If you’ve ever experienced true terror in real life, then you probably already realize it’s nothing like the movies.

These people know that for sure, and you might be surprised to learn what exactly they went through in real life.

You’d better stay put.

Was working the evening shift at a gas station. Man comes in all disoriented. I go to help him out. he has a gash on his head and doesn’t know where he was. I couldn’t see any crashes around so assumed he had fallen or something.

Normally we are supposed to stay inside the glass shielded register area whenever anyone is in the store. I, being a nice human being, went to help while calling the police/EMS. They got there and checked him out. They thought his head may have been fractured. Took him to the ER. I went back to work.

Cops stopped back by for some coffee a few hours later. They told me the guy got hit by a baseball bat trying to break into a little girl’s bedroom and was wanted for rape and murder in two other states. I never left the register area at night again.

Capable of anything.

I once heard a property was abandoned, and it was all over school that it was haunted. My friends and I decided to drive up to take a look at it one night. There was no fence and no signs prohibiting access, and all we had to do was take a dirt road for a mile to get to a hill that overlooked the whole property.

Turns out it was abandoned but still owned, and had a caretaker. The caretaker literally drove a truck with the lights off right up to us and then turned them on and tried to ram us. We were able to avoid him but he then followed us at 60 miles an hour off his property back onto the road, then into and past a residential neighborhood, trying to ram us off the road the whole way.

My car and his truck narrowly avoided hitting houses, parked cars, and narrowly missed driving straight into a church before he stopped and turned around.

I know I was on his property, but there were no signs and no barriers, and we were just on the edge of it. That he chased us way past his property and tried to kill us multiple times, and probably felt justified because we were trespassing, still gives me the chills.

People are capable of anything if they feel justified in their violence.

Every parent’s nightmare.

My brothers ex-gf had two older sisters (they died before she was born).

One day they decided to play hide-and-seek or something, so anyway, they both climbed inside a chest and accidentally locked themselves in. They suffocated.

Sixteen days.

3 sailors survived the sinking of the USS West Virgina at Pearl Harbor, only to die 16 days later, due to the lack of air.

The Navy knew they were there, but couldn’t get to them.

Two whole years.

A woman named Joyce Vincent died alone in her bedsit/apartment in London and wasn’t found for two years. She was only discovered because bailiffs came to evict her from the property and instead found her decomposed body in half-skeleton form.

The TV had been on, and the windows had been open, for two years. Despite the smell and the noise emanating from the apartment, no-one had come sooner and found her.

Because of the state her body was found in, they could only identify her through matching her teeth to a photograph of her smiling. Because there was basically no body left to study, no-one knows how she passed. Her friends guess it was anything from murder to an asthma attack but no-one can ever know.

It’s not the most scary story in terms of its gruesomeness (some tales in this thread have made me nauseous), but to think someone can die alone and not be found by their family or friends for so long, especially in such a densely populated city, f**king terrifies me.

The randomness.

I’ll tell you one that happened to me, or rather, I was witness to.

One night, I was out at a bar with a friend I was visiting in New Rochelle, NY. We went outside for a cigarette, and a car came flying past the bar. The car burned through a red light, and started going up this hill that was on a curve. We watched as he veered over the double yellow, and smashed head on with another car coming from the other direction.

Both car’s hind ends lifted up, then slammed down. The car that was driving correctly burst into flames. I ran inside and grabbed the fire extinguisher, then yelled to the bartender to call 911 and say there has been an accident.

My friend, a few other patrons, and me ran to the cars. Now, I used to think this was a fictional trope, but I was pretty drunk before this happened, and I swear it sobered me up instantly. I tried spraying the fire, but it did nothing. The fumes and heat were awful, and all we could do was stand back.

The worst part was, and this will haunt me forever, was that the woman in the burning car was screaming as she died. My God, it was the worst sound ever.

The fire department came and put the fire out. The police took us back to the bar and took statements.

I found out the next day in the news, that the car that was not speeding was being driven by a young woman coming home late from work. She was a block away from home, and I think she was either newly married or a new mother.

The rotten motherf**ker driving the other car was some rich drunk c**ksucker. He lost a leg, but otherwise was physically unharmed. I have no clue if he did time, as I left to go back home a day or so later.

I’m trying to find a link for the news story, but I can’t, as this was maybe 6 or 7 years back. I remember it being reported on Lo-Hud and Channel 12 News.

Terrifying history.

A pub in Colnbrook, Berkshire in UK has a pretty terrifying history:

The Ostrich has seen it’s fair share of murders and they say that over 60 were committed here. Most famous of all were those committed in the 17th century by the landlord of the time, Jarman, who with his wife made a very profitable sideline by murdering their guests after they had retired for the night.

They had a trap door built into the floor of one of their bedrooms and when a suitably rich candidate arrived Jarman would inform his wife that a fat pig was available if she wanted one! She would reply by asking her husband to put him in the sty for till the morrow. The bedstead was hinged and they would tip the sleeping victim into a vat of boiling liquid immediately below, thus killing him.

The guy in her house.

In my town in the early 90’s there was a notorious killer that had all of BC, Canada on watch. My wifes mother (years and years before I knew them) had been home alone while her Husband was in England doing tree surgeon work (arborist)

She was in her laundry room when a man walked up from her basement, completely scaring her, she freaked out and said what the hell are you doing here?

He said he was friends with her husband and was just coming to see if he was here, apparently he told him he could just walk in. Which she knew was bulls*%t.

She was smart enough to tell him that he was just at the store and would be back any minute. He said he would wait outside for him, as soon as he left she called the police, but he was long gone by the time they got here.

Two weeks later, the killer was caught, his mugshot put on TV and it was the guy in her house.

Why are humans?

Well, I’m a bit late, and I’m not sure if anyone posted this already, but the story of Hisashi Ouchi.

He suffered radiation exposure so thorough his DNA was destroyed and he probably would have died in a matter of days or even hours, but doctors kept him alive for almost 3 months.

He was conscious and begging for death as his body literally fell apart.

Hitchhiking was wild.

When my parents were in college they went on a trip down to Florida. They had met through mutual friends and were down there together but hadn’t gone on a date yet. My dad and one of his friends were planing to meet my mom and some of her friends at a hotel but being the carefree college guys they were they lost track of time and realized it was impossible to get to the hotel on time by walking.

They decided the best solution to their problem was to hitch hike and a car with two women picked him up.

Everything seemed fine until the driver asked them if it was okay to stop for gas. My dad and his friend agreed it was no problem since they were making good time and she drove into a gas station. She then pumped her car full of gas before hopping back in and flooring it, basically stealing the gas with two hitch hikers in the back. My dad and his friend were beginning to freak out when she pulled a gun from under her seat and asked “are we gonna have a problem” or something like that.

My dad and his friend shook their heads vehemently because what else do you do in that situation.

She then drove them to the hotel and dropped them off without so much as a scratch and they kinda thought nothing of it until the news started reporting on a serial killer in Florida known as Aileen Wuornos. He took one look at her picture and instantly recognized her as the driver.

The only reason my dad thinks she didn’t straight up kill them was because they were supper polite and respectful to her and her victims where usually scumbag guys trying to take advantage of her.

Tl;Dr: Aileen Wuornos is the reason my dad got to his first date with mom on time.

They just happened to hear.

Two off duty US soldiers were on a train in France. When walking past a toilet they recognised the loading noises of rifles coming from inside.

They waited outside and jumped the guy when he came out. He was a terrorist who was about to go through the train killing people.

I would never be ok.

Happened to me, have posted about it before. I was around 11 years old and I woke up in the middle of the night to a man straddled on top of me with his hand over my mouth and nose. He told me to roll over and not scream.

I rolled onto the floor and tried to scream bloody murder ( I say tried cause when you are truly terrified it can take a second to find your voice).

My mom heard me screaming and came in and fought with the guy, he was at least 6′ she was 5’3″ and scared him enough with the fighting and screaming that he took off out the window he had come in through.

Never did catch him.

No warning signs.

My long-term partner decided to end his life suddenly and unexpectedly a few years ago.

He was the happiest person I knew and even with 20/20 hindsight, videos, poring through old messages etc I wouldn’t be able to identify any warning signs.

Not who nor why.

On September 20th, 1987 in Bellingham Washington, a Georgia Pacific paper mill worker was sent to inspect a heat exchanger system in the steam plant.

Inside the base of the stack, he spotted a charred skeleton. To this day, no one is certain who the victim was, how they wound up in such a horrible place, nor why.

She cannot imagine.

Alright, so my pre-school teacher who also ended up somehow changing jobs and becoming my 11th grade english teacher had a super interesting life. Her mother had some super famous book, her father worked high up in the government, but enough about her family.

First, let me describe her to you, she had dark hair and blue eyes (you’ll see why this matters in a minute). She told this story every single year to the new students in her class…when she was younger, she was driving through Arizona on a two-way road while her boyfriend at the time was following behind her on his motorcycle.

For those who don’t live in Arizona, certain stretches of it can be quite isolated and deserted. She said that they were on a long drive (it’s been about 6 years since I was in her class so details are fuzzy), but basically her and her boyfriend both knew the destination where they were heading by memory and eventually got separated by a few miles.

A man who was behind her in a Volkswagen beetle kept pulling up beside her into the other lane (no one was coming) and motioning at her to pull over. She somewhat ignored him the first few times, but he kept doing it and began getting more frantic each time.

She said that she believed that he spotted something wrong with her car, so she saw a parking lot off the road for a deserted gas station and pulled over. Once pulled over, she said that she instantly got an eerie feeling.

The man was suspicious and kept telling her that he saw something wrong with her headlight and insisted she get out of the car so he could show her what he meant. Her boyfriend who was a few miles behind her, eventually caught up and spotted her car at the sketchy gas station.

Right as she was out of the car, her boyfriend began to pull in. As he did that, this man got into his car and SPED off like his life depended on it.

They later were able to identify that the man was Ted Bundy. She said she cannot imagine what would have happened to her if her boyfriend had been even another 3 miles behind her on the road.

Mental illness is scary.

In 3rd grade a guy came to our school and held our class hostage. He had already killed his wife and was there to kill his kid. The administrators convinced him the kid was not there and to take one of their cars and leave. After threatening to kill us multiple times, tying up the gym teacher, and dragging someone’s grandma around with a knife at her neck, he finally left about 30 minutes later.

The police caught him in Indiana on his way to kill his parents. He was convinced the world was ending and he was killing everyone he loved to spare them. The school did worse than nothing, they lied to parents and no assistance was given to either the kids or teachers involved.

The gym teacher never came back and every time she would see one of the kids at the store or whatever she had a breakdown. Several of us have PTSD, undiagnosed, for decades. We just thought it was normal.

In the 70s the Chicago Public School system was more concerned about their jobs and lawsuits, so they covered it up.

I’ll take a pass on all of this.

Hopefully the universe will continue to give me a pass – and you as well.