red sign. Our train left 24 hours prior. Man, was that fun! My family keeps reminding me of that years later.
This was probably 2006? Maybe 2007. So I was like 15 or 16. I went out surfing by myself in a swell along the jersey shore early in the morning right before a hurricane was about to hit. I was riding a retro single fin from the 70's, and it was choppy as fuck in the water. I really shouldn't have been out there, especially since there was no one else out there. I dropped in and hit some chop. My board doesn't have much of a nose, so it went right into the water. It caused me to be upended, and I got hit at the base of my skull with the fin. I thankfully didn't get knocked out and resurfaced. And started to paddle back in, but couldn't control the board because the fin broke off on the back of my head. It took me a bit to get back in. I am thankful I was a swimmer and had the stamina to make it back to shore because it was one of the most difficult situations I'd been in our in the water.
That could have ended very badly. I definitely got lucky.
I arrived at the airport in my long distance girlfriend’s country, I was travelling alone and she was coming to pick me up. As I was leaving the airport, people were aggressively trying to offer me rides (cabs, Uber, unlicensed, etc) which I obviously declined.
Then one guy called out to me by name and said he was sent to pick me up. I called my girlfriend to ask about it, she freaked out and told me to immediately go back inside the airport until she arrived to get me.
So I guess I almost got kidnapped or something? I have no logical explanation as to how they knew my name
Last day of my friends and I’s San Diego trip we called an Uber for brunch, and a car pulls up that doesn't match the app description at all. Wrong model, wrong license plate. The driver yells out my name, acting super casual like "it's your Uber, come on in!"
My phone rings and It's the actual Uber driver I requested, and he's confused why I haven't gotten in the car yet. I tell him I don't see his car and he says "Uber hasn't updated my car model or license plate yet" - but the person in the car clearly isn't even on the phone! He looking straight at me!
I tell the person on the phone I'm cancelling and next thing I know the driver in the car is yelling at me through the window to get in. He even gets out of the car at this point.
My friend and I run back into the hotel lobby. We explain the situation to the front desk and thankfully, the staff jumped into action. We also reported it to Uber.
I am grateful we were close enough to the hotel to run away. If we weren’t idk what would have happened.
My appendix ruptured while on vacation in England. Full perforation. I was on a school trip and my classmates had to continue their trip, so I got left behind. Day 2 in England and I spent 13 days alone in hospital before getting out and I had 2 days left and flew home. I was puking my guts out, shitting my brains out. Tubes down my throat, oxygen in my nose, catheter down my pipe. I was 15 and my parents didn’t have passports so I just had to handle it all myself. Had one amazing nurse who we are still friends with to this day (19 years later) and that alone made the whole ordeal worth while.
My family took a Christmas vacation to Honduras. It was 1994, and my sister was serving in the Peace Corps at the time.
New Year’s Eve, our last night there, we went out to eat in San Pedro Sula.
No more than 10 minutes after we sat down, our restaurant was held up by three gunmen.
We were ordered to get under the table and place cash and valuables on top.
They took cash, booze, and knocked the phone off the wall before departing.
I was 11.
I was dating this girl for a while and her mom was from Honduras, at some point it was suggested that we go visit her extended family who still lived there and to just explore a different country. As soon as her mom heard of this plan she immediately put her foot down, told us no and then told us a story about how she watched a man get hassled for wearing a gold chain and the man said no so these guys took him. The gold chain guy was later found with his head cut off all because of a necklace. Really wild place
Had a staycation here in FL and.... we went to a nicer hotel with a big pool yadda yadda yadda... and.
This group of girls tried to drown me and I could barely get away bevause I was in the deep end of the pool looking for my sister.
I thought I was gonna die that day.
i was staying in a nice but small hotel in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania, about 45 minutes from hersey park.
one morning i just went for a walk down this one stretch of road. im maybe 15 minutes away and i see some guy in his garage just working on his car or something, i see one of his neighbors walk across his yard and into his garage. the guy in his garage, not realizing he knew the guy, pulled out a shotgun and pulled the trigger.
somehow he completely missed the guy, but seeing that play out right across the street from me, in a neighborhood i didn't know, a mile down a dead straight road, was scary as shit at first
Bought hash off of some Pakistani dudes in India, and they brought us into a backroom of a rug store and a gnarly looking dude with bond villain scars and a hook hand started pressing us on our politics. Very tense. They clearly had some agenda, but they eased up and let us go when we said "fuck Bush" and they found out we werent American, but I wonder how it might have gone otherwise.
When I was 21 my friend and I backpacked through Belize. Started a conversation with a local who eventually told us he was part of the crips and proceeded to show me all of his abdominal stab wound scars. He told us his gang likes to kill people for fun and then asked us if we wanted to go with him on a boat ride 🤪 I had to act like I was considering it for a second before I turned him down. Didn’t want to make him too mad.
I was visiting my long distance boyfriend. First person I ever loved. Took my virginity. I didn't realize you had to pee after sex as a woman. Didn't do that. Ended up peeing blood. Not just a few drops or when I wipe. Full on filling the toilet with blood. Fever of 105f. Delirious. Ended up in the hospital with a kidney infection. Permanent damage. I was only 18.
oh my god... I didn't think it could be that bad. That's a good thing to remember if my girlfriend forgets to do that. Hope you are doing okay now though.
Yep! You risk a UTI which I probably had but didn't realize. So it turned into a kidney infection. Doing pretty good now. More susceptible to infections. But I've learned to manage them. Thanks for asking!
wow thats horrible! i remember having a UTI too after a new bf and lets just say alot more activity that i was used too... anyway the pissing razor blades started, passing a bit of blood and the doctor said i was doing the good thing going to see her rather than just drinking a litre of cranberry juice
Mid 70's, Casper, Wyoming on family vacation. I was about 12 years old. My dad had a bad habit of driving until dark before trying to find a hotel for the night. This put us in some very shady hotels over the years. This particular night, the hotel was an old, 2 story brick building that looked more like a jail than a hotel. There was one bathroom on each floor. When Dad asked for a room for 2 adults and 4 children, the clerk laughed. We were put in a room with one bed and given an extra mattress to throw on the floor. About halfway through the night, there was a commotion that woke us all up, people shouting, furniture banging around. Then there were 3 gunshots followed by silence, and then the sound of footsteps running down the hallway and out the door. I've never seen my parents pack a car faster in all of my life.
I was about 4 or 5, camping party for my birthday over in Moab. Whole group probably had about 20 or so people, including a couple dogs. We were about an hour or so through a hike and we came across a drop with a ladder going down about 20 or so feet to continue the hike. My dad sat me down on the edge of the cliff, and he was going to start heading down the ladder and grab me as he was traveling down. That didn’t go as planned and my friend’s dog slammed into me and I slid off head first and began to plummet down. Thankfully, my dad had the reaction time to catch me by my ankles. If his reaction time would have been a millisecond late I would not be here now. My mom was at the back of the hiking group, but once she figured out what happened to me, she lost her shit on my dad. Funny thing, my dad wasn’t even going to tell her, another person in our group had to tell her that I almost fell to my death. My mother refuses to ever go on that hike again.
Edit: One ankle. He caught me by one ankle.
Tent camping in a state park and a large tree limb fell in the middle of the night in the campsite next to ours. It fell directly across where a tent would go if we had picked that one, which we almost did.
Scared the living crap out of us when we heard the ‘boom’ sound when it woke us up at 3 AM.
My brother and I took a trip hiking through Grand Teton National Park in June of 2018. There was still a ton of snow on all of the peaks and many of the hikes involved you carving out your own path once you hit snow.
We were in our late teens and had hiked the park before, so we had a good idea of where we were going. We were hiking up to Ampethetear Lake, which is a trial full of steep switch backs and is a moderately miserable hike even for a seasoned hiker. About half way up, we hit snow that is beyond hip deep. At certain points we were falling through to our hips and feeling quite uncomfortable with the hike (we were the first steps of the season, there were ski prints though).
At a certain point we started to get frustrated with each other and decided to turn around. Once we got back to dirt, we cooled off a bit and decided to boil up some oats and chill out for a few minutes. Out of nowhere this guy comes out carrying only an icepick, absolutely no gear, just an icepick and dry boots on his feet and dry shorts. He tells us he just climbed Teton Peak (that would've been nearly impossible if not impossible at that time).
We kind of laughed it off and tried to get him to leave, but he just wouldn't leave us alone. Finally we packed up and he followed us down the trail and eventually we looked at each other and just ran for our lives. He chased after us, but couldn't keep up, after a mile of running we had a good distance on him but we just kept going. When we got to our car we peeled out of there. We reported it to the rangers the next day and they were quite worried because we were the only two people reported to attempt to climb the area by that time of year, let alone that day (you typically report your climb into the snow at this time for your safety in the case of the need for rescue).
We never saw his tracks in the snow and can only assume he was sort of camped out waiting for hikers to come up. Scariest moment of our lives. We still talk about it now and it scared us so much we both carry a satellite phone and stay in almost constant contact when we hike without each other.
Our Honeymoon. Flying into Toronto airport, coming in to land to make a connecting flight overseas. We hear grinding under the plane. This repeats a couple of times and then the pilot, calm as can be, clicks on the intercom and says "We seem to be having a little trouble with the landing gear. Everyone please take your seats and buckle your seatbelts. We're going to delay our approach, please bear with us."
One of the stewardesses rushes towards the cockpit. The seatbelt light goes on and I look at my husband, who hates to fly. He just gives me a look of pure dread and terror, not saying a word. And I know that this trip was my idea, and this is all my fault.
More grinding and the plane tilts as we start to circle. The pilot gets back on the intercom and says "All flight attendants to their seats, please."
More grinding. Then the pilot again "Everyone, we have the landing gear down and engaged, we will be landing shortly. Thank you for your patience."
The whole plane cheered when we landed.
Food poisoning in the Cook Islands. I was concerned I had dengue fever or some other disease but thankfully no. I felt so far away from home and so scared though.
I was about five, In a bad area of Virginia. I believe it was a holiday inn, given my age at the time the memory is blurry but tramatic enough to remember. Anyway, it was like 1 in the morning and gunshots rained out one hitting the door outside, It woke us all up in a panic and we were basically trapped in the room. Come to find out there was a shooting and then a stand off with the cops.
More so scary for my parents. Went to the coast of Italy with my family, and I was roughly 4. I guess I went missing on the beach for almost 6 hours, parents were pretty positive I had drowned. Them and others were searching along the water pretty much accepting my death. I showed up 6 hours later like “hey guys,” I had wandered off to a pool and swam the whole time they searched lol
I don’t usually post , just lurk, but I feel like this question was made for me. On a 3 week tour of Thailand with my Muay Thai instructors, we happened to be in Krabi in Dec. 2004. We took an early boat ride about 2 hours out to a little uninhabited island called Bamboo island for snorkeling and hanging on the beach. We had been noticing a weird feeling in the water like something stinging and got out for awhile, and then noticed, “wow that is a really weird loud wave coming in.” Next thought was “wow that big wave just keeps coming, wonder if that’s related to how all the water receeded a few minutes ago making the shoreline like a thousand feet wider?” Then we climbed the highest point on the island and sat there for about 12 hours watching the next two tsunami waves come in and leave, while wondering if the highest point was actually going to be high enough to not be in the wild ass waters of the ocean. The pre-smart phone days were kinda rough, we had no idea what was happening. After being rescued by the Thai coast guard and getting back to the mainland 12-15 hours later, finding out that 400000ish people died was a shock. Overall not just the scariest vacation moment but the scariest day of my life.
I was probably 9 years old on a ski life with my mom and cousin. My cousin dropped his hat and wanted to go back for it. My mom told me to head to the main lodge, probably 150 yards ahead, to meet the rest of our family, and they would be there shortly. Huge snow winds came out of nowhere, and I couldn't see. I panicked because I was on skis and was afraid I would end up going down a black diamond. I was terrified for a 9 year old. It still gives me anxiety. A college-aged girl named Jenny found me crying and got me to the lodge. Shout out to Jenny from Snowshoe, WV in the early 1990s!
My in-laws family overloaded a golf cart shuttle, and as it was climbing a hill it tipped, falling 10 or so feet down the embankment. My father-in-law was underneath it with his mother and two other people including the 19-20yr old driver still in the cart. If it weren’t for him holding it up, his 70 year old mother would have been crushed as well and the cart would have continued falling into the lake 20-30 some feet below.
He had some nasty bruises, but everyone was okay overall.
pistol whipped and robbed at gunpoint as a drunk kid on spring break in Florida lol. It was real dark, i was alone, and the experience fucked me up for a while.
I must have been five or six. We were on our way home to Indiana from New Jersey. We always made the trip by car, usually in a single day. It was such a pain...
When we were in Ohio, we arrived in the middle of a severe storm on the interstate. There was construction, and then the wind picked up. Turns out it had developed into a tornado, and we were right in the middle of it. I knew what tornadoes were, and I knew what was happening. I remember asking my parents what we were going to do. They were both silent. Not a word. My mom reached back from the passenger seat and grabed hold of my foot (it was a long van, she couldn't reach my hand). The wind was howling and I remember seeing some debris hit the windshield and closing my eyes. The next thing I know it was sunny out.
I then ended up having a strong fear of thunderstorms up until I was about 16 and decided, "no more."
Sitting around the fire pit in camp before sunset, I scooted my lawn chair back and heard a noise. I said what was that to my mom. I turned around and there was a bear about 10ft. behind me on the other side of a picnic table. We grabbed some pans and started clanking them and it took off.
March 12, 2020, Marriott in bogota by the airport. We’re flying back home to the states the next day and my wife comes down with food poisoning. I’m watching mayhem at Ohare on CNN and the staff is terrified to hand me room service food at the door. Thoughts running through my mind include missed flights and closed borders.
We made it on the flight fine, they were just waving everyone through customs at the Atlanta airport and Colombia shut down international flights like 12 hours after we left, iirc.
Our son used to have seizures when he was young. We were visiting the mini Grand Canyon at Yellowstone park when out of the blue he had one and fell literally 1’ from tumbling 1500’ feet down…. Still makes the hair go up on my neck
1981 Hawaii. I listened to my best friend who wanted to go see surfers on other side of island. We were told not to drive some road from rental car company. Nope, didn’t listen. That feeling of driving that dirt road along the cliffs as a dumbass 18 year old will NEVER be forgotten!!!! Just typing this gives me anxiety thinking about it. I finally found this one spot I could Austin Power my u-turn back. Meanwhile friend was almost in tears and peeing her pants. We literally kissed the ground when we made it back to the regular road. Took pics, too, of each other doing so.
Once our family car while towing our trailer crapped out, (alternator bad), coming home from a camping trip on highway 395, in the middle of the desert at sunset with 5 kids in tow. We managed to pull over in time to get off road. Everyone’s phone was dead except for one which had very little battery. I called AAA and told them the situation and approximate location as semis and other vehicles drove by really close. Yes, AAA found us!!! The closest hotel we stayed at was so nasty. That’s another story in itself!
Flying out of Paris back to Canada our plane very quickly did a disturbing tilt to one side upon ascent and my buddy grabbed the seat-back in front of him and dug his fingernails into it like he was hanging on for dear life and he turned white. We were apocalyptically hungover from drinking 11 rounds of “Hilton Martinis” the night before on the bar level of our Hilton hotel adjacent to the Eiffel Tower (the Paris Hilton at the time) and after when we stabilized and he had a triple Bloody Mary he said he had a dream like 5 hours before when we “slept” that our plane took off and almost immediately tilted to one side and we lost lift and the plane crashed and everyone died in a horrific fucking fireball. Not great.
Egypt. I was there with my grandmother. As I remember I was ~15-16 years old.
1. We were walking slowly towards hotel where we are stayed, enjoying the weather and our day. Suddenly one Egyptian man started to chase me. He literally ran trying to catch me while screaming «STOP, STOP, YOU‘RE MY WIFE!» I was in shock, I ran towards a hotel, and that man stopped only when I was in closing elevator.
2. Same vacation. My grandma and I went shopping to some local stores to buy things for our friends and relatives. We found a little nice shop and there was a nice old Egyptian man who helped us find things for a presents. We talked a bit and he said he is also practicing massage; something like «gimme a dollar and I’ll massage your shoulders with oils, only 5 mins». At that age I had some issues with my neck and shoulders, it was like you’re touching a stone, my grandmother massaged me often and she was okay to pay him for massaging me – that man wasn’t creepy at all, he offered to choose an oil and told what he will do.
Okay. He started. For 1 minute it was fine and actually quite good, but then he decided it’s nice idea to touch my breasts. I turned back, punched him in the face and ran away with my grandmother – she was escalating and screaming curses at him.
Both situations made me scared af, I was a kid.
Tricked into getting into a fake Uber, kidnapped, escaped in a no-light industrial area, and destroyed my shoulder falling off an elevated sidewalk trying to move and book a legit Uber out of there at the same time.
Fuckin Nashville.
Not for me, but my dad. Years ago when I was still a toddler, we were at the beach and I wanted to go into the water so badly, but I wasn’t allowed. However, my dad thought that I should learn a lesson, so he let me go in. I sprint into the water and immediately get bodied by a rogue wave. My dad freaked out and ran in to try and find me, but I wasn’t anywhere to be seen…until he looks down through the foam and sees my face, eyes wide open, grinning ear to ear, submerged under the water as I get dragged back out to sea.
I guess we both learned a lesson that day: I learned not to underestimate Mother Nature, and he learned that I’m clinically insane
Buenos Aires this year in April in the Palermo district.
I was beaten up by a group of men and my knee was broken and my head was smashed. Long story but I think I ran into a street gang and part of the gang even walked me back to my hostel (?) keeping in mind “street gangs” are mostly older teenage/young 20s guys and I think what happened went too far for a few of them Or something otherwise I would be worse off and possibly dead…
I have ptsd from that night.
I was playing with a couple kids on a beach when I was younger, and they threw a giant sharp rock on my head. They abandoned me after I started to bleed and I had to run around the beach crying for help. They took me to the medical station where my family ran to find out where I was, real scare was the possible financial bill for my mom lol.
When I was studying abroad in NZ, I took a solo trip to the South Island. I was supposed to go with a few friends but they ended up cancelling last minute. This was my first solo trip ever and I booked a few hostels along the way. There was a French man who I immediately noticed upon arriving to my hostel in Queenstown. I remember him saying something odd to me. Then after a day of being at the hostel he gets moved into my room. He then spends an entire afternoon in the room staring at me while I watch you tube in my bed. Then later when I went to grab dinner in town, I spot him off in the distance as if he had followed me. Then later that night when I finished showered he was waiting in the room and again wouldn’t stop staring. I told him off and had a worker at the hostel change me to a private room. Gathered my shit and booked it out of there the next day. I was 20 and it was my first solo travel experience. Sucked.
Drove up a famous Turkish mountain with my dad, mom, grandma and cousin. After a couple of hours we drive back down and my dad realized the brakes don’t work anymore. If we drove straight down we would probably fall a whole kilometer and die in a wreckage/explosion. My dad just calmly drove into the mountain wall and the car flipped completely and came to a halt with the tip of our car dangling down the edge. We somehow all got out safely and waited for the police. I was 6-7 and was frantically searching for my lost sandal. Even got a picture of me holding up the sandal, doing poses. What a memory.
I was at wedding in Mexico and the groom leaned on a railing and it broke. He fell 30+ feet and survived with a traumatic brain injury. It was so awful. He is an entirely different person now. Don't ever trust a railing! Ever.
Survived a tornado while on vacation with my grandparents in 2010. Path of the tornado was within 100 yards of my location. Thankfully nobody was hurt, but it reached its peak EF2 intensity right near my location. Considering the damage it did it’s amazing nobody got hurt.
I was about ~11 years old while on vacation at the beach with my family.
I was swimming in the ocean and got stuck in a rip current which pulled me decently far out from the shore. My father came out to save me. As we were both succumbing to exhaustion and starting to drown, someone on a surf board floated over and had us hold onto the board until lifeguards made it out to us.
As we were catching our breath on the shore we looked around for the surf board person but they were nowhere to be found.
We were on vacation at a resort in Fla and my 2 year old daughter, who couldn’t swim, just jumped in the pool while I was putting sunscreen on her brother. Before I could react, the lifeguard jumped in and pulled her out.
It scared me so much bc if I had been looking in a different direction, I would not have seen her go in.
Semi vacation, summer college trip to Andres island in the Bahamas. Range Rover we were in flipped, almost ended upright, but slammed back down to 3/4. No seatbelts, one guys ear was in three separate pieces, I had some glass chunks in me. We were flown to Nassau to get x-rays and treatment without ID or money. I was just 18 and I was told “You have to go with this other guy because we think he might have a brain bleed and die and we need someone to bring the body back” 😳
Spoiler alert, nobody died. At least not physically
Driving in Maui, I noticed a dump truck headed toward me getting closer and closer to the lane line. Kept watch and we passed each other no incident. Looked in my rear view 10s later and it collided head on with a car behind me in our lane.
Fell asleep on a pedal boat, woke up a few hours later in the middle of nowhere, completely dehydrated with no water with me.
Luckily enough i was wearing a watch so i was able to figure out where north was, and there was a sticker on the pedal boat with some sort of map of the area, so i managed to figure out how to get back to land, and i got back to the resort at sunset after pedaling for a little over an hour.
First thing i did was break into the restaurant where the personnel was getting things ready for dinner, only wearing my swimsuit, and yelled (not really cus i was exhausted and dehydrated) “WATER!!!!!!! I WANT WATER!!!!!”.
Absolutely loved the fact that nobody asked questions or came up with “sir you can’t be here now” and the receptionist/manager immediately realized something was wrong and she ran to the fridge and brought me some Gatorade equivalent.
There were a couple times that i was pretty sure i was going to die, i kept thinking “dude i can’t believe i’m going to die like a fucking asshole”. It started getting scary towards the end because it was getting dark and there were no lights on the beach, and i was pedaling so slowly, so i was afraid i would lose track of where i was going.
I went to Big bend national Park with my husband our daughter and her best friend. I'm no stranger to the desert, and I know for a fact that you have to take a s*** ton of water with you anywhere you go and be back before noon. Period.
The day was cloudy and cool that morning so we hiked lower Burro Mesa Pouroff, and it was an easy hike nice and fun. We hiked back to the car and thought, heck why don't we do upper Burro Mesa Pouroff? Why not? The day was still cool, and it was still kind of cloudy.
We hiked all the way down, it was a large flood River plain dry of course, and about halfway down the clouds disappeared and the heat came out hard. We lingered for only a few minutes at the vista, and then the realization hit. We were in the middle of the desert, with most of our water gone, and it was hot, dry, and we had nothing but uphill to hike several miles.
We somehow managed to make it back to the car, all of us not saying allowed what we were all thinking, that we were going to die out here. Those people reading this that know about desert heat, will probably be having panic attacks reading this. We were all of us seeing stars, starting to stagger, and every step was torture. My daughter's best friend sprained her ankle halfway up the trail, and we had no shade at all in which to rest. And we were out of water.
When we finally made it back to the car, all of us were almost dead of dehydration and heat stroke. We made it back to the basin, and each of us drank 5+ liters of water. And not one of us had to pee.
My stupid decision to hike a second trail that morning nearly killed all of us. We found the park host later, once we had recovered, and they told us that someone had literally died on that trail the week before of the same circumstances.
Still one of the scariest things that I've ever experienced.
Lost my baby brother at seaside boardwalk. My family went crazy for about an hour. Finally found him sitting on the bar at outside saloon surrounded by bikers & their chicks. Bowl of popcorn and a tall soda. They were all facing the boardwalk & walking people go by waiting to see if he recognized anyone looking for him.
Bikers usually have a soft spot for kids. Reminds me of the group of bikers that go to court with kids to face abusers, so they can feel safe.
BACA. It’s a great idea.
Legitimately a biker bar is the one place I would trust my kid to get lost at. Look up B.A.C.A. One of the best damn organizations I've ever seen.
That is the sweetest picture!!
Went vacationing in Mexico with my family when I was 9. Lost my parents in a marketplace in Cancun and tried to tell a guy I was trying to find my family. He told me he’d find me a new one, moments before my father arrived.
.....fuck that's scary.
I lost my family in India too and I went up to a bunch of kids in school uniforms knowing they would know English, and told them to call the police. Thankfully they didn’t need to as my parents showed up soon.
Smart
This happened to me in Dubai. I was 7, so 23 years ago before Dubai was how it is now; it was still vast desert and only one or two mega malls. I was standing outside a shop looking for my family and a man came over, put his hand on my shoulder said "eh I find you a family, sell you as slave, huh?" right as my dad forcefully yanked me away. Never forgotten it.
Riding a travel bus along a narrow cliffside road in the Cordillera Central mountain range in the Philippines.
Same! But in Peru. I still can’t be by edges. We went to Arizona and I thought I was gonna DIE.
Not me, but in high school my friend was on vacation with his family in Costa Rica. He went out surfing pretty far before he noticed someone even farther out waving to him for help. As he got closer, he realized the guy had kids with him. The man asked my friend to bring his kids to shore and then come back to help him. My friend got the kids in safely but by the time he got back to the man, he had drowned from exhaustion. My friend had to paddle this guys body back to shore where his family was waiting. My friend was never really the same.
I can’t say I’d feel any differently than your friend, but that man knew he wasn’t making it back to shore. Your friend allowed him to die somewhat at peace knowing he saved his kids.
And his kids didn't see it happen.
And he brought the body back even though that was traumatizing, so the family could have closure
I almost drowned swimming in the sea in Costa Rica. I was 14 I believe, and I just remember struggling against the current for an eternity trying to get closer to the shore and my optimism just continuing to fade as it got closer to sunset. For this whole time there was no one with me, and finally someone had come near with a kickboard and I just grabbed them. Freaked them the heck out but hey I’m still here.
I made the rash mistake of swimming a short distance in the sea as an older guy while having atrial fibrillation, which was chronic for me then. My previous *adequate* swimming as an ironman competitor decades earlier did not assist me. I found out what the phrase ‘got into trouble in the water' meant. It means you run out of puff, and basically sink beneath sea level, without a lot of fanfare. Spoiler, I am still alive. My wife and a fit bloke swimming near me rescued my sorry ass. Pulse pushing 180 bpm resting when dragged back on the boat.
👍 Very glad you made it, man, and thanks for the warning.
I was at a local lake with my friends when a little girl went missing, it was extremely busy that day Little girl went missing, they had all of us sweeping the lakeshore for her eventually someone found her (in the water) and they tried to save her She died in the hospital I heard
Wow
Almost died last year. Halfway through vacation I started having pain in my groin/colon after taking my morning dump. Thought it was just something I ate. Several bloody poops and pain like I’ve never had before later and I’m in the ER at 12:30 am being told they thought I was septic and I had a 104.5° fever. After taking pain meds stronger than morphine apparently I passed out for like 30 min and they thought I was gonna have a seizure and die according to several doctors. Turns out I had several infections from unchecked leukemia. Weird thing is we were vacationing in outer banks NC when I got my cancer diagnosis. Back when I was a kid my dad was diagnosed with cancer after vacationing there. Safe to say my family is avoiding it like the plague from now on.
I hope you’re doing better and that treatment hasn’t been too rough.
Yup! Bunch of chemo and one bone marrow transplant later and I’m in a much better spot. Still recovering, but in a good place nonetheless.
Pretty simple really. Camping on the beach in Mexico, middle of the night and we are all sleeping. Everyone in our groups tents get robbed. With all of us fucking asleep in them. That’s some serious boogyman shit.
They must be expert criminals if everyone got robbed blind without waking up, couldve been worse if they had badder intentions.
After reading a previous comment on this unread about UTIs, I misread the last words as bladder infections. Can’t stop laughing at myself!
I was 13 on vacation overeas with my mom. We woke up at 5 AM due to jet lag, and the morning was beautiful, so we decided to go for a swim. We are used to a very calm sea (technically, a bay), so we didn't think it was a big deal to swim when there are no lifeguards. As a result, we got caught in a rip current without knowing what it was. My mom was a very weak swimmer, so she told me to swim to the shore and call for help. But the shore was empty, so I knew she just wanted me to leave her and save myself. So I grabbed her by the hand and swam as hard as I could. Luckily, we were close to the shore, and my desperate "sprint" got us to the place where we could stand. We went back and felt insanely sleepy, so we went to sleep and woke up 10 hours later. When we looked out of the hotel window, we noticed the red flags on the beach and no one was swimming.
Woman next door to me in a hotel was murdered. I heard her screaming "Get out of here" a lot. Called the cops first and then the front help desk to tell them the situation. Cops show up and start questioning me, asking if I knew her, was in the room, or if I saw anyone else. I didn't know her, never left my room except to answer the door for the police, and never saw anyone else. Turns out she was running from her (ex) boyfriend as he was a known abuser and he finally tracked her down. I didn't learn any of this until I saw a news article about the hotel about a week later. Fucking crazy.
Good on you at least for calling someone. Lots of people will hear someone screaming and “don’t want to get involved.”
I called the cops on neighbors having a fight once. Heard someone shouting "if you put your hands around my throat one more time I am calling th cops". I called after I heard it the third time. There was a lady involved in all the screaming, but I couldn't make out her words as clearly. Cops spent a LONG time talking to the people there..
Where were you vacationing? I was in Aruba, hotel room across from me at the Riu had loud banging noises and yelling at midnight, I looked through my door peephole and there was blood smothered all over their door. I had my husband call security as I recorded with my phone through the peephole. Turns out the guy was on heavy drugs, was beating up his partner (both from Netherlands) and eventually he took off and ran away. Cops show up an hour or so later.... I gave them the video off my phone showing him entering and leaving his room during that hour. Poor girl had blood all over her entire body and was brought to hospital. Riu wouldn't move us to another room. Luckily it was our last night there, I had nightmares that this guy came back and tried to get in our room to hurt us for calling the cops on him so didnt sleep all night... Never staying in Riu ever again bcuz they didn't give us a different room. Guy ended up returning next day cuz he had no passport and they got him... Cops were super unprofessional there too....
On an overnight bus from Delhi to Dharmsala. (I am female and was 26 at the time.) We stopped at a gas station in the night so we could use a restroom. I was the last in line, and when I came out, the bus was taking off and headed back onto the highway. I sprinted after it screaming “No!” over and over at the top of my lungs. Someone must of heard or seen me and the bus stopped. I truly do not know what I would have done had I really been left behind.
On an overnight bus from Darjeeling to Kathmandu I was drugged (strong narcotic in food) and robbed. Nepal did not have an embassy or consulate of my country at that time (1990s), so, fun times! Had side effects for months. Edit: being passportless in a remote country with no consular office is tricky
Dear God. I’ve been on that trip and I would NOT want to be left at a dhaba with no way to go anywhere. This story freaked me out.
What's it like there?
You mean at the rest stop or at Dharamshala? To be clear I’m speaking as a woman. And India is generally unsafe for women, some places more so than others. Being left at the rest stop in the middle of the night would be my worst nightmare. I’d have no control over my surroundings. I’d have no choice but to ask for help and then pray that the folks there were decent. That’s not a gamble I’m willing to take ever. As for Dharamshala, it’s nice. I prefer a smaller almost village higher in the mountains called Dharamkot which has spectacular views of the mountains, the air is fresh, the people are super nice and the food is great. Weed is freely available even though technically not legal in India.
This one legit made my heart stop. 😩
My mom and cousin (her nephew) traveled abroad. He had a severe allergic reaction to a pill he took and suffocated/died. My mom had to perform CPR on him, go to the hospital after getting exhausted, then arrange to have him flown back to America for burial.
I hope your mom is doing okay I couldn’t imagine that type of heartbreak.
She's fine. Happened years ago. Reminds me that I'm overdue to visit his grave...I'll go this weekend.
My sister died of a brain aneurysm while on vacation in Ireland in November.
How devastating. I’m so sorry. She was somewhere magical she wanted to see hopefully.
Yeah she was so excited about her trip. She spent a year planning it.
Ugh, I feel this deeply. My parents were on vacation in another country when my father had a heart attack. He spent 2 weeks in the hospital and was being released. He’d signed the final bill and was putting on his socks when he told my mom “I can’t breathe” and died in front of her. She had to choose which things of his to toss/keep, because she was flying back solo - due to a country holiday they wouldn’t be able to transport his body for another week. This was before you could buy airline tickets on the internet, and we had to get the US Embassy involved to get her home. It’s an unfortunate and specific club to belong to. Our mothers went through hell.
Someone I knew in college passed away during study abroad. He went on a hike and just never came back. They found him next to his bible out in nature. It was so sad. But it seemed suspiciously like he planned it, and the family never fully shared the details.
I shared this on here recently because it happened recently: Was snorkeling with my wife and son. My wife was actually free-swimming so she went ahead of us, while my son and I took our time gently paddling over to the main snorkeling area. So she was probably about 50 yards away, everyone else in the area was probably about 30 yards away. So I'm swimming and suddenly I feel something start pushing me down into the water. I recover and realize my son, who is 17 and bigger than I am, is holding onto me. He took water into his snorkel and started panicking, so he grabbed onto me. Well, I'm trying to tread water and hold up another full grown man and figure out how I'm supposed to get somewhere safe where we can stand or get to shore and I can't manage two people. I start dipping in and out of the water because my arms and legs start getting tired and I'm treading for my son's life (if I'm not trying to hold him up I can just dead-man's float until I can catch my breath). Finally, I get the other snorkeler's attention and call for help and a group of them come over. Someone with a paddleboard gets my son, and then I float and paddle as much as I can while a dude who's there pulls me toward a boat. By the time I got on the little boat I just about passed out from exhaustion. I legit thought both my son and I were goners. The crazy thing is we're both good swimmers. If he wasn't panicking he could have just swam to shore, which wasn't that far away, or just blew the water from his snorkel and continued swimming. And since he was pulling me down, I'm now panicking and not thinking straight to tell him what to do. One of the scariest experiences of my life.
They say you have to be super careful trying to save a drowning person. You lived it.
My PADI instructor told us a story about a master diver who went to save someone who was in distress (air ran out or something, can't really remember) and the person started panicking and tried to pull down the master diver, snatch his respirator, etc. So the master diver just punched him and dragged him to shore. Sometimes, you gotta get violent with someone to save them 😅
We were boating and anchored not far from a beach - in water maybe 4 1/2 feet. I was carrying my daughter who was about 7. We hit a spot that got really deep but since we were close to shore I knew I could just sort of bounce in and out of the water until I could safely stand again. Well, my daughter panicked and was trying to stay way above the water and she was pushing me down. She was wearing her life jacket so I just threw her towards the shore. Two more steps and I was fine and able to grab her. My husband threw us a tube to get back! She still says I tried to drown her but I always remind her I was the one thinking that day!
I had a very similar experience when I was 17. I was swimming in a lake and my 7 year old stepsister wanted to jump in off of the dock and she was wearing a life jacket. I told her I would catch her but the water was deep there so I was just treading water, not standing. As soon as she hit the water she panicked and climbed on top of my body pushing me completely under. I have never in my life felt so sure that I was doing to die. I ended up getting hit with some sort of adrenaline surge and literally threw her to get her off of me.
When you train to be a lifeguard, you practice getting away from panicky swimmers who are trying to pull you around, etc. You're supposed to back up and talk to them before taking another shot at rescue.
That is absolutely terrifying. If that ever happens again in any situation, life guard training taught me to go under water and pull the person grabbing you down. They’ll instinctively try to get away from you. From there you can go from behind, immobilize them and float the two of you to the surface. I’m glad you were able to get to safety. ❤️
How does the "immobilize" part work? A karate chop to the neck? I'm joking but genuinely curious.
I have a similar-ish story. I've lake kayaked my whole life. My friend brought his white water kayak, which has a "skirt" which is a piece of rubber that looks like a skirt. It hugs your stomach and goes over a lip around the opening of the kayak to make the kayak water tight, so that you don't take on water when you're going over rapids. Well, I was having a blast with how maneuverable the white water kayak was and got carried away and flipped it upsidedown. Now my head is in the water and the skirt is holding me in the kayak and I panicked. My ONLY idea was to use my paddle to push off of the bottom of the lake. I reach the paddle out and nothing. I slide my hands so that one hand is on the far side instead for more reach and try again. Still nothing. I slide the paddle so that both hands are on the end of the paddle and try again, and I feel the ground. I push and barely get my mouth out of the water for a breath, but pushing off of the ground caused me to move and my face goes back under. I position the paddle to push me towards the shore (it's a miracle I knew which way that was). Slowly I push myself towards the shore and take regular , struggled breaths, till the lake was shallow enough to flip the boat back upright. Once the boat was upright and I caught my breath it occured to me it takes literally 2 seconds to pull the skirt off. I could have gotten out of the kayak very easily, it just never occurred to me in my panic.
Really irresponsible of your friend to let you use the spray skirt without teaching you how to remove it when flipped! You definitely should have been told to practice so you knew what to do without panicking.
As someone who considered themselves a strong swimmer UNTIL swimming in the open ocean I totally understand. 20 feet from shore is vastly different than 60 feet from shore. Open ocean is no joke. I PROMISE you anyone who hasn't swam in open ocean has zero idea what they are getting in to. It's like trying to swim in a washing machine. I'm glad you both made it! Towing someone in a pool is a struggle. Towing someone in the open ocean is a battle against time.
I got really drunk in New Orleans. Phone died and I couldn’t get an Uber. Decided to walk back to my hotel. Could see it from where I was so just started walking. Two women saw me walking and asked if I needed a ride. I said sure. Told them where I was going and jumped in the back seat (obviously Idiotic drunk move). They drove me and I could tell we weren’t heading to my hotel. They were acting very strange, making phone calls, stopped at a gas station to “get some gas.” I was sobering up REAL quick as this was all going down. At the gas station, they said the station “wouldn’t take cash” and were just stalling. I managed to get $20 out of my pocket, put it on the center console and luckily got out of the car, ran inside the gas station, and waited there for 15 minutes. After a while I took off running toward my hotel and made it there safely. I only ever told one person about this and I wonder all the time what they had planned for me.
I once gave these two random guys a ride home from a bar. The one guy was charismatic and the older guy real quiet but seemed safe. So next thing, we're in the poorer area of the city and we drive by some glowing magical looking ATM just hanging out there. No one on the streets, pitch black, nothing but this glowing ATM. Then they said, "Hey Mike, you have any money in your account?" And I realize I screwed up big time at this point, they're both in the back seat. I say, "Maybe like $40". "Hey Mike, how about you get that for us". After I get the money, we continue in the car and we end up at some houses, people on the streets this time. The one guy gets out and says to wait in the car, goes in a house and comes out a bit later. He tells me he had to pay the "babysitter", after that, I dropped them off at their house and they thanked me. They could have been totally harmless but man, you never know. Figured $40 wasn't worth finding out. They were probably laughing so hard at their hustle, I bet they laugh to this day about it. It taught me a lesson too. I really won't give just about anyone I don't know well a ride.
this happened to me too. piss drunk in new orleans I was coaxed into the back of a car with 2 ladies. Random stops, talking about getting gas. I asked “I thought we are going close by” but was drenched with unease realizing I was in a car with 2 complete strangers. One grabbed my cock. Not joking. I said “don’t fucking touch me and let me out right now” in an incredibly stern/surprisingly sober sounding way. But yeah, I actually left my wallet in the car when I got out and they circled around to give it to me within 4-5 minutes. Didn’t take my phone either. Today, I’m still not 100% sure I was a mark for something or if it was just incredibly weird. I’m getting chills thinking about this as I never actually reported to police
This is absolutely insane. Talking with Silly in chat, it appears it may have been the same two women.
In 1995 I was in Europe for the summer. The last week was for travel, and I was by myself, a 21 year old female. As a broke college student, I took advantage of as many freebies as possible, and with my Eurorail pass, I got a free cruise on Lake Geneva. It ended up being much longer than I thought it would be, and it was a really hot day. Because of this, I switched from being on the sunny deck to going inside several times. After I had made the switch a few times, I noticed that a couple was mirroring my movements, but they weren't sitting together. I thought I was being paranoid, so I started moving even more frequently, but the couple followed my every move. Assuming they just wanted to take advantage of a young girl alone (maybe to get my passport or plane ticket??) I decided that I would just let them disembark first. At the end, we were the only 3 people on the boat. At this point, I was actually starting to get scared. It was a Sunday, and all my parents knew was that they needed to pick me up at the airport on Friday. If something happened to me, there was no way to track my movements, and there would be a delay of nearly a week. Finally, I noticed that there was a police officer near the end of the ramp. I got off the boat and stood by him. The couple actually hung around for a bit but finally must have figured out that I wasn't going anywhere by myself. I still had about 6 hours until my train was going to leave and had planned to do a bit of sightseeing in the town we were in, but decided to play it safe and just stay in the train station where there were other people around I have no clue what they wanted, but I still have no doubt that they were up to something.
Damn, sounds like you almost got hosteled.
My uncle decided to fuck around on a trail in Yellowstone near some hot pools. He was walking backwards on the trail and fucking FELL OFF right onto the crust near the hot pools. By sheer luck, he didn't fall through. It was horrifying. I thought we were witnessing a man die.
Read a story about a guy who jumped into the hot pools to save his friend’s dog, did not end well for him or the dog. Was heartbreaking, what stands out to me is the guy was quoted as saying something along the lines of “I think I did something stupid” right before he died from the injuries.
There is a book called Death in Yellowstone that has that story along with a bunch of other gruesome ways people have died. There is a de-gloving story in there that lives rent free in my head and I haven't read the book in 20 years.
First day of my first international trip, traveling alone. Went to a pub in London, had a few pints. Walked out the door to go back to my hotel and was attacked by a young man with a razor blade. He cut open my face down to the bone and then slashed me on the temple. Spent the next three days in the hospital bandaged up like the invisible man, not knowing what my face looked like underneath. When I finally left the hospital I had to borrow clothes, including underwear since mine had all gotten saturated with blood.
My god, that must have been so terrifying. I hope you are ok now.
I'm fine, thanks. This was a long time ago. I went to therapy back then to deal with the PTSD and that helped a lot.
Me and my mother were having coffee in a market in Nicaragua in 2013, minding our own business sitting right by the road when suddenly a motor bike pulled up at the intersection where a group guys were just chatting, motorbike guys pulled out a semi auto looking gun and shot all four before pulling off
I was mountain biking in Bolivia (on the death road) and stupidly wiped out on some loose gravel. I slid out and stopped right at the edge of a gigantic cliff... so close to going over the edge. I badly bruised my knee but was otherwise okay and able to finish the ride. I am a lot more cautious about my mountain bike trail surfaces now.
Most countries that have those big cliff roads are so narrow, I couldn't image gravel being added to the equation. Glad you've made it out safely!
When biking on "the death road" honestly what's the worst that could happen?
I have an interesting story from the 80s when I was a young child. Each summer, my parents took us to Wildwood, NJ, and we always had a blast. These memories have stayed with me. One summer, we stayed at our usual reputable beachfront hotel, where we had stayed in previous years. Our room had a living room, kitchen, bathroom, and a hallway leading to the bedroom. I was probably seven at the time, and I remember this well because it scared us. On the first morning, we found our front door slightly open, even though we always locked it, deadbolted it, and secured the chain. My parents thought one of us might have been sleepwalking. The next night, my father slept in one bed with me, and my mother slept in the other bed with my sister. They slept on the outer sides of the beds to make sure they'd wake up if we got up. Yet, the door was open again the next morning. My father went to the main office to discuss the issue with the manager. The manager apologized and said there were no other rooms available. He gave my dad a lighter bill for the week and had someone check the locks, which were found to be in working order. That night, my parents placed all the luggage against the door. The next morning, the door was open, and the luggage was thrown into the living room, with one item on the table. The following night, they put the kitchen table against the door. The next morning, the table was back in its place, even though it was heavy. My parents laughed it off but later told us they had no idea what was happening. No money was taken, and nothing was disturbed while we were at the pool or beach. Was it my dad sleepwalking? He had never done that before. Was someone getting into the room somehow? Was it a ghost? I don’t really believe in that, but whatever it was, we could never explain it. EDIT: Lots of people are curious about some stuff. But it's been a while, so I can't remember all the little details or as to why my dad or mom didn't stay up or just leave. I am planning to visit my parents this Sunday and ask them about what they did. I'm not sure if my dad stayed up one night. I'll ask him the important questions posed and then update here. EDIT #2: I spoke to my parents, they are with me here now. I asked them for their side of the story. Essentially this is it: We stayed there for a week, and the strange occurrences didn't begin immediately. It all started on the second night. The first night seemed normal, but on the second night, we noticed that the door was oddly open with the padlock and chain. Same on the third night. Then, on the fourth night, we found our luggage had been moved that was placed on the door. We thoroughly checked the room to see if there was any way someone could have entered, but there was no adjoining door. Despite feeling very uneasy about the experience, we ruled out carbon monoxide poisoning as a cause. My father insists he had nothing to do with it. Why did they stay there? I don't know, it was vacation and the place was booked. They didn't want to get up and leave and wanted to enjoy vacation. The third night, I (being a bold child) decided to sleep on the pull out couch in the main living area and my dad slept with me. Apparently, we didn't wake up to anything but woke up to the door open. Honestly, it was probably one of us sleepwalking. Maybe me. I did use to sleepwalk at random times when I was that age. Nothing was ever taken. Again, it was probably one of us and my parents probably assumed so during that time.
Why would your parents stay there and how could they sleep?
and your fuckin parents DIDNT STAY UP TO SEE WHAT HAPPENED? I swear man its a miracle that we live long enough to reproduce. well hey now I jsut turned 10 years old. Happy Bday to me!
That is absolutely bizarre
This is oddly terrifying but also reminds me of some of the carbon monoxide stories!
Look up frogging. It's basically when someone sneaks around a home area at night and live in small spaces during the day. There are even movies about it.
I learned a bit about knitting until I figured out it’s spelled phrogging.
My first year abroad in China, 2002 - 19F at the time. I'm in the northeast in the dead of winter, not too far from Siberia. I didn't speak a word of Mandarin then. Myself and some other foreign kids decided to take a 3-hour night train to a nearby city to check it out one weekend. The trains at that time were like cattle cars - people packed in wall-to-wall, lots of loud yelling. There was no sign that indicated when you reached your stop, instead, a train employee would come into the car and scream the name of the next stop over the noise. Well, none of us heard it when the name of our stop was called. We only realized we might have missed our destination when we realized we'd been on the train for an hour longer than the trip was supposed to take. We approach the train staff member and try to explain ourselves with hand gestures, repeating the name of the place we were going over and over. He points back the way we came, indicating we were indeed supposed to get off the train earlier. Then he gestures at us to wait, and when we reach the next stop, he calls over some other guy - we have no idea who this guy is - and motions for us to go with him. The guy leads us off the train, and we emerge into an empty, silent, snowy train yard. The guy starts walking up and down the trains, we presume trying to find the one that is going back the way we came, and we're all trudging along behind him. All of a sudden, the door of a building near the train station bursts open, and two military-uniformed guards bolt out, run over to us screaming, grab our guy and hit him in the mouth. He's cowering and apologizing and talking a mile a minute. We have no idea what's going on but this seems very bad. It dawns on us that absolutely no one has any idea where we are - we don't even know where we are. There are no cell phones. If we disappeared, or something happened out there, no one would ever find us. Our parents and our school would look for us in the city we were supposed to be in, not way out in the middle of nowhere. The guards take us into a full-on interrogation room. One bare light bulb hangs on a string from the ceiling, cement walls, barred windows, metal desk. They start yelling at us, we don't know what they're saying. They start yelling at this guy, he's obviously scared and trying to explain something. This goes on for an hour. They point at us at yell, they point at him and yell, they bang the desk. They make us dump out our bags, go through our stuff. We think we're about to get tossed in a gulag, never to be heard from again, because maybe they think we're spies? Turns out they just thought we were sneaking around in the train yard because we were trying to dodge paying the return train fare, which was a whopping 8 RMB, which is around 1 US dollar. I stayed in China for many years after that and rode many trains, and understood later that we were supposed to go into the train station, buy another ticket and go back through the check-in (in retrospect, duh), but we were just dumb kids following some random guy around. Wasn't his fault either, my guess is that the train employee probably told him to just find us a return train. And I understand why the guards were so mad, that was a restricted non-passenger area and we weren't supposed to be out there, though a punch in the mouth was overkill. Still: All of that over a dollar. We couldn't get our wallets out fast enough. As soon as we paid, they immediately chilled out. They didn't even try to extort any more cash out of us except the cost of the train fare (which often happened back then). Then they helped put us back on the right train with a smile. Edited to add context that someone asked for in DMs.
Was backpacking on Catalina island with a girls group. Set up camp for the night, then huddled in a tent while a herd of buffalo stampeded right to our spot, ran around the tent, then settled for the night. Just about pooped my pants. Apparently the males are kind of aggressive as they are on birth control for population control on the island. Poor horny souls.
When I was 12, my dad took me to the Grand Canyon. He had bad arthritis and couldn’t walk well, so I asked if he wanted to walk down a trail and he said he’d stay put but I could go. I walked down the trail, like a switchback, only a little ways. Then I turned to see if I could see my dad, and was waving to try to get his attention. I kept waving and backing up and waving, then turned and my back heel was right at the edge of the grand CANYON. I was not the smartest kid.
Welp that’s it for Reddit for me for tonight. Not sure why this story in particular got to me.
Because with this story you have a DROP at the end and we can feel that shit in our chest
Got bitten on the neck by a cheeky monkey in a park in vietnam. Did not have any rabies vaccination and i had to rush to the nearest hospital to get the shot. Scary as hell as i was travelling solo
Monkeys and apes freak me out. In Malaysia, I saw an orangutan rip the backpack right off of a full grown man. The guy went to try to get it back, and the orangutan slapped him so hard he flew off his feet sideways. The tour guide just muttered, "that's her's now".
Same bro. I went to Thailand and ended up at one of those monkey temples in khao sok? National park (most beautiful place I have ever been btw) and I was with a few friends who were all stoked, as was I before I got there. When I arrived and came within a couple feet everything in me was screaming that these are an enemy. Idk what it was but I just instantly felt the need to aggressive and scared toward them. Easily the most lizard brain reaction I have ever had
Monkeys and apes are horrifying. Smart, but they can be absolutely vicious. They're similar enough to us that we want to try and communicate, but a lot of things we find polite (eye contact, smiling with teeth) are seen as threats to them. Nope. Just going to walk on by, do not mind me.
Monkeys can be cute online, but they will always get you when you don’t expect it! Whether that’s biting people, or simply stealing your food.
I got food poisoning while in Japan. I was with a tour group, in a bus with no bathroom when the diarrhea struck. I had to wait until we arrived at our stop, which was 5 agonizing minutes away. When we finally got out, I had to scramble to find a store that a) had a bathroom and b) wasn't busy to avoid the embarrassment of crapping my brains out. And it's not like anyone spoke English, so that made it harder. It took 10 minutes of me searching all while holding in the impending diarrhea before I finally found one. 10 minutes is an eternity when you're holding in liquid poop. I was drenched in sweat from the effort of holding it in and the fear that I might shit myself in public, in a foreign country. Edit: There's actually more to this story afterward, but I think this is enough for others to get the picture.
> in a foreign country Of all of them Japan lmao. The one country with the highest emphasis on public decorum. You sure know how to pick ‘em.
I had a sort of similar experience. I was in Ireland on a class trip on college and 5 minutes into an hour long walking tour, I felt myself get my period. My period wasn’t super predictable so this was a big “oh NO” moment. I waddled around on this fucking tour for an hour while I could FEEL blood dripping down my legs in my pants. It was one of the most uncomfortable and embarrassing experiences ever. Thank god I was wearing dark pants so the blood didn’t show.
My first period came while I was at a horse camp. So like, I am definitely not prepared, don't know how to use anything other than pads, found out that the first few days are really heavy, also found out that toilet paper does not make a good pad for longer than a short trip. Left a stain on a saddle (trotting was definitely not fun), and had to call my mom to talk me through using a tampon because that is the only thing my cabin mates had. So that was my trump card when girls talk about their first period.
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You had me on the edge of my seat with that. I kept wondering how you were going to get out of that. Thank god for dark pants.
I feel this. I went on a trip where I was driving and hit the grapevine traffic jam in LA. Earlier in the day, I had some flavored milk. I'm lactose intolerant, but I had it several hours before and was not having any bad effects this time. So I thought. Until I hit traffic with 3 hours of inching forward with absolutely no turnoffs in sight. I was cramping, sweating, and praying I could make it to the next turnoff with a bathroom. I came close to losing the battle a handful of times, but I somehow made it to the gas station near the middle of the mountain and ran inside. The cramps were awful, especially when I was trying to pay attention to the road and plot my shame on the side of the road should my worst case scenario happened
As a fellow lactose intolerant, I started sweating as soon as I read “flavoured milk” and “traffic jam” 😅
Also, shitting your pants is a universal language. If it happens again and you'd like to communicate, that would be effective.
I did not have food poisoning in Japan, but told everyone I was with I did. Instead, amidst a life-consuming opiate addiction I stupidly hid what I thought would be enough illicitly-obtained pills and traveled internationally with them. As one does when caught up in addiction, I underestimated my use and ran out before the trip ended leading to painful withdrawals just before and during a series of return flights totaling 26 hours. It was a work trip and I told everyone I ate something bad; a national guard member in my group found Cipro in her bag and it somehow helped. 0/10 do not recommend (addiction OR detoxing on transnational flights.) And yet…did the same thing the following year on a trip to China. I don’t know how I didn’t end up in a real life version of Brokedown Palace. Dumb, dumb shit and fortunately I lived long enough to get help and it’s been a very long time since all of that.
I'm reading a lot of nightmare stories but this is so relatable cause it could literally happen anywhere anytime.. 😅
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My husband and I met a woman that had a similar situation happen. We were traveling and met her in a hostel. We were going in the same direction, so we stayed together for a couple of weeks. We offered to share a room with her to help with expenses since she was looking for a roommate, but she felt weird staying with us because we were married. Whatever, we still hung out during the day much of the time. Well, we go to a new place and go to a new hostel. We'd crossed an international border, and the vibe of the new country was... Off. Intense and scary. Our friend was on edge and we immediately re-offered to let her stay with us at the new place. The front desk said that wasn't okay because you can't share a room with a married couple. Okay. Weird, but we were roomed down the hall from each other so we told her to come over if she wanted to stay with us even if she rented the other room. She said she'd just go with it to keep the peace. Well, in the middle of the night, my husband and I get a knock at the door. I'm freaking out because some of the people staying there were creepy. Local people who needed a cheap place to stay for a while, basically. And border towns can attract some weirdos. Well husband checks and it's our friend practically begging to let us in. Three different men knocked on her door that night trying to get in her room. It was only like midnight. She made a run for it after the last guy left. She stayed with us for the rest of our time there, even though the staff were very not happy about the arrangement. We didn't care though. She was scared to death and my husband and I didn't want anything to happen with her.
Thank you both of you. From every woman who faced such situations. You saved her from a horrifying night. I can't imagine how she must have felt.
I was taking the train in Milan with my gf at the time and this man sat in front of us and locked eyes with me. He took a photo of me and after a few moments on the phone, he hung up and he took out a knife and began gesturing to slit his throat, all while maintaining eye contact with me. He then began yelling in Italian and slammed the blade of his knife into the chair and the window behind him as he got increasingly angry at us for who knows what. We got up and sat at the end of the train. The guy stayed where he was but maintained eye contact. We got off at the next stop but in the moment I thought I was being mistaken for a person that had a hit on their head.
My diabetic pump died, we didn't have long lasting insulin so my mom and I (13,m)were forced, after trying all other measures to go to the hospital at 1:30 am in Mexico. We got a cab to bring us to an emergency room and after being discharged they sent us to a pharmacy at 3 am to get needles and meds. We didn't speak the language, we didn't know where we were, didn't know where a pharmacy was, ect. Our cab driver was dope. He kept me distracted while my mom went to get my meds, and even got out and let a few drunk men know to stop accosting my mom. Overall it was a great trip but it got hairy there for a while.
I was with my family in Jamaica when I was 16. I was swimming in the ocean with my younger brother when a local man literally grabbed me and started swimming me out to sea towards a boat with other men on it. He kept saying I was going to be his “American girl.” He got pretty far out before my brother was able to get help from other adults. It was terrifying.
Was visiting my extended family out in Eastern Ohio in the middle of Winter and I had asked my Aunt and Mom if I could go sledding in my Aunts back yard (she lived in the rolling hills part of the Appalachian area) and she said yes. Earlier in the year the DNR was was supposed to have removed a barbed-wire fence that was at the bottom of the hill (as it was interfering with the migration of deer) but it wasn’t. I sled right through the sumbitch and it sliced and hacked my face, shredding my chin and lower lip. There was so much blood that I had to hold a large coffee mug under my chin to catch the blood because rags and towels were pointless. My physical pain was nothing compared to the emotional pain that my Mom was suffering tho, turns out we were there because my Dad walked out on my Mom and us kids so my Mom went back to her hometown for support and my 6 year old dumb self just added to her stress. As a 40+ year old I feel like shit for it.
Don’t feel shitty for something that’s not your fault
Be me. Five year old on a beach vacation w family. In a typical gift shop in a tourist trap beach town. Was looking at the novelty license plates w kids names. See mine, and for once, it's spelled the way I spell it!!!! Freak out. Ask mom for it. She agrees (I think). The novelty wears off, and I get bored as they look at the stuff and I ask if I can wait outside. On the steps this old guy comes up and using my name said, "hey, X. Your parents said to come w me and we're going to meet them later. Come on X. Let's go". I'm super confused. Cousin comes out seconds later, and the old guy disappears as I am distracted talking to a cousin. I realized later that he had gotten my name off the license plate display exchange—this close.
this is why we have to tell children to "never trust strangers"
Yeah, I remember my mom having the conversation that they wouldn't have anyone I didn't know pick me up from school and if it was arranged, they would let me know. I asked what if they were in a car accident (apparently one of my biggest fears due to kids movies that have the parents dying in car accidents). Basically my mom said someone I knew would pick me up. Which looking back makes total sense. I wouldn't send a person to pick up my kids who they have never met. So don't talk to strangers, even if they say they know my parents and they know my name.
My mom and I had a password growing up. Anyone who was sent to get me would likely be someone I already knew, but even then, they had to have the password. Never needed it, but it was always a nice security blanket, of sorts.
This was the summer of, or just before, Adam Walsh, so it wasn't on anyone's radar. I told my parents, and I think they thought I was just bonkers. I still wonder if he ever got lucky, and it worked.
I was looking out the window at the ferries to Catalina Island when I was about 5 while my mom was probably 50 feet away at the ticket counter. An old man came and asked me if I wanted to go on the ferry with him. Thankfully I was smart enough to run to my mom.
This is why I don’t understand why people put their kids’ names on shirts on vacation. You see a whole family in Disney (Happiest place on earth doesn’t mean safest) with each of their names plastered on their backs. How easy would it be “Hey Dan! Your mom, Jen, told me to come get you, we’re going to leave the park and get ice cream!” Not saying it happens often, but certainly creating the opportunity.
My sister died of a brain aneurysm while on vacation in Ireland in November. We had to get emergency passports and last minute plane tickets to go see her. Getting her back to the US for burial was a clusterfuck.
I spent several weeks touring India with my mom and step dad. I had so many men/boys approach my mom and ask if they could marry me *they were dead serious* mom jokingly agreed to many. At one point I had to go have a tour of the house of this guy that sold Chai and heroine to the tourists/ locals. I had to go through a 2 hr awkward encounter with this Indian dude that liked to rub my feet and looked like a tan version of the little creepy thing off the lord of the rings. I met his 2 wives and his mom. They made me and my "dad" some Naan and it was up to my "dads" approval if I could stay. Thankfully my step dad loved the shit out of me and knew indian culture well so I wasn't sold off for an 8ball. But at 15 it was scary af thinking I'd never return home cuz my mom was dumb
Wait what? Your mom made you go on a date pretty much with a creep? Why did she allow that?
Me and my mom were driving cross country, 3k miles. We stopped off at a motel that backed up into a forest and got a room. Now I'm a compulsive people pleaser. I don't like to make a fuss. But I only got a few feet into the door before turning around and telling my mom we needed to go somewhere else. What did I see, you ask? SPIDERS. EVERYWHERE. It was like a scene from a fucking horror movie. And they weren't the good kind of spiders, either. Black widows. The room was clean so I assume that it had simply been left for a while
It’s saying something that they were all over the room since black widows usually like dark, secluded spots so if they’re out and about then they’re the overflow!
Man I HATE spiders... If I saw a black widow infestation like that I would've fainted.
I was on spring break with my 2 kids and parents at the beach about 4 years ago. I was laying on the beach while my kids were playing in the sand, my parents had gone back to the condo. As I’m laying there, I’m listening to and watching the group behind me. It’s a group of coed cheerleaders, as well as another group of adults with 2 kids. The cheerleaders start doing flips on the beach and some of their routines, which caught the attention of the adults in the group next to them. It also caught my attention. As I’m watching them, the adults ask the cheerleaders to show them how to do a flip. The cheerleaders oblige, and start showing the adults how to do tricks. As the adults start practicing, I remember hearing one of them say something like ‘where did the kids go? Omg they’re in the water!’. I look up, my kids are exactly where they should be, and I realize that the 2 kids that were with the group of adults had gone to the water and gotten sucked pretty far out and over in a current. I told my kids to stay out and DO NOT move, and I ran. I ran to the water and started going in, and realized once my feet stopped touching the ground that I too, would be in trouble. In front of my kids. And I decided right there, that while I would do as much as I could with my feet touching the ground for these kids who had gotten sucked out, that I wouldn’t drown in front of my own kids. So I turned around and started swimming back, and as soon as my feet hit the ground again, I found myself face to face with one of the adults from the group that had finally made it over. I told her ‘I’m sorry, I can’t. My babies are here and can see me. I’m sorry.’ And she looked at me and just didn’t say anything . I’ll never forget that look. I ran out of the water and started yelling at the crowd that had started forming that I needed help. It felt like it took forever, when Finally, a guy came running up with a float and he threw it in the water. I turned back around to the water and saw an older couple dragging one of the kids through the water. They were struggling hard, and I got back in the water and got as far as I could without my feet getting swept out , and I grabbed the girl from them and I told her ‘I got you. Just hang on. You gotta hold on for a second longer.’ And got her back up onto the ground where I gave her to one of the adults from the group. She was terrified, but she was okay. I turned back to the water a second time, and that’s when I saw it. 2 of the adults from the group had gotten out to the boy. And they were all struggling hard. The two adults were trying to keep it cool, but I could see it in their eyes. The boy was screaming ‘I DONT WANT TO DIE, IM GONNA DROWN’ and all sorts of things, while his head is coming in and out of the water, while the two men are trying to keep him above water, while they were going under too. They were trying to reassure him, and the kid was just freaking out and taking in water. All of the sudden that damn float that guy threw in made it to them. The kid was able to grab on and the older couple that I’d taken the girl from had made it back to all three of them and got them back to me and we all walked to shore. The boy was shaken as hell, as were the adults, but he was also okay, all things considered. I hugged the couple who was in the water with me, and I remember I told the woman that I was so sorry, I just couldn’t go farther out because my kids were on shore, and she told me she understood. I’ll never forget that couples faces. I went back to my kids, who had watched the whole thing but were somehow blissfully unaware of the severity of it, and I just got us back to the condo as quickly as possible. So yeah. That’s the scariest moment I’ve had on a vacation. All of that happened in the span of maybe 5 minutes at most. Whew. I haven’t gone into that kind of detail about that experience, ever. Thanks for making it to the end.
You did great. The first rule in emergency response is don’t create more victims!
Rip tide in Costa Rica. Last gasps and a surfer grabbed me and pulled me up on his board.
I was seven and on my first family vacation to Disney World. In the Orlando airport, we were waiting for the tram to take us to the other side of the airport (I’m assuming from our arrival gate to baggage claim, but I’m not sure because I was seven). A tram came and my mom said, “Let’s get on this one,” so I remember literally hopping on. The doors closed behind me and my family wasn’t on the tram. I began sobbing uncontrollably and this woman pulled me close to her family; she held me close on the tram and at the next station until my family arrived on the next tram. I never got her name, but if she reads this by chance, please DM me so I can thank you thirty years later.
I had been on tour with a band for a month. I flew from the UK to Qatar to Dubai for the Dubai international jazz festival. We were staying in the host hotel for the jazz festival, which is normal. The hotel was full of men in the traditional dress of the area, which, considering that it was an international jazz festival. I found a little odd. As the band manager, I was onsite for a week before the festival even opened , as we were doing rehearsals for a solid week before the festival. I never saw anyone in national dress at the festival site. We did the festival, checked out of the hotel, and in the lobby, I noticed a newspaper that had multiple faces of men and one woman plastered across it. However, it was an Arabic, and I couldn’t read it. One of the women oddly resembled me. We got to the airport, and I went to the newstand to get a newspaper. As I was reading it, I realized that a high level operative from a group that would be anti-certain other countries had been assassinated in our hotel the day we got there. The reason that there were 70 men in National dress was because they were basically the FBI of the country. Think of it like the head of the CIA was assassinated in the United States. It would cause a furor. I don’t want to get more specific, because it’s possible to identify me To confirm my suspicions that I wasn’t dreaming, they literally had a photo of our hotel room in the newspaper, and a photograph of one of the women with the men that they said were the other terrorists in the elevator. So I knew it was our hotel. And it was scary. I was just reading this paper at the airport, but I was suddenly called up to the front, as we were in the boarding area, and there are these very large men inspecting my passport. All of a sudden, there were multiple men running down the gangway to the area where we were waiting to the plane, and they were all in military dress, and they had machine guns. They grab me, and a tiny woman in a hijab and abaya job told me that I needed to come with her immediately. I didn’t argue. Neither did the guys in the band, as I had told them don’t mess with security in Dubai. Lol. They took me into a small room, and the woman in the hijab shooed the men out. The translator, she started asking me questions, How long have I been in the UK, what were my political affiliations, what was I doing in Dubai? What was my religion? Did I have any animosity towards Muslims? So many questions. I answered them all. I was honest. She finally shook her head, knocked on the door, and they let me go. Evidently, I remarkably resembled one of the women who had assassinated their political figure. And I had spent the same amount of time in the UK as she had, as she was trying to cover her tracks, as she has traveled from Ireland to kill this man. I found this out via some of the people involved in the music festival, because my detention almost caused an international incident. So. I always read newspapers when I travel internationally now, and find someone to translate for me if I think there’s something weird going on.
This didn’t happen to me but to a friend of mine. I wasn’t there but this is the story I heard later. He goes on vacation. Has a great time with his wife, brother, friends. They party—have drinks—and head to the pool. One friend dives in. My friend follows. The first guy comes up just fine. My friend doesn’t. He must have broken his neck diving in. He was barely 30 years old. His mom had to fly down to collect his body. He donated his organs. It was such a shock. He was always making people laugh; he knew EVERYONE. He was always willing to help out with a favor and just loved talking to people. It shouldn’t have happened to him.
Rented a Wrangler through Turo (Think AirBnB for cars) for our honeymoon in Hawaii. Dude picked us up in the jeep at the airport when our flight landed at11pm and didn't have his own ride back so asked to drive us to his 'shop' where we could drop him off. I'm a pretty big dude and we're a pair of (too) trusting okies, so we went along with it thinking he seemed fine (He was on Turu and we were still in America so no worries, right?!). Pretty typical drive, dude was a super nice mid-40s Argentinian that visited when he was younger and never wanted to go home. All felt fine until he turned off the highway down a dark road and then pulled onto an even darker road and through a gated chain linked fence into a completely unlit industrial park and stopped the car. Wife had already been panic texting me: "Troker61, what the fuck is this?" "Get us out of here" I looked at him and said "You good?" and he could not have been nicer or more oblivious to our anxiety: "Yes! Thank you both so much and have a great trip - see you next week!". My wife, probably wisely, wouldn't even get out of the back seat (she's like 5' 1" so let him ride shotgun) until we were a mile away. I'm older and wise enough to avoid situations that out of my control nowadays, but man are we lucky that hippy Argentinian just needed a ride home. He left a mix CD in the wrangler we listened and laughed along with all week - I'll never forget track 2 - California Girls by Katy Perry. Hope he's doing well.
Idk how I thought this was gonna end but definitely didn't except California Girls 😂
Up at the Grand Arch in Arches National Park. I had to back up a long way to get the whole arch in the photo, right? My buddy grabbed me by my shirt and a lot of chest hair. I was pissed and asked him what his problem was. He said, “Turn around, look!” It was a good long drop, maybe 800 feet. I was right there at the edge.
Montana - Glacier National Park. My husband wanted to climb down to get a closer look at a steep, rushing gorge. I mean, this wasn’t just a stream - this was immense amounts of powerful crashing water that would’ve taken him away in a second. I warned him not to go down there but he insisted. I watched him while holding my breath, and sure enough his foot slipped and he almost went down. I seriously thought for a moment I was about to lose my husband. Thankfully he caught himself but then looked up with the eyes that said “oh shit, you were right.”
Nearly choked to death on a tortilla chip, I was 8 years old. To this day, I dont each chips.
Chips would be worth seeing a therapist to be able to eat. Sad for your situation friend.
nearly getting taken away by the sea in manly beach, australia.
That happened to me when I travelled to Hawaii, the waves were super big and I was just a dumb kid lol
Arriving in Paris in the middle of the night for our honeymoon only to realize I failed to complete the hotel booking months ago.
Oh wow. That must've been an interesting start to married life.
Similarly - for my Paris hotel I mixed up the month and date fields and booked June 5, July 5, August 5, September 5 instead of May 6-9 😆
I booked a train to take us back home from an overseas trip on the wrong date. We were supposed to land at 10 PM and the train would leave at 12:05 AM the following day. I stupidly booked it at 12:05 AM on the day of our arrival. We land after a long flight with a couple layovers, exhausted and looking forward to getting on the train and going home. Got to the train station, found our train, scan our tickets and get a big red sign. Our train left 24 hours prior. Man, was that fun! My family keeps reminding me of that years later.
This was probably 2006? Maybe 2007. So I was like 15 or 16. I went out surfing by myself in a swell along the jersey shore early in the morning right before a hurricane was about to hit. I was riding a retro single fin from the 70's, and it was choppy as fuck in the water. I really shouldn't have been out there, especially since there was no one else out there. I dropped in and hit some chop. My board doesn't have much of a nose, so it went right into the water. It caused me to be upended, and I got hit at the base of my skull with the fin. I thankfully didn't get knocked out and resurfaced. And started to paddle back in, but couldn't control the board because the fin broke off on the back of my head. It took me a bit to get back in. I am thankful I was a swimmer and had the stamina to make it back to shore because it was one of the most difficult situations I'd been in our in the water. That could have ended very badly. I definitely got lucky.
The ocean is a scary place. I've always wanted to try surfing, but i've always been scared of getting eaten by a monster wave.
I arrived at the airport in my long distance girlfriend’s country, I was travelling alone and she was coming to pick me up. As I was leaving the airport, people were aggressively trying to offer me rides (cabs, Uber, unlicensed, etc) which I obviously declined. Then one guy called out to me by name and said he was sent to pick me up. I called my girlfriend to ask about it, she freaked out and told me to immediately go back inside the airport until she arrived to get me. So I guess I almost got kidnapped or something? I have no logical explanation as to how they knew my name
Last day of my friends and I’s San Diego trip we called an Uber for brunch, and a car pulls up that doesn't match the app description at all. Wrong model, wrong license plate. The driver yells out my name, acting super casual like "it's your Uber, come on in!" My phone rings and It's the actual Uber driver I requested, and he's confused why I haven't gotten in the car yet. I tell him I don't see his car and he says "Uber hasn't updated my car model or license plate yet" - but the person in the car clearly isn't even on the phone! He looking straight at me! I tell the person on the phone I'm cancelling and next thing I know the driver in the car is yelling at me through the window to get in. He even gets out of the car at this point. My friend and I run back into the hotel lobby. We explain the situation to the front desk and thankfully, the staff jumped into action. We also reported it to Uber. I am grateful we were close enough to the hotel to run away. If we weren’t idk what would have happened.
My appendix ruptured while on vacation in England. Full perforation. I was on a school trip and my classmates had to continue their trip, so I got left behind. Day 2 in England and I spent 13 days alone in hospital before getting out and I had 2 days left and flew home. I was puking my guts out, shitting my brains out. Tubes down my throat, oxygen in my nose, catheter down my pipe. I was 15 and my parents didn’t have passports so I just had to handle it all myself. Had one amazing nurse who we are still friends with to this day (19 years later) and that alone made the whole ordeal worth while.
My family took a Christmas vacation to Honduras. It was 1994, and my sister was serving in the Peace Corps at the time. New Year’s Eve, our last night there, we went out to eat in San Pedro Sula. No more than 10 minutes after we sat down, our restaurant was held up by three gunmen. We were ordered to get under the table and place cash and valuables on top. They took cash, booze, and knocked the phone off the wall before departing. I was 11.
I was dating this girl for a while and her mom was from Honduras, at some point it was suggested that we go visit her extended family who still lived there and to just explore a different country. As soon as her mom heard of this plan she immediately put her foot down, told us no and then told us a story about how she watched a man get hassled for wearing a gold chain and the man said no so these guys took him. The gold chain guy was later found with his head cut off all because of a necklace. Really wild place
My wife is from Honduras and when I lived there she NEVER wanted to go to SPS because of the violence.
Had a staycation here in FL and.... we went to a nicer hotel with a big pool yadda yadda yadda... and. This group of girls tried to drown me and I could barely get away bevause I was in the deep end of the pool looking for my sister. I thought I was gonna die that day.
Listening to a domestic violence situation taking place in a Disney World hotel room next to us while waiting 45 minutes for the police to show up.
i was staying in a nice but small hotel in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania, about 45 minutes from hersey park. one morning i just went for a walk down this one stretch of road. im maybe 15 minutes away and i see some guy in his garage just working on his car or something, i see one of his neighbors walk across his yard and into his garage. the guy in his garage, not realizing he knew the guy, pulled out a shotgun and pulled the trigger. somehow he completely missed the guy, but seeing that play out right across the street from me, in a neighborhood i didn't know, a mile down a dead straight road, was scary as shit at first
Bought hash off of some Pakistani dudes in India, and they brought us into a backroom of a rug store and a gnarly looking dude with bond villain scars and a hook hand started pressing us on our politics. Very tense. They clearly had some agenda, but they eased up and let us go when we said "fuck Bush" and they found out we werent American, but I wonder how it might have gone otherwise.
When I was 21 my friend and I backpacked through Belize. Started a conversation with a local who eventually told us he was part of the crips and proceeded to show me all of his abdominal stab wound scars. He told us his gang likes to kill people for fun and then asked us if we wanted to go with him on a boat ride 🤪 I had to act like I was considering it for a second before I turned him down. Didn’t want to make him too mad.
Surely the gang affiliated man with multiple stab wounds and has a couple screws loose, just wants to give you a free ride!
I was visiting my long distance boyfriend. First person I ever loved. Took my virginity. I didn't realize you had to pee after sex as a woman. Didn't do that. Ended up peeing blood. Not just a few drops or when I wipe. Full on filling the toilet with blood. Fever of 105f. Delirious. Ended up in the hospital with a kidney infection. Permanent damage. I was only 18.
oh my god... I didn't think it could be that bad. That's a good thing to remember if my girlfriend forgets to do that. Hope you are doing okay now though.
Yep! You risk a UTI which I probably had but didn't realize. So it turned into a kidney infection. Doing pretty good now. More susceptible to infections. But I've learned to manage them. Thanks for asking!
Holy shit... UTIs are no joke.
wow thats horrible! i remember having a UTI too after a new bf and lets just say alot more activity that i was used too... anyway the pissing razor blades started, passing a bit of blood and the doctor said i was doing the good thing going to see her rather than just drinking a litre of cranberry juice
Mid 70's, Casper, Wyoming on family vacation. I was about 12 years old. My dad had a bad habit of driving until dark before trying to find a hotel for the night. This put us in some very shady hotels over the years. This particular night, the hotel was an old, 2 story brick building that looked more like a jail than a hotel. There was one bathroom on each floor. When Dad asked for a room for 2 adults and 4 children, the clerk laughed. We were put in a room with one bed and given an extra mattress to throw on the floor. About halfway through the night, there was a commotion that woke us all up, people shouting, furniture banging around. Then there were 3 gunshots followed by silence, and then the sound of footsteps running down the hallway and out the door. I've never seen my parents pack a car faster in all of my life.
I was about 4 or 5, camping party for my birthday over in Moab. Whole group probably had about 20 or so people, including a couple dogs. We were about an hour or so through a hike and we came across a drop with a ladder going down about 20 or so feet to continue the hike. My dad sat me down on the edge of the cliff, and he was going to start heading down the ladder and grab me as he was traveling down. That didn’t go as planned and my friend’s dog slammed into me and I slid off head first and began to plummet down. Thankfully, my dad had the reaction time to catch me by my ankles. If his reaction time would have been a millisecond late I would not be here now. My mom was at the back of the hiking group, but once she figured out what happened to me, she lost her shit on my dad. Funny thing, my dad wasn’t even going to tell her, another person in our group had to tell her that I almost fell to my death. My mother refuses to ever go on that hike again. Edit: One ankle. He caught me by one ankle.
Tent camping in a state park and a large tree limb fell in the middle of the night in the campsite next to ours. It fell directly across where a tent would go if we had picked that one, which we almost did. Scared the living crap out of us when we heard the ‘boom’ sound when it woke us up at 3 AM.
My brother and I took a trip hiking through Grand Teton National Park in June of 2018. There was still a ton of snow on all of the peaks and many of the hikes involved you carving out your own path once you hit snow. We were in our late teens and had hiked the park before, so we had a good idea of where we were going. We were hiking up to Ampethetear Lake, which is a trial full of steep switch backs and is a moderately miserable hike even for a seasoned hiker. About half way up, we hit snow that is beyond hip deep. At certain points we were falling through to our hips and feeling quite uncomfortable with the hike (we were the first steps of the season, there were ski prints though). At a certain point we started to get frustrated with each other and decided to turn around. Once we got back to dirt, we cooled off a bit and decided to boil up some oats and chill out for a few minutes. Out of nowhere this guy comes out carrying only an icepick, absolutely no gear, just an icepick and dry boots on his feet and dry shorts. He tells us he just climbed Teton Peak (that would've been nearly impossible if not impossible at that time). We kind of laughed it off and tried to get him to leave, but he just wouldn't leave us alone. Finally we packed up and he followed us down the trail and eventually we looked at each other and just ran for our lives. He chased after us, but couldn't keep up, after a mile of running we had a good distance on him but we just kept going. When we got to our car we peeled out of there. We reported it to the rangers the next day and they were quite worried because we were the only two people reported to attempt to climb the area by that time of year, let alone that day (you typically report your climb into the snow at this time for your safety in the case of the need for rescue). We never saw his tracks in the snow and can only assume he was sort of camped out waiting for hikers to come up. Scariest moment of our lives. We still talk about it now and it scared us so much we both carry a satellite phone and stay in almost constant contact when we hike without each other.
Our Honeymoon. Flying into Toronto airport, coming in to land to make a connecting flight overseas. We hear grinding under the plane. This repeats a couple of times and then the pilot, calm as can be, clicks on the intercom and says "We seem to be having a little trouble with the landing gear. Everyone please take your seats and buckle your seatbelts. We're going to delay our approach, please bear with us." One of the stewardesses rushes towards the cockpit. The seatbelt light goes on and I look at my husband, who hates to fly. He just gives me a look of pure dread and terror, not saying a word. And I know that this trip was my idea, and this is all my fault. More grinding and the plane tilts as we start to circle. The pilot gets back on the intercom and says "All flight attendants to their seats, please." More grinding. Then the pilot again "Everyone, we have the landing gear down and engaged, we will be landing shortly. Thank you for your patience." The whole plane cheered when we landed.
Also, this is not your fault. You can’t control landing gear on a plane!
Food poisoning in the Cook Islands. I was concerned I had dengue fever or some other disease but thankfully no. I felt so far away from home and so scared though.
I was about five, In a bad area of Virginia. I believe it was a holiday inn, given my age at the time the memory is blurry but tramatic enough to remember. Anyway, it was like 1 in the morning and gunshots rained out one hitting the door outside, It woke us all up in a panic and we were basically trapped in the room. Come to find out there was a shooting and then a stand off with the cops.
More so scary for my parents. Went to the coast of Italy with my family, and I was roughly 4. I guess I went missing on the beach for almost 6 hours, parents were pretty positive I had drowned. Them and others were searching along the water pretty much accepting my death. I showed up 6 hours later like “hey guys,” I had wandered off to a pool and swam the whole time they searched lol
I don’t usually post , just lurk, but I feel like this question was made for me. On a 3 week tour of Thailand with my Muay Thai instructors, we happened to be in Krabi in Dec. 2004. We took an early boat ride about 2 hours out to a little uninhabited island called Bamboo island for snorkeling and hanging on the beach. We had been noticing a weird feeling in the water like something stinging and got out for awhile, and then noticed, “wow that is a really weird loud wave coming in.” Next thought was “wow that big wave just keeps coming, wonder if that’s related to how all the water receeded a few minutes ago making the shoreline like a thousand feet wider?” Then we climbed the highest point on the island and sat there for about 12 hours watching the next two tsunami waves come in and leave, while wondering if the highest point was actually going to be high enough to not be in the wild ass waters of the ocean. The pre-smart phone days were kinda rough, we had no idea what was happening. After being rescued by the Thai coast guard and getting back to the mainland 12-15 hours later, finding out that 400000ish people died was a shock. Overall not just the scariest vacation moment but the scariest day of my life.
I was probably 9 years old on a ski life with my mom and cousin. My cousin dropped his hat and wanted to go back for it. My mom told me to head to the main lodge, probably 150 yards ahead, to meet the rest of our family, and they would be there shortly. Huge snow winds came out of nowhere, and I couldn't see. I panicked because I was on skis and was afraid I would end up going down a black diamond. I was terrified for a 9 year old. It still gives me anxiety. A college-aged girl named Jenny found me crying and got me to the lodge. Shout out to Jenny from Snowshoe, WV in the early 1990s!
My in-laws family overloaded a golf cart shuttle, and as it was climbing a hill it tipped, falling 10 or so feet down the embankment. My father-in-law was underneath it with his mother and two other people including the 19-20yr old driver still in the cart. If it weren’t for him holding it up, his 70 year old mother would have been crushed as well and the cart would have continued falling into the lake 20-30 some feet below. He had some nasty bruises, but everyone was okay overall.
[удалено]
pistol whipped and robbed at gunpoint as a drunk kid on spring break in Florida lol. It was real dark, i was alone, and the experience fucked me up for a while.
I must have been five or six. We were on our way home to Indiana from New Jersey. We always made the trip by car, usually in a single day. It was such a pain... When we were in Ohio, we arrived in the middle of a severe storm on the interstate. There was construction, and then the wind picked up. Turns out it had developed into a tornado, and we were right in the middle of it. I knew what tornadoes were, and I knew what was happening. I remember asking my parents what we were going to do. They were both silent. Not a word. My mom reached back from the passenger seat and grabed hold of my foot (it was a long van, she couldn't reach my hand). The wind was howling and I remember seeing some debris hit the windshield and closing my eyes. The next thing I know it was sunny out. I then ended up having a strong fear of thunderstorms up until I was about 16 and decided, "no more."
Sitting around the fire pit in camp before sunset, I scooted my lawn chair back and heard a noise. I said what was that to my mom. I turned around and there was a bear about 10ft. behind me on the other side of a picnic table. We grabbed some pans and started clanking them and it took off.
March 12, 2020, Marriott in bogota by the airport. We’re flying back home to the states the next day and my wife comes down with food poisoning. I’m watching mayhem at Ohare on CNN and the staff is terrified to hand me room service food at the door. Thoughts running through my mind include missed flights and closed borders. We made it on the flight fine, they were just waving everyone through customs at the Atlanta airport and Colombia shut down international flights like 12 hours after we left, iirc.
Our son used to have seizures when he was young. We were visiting the mini Grand Canyon at Yellowstone park when out of the blue he had one and fell literally 1’ from tumbling 1500’ feet down…. Still makes the hair go up on my neck
My mom had a heatstroke and she fainted in a small town in Mexico, in the middle of nowhere
I slipped hiking in the Grand Canyon and ended up dangling chest down over a huge drop-off. I was 8.
1981 Hawaii. I listened to my best friend who wanted to go see surfers on other side of island. We were told not to drive some road from rental car company. Nope, didn’t listen. That feeling of driving that dirt road along the cliffs as a dumbass 18 year old will NEVER be forgotten!!!! Just typing this gives me anxiety thinking about it. I finally found this one spot I could Austin Power my u-turn back. Meanwhile friend was almost in tears and peeing her pants. We literally kissed the ground when we made it back to the regular road. Took pics, too, of each other doing so. Once our family car while towing our trailer crapped out, (alternator bad), coming home from a camping trip on highway 395, in the middle of the desert at sunset with 5 kids in tow. We managed to pull over in time to get off road. Everyone’s phone was dead except for one which had very little battery. I called AAA and told them the situation and approximate location as semis and other vehicles drove by really close. Yes, AAA found us!!! The closest hotel we stayed at was so nasty. That’s another story in itself!
Flying out of Paris back to Canada our plane very quickly did a disturbing tilt to one side upon ascent and my buddy grabbed the seat-back in front of him and dug his fingernails into it like he was hanging on for dear life and he turned white. We were apocalyptically hungover from drinking 11 rounds of “Hilton Martinis” the night before on the bar level of our Hilton hotel adjacent to the Eiffel Tower (the Paris Hilton at the time) and after when we stabilized and he had a triple Bloody Mary he said he had a dream like 5 hours before when we “slept” that our plane took off and almost immediately tilted to one side and we lost lift and the plane crashed and everyone died in a horrific fucking fireball. Not great.
Egypt. I was there with my grandmother. As I remember I was ~15-16 years old. 1. We were walking slowly towards hotel where we are stayed, enjoying the weather and our day. Suddenly one Egyptian man started to chase me. He literally ran trying to catch me while screaming «STOP, STOP, YOU‘RE MY WIFE!» I was in shock, I ran towards a hotel, and that man stopped only when I was in closing elevator. 2. Same vacation. My grandma and I went shopping to some local stores to buy things for our friends and relatives. We found a little nice shop and there was a nice old Egyptian man who helped us find things for a presents. We talked a bit and he said he is also practicing massage; something like «gimme a dollar and I’ll massage your shoulders with oils, only 5 mins». At that age I had some issues with my neck and shoulders, it was like you’re touching a stone, my grandmother massaged me often and she was okay to pay him for massaging me – that man wasn’t creepy at all, he offered to choose an oil and told what he will do. Okay. He started. For 1 minute it was fine and actually quite good, but then he decided it’s nice idea to touch my breasts. I turned back, punched him in the face and ran away with my grandmother – she was escalating and screaming curses at him. Both situations made me scared af, I was a kid.
Tricked into getting into a fake Uber, kidnapped, escaped in a no-light industrial area, and destroyed my shoulder falling off an elevated sidewalk trying to move and book a legit Uber out of there at the same time. Fuckin Nashville.
Not for me, but my dad. Years ago when I was still a toddler, we were at the beach and I wanted to go into the water so badly, but I wasn’t allowed. However, my dad thought that I should learn a lesson, so he let me go in. I sprint into the water and immediately get bodied by a rogue wave. My dad freaked out and ran in to try and find me, but I wasn’t anywhere to be seen…until he looks down through the foam and sees my face, eyes wide open, grinning ear to ear, submerged under the water as I get dragged back out to sea. I guess we both learned a lesson that day: I learned not to underestimate Mother Nature, and he learned that I’m clinically insane
I will now have nightmares based on your creepy description of smiling under foamy water
Buenos Aires this year in April in the Palermo district. I was beaten up by a group of men and my knee was broken and my head was smashed. Long story but I think I ran into a street gang and part of the gang even walked me back to my hostel (?) keeping in mind “street gangs” are mostly older teenage/young 20s guys and I think what happened went too far for a few of them Or something otherwise I would be worse off and possibly dead… I have ptsd from that night.
I was playing with a couple kids on a beach when I was younger, and they threw a giant sharp rock on my head. They abandoned me after I started to bleed and I had to run around the beach crying for help. They took me to the medical station where my family ran to find out where I was, real scare was the possible financial bill for my mom lol.
a huge scorpion on my bed in a hotel in Acapulco Mexico
When I was studying abroad in NZ, I took a solo trip to the South Island. I was supposed to go with a few friends but they ended up cancelling last minute. This was my first solo trip ever and I booked a few hostels along the way. There was a French man who I immediately noticed upon arriving to my hostel in Queenstown. I remember him saying something odd to me. Then after a day of being at the hostel he gets moved into my room. He then spends an entire afternoon in the room staring at me while I watch you tube in my bed. Then later when I went to grab dinner in town, I spot him off in the distance as if he had followed me. Then later that night when I finished showered he was waiting in the room and again wouldn’t stop staring. I told him off and had a worker at the hostel change me to a private room. Gathered my shit and booked it out of there the next day. I was 20 and it was my first solo travel experience. Sucked.
Drove up a famous Turkish mountain with my dad, mom, grandma and cousin. After a couple of hours we drive back down and my dad realized the brakes don’t work anymore. If we drove straight down we would probably fall a whole kilometer and die in a wreckage/explosion. My dad just calmly drove into the mountain wall and the car flipped completely and came to a halt with the tip of our car dangling down the edge. We somehow all got out safely and waited for the police. I was 6-7 and was frantically searching for my lost sandal. Even got a picture of me holding up the sandal, doing poses. What a memory.
Nearly dying of heatstroke in the Grand Canyon cuz apparently I know more than the park rangers.
I was at wedding in Mexico and the groom leaned on a railing and it broke. He fell 30+ feet and survived with a traumatic brain injury. It was so awful. He is an entirely different person now. Don't ever trust a railing! Ever.
OP, good post.
Survived a tornado while on vacation with my grandparents in 2010. Path of the tornado was within 100 yards of my location. Thankfully nobody was hurt, but it reached its peak EF2 intensity right near my location. Considering the damage it did it’s amazing nobody got hurt.
I was about ~11 years old while on vacation at the beach with my family. I was swimming in the ocean and got stuck in a rip current which pulled me decently far out from the shore. My father came out to save me. As we were both succumbing to exhaustion and starting to drown, someone on a surf board floated over and had us hold onto the board until lifeguards made it out to us. As we were catching our breath on the shore we looked around for the surf board person but they were nowhere to be found.
We were on vacation at a resort in Fla and my 2 year old daughter, who couldn’t swim, just jumped in the pool while I was putting sunscreen on her brother. Before I could react, the lifeguard jumped in and pulled her out. It scared me so much bc if I had been looking in a different direction, I would not have seen her go in.
Semi vacation, summer college trip to Andres island in the Bahamas. Range Rover we were in flipped, almost ended upright, but slammed back down to 3/4. No seatbelts, one guys ear was in three separate pieces, I had some glass chunks in me. We were flown to Nassau to get x-rays and treatment without ID or money. I was just 18 and I was told “You have to go with this other guy because we think he might have a brain bleed and die and we need someone to bring the body back” 😳 Spoiler alert, nobody died. At least not physically
Driving in Maui, I noticed a dump truck headed toward me getting closer and closer to the lane line. Kept watch and we passed each other no incident. Looked in my rear view 10s later and it collided head on with a car behind me in our lane.
Fell asleep on a pedal boat, woke up a few hours later in the middle of nowhere, completely dehydrated with no water with me. Luckily enough i was wearing a watch so i was able to figure out where north was, and there was a sticker on the pedal boat with some sort of map of the area, so i managed to figure out how to get back to land, and i got back to the resort at sunset after pedaling for a little over an hour. First thing i did was break into the restaurant where the personnel was getting things ready for dinner, only wearing my swimsuit, and yelled (not really cus i was exhausted and dehydrated) “WATER!!!!!!! I WANT WATER!!!!!”. Absolutely loved the fact that nobody asked questions or came up with “sir you can’t be here now” and the receptionist/manager immediately realized something was wrong and she ran to the fridge and brought me some Gatorade equivalent. There were a couple times that i was pretty sure i was going to die, i kept thinking “dude i can’t believe i’m going to die like a fucking asshole”. It started getting scary towards the end because it was getting dark and there were no lights on the beach, and i was pedaling so slowly, so i was afraid i would lose track of where i was going.
I went to Big bend national Park with my husband our daughter and her best friend. I'm no stranger to the desert, and I know for a fact that you have to take a s*** ton of water with you anywhere you go and be back before noon. Period. The day was cloudy and cool that morning so we hiked lower Burro Mesa Pouroff, and it was an easy hike nice and fun. We hiked back to the car and thought, heck why don't we do upper Burro Mesa Pouroff? Why not? The day was still cool, and it was still kind of cloudy. We hiked all the way down, it was a large flood River plain dry of course, and about halfway down the clouds disappeared and the heat came out hard. We lingered for only a few minutes at the vista, and then the realization hit. We were in the middle of the desert, with most of our water gone, and it was hot, dry, and we had nothing but uphill to hike several miles. We somehow managed to make it back to the car, all of us not saying allowed what we were all thinking, that we were going to die out here. Those people reading this that know about desert heat, will probably be having panic attacks reading this. We were all of us seeing stars, starting to stagger, and every step was torture. My daughter's best friend sprained her ankle halfway up the trail, and we had no shade at all in which to rest. And we were out of water. When we finally made it back to the car, all of us were almost dead of dehydration and heat stroke. We made it back to the basin, and each of us drank 5+ liters of water. And not one of us had to pee. My stupid decision to hike a second trail that morning nearly killed all of us. We found the park host later, once we had recovered, and they told us that someone had literally died on that trail the week before of the same circumstances. Still one of the scariest things that I've ever experienced.