For these folks, they thought they were just experiencing another mundane day when they were hit with an unexpectedly scary event. From witnessing a car crash to a medical emergency, get ready for these intense AskReddit stories.
Source list available at the end.
I was walking back to my family’s car after my great grandmother’s funeral. Not exactly casual, but it was a quiet, sunny afternoon. She basically died of old age.
We were about 40 yards from our car when we heard a loud snap of wood breaking to our left.
To our horror, a large dump truck had just barrelled over a small tree and was heading down a hill directly towards our cars with no one behind the wheel. Two of my younger brothers were already running to our minivan to get the “good seats” and were close to its path. I still remember the screams of my parents and uncles/aunts as everyone realized what was happening within a few seconds.
Amazingly, no one was hurt. My brothers stopped in their tracks, and the truck missed our car. Unfortunately, it absolutely crushed my grandpa’s car right behind and multiple gravestones from across the road before finally coming to a stop.
We would later find out the driver forgot to engage the emergency brake when parking.
COCONNO
I left work for lunch and was walking to a restaurant just 2 blocks away. As I rounded the corner, a car accident happened right in front of me. A lady walking just 10 feet in front of me was hit and pinned between the car and a building. She was conscious and mad as hell. Despite her legs obviously being broken, she let out a stream of verbal abuse on the driver about her shoes, dress, and phone. She went on about on about everything else except for her actual injuries. It was surreal.
Depression-Unlocked
I went to eat at a Chinese restaurant with a couple of friends. One friend of ours had a shellfish allergy. She would tell the staff every time, and we had been to that restaurant a million times before without any issues.
That day, we had a new server who barely spoke any English. Apparently, the message didn’t get passed along that she had an allergy and could absolutely NOT have ANYTHING that came in contact with shellfish. Her tempura couldn’t even be fried in the same oil as any kind of fried shellfish.
She started eating. Suddenly, she began to panic and told us to call 911 because she was having an allergic reaction. I got on the phone while she took out her EpiPen and shot it directly through her thumb.
Thankfully, the response time was ridiculously fast. They were able to administer epinephrine before her throat completely closed up. Expensive hospital bill and sore thumb aside, she ended up being fine. However, for a few moments, when she first shot her EpiPen through her thumb and was clearly getting worse, I really thought I was going to witness my best friend suffocate right in front of me, and there would’ve been nothing I could’ve done about it.
TonyDanzer
My daughter was just over a year old. We were outside putting some washed stuff out to dry near our pool. I pointed out a flock of birds overhead that were migrating. I looked down at her and saw her at the bottom of our pool. I jumped in, pulled her out, tipped her over, and got all of the water out. I brought her to the ER just in case. Thank God, she was fine. I was only looking at the sky for 2 seconds. I will never forget seeing her and the red sweatshirt that she had on at the bottom of the pool.
Catusa
I was at the library one day during college. Apparently, a kid hit his head on the desk and began having a seizure. He passed out, and they asked everyone to leave. I was lucky I had my headphones in. So, I didn’t see or hear anything, but the guy was two seats down from me. I just saw him laying on the floor.
I went to a college for handicapped and disabled people, so the counselors and teachers knew what to do.
Bikinigirlout
Back in the sixth grade, I was in English class while construction workers were on the roof repairing stuff. My English teach stepped out to talk to the principal, so everyone started getting loud. All of a sudden, the hanging lights fell on us.
The way the lights were set up, they had three lines that ran across the classroom. They hung off the roof at about a foot with metal poles. The school was built in 1960, and I doubt anyone had actually replaced the light holdings since then.
The lights started to squeak, but nobody cared- except for this one kid. His spider sense kicked in, and he bolted out of the room. Once he got out of the room, the lights started to collapse and everyone else ran out. Our teacher looked like she was about to have a heart attack, and the principal ordered everyone to check for any glass shards. No one was hurt, and we all got the day off to play on the Wii that was in the band room.
CatsAreShitTigers
I’m eating dinner at a Ruby Tuesday’s with my girlfriend one night when this guy walks in all casual from the back. I’m not really thinking much of it, but then a cop rushes in behind him and tells him to, “Drop to the ground!” With his gun drawn, he starts to run right by our table, but another group of officers rush in and tackle him to the ground. We witness them confiscating a gun from him as we’re eating our appetizers.
pauliepitstains
I’m making the long drive home from the lake house and following behind a tractor trailer on the highway. This is in the middle of nowhere, way up in the Canadian Rockies . We round a bend and, out of nowhere, a small car coming the other way, far too fast, loses control and hits the tractor trailer head on going at highway speeds.
A big cloud of car parts explodes into the air. The small car spins violently into the ditch. Instinctively, I jump out and run to the small car while shouting at another motorist to call 911. I get to the small car, and there’s basically nothing left of the front. The engine was sitting on the other side of the highway.
I look in to see what’s left of the car and can’t find the driver. Confused, I look around and see him in the ditch. I run over and check his carotid pulse but nothing.
I step back. It’s only then that I realize his arm and one leg are missing. His other leg is pointed in the completely wrong way at the hip and is bent in a number of horrific angles.
They shut the highway down for 8 hours to investigate the scene. The image of his mangled body hasn’t faded though.
Fizzy_Electric
Junior high school. I was supposed to meet my buddy Nick at the swimming pool. He didn’t show up, so I just walked 3 blocks to his house with intention of yelling at him. His mom let me in, and I walked up to his room and opened the door. I found him hanging from a belt tied to his ceiling fan.
Mikehideous
I came across a car accident and went to help. The scene was of an upside down car with its wheels still spinning. The guy crawls out from the back seat with blood everywhere. He looks up at me and his eye is hanging out by the nerve and rolling around his cheek. I get him cleared, and the professionals arrive so I can leave.
Ivotedforher
A wired patient ran down a hallway naked screaming that he was going to kill me before finally being stopped by a hospital guard.
jeff_the_nurse
I was working at my cinema doing a clearing session. I had to go and wake up this old man who was sitting in the back row. I got closer and realized his skin was pale blue, and he was covered in his own vomit. He had overdosed and decided to go out while watching ‘Guardians of the Galaxy.’
tuplski
A few weeks ago, I was driving in Seattle on this narrow, winding road. Three guys flew by me on motorcycles. They were trying to be cool, weaving in and out of traffic, and onto the oncoming lane at points. It was honestly suicidal.
I was behind them thinking, “These guys are going to mess up real bad.” Sure enough, one of them got into the bicycle lane and gunned it. He blew a stop sign and almost got wrecked by someone turning. Luckily, he avoided it but lost control of his bike instead. He ended up slamming full speed into a house and went flying. He was dead on impact. The body ended up not far from the road.
oglach
I grew up in a pretty small, rural community. Like the entire county only had one stop light and 3/4’s of the streets were one way. It was very much an “Everyone knows you and your business” kind of place. On the day in question, the high school and middle school kids were already on the bus (I was in middle school at the time). We were circling around the one way streets, headed to the funnel of our county’s only stop light so that we could eventually get to our elementary school. As we were waiting to inch closer to the light, we pulled up to the end of a small cross street that had the only three bars in town and just in time for me to look to my left, out the window, and watch one of my classmate’s dad’s shoot a man in the face with a double barrel shotgun from maybe 4 feet away. The guy was standing on the sidewalk against the white wall of a small restaurant across from the bars, and my friend’s dad was standing on the curb of the same bit of sidewalk. He blew his head almost completely off. I will never in my life forget that man’s skull and brains dripping down that white wall on an otherwise beautiful fall afternoon.
After he shot the guy, my friend’s dad just turned and sat down on the curb with the gun next to him, lit a cigarette, and waited for the cops to show up. I was the only person to actually watch him pull the trigger. Everyone else didn’t turn until they heard the blast. My bus driver got on the radio and called it in, but he couldn’t move the bus out of the way because of the stoplight bottleneck and one way streets. Basically, a bus of about 20 middle and high school students got a front row seat to a mostly headless corpse for almost 15 minutes, while we waited for emergency crews to bust through traffic to get to the scene and get everything moving enough so that our bus could finally pull away.
Jenipherocious
I was driving on the freeway in the backseat of a VW Jetta going about 80 with two other people. A friend of a friend was driving. They were speeding up and trying to catch up to some sort of supercar on the freeway that was a little bit ahead. Suddenly, that guy’s hood pops up and spiderwebs the entire front windshield, caves in the metal roof section about 4 inches from the top of the windshield, breaks the roof’s plastic undercarriage off- which then flies down the freeway, and the hood stays up blocking all vision through it. We’re still going 80, he leans out the window and gets us to the curb safely. A cop was right behind us this whole time, but he didn’t notice that guy speeding (or the fact that he had an expired license somehow) and just says, “Wow, I’m really impressed with how you handled that.” He then calls us a tow truck. Turns out, the guy driving had fixed his hood-locking device with a clothes hanger recently, which obviously broke when the wind got under it. So dumb. I still get flashbacks whenever I’m going fast in a car. It’s like I expect the hood to shatter the window again. We were covered in glass.
plopseven
I was driving behind an open top jeep, and the dog riding in the back actually jumped out. The driver had no idea what had just happened, so I quickly got his attention, and the dog was safely reunited.
CPL_McSnugglePants
I was stopped at a red light arguing about ice cream when a motorcycle plowed into a left turning SUV right in front of me. The impact threw the biker 50 feet. His legs were totally destroyed and he was screaming, “MY LEG IS BROKEN.” His leg was more than broken.
UnpopularCrayon
Just this last Thursday, I got up early at around 5 AM for work. I spent 10 hours there, went home, took a shower, and then I went back out to get something to eat. When I returned home, the old man (who lived across the street from me) came over and said something to the effect of, “Hey man, glad to see you’re alright, who died at your house today?”
freekwagon
I was in class one day when my professor had a seizure. She tried to stand up but ended up falling to the ground and violently shaking. Of course, I acted like a helpless idiot and had no idea what to do.
Eletheia
I’m fixing a pump when I hear some shouting. I walk out thinking someone may have spilled something, or it’s some similarly humdrum activity.
Instead, I see bright orange and lots of it. I panic for what feels like ages, but the camera later shows it as only being half a second. As I struggle to remember where the nearest fire extinguisher is, I run for it. I run towards the fire. The fire laughs at my feeble efforts and grows at a frightening pace, so I shout to evacuate and run for the door. Right when I hit the door, the tank ruptures. Kaboom! I run a bit faster after that.
Nothing like a nice nitrocellulose fire reaching up to the ceiling to get your heart going.
CutterJohn
While my family was driving on an overpass, a gas tanker below us crashed and burst into flames 20 feet down the road. The flames were probably two-stories high. It was scary.
Turns out, a van with a family had smashed into the truck, and both the family and truck driver died in the explosion.
The most insane part is, my family had just been driving in that lane not less than 5 minutes before.
mayo-yo
A small twin prop plane I was a passenger on was coming in for a landing. This was one of those planes were the wing is on top of the fuselage, and the landing gear comes out from the bottom of engine housing. I looked out the window, and the right gear was down while the left gear was up. The pilot announced that we were in a holding pattern due to the airport being busy (Lies). He spent the next hour circling the airport while he messed with the gear. It was slowly coming down a little at a time. After an hour or so, it looked like it was down and “suddenly” congestion at the airport had cleared up, and we were “allowed” to land. Most of the passengers had no clue that while he was messing with the gear, he was also intentionally burning off fuel to reduce the fire risk if he had to belly land it.
lancer360
My significant other at the time and a friend or two are driving back from my casino birthday party.. We got stuck in some really, really bad rain…stopped on the bridge around Sunset Hills because no one could see outside the car.
Category 3 Tornado was passing by us within a mile or so. I thought we were all going to die my 21st bday with hangovers.
I will never forget the terror I felt about dying in a tornado after my birthday…or a tornado in general, honestly.
rancidkitten
Starting a bonfire with friends, woods wet, fire isn’t really starting, out of lighter fluid, gallon of gas at my side. What could go wrong if I’m careful, right? Flames goes up to nozzle, so I chuck the can as far as I could, fireball lands right on my friends leg. Luckily he put it out before he got injured.
TheOkHunt
I build fence for a living. When we stretch fence, we do it with a bulldozer. I don’t know how tight exactly, but it’s 6000-10000 lbs of tension in a net wire fence if I had to guess.
You ever see 6-10k lbs cut loose because someone put a clamp on wrong? It’s scary. A twang, then a crash of metal on metal. A 14,000 lb dozer jerking because all this tension is now gone.
Now imagine what that would do to a human body in the wrong place.
I now have respect for stretching wire. Lots of it.
Just_a_Texan
I was sitting at a stop light in Athens, GA one day somewhere near the intersection of Broad and Hawthorne. I was gazing out the window and listening to some music when I see this lady back out of a shopping center in her Jeep.
Just as she puts it in gear to drive forward, she slumps over the steering wheel and guns it through the front window of a flower shop. It turns out later that I knew someone who worked there when it happened and apparently she had narcolepsy.
Seriously, why are they handing out drivers licenses to people with actual damn narcolepsy?
DuctTapeChainsaw
Post are edited for clarity.