People on Reddit were asked: “What is the most horrifying thing you’ve ever witnessed?” These are some of the best answers.
1. I saw a toddler run into the street and get hit by a taxi in NYC. The father then picked up the kid and ran with its limp body down the street. I called 911. Got in an argument with the dispatcher about where I was. Then I threw up.
blindtheskies
2. My parents + my neighbors + double sided dildo + needing to ask my mom a question + bedroom = seeing my parents in group sex using a double sided dildo. Consequences will never be the same.
squall24
3. Watched my own sister die in a hospital bed after my family made the decision to end her life support. Just thinking about it makes my eyes well up with tears.
Let me tell you, after seeing that I never joked about death. That was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to see. When you see someone dying in a hospital bed on TV or in the movies, they slowly close their eyes and fade away.When you see someone dying in a hospital bed in real life, let me tell you… it isn’t like the movies, at all. The person is choking, struggling to breathe, eyes twitching, body twitching, it’s just horrible to see.
I consider myself a pretty emotionally solid guy, but I just lost it when I saw my sister dying in that bed and I had to leave after about 30 minutes of seeing her trying to cling onto life. My parents on the other hand, stayed the entire time (over 10 hours) and to this day it breaks my heart seeing them because I know that so many things remind them of their daughter, and they’ll never see her again.
The part that always makes me cry is remembering my Dad’s desperation in the hospital… Offering to give his organs if it could save his daughter’s life, saying it doesn’t matter if he loses his life. Offering to give the doctors millions and millions of dollars (Dad used to be a CEO of a gov’t health sector, very wealthy) if they could just save his daughter’s life. By far the most selfless thing I’ve ever seen him do- and the most powerful message he could have sent my brother and I that he cares for his children more than anything in the damn world.
RationalArgymentMan
4. I woke up to find my fiance had passed away suddenly during the night. He was cold and stiff, eyes open. Horrible, just absolutely horrible.
bunnielowbrow
5. Many years ago, on a very sunny day I was riding bikes with a fellow friend of mine alongside some train tracks that ran behind our nieghborhood. We weren’t very well taken by our other classmates and found refuge in our own little circle of two. We had every intention of growing up together and being the best of friends until we had both passed.
We weaved in and out on our bicycles between hollowed tree trunks while singing happily while the uneven ground beneath us created a vibration in our voices which made us chuckle during the song. Out of the blue, my friend’s front wheel hit a rock and he went airborne forward off of his bicycle and onto one of the aforementioned hollow trunks.
Immediately I went to his aid only to find half of his face was unattached, his right leg was exposing bone and his body was violently convulsing. I took off my overshirt and covered his face before getting on my bike and riding for help. Once the adults came to his aid, it was obvious by their gasps and inability to look at my best friend for an extended period of time, that he had succumbed to his injuries and the person who was all I had for solace and happiness had died in one of the most unnecessarily brutal and at the same time, innocent, ways imaginable. I will never forget his face, my only regret is that the face in which I will never forget is the one I last saw him with.
Mypartimeaccount
6. One time when I was at a bar a fight broke out and one guy shot the other guy point blank in the face. Gore in real life is scary.
[deleted]
7. This goes with being sad and horrifying, because of how indelible it is to me to this day. Close to when I was born my parents got a puppy and I grew up with him. A rottweiler named Zeke. My mom has told me how protective he was by going over a few anecdotes, like when she swat my diaper he grabbed her arm with his mouth. Didn’t bite or anything just basically a warning. It made my mom completely bewildered, because he was never aggressive. I remember getting on his back and actually riding him some when I was young.
My mom and dad separated when I was young-ish and my dad is the one who had Zeke. Unfortunately my father lived far and I couldn’t see Zeke often. One day my mom tells me that Zeke is really sick and can’t walk (hip dysplasia, couldn’t afford to do anything about it). He wouldn’t walk to his food bowl or water bowl or anything because of the pain. Dad agrees to bring Zeke up to see me before he has to be put down… as I’m waiting and dad stops his car, he opens the passenger door. He goes to reach for Zeke then stops. Zeke slowly brings himself out of the car and makes his way to me about 10ft while I’m stunned at what he’s doing. He cannot physically walk without extreme pain, and does so anyway to get to me. I have no words to properly describe what that moment means to me.
Eroth
8. My father committed suicide a while back, using a shotgun slug to the head. He did it in the garage. My brother and I cleaned up the mess as best we could (after the official cleaners were done). We kept noticing a smell though. After a week or so, we really got down and pulled everything out of the garage. Wedged behind the dryer was a large section of brain. Hard to forget that moment.
rchaseio
9. I sat in the living room with my mom and dad talking to my mom about why I can’t stand her as a person. She asked me how I really felt, so I told her. Being a young teen I didn’t let back and didn’t think about how much it would hurt her, you know what thats like I’m sure. Mom went to her room after crying heavily during the entire conversation. Dad and I left the house to breathe and get food. We pulled in the driveway and dad asked me to feed the dog but being a kid dodging chores I told him I would take the food in instead. I walked in the door calling for my mom to get the food, she didn’t answer so I walked in her room.
She was laying face down on the bed completely unconscious, her bed covered in pills from the assortment of bottles in her drug bag. There was a yellow legal pad sheet with red ink shooting from the paper every single word of her suicide note. I yelled for dad I don’t know how many times and he came upstairs and called 911. I sat on the porch reading her suicide note over and over until EMS arrived and took the note from me. As ‘Forest Gumpish’ as this sounds I just started running and didn’t stop til I reached the next county. I will never forget her face, her skin pushing on her to try and wake her up. I ask myself everyday why didn’t I just feed the dog, or why did I tell her the stuff that I did…..
[deleted]
10. Responded to a call about a gang fight in NW Detroit – 7 cars respond 10 cops arrive on scene. When I get there people are scattering from the flashing lights and there are not enough cops to start chasing a gang of 30 people without riot gear or a larger police presence. Basically were there to break it up and secure the crime scene.
At the center of the cabal is a dude naked face down crying in the fetal position. Turns out it wasn’t a gang fight it was a gang RAPE in the middle of the street with 30+ people involved in one way or another Turns out the victim was trying to get out of a gang and they didn’t like that very much… He lived.
n1njabot
11. My stepfather beating my mom. What a scumbag. My brothers and I were still little, and my brothers used to yell at him that they’d beat the crap out of him as soon as they could take him on. They never got the chance because he died of lung cancer.
CompanionCone
12. I watched my father die in front of me in our back yard. We were cleaning up and doing some general landscape type of stuff when he went in for some sodas. He came out and dropped a soda and then picked it up and sat down to drink it. I turned to him and he had soda dripping from his mouth. The right side of his face had drooped and I said, “You’re having a stroke.” He tried to say, “No, I’m fine,” but it was sort of garbled. He fell to the ground and I held him up until the ambulance came. I could hear the sirens getting louder and louder as they got closer to the house.
When we got to the hospital, they told us he’d had a catastrophic stroke and blood leaked to his brain. The rest of his body was still working so they had to put him on a morphine drip and he officially passed later that night in hospice. I still play it out in my head. He’ll have been dead 6 years on June 5th at 10:10pm. I miss him so much and even more now that my wife and I are trying to have a baby.
[deleted]
13. I saw a guy fall over on his bike a few cars ahead of me in traffic. He had fallen with his head under the tire of another vehicle. His brain popped out and was several inches away from his head mostly intact.
DarrenEdwards
14. Went hunting with step dad, he had a doe license or something? (so he could hunt a doe) all weekend we couldn’t find game. But on the way home next to the road we found a doe grazing. He pulls out his rifle and shoots it. We get super excited and run out to see. Next to the body there were two baby fawns, they didn’t even realize the mother was dead. We don’t know what to do… so my dad tells me to chase the fawns away. I start crying while throwing rocks at them, they get scared but ultimately don’t back away more than 10 feet of there mother. We drag the body over to an area were we could gut it. They follow. I watch them as he skins them… I couldn’t even describe how I felt or the look in their eyes. We leave the skin and keep the body. As we drive away I look back and I see one of them licking the skin of their mother.
I never went hunting again, and didn’t speak to my father for several weeks.
[deleted]
15. Watching a coworker have a heart attack and fall onto the table saw and have his chest ripped open. He was dead even if he didn’t fall on the table saw, massive heart attack.
paperconservation101
16. My dad was taking me, my little brother, and my three little sisters out to go Christmas shopping for my mother. We were at an intersection, waiting for our green light, and I pointed out to everybody a guy in a motorized wheelchair hauling ass down the sidewalk. I guess we thought he looked kinda funny. Anyway, he gets to the corner, takes a right into the crosswalk just in time to get nailed at full speed by a car coming across the intersection. Everybody in the car screamed! My sisters and little brother were crying full volume, and my dad was just yelling obscenities! He called 911 as we drove past (other people nearer to the accident we trying to assist), and I will never forget him explaining to the operator that they “might be dealing with a fatality”. It was awkward Christmas shopping after that.
MileHighBarfly
17. Old folks home. All the olds sit in their wheelchairs in the hallways and stare you down as you walk by. All very sad and decrepit. One even said “take me home with you!” Terrifying.
PhilipOntacos
18. I grew up in an extremely ghetto part of West Virginia when I was a kid. It was basically Boyz N Da Hood IRL, just to give you the setting. One day, I was out in the neighborhood playing baseball with my friends when we saw an older kid named Lorenzo running by frantically. Lorenzo was a bit of a star in the neighborhood for being such a great ballplayer, so we all kind of looked up to him. At the time, it was becoming well known that he was getting caught up in selling crack, like most of the other kids his age that lived around me. After he ran by us, we chased him down the street because he looked like he was in trouble. After a while of us chasing after him and yelling for him to stop, he stopped right in front of our elementary school and turned to face us.
He tried to catch his breath and then all he said was, “They’re going to kill me. I can’t stop ’em… they’re going to kill me.” He reached into his pants and pulled out a small pistol. All in unison, my whole group of friends screamed “NOOOOOO!” But he put it to his temple and blew his brains out of the other side of his head, all over the main entrance wall of the school. His body stood in place for a moment while we all stared in shock. After what seemed like a slow-motion lifetime, his body tipped over like a tree and laid lifeless on the sidewalk. Hopefully the most disturbing thing I will ever have to witness.
[deleted]
19. I was DJ’ing at a night club, and between sets I was walking out to a 7-11 to get some cigarettes. While I was waiting for the walk signal at the corner, a bicyclist tried to cross against the light. A large SUV hit the cyclist and skidded through the intersection, decapitating the cyclist in the process. The scene was the most horrific I think I have ever personally witnessed.
InfoSec812
20. When I was seven my mother was raped by two junkies she was ‘friends’ with. In front of me. We were homeless due to her complete mental breakdown. She had gotten pregnant with a man she was in love with, but for reasons still unclear to me, he left. She decided to give her son up for adoption, and then suffered a mental breakdown. She lost her job, our apartment, and refused to work towards getting her life back. She succumbed to severe alcohol abuse and nearly cost us to be removed from the homeless shelter we stayed at.
Sometimes, in these drunken states, she refused to go to the shelter for the night, forcing me to stay up with her and whatever guy she was clinging to. These binges would last days at times. Mostly this meant sleeping in cars for a couple hours at a time.
On that particular night, some friends she knew from years before wanted to party, and that meant heroin for them. Mom did not take part, I don’t think, she did however get stupid-drunk. She was blacked out (not passed out) for hours.
They drove us to a park and her two friends sprawled her on the grass under a tree and both had a go at her, all the while her screaming for them to stop. I was in the car ‘asleep,’ but obviously watching. Later they were back in the car grinning about how tight she was. She swears she remembers none of this. Which is understandable given how disgustingly drunk she was.
sporkafunk
21. When I was 16 and had been driving for a few months, I was on my way home from a job and turned onto the on-ramp of the freeway. Being the good girl I was, I kept my speed in check (but still accelerated to 60 mph) but apparently didn’t accelerate fast enough for the motorcycle behind me. He shot out and crossed four lanes of traffic. I felt ashamed that he was so angry at my speed that he would pull such a dangerous move. Seconds later I saw his helmet flying across the lanes of traffic. I didn’t see the accident, or the result of it, but I had to pull over and stop because I was crying so hard. Called my mother and sobbed. I still remember to this day how upset I was. Later that evening, the news confirmed that he had died. The guilt from that accident has eaten at me for years even though I logically know that it wasn’t my fault.
lnpeters
22. Last December my mom caught my dad cheating on the internet. She made him sleep in the basement that night, and made up an excuse so I didn’t know. The next day, she broke down and told me. She said she wasn’t going to throw him out, because after twenty five years of marriage, things might be fixable. A few hours later, my dad came home from work.
He stood at the top of the stairs and told my mom that he didn’t love her anymore. She started bawling and ran over to hug me. As I was hugging her, I looked up. My dad looked dead. His face was empty as he stared at the hand-drawn portrait of me on the wall.
The cold look on his face was the most horrifying thing I’ve ever witnessed. To this day I’m still convinced that my real dad died somehow. I haven’t seen him since.
Ohh_Yeah
23. The most horrifying thing I’ve witnessed was a hand reaching under a bathroom stall to try and grab me out. I was 7 at the time, at Burger King with my family. I couldn’t scream, and just pulled my feet back. Eventually he left. Just digging this memory up from the recesses makes me shudder. It pales in comparison to some here, but WOW it sucked.
ShawnSDavis
24. I had let my puppy out in the backyard for a bit while doing some things inside. After awhile I heard a gurgling sound. I didn’t think much about it because there was a pool out back, so I continued about my business for a minute, but then I heard a weak scream, that’s the only way I can describe it.
I sprinted outside, couldn’t find my dog for a minute but then saw him in the bushes, his head deep inside a bush and shit covering his backside. I ran over to him, he couldn’t move, was foaming at the mouth, and his eyes were looking at me in such pain. I held him like this until he died a couple minutes later, trying to calm him as much as I could.
The only comfort I had afterward was that there was nothing I could have done, no preventative care to be taken, it was a brain aneurysm or something like that, I was freaking out too much to really comprehend what the vet was telling me.
I don’t know why I even wrote this down, I’m crying now. This was a number of years ago though, I now have a beautiful healthy three year old doggie, he’s my baby.
MannequinLegs
25. Waiting outside of my high school for the drivers ed car to show up. I hear a screech of tires and a bit of a crunch, look over to the street to see a motorcyclist gone wrag doll and cart-wheeling through the air about twenty five feet off the ground. I wasn’t close enough to see any of the gore, but heard on the news later that night that motorcyclist had died.
messtastic
26. I got off the bus one morning for school in grade 11 and heard the most haunting scream I will always remember. I looked to the parking lot adjacent to me and saw a short, tiny, teenage girl caught under a small, low riding truck.
She was walking from the same bus from me and after dropping her cell phone, bent down to pick it up. As she did this the truck backed up and dragged her about 5 feet. Her screams alerted the driver and the guy driving and another near ran and lifted the truck up while another pulled her out. Her injuries were minor, broken collar bone and nose I believe, but it was the screaming that made it really terrifying.
kraftm
27. One day my brother and I were working in a peat and moss factory sort of thing, and there is a machine that breaks up dirt and mud and my brother noticed that there was a rock about the size of a fist stuck in the conveyer belt so the machine had stopped working. He had forgotten to turn of the machine and as soon as he got the rock got loose (with his hand) the machine immediately started up sucked in his arm. The worse part about it is that it did not take him fast, it slowly broke the bones in his arm as well as tearing his flesh right off of his arm as he was pulled into his death. I went to get help but as soon as I got back the machine had already sucked him in up to his head
I could not look at all… I will never ever be able to go a single day without thinking of that one day that I went with my brother to work.
danebrauchla202
28. I was the first on the scene of a nasty car accident where the driver was ejected from the drivers window as he was taking a sharp curve at high speed and hit the center barrier. Built into those center barriers were light standards. His neck met one of those light standards when he was ejected and he was decapitated.
I felt really bad about the whole thing until I got all the details. Him and his brother were both in the truck. They had just left a bar after packing back an insane amount of alcohol. The driver was doing double the speed limit (160Km/h in an 80Km/h zone) which is why he hit the barrier. Now no one deserves to die, but I am glad this guy took himself out instead of some innocent person.
fatlipcdn
29. I rock climb a lot. One day out climbing I saw this girl deck from about ~60 feet or so. When she hit the ground, it made one of the loudest, most disturbing noises I’d ever heard. It sounded sort of like someone throwing a large piece of sheet rock off a cliff and having it land on the flat side. At the bottom, she probably bounced five or six feet in the air and then crumpled at the feet of her party.
This was all followed by hysteria and some of the most horrible wailing/screaming by her climbing partners I’d ever heard. It was a big climbing area, so about a dozen people called 911 immediately. She was intubated, life-lined out and lived, but with serious problems (head injurynot pretty).
I went home after that. Just didn’t feel right climbing that day anymore.
kidjan
30. was walking to the top of my street to hear a cat shriek. Like when you step on its tail and it scurries off. When I get to the intersection I see a black and white cat with tire streaks of blood trailing 10 feet down the street. The cat’s head is busted open and part of its body is flat. This is a residential neighborhood, so I only hope the owners didn’t live in the house in front of the accident, because there is still a blood stain.
loganbouchard
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