When we think about scary events, we often picture them happening in the dead of night. Maybe the person is somewhere they shouldn’t have been, or they made some choices that made it easier for the bad thing to find them.

We know that’s not true (right?). Bad things can happen any time, to any one – even people who have done everything “right” as far as keeping safe.

These 15 people’s stories are all the proof we need.

15. Glad Mom was there.

Almost drowned as a 6 year old in a populated adult pool.

I was floundering for what felt like a minute, quickly loosing breath and swallowing water.

No around me heard my gargled cries. No one helped.

Thank god my mother pulled me out before it was too late.

And that’s how i developed my fear of water.

14. So not ok.

I was 18 or 19 and picking up a prescription at the pharmacy. While I was waiting in line, a man (who I guess was waiting in line as well) started taking pictures of my feet with his cell phone. He wasn’t even trying to be subtle, just kind of bent over and aimed his phone at my feet. I moved a few feet away and he just followed me.

The pharmacist saw the whole thing and mouthed “do you know him?” I shook my head with my eyes wide, grabbed my prescription and bolted away from the counter. I hid in the store until I saw him leave and drive off because I was afraid he might follow me.

Maybe not terrifying, but definitely unnerving and creepy. Still creeps me out thinking about it.

13. That’s a rough ten seconds.

Sixteen, female fresh out from school for the day.

Take bus home and am standing next to a kid who felt like wearing all red. Car pulls up and a guy in the backseat has a handgun.

Points it at the kid in the red but I knew more or less everyone at the bus stop was going to get shot because some dumba** wanted to wear gang-affiliated colors.

Light turns green and the driver goes and I’m left reeling with the whole “what if” scenarios for a few days.

12. More people should do something.

A friend and I had just ridden our wave boards like nerds from the engineering dorm down into the public square (Red Square at UW, we rode down nonstop from McCarty hall) and were sitting on the library steps watching the sunset. Across the way near the smoke stacks, we saw a couple yelling at one another really exaggeratedly. The guy then grabbed the girl and started hauling her about. We were amused, as we thought they were just play fighting – there was a large group of students sitting right next to them watching and doing nothing either. Nothing seemed wrong until he threw her to the ground, and started dragging her towards the stairwell leading to the parking garage.

During this time, a group of five girls left the garage and walked past. The girl, still being forcibly dragged, pleaded to them, “Please help me!” – we could hear her clearly from across the square. The girls looked and did nothing, and kept walking. Nobody on the stairs moved, either. They just watched. My friend and I got up and started walking quickly towards them, but they disappeared into the stairwell before we got halfway across. There, we intercepted the girls who had passed them.

“Did you see that?” they were asking amongst themselves, worriedly. I glared at them for not stopping.

I sent my friend into Odegaard library to have the help desk call the campus police. While he did that I went into the stairwell and headed down the steps, all the while hearing the girl screaming while the guy kept hitting her and shouting at her.

I got to the bottom platform, passing two people on their way up. One was joking about how it looked like the guy was going to kill his girlfriend. They were amused and unconcerned, and ignored me.

The bottom platform has double-swinging doors that lead to a smaller room with an elevator, and then more doors leading directly into the garage. The guy and girl were in this room, and I was in the stairwell just outside. I waited there for campus police while the guy kept yelling and the girl kept crying. After about thirty seconds, he hit her again, and hefted my wave board, kicked the door open and shouted (rather lamely) “STOP IT OR I’LL HIT YOU!”

The girl took this opportunity to break free and run up the stairs. The guy (taller and more muscular than me, whoops) looked surprised as well but didn’t move, he saw my club-like board and gave up immediately. He tried to explain that his girlfriend was threatening to have him deported (he was in the US illegally past his visa or something) and he was trying to blackmail him or something of the sort. I held him there for a few minutes waiting for campus police, but they still didn’t show up. I finally told him to get on the elevator and to stay away from the girl, and that I’d beat the shit out of him if I saw him doing that again. He scrammed.

Went outside and saw my friend waiting. He said the front desk at the library wasn’t willing to call the campus police, and when he finally relented and called, they said they would send a unit out. We waited about an hour and nobody showed up.

11. Can’t give up a girl like that.

I was a Senior in High School and was dropping my girlfriend off at her house. She lived in a pretty ghetto area, and I was from the “nice” part of town. As I was saying bye to her, her neighbor from across the street walked over to us and started yelling at me.

This guy was our age and I guess she knew him as well. He started yelling at me for some reason, so I started walking towards him to do who knows what, when he said “I have a gun and I’m gonna fucking kill you”. At this I just stop in my tracks trying to determine if he’s being serious.

And then my girlfriend stalks past me, walks up to him and slaps him in the face as hard as she can and yells “get the f*ck out of here Junior and go home!”.

I stood there thinking “Holy sh%t, she just owned that guy”. That was 15 years ago and we’re now expecting our third kid ?

10. Talk about an overreaction.

My dog and I are stopped at a crosswalk and he barks and scares this woman. As soon as he barked the walk dude came up to cross but the lady started yelling about my needing to control my dog and she pulled out a taser.

I’m just trying to get across the street and she starts making even a bigger scene saying how she’s going to shock me. My dog is barking at the crazy lady we are standing in the street now, at a busy intersection and I thought to myself I’m about to get tased in front of all these people.

9. This hurts my heart.

When I was in 5th grade, I had a seizure in the middle of class. When I woke up on the floor, kids were running around me and laughing, and the teacher was yelling at me to get back in my desk and stop trying to get attention.

Everything hurt and I was completely out of it for the rest of the day, and I didn’t understand anything about what happened, or just how big of a shitlord the teacher was, until a couple of years later.

8. All too common.

A couple of years ago I was jogging in the centre of my town as usual, when I realized I was being followed by some guy I had never seen.

He kept trying to talk to me, and at some point he grabbed me from behind and went full molester on me. I shook free then started screaming, knocking on the hood of a car passing by. He ran away, never to be found.

I couldn’t jog for over a year.

7. What a complete creep.

Recently went to Dolphin Cove to take care of my number one bucket list item, swim with sharks. I went with my best friend. Her and I are in our 40’s and cute enough in our own right. Our shark trainer flirted with us but we thought nothing of it.

Once we were in the water, we had to sit on a bench. He maneuvered the shark on our lap. Part of the program was the trainer guiding our hands to feel the shark. He put both of our hands on his very erect penis. We again kind of blew it off thinking it was an accident.

Then he told us to spread our legs so we could hold and balance the shark on our legs. He slid his hand up our thighs and got his fingers under both of our bottoms before we stopped him.

We both felt violated and it ruined my very top bucket list item experience for me. It horrifies and frightens me to think of how often he’s done that with other women and kids.

6. I think I would have said something.

As a young teenager, in the early 90s I went to a slightly low-rent amusement park on a school trip. They had some rides, nothing like the huge ones at premium parks, but there was a reasonable looking rollercoaster – with a full loop and a corkscrew-style part (I’m sure there’s a bunch of terminology I don’t know about rides, so don’t mind me).

My group of friends all decided to give it a try. I’d never been on one, so while I was a bit scared, it looked pretty cool, so why not? Our group all get on at the same time, talking and bullshitting each other in the way excited kids do.

The cars start moving backwards up a slope. Once it gets to near the top, the cars would release and go down the track. We’re still moving up the slope and I look across at my friend and his restraint is down. Mine isn’t. Oh shit.

I panic naturally. We must be over a hundred feet up, on a 45′ slope. There’s nothing I can do to get off and it can’t be too long until the cars will drop. I grab my restraint and pull it down across my chest. I think it locks into place, but now the cars drop.

I can’t do a fucking thing except hold on. The speed pins me into my seat, and while I don’t think I’d come out in the corkscrew part, here comes the loop. As I pass the top of the loop I feel the cars slow just a little. My knuckles must have been transparent, they were gripping the edge of my seat so hard in a vain attempt to hold my upside-down ass in the seat…

We exit the loop and go up another slope to then reverse the track direction. As it slows I can just about prise my hands from the seat to check my restraint and it felt secure. Naturally I didn’t quite trust it and I gripped my seat all the way back through the course.

I got off the ride in a daze and never said a thing about it.

5. Don’t go after a guy’s mama.

A few things come to mind but this is the biggest one for me…a few years ago I was at the local mall, outside waiting for my mom to get there. I see her car pull up, and she turns around and goes to park. Parking is accomplished without incident. She’s maybe 50 feet away from me. She gets out of the car, and some car drives up into that row of parking about 10 seconds after she finishes parking.

This guy (maybe 45) gets out of his car and starts yelling at my mom for “stealing his parking” (even though he wasn’t anywhere near her when she was parking), calling her some nasty sh%t, and says that if this were his country that “she’d be dead for crossing a man.” Anyways, my mom had parked fair and square.

After he starts throwing this sh%t at her, his relative gets out and also starts yelling at her. I’m a large person (6’1, 230 lbs and I have a lot of muscle but some extra chub too cuz I’m too lazy to diet perfectly and my wife likes it….that’ll be my excuse), but I HATE fighting and violence.

Regardless, I run towards them and my mind goes into warrior mode. This guy was getting uncomfortably close to my mom, so I bark some obscene stuff at him and act like a caveman in heat fighting a sabertooth and the guy actually screamed like a child and fell backwards over his car and begs me not to cut him (I didn’t even have a knife or anything on me).

I tell him that respecting women is both important and honorable and asked him to apologize, and then he drove off. Adrenaline was going crazy and my heart was pounding but my mommy dearest is safe and hopefully d*ckwad learned his lesson.

4. It happens every day.

Walking back from lunch to my office. I work in a urban area but it usually is safe to walk. From the corner of my eye I thought I saw someone following me. Didn’t think too much about it but picked up my pace a little.

I had to stop at the crosswalk and the person behind me catches up and I feel something on my back and he tells me to make a left turn. I turn into the next street and he asks me for all the money in my wallet. I gave it to him and he bolted past me.

It had to be no later than 1:00 PM and I got mugged right in broad daylight.

3. Funny as long as it didn’t happen to you.

Im a little late to this party but here goes. I was on a 300 mile ride on my motorcycle when I stopped for gas at a sketchy gas station. While I’m stopped this homeless guy in a puffy ratty fur jacket and a flava flav style Viking hat rides up on his bicycle with a milk crate for a basket and a home made trailer.

He rings the bell on his handle bar and tells me I have a nice bike as I’m walking in to pay. I say “thanks you too bud” and he charges at me on foot and pushes me, from behind, hard and says “no man I said you have a niiiiiiiiceeeeeeee biiiiiiiiiikkkeee”.

Im freakin out now cuz this dude looks high as hell on something hard and, though I’m not a small dude, I’ve heard drugs make ya fight hella crazy.

So I push this guy to the ground and yell for him to BTFU and he gets up, adjusts his hat and says “this is what you wear when you wanna sing immigrant song by Led Zepplin….. AHHHHHHH-AHH-AHHHHHHHHHHHH-AHHHHHHH!!!!!” then he runs to his bike like a mad man and rides off.

Most terrifying and hilarious thing to every happen to me

Tldr; cranked out homeless dude attacked me in a parking lot. May have been Robert Plant.

2. Hate to think he’s still out there.

I’m a 20-something lady. I was heading home from the gym (tired) dressed elegantly (on my way from work) along a large, well-lit street. About a block from my house, a man first tried to catch my attention and then to grab me and pull towards the bushes on one side of the sidewalk, having already partly removed his pants.

I screamed bloody murder and ran home. After calling the police and describing the attacker, they asked what I was wearing. I was going to get mad, but it turned out he matched the description of a local pedophile suspect that preys on young girls form the nearby school. I was wearing a rather girly navy blue skirt with a white shirt that day.

He was never arrested.

1. This is quite a ride.

I had a friend with primary-progressive MS. He got sick early, too. Only 35. As it progressed to the point that he started relying on a cane (and some days a walker) to get around, you can imagine how he changed. I say this not as excuse for what he did, but so you can understand how anger and depression can make a person behave differently than they had before. By this time, he was not the same man I befriended. I still cared for him and wished him will, but we stopped hanging out after that because his attitude was too terrible.

One evening, we’re sitting around in a bowling alley bar. My friend’s girlfriend is setting up a Karaoke show, and the sun hasn’t even gone down yet. It’s 8:30 at night. Three guys come in and hassle her about wanting to sing now. She tells them it won’t start for an hour. They hassle her some more, then wander off. They bowl, the place starts to gain some customers, the lights in the bar get turned on to balance out “cosmic bowling”. Then these three guys wander back in at about 10. They want to sing.

They get mad when she didn’t remember the songs they’d shouted at her earlier while screwing with her microphones. They get mad again when they’re told they have to fill out the little slips and wait their turn like everybody else. They get mad a third time when she won’t take five dollars to let them go next. By now, our entire group of friends were there and celebrating a birthday. (We are not cool.)

The guys wander away again, then almost get skipped over before showing up to do their turn half an hour later. As they pick up the mics, they shout “WE BETTER GET TWO SONGS FOR MAKING US WAIT, TOO.” into them, causing feedback and a lot of angry people. She tells them “one song. Everybody gets a chance to sing.” It devolves into a full blown argument between them.

My friend, who is having a walker day, gets up to go defend his girlfriend, and in the middle of the shouting, the whole room distinctly hears my friend say “And if a bunch of niggers think they can intimidate my girlfriend…” He trails off as he realizes that the entire bar, and indeed a big chunk of the bowling alley have gone silent.

These guys aren’t about to (and shouldn’t) take that shit, but it didn’t have to go down the way it did. All of a sudden, he’s trying to back away (with his walker) from these three guys who are all twice his size while he apologizes. They’re screaming at him about how he’s a “crippled cracker” and they’re going to make sure he needs a wheelchair if he lives through this and his girlfriend can use the walker after they break her legs too.

Too far. They didn’t have to accept the apology, and if one of them had just punched him, I’d of said that’s fair and he deserved it. But we couldn’t let them do what they were threatening. Next thing I know, two of our friends and I have stood up and I’ve shouted “That’s enough.” Next thing I know, they’re in our faces. One of my friends is just trying to negotiate our way out of it. The other is making threats. I’m just standing there trying not to lose my game face because I’m terrified as fuck of this 350+ pound 6’6″ mountain of a person who’s picked me to square up with.

I manage to duck under the punch he throws at me, and somehow end up behind him. Desperately, I somehow end up with this guy in a full nelson. Except I’m 145 pounds and 5’8″. At this point, I’m this guy’s new cape. He starts swinging around wildly screaming “get him off! Get him off!” The entire room has gone from fear and agression to amusement. I hear people start to laugh. One of his buddies grabs me by the back of the shirt and shoves me away. I stumble, trip over something, and break my nose on the corner of a table. I can’t even claim a decently taken punch to the face.

The Mountain walks over to me. I’m now laying on the ground with blood gushing out of my face. He leans right down over me and shouts “Stay down!” Then he looks at me for a second, points a finger in my face, and says “I get it. You gotta stand up for your boy. What you really gotta do is pick better boys, or educate yours.” Then the waved finger turns into an extended hand and he helps me to my feet. Bartender grabs me a rag, and we all get kicked out together.

When the cops showed up and found us all (except loudmouth) sitting outside congenially, they agreed to let us all go on our way (and drive me to the hospital), if we all agreed to drop the matter. My friend wanted charges pressed against all three and was threatening to sue the bar too. He backed down when I told him I’d break his nose to match mine if he did anything of the sort. It was the scariest moment of my entire life, and the only reason I lived was because The Mountain showed me mercy. This fucker wanted to bankrupt me in lawyer’s fees after that?

That was eleven years ago. I only saw my friend twice after that. Once at a bar, and once at his funeral. I miss the man he was before the MS. I don’t miss the angry, depressed man he became.

I’m legit horrified and promise to be safer in the future, Mom.

If you’ve got a story that would fit on this list, drop it in the comments.

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