Close Call
When I was younger, I used to skip school. I would hide in the garage until my parents left and then go back in the house. One day, I was in there waiting for them to leave, and I thought they had already when I heard their footsteps approaching the garage door.
This had never ever happened before, as they always just got in their cars and ran.
I crept to the door to listen closer, but then I heard a sound that made my heart stop. They started messing with the lock. I ran out the back, the other side of the garage, out into the garden, and into the bushes.
I was so scared. When about half an hour later, I dared to look back, I couldn’t see anyone. I went inside and made a terrifying discovery.
The place was trashed. My parents had actually left at the normal time. We had been burglarized, and I had stood maybe six inches from the burglar on the other side of the door and made a run for it because I thought it was one of my parents.
The guy in the next story had a very close brush with death.
The Right Place At The Right Time
I had some chest pains one night and woke up my wife to tell her. She got a little scared that it might be a heart attack, and we went to the ER. The nurses were pretty sure it was a false alarm, but would run an EKG.
The EKG was done by one veteran nurse and a new nurse. I was watching over their shoulders, and I didn’t like what I saw. Something was flashing on the screen that made both nurses look at each other with disbelief. They ran it again and one nurse went out to the station for help.
A few seconds later, five or six more people came into the room slowly and calmly and began preparing me for something. It turns out that I was having my second heart attack.
The doctors and nurses found an obstruction in my heart and were preparing me to have it cleared and a stent placed.
When I got out of surgery, the doctor told me, You probably picked the best time and place to have a heart attack.
The guy in the next story was not going to let his good reputation be dragged through the mud.
Paternity Problems
Back in college, my ex-girlfriend cheated and got pregnant. She blamed it on me, involved her family and all. I was willing to file a case in court with medico-legal as needed.
My ex-girlfriend got too pressured as I was talking to her dad about medical tests, etc. Out of nowhere, she admitted that I wasn’t the father and that it was some classmate she had a fling with.
The man in the next story made the right decision.
Close To Home Is Best
My father-in-law was working on the construction of a power plant and was scheduled to work Sunday. He was a union pipe fitter.Â
On Saturday, he got a call from another company asking him to run a job much closer to his house. I think it was a five-minute commute vs 50 minutes, so he accepted and didn’t go to the power plant job on the Sunday.
That day, there was an explosion at the plant, and people in the crew he was working with wound up dying in the explosion.
The person in the next story can thank their lucky stars they went to the doctor just in time.
The Pesky Sore
I was 24 years old and had a pesky sore on my tongue that was really bothering me. My boyfriend’s dad was a dentist, so when I was over at his house one night, I asked him to take a look.Â
He recommended I go see an oral surgeon the next day for him to check it out.
The next day, I decided I was feeling better. So, I tried to cancel my appointment. But, my boyfriend’s dad insisted I go. Thank heaven he did.
I went, and the oral surgeon pretty much diagnosed it as cancer on the spot. It was aggressive and by the time of my surgery to remove it, it had already spread to multiple lymph nodes. They ended up removing over half my tongue, followed by chemotherapy and radiation.Â
Given how aggressive it was, I often think that if I had put off the doctor’s visit any longer, I probably wouldn’t have survived. I’m coming up on my 10-year anniversary in January.
The woman in the next story thankfully ended a relationship at a good time.
The Cheat
I was briefly engaged to a man who has since cheated on his gorgeous, intelligent, sweet wife hundreds of times. They are separated, but have two children and will likely reconcile.
I broke our engagement when he said that he thought it was perfectly fine for a man to cheat on his wife if they’d been married for a while and he’d gotten bored. Oddly enough, he didn’t believe a woman was entitled to do the same.
I feel so badly for his poor wife now. He began cheating on her two years into their marriage when she was pregnant with their first child.
The couple in the next story can be happy they didn’t end up purchasing a house.
The House
My wife and I were prepared to buy a nice riverfront property in 2019, but the owners, who were her dad and uncle, were dragging their feet.
We had our down payment, we were approved for the mortgage, and we had even been living there paying rent. Then, the river rose 30ft (10m) and we had to evacuate. The water kept rising. The house was destroyed before we bought it. So, we didn’t buy it.
The person in the next story can thank their bus driver for being on time.
Almost An Icy Grave
I was walking to work in the winter, when halfway through a step forward under a sky bridge, an icicle a foot taller than me and probably two feet around at the base crashes down right in front of my nose. If my bus had been a half second earlier, if I had walked even a tiny bit faster?
I would have been impaled right down the middle. I was frozen in place for a minute, quietly surveying my experience.
There was another pedestrian nearby who witnessed it, and the wide-eyed, ashen look on his face as he stared at me confirmed just how narrowly fortunate I was that day.
The person in the next story got back on their feet and dished out some much-needed revenge to their manager.
A Taste Of Her Own Medicine
My manager was trying to have me fired for underperformance, and I was so depressed at the time. The place I worked had a whole song and dance routine just to get someone a verbal warning, so she tried to get me to take a severance payment so that I’d leave and save her the trouble.
I had to take sick leave shortly after that conversation, and while I was gone, she initiated the formal process to have me fired. I was able to drag things out for a couple of months, and during that time, I discovered she’d falsified documents to make me look like a lost cause.Â
Well, I got my revenge. I presented a dossier to HR demonstrating how her statements were probably misleading, and documenting every time she failed to follow proper procedures, which turned everything around.
I got moved to a better job on a better team and spent a solid year rubbing it in her face how well I was doing. It was pretty annoying that she didn’t get fired, but there would have been too much blowback on management if she had. Still, I went from the verge of unemployment to unequivocal success.
The person in the next story thankfully didn’t lose any body parts.
Seconds From Disaster
A few years ago, I was in a small fender bender. Someone merged into my lane, with me in it, and smashed my driver-side door and their passenger door together.
I had pulled my arm in from having it hanging out the window about 15 seconds before that happened. I would have most likely had my arm ripped off.
The person in the next story was right to leave the job when they did.
Sick As A Dog
I quit a job after my boss yelled at everybody for faking being sick when one guy came in with the flu and passed it around the office.
He claimed that people don’t get sick by being near each other. One guy got the flu so bad he was hospitalized for two weeks. I quit with no backup in October 2019. By February 2020, his company went out of business.
The guy in the next story was involved with a serial liar.
Girl Fight
I was dating this coworker who lied all the time. I told her from the beginning that I didn’t want to start anything if she wasn’t serious and if there was someone else.Â
She assured me no, and that she had deep feelings for me. One day, out of the blue, a random girl stopped by our workplace and asked around for the girl I was dating.
In a building filled with hundreds of people, I happened to be the only one at the front and asked what was going on. As it turns out, this random person was pretty much there to start a fight.
The girl I was dating was sending photos to this girl’s boyfriend. Whoops. If I had not been at the front, I would’ve never found out. One angry text later, I never heard from her again.
The guy in the next story was saved by something unexpected.
A Little Friend
I was driving home from visiting my brother in Vermont when a snowstorm started. I didn’t have much experience driving in serious snow, and I completely lost control.
The car careened off the road, and I was heading for a giant boulder extremely quickly. I felt time slow down and I reflected on my life for a moment and then said goodbye to my body.
Suddenly, I was jolted out of it by an abrupt impact, but I could see that the boulder was still quite a few feet away. When I got out of the car, I saw that I had hit a little skinny tree that I could have easily grabbed with one hand.
However, it had a giant root system that lifted the car off the ground and stopped me. The car was totaled, but I was completely fine because of that little tree. There is no way I would have survived the other impact.
The men in the next story came so close to being blown away.
Gas Tank Grace
Yesterday, I was helping my fiancé dad cut some tree limbs from his yard. He was on a lift trying to cut some limbs that were dangling dangerously high over a steel propane tank. The tank itself had $1500 worth of propane.
The keyword is had. He cut off a limb and it hit the tank with the largest bang I’ve ever heard. Propane came pouring out the top like smoke from a mortar. He struggled to get the lift down enough to jump out and run for his life.
We would later find out that the limb hit the gas valve and it fell straight down into the tank. If it had sparked once, it wouldn’t have mattered how far we ran. We would have been goners. Him, me, and my fiancé who was showering inside, unaware.
Now he has no gas, is out $1,500, and almost died. There’s no way we should be alive. The gas is still leaking out even after 24 hours.
The guy in the next story thankfully made a level-headed decision about his relationship.
The Final Nail
We came up shy of our financial goal for a wedding and decided to save again for another year. We were gonna go on an adventure and elope. I’m so lucky we didn’t. Our relationship fell apart in the following year.Â
Both of us put nails in the coffin. I was the only one to acknowledge mine. She could do no wrong, and I was being gas-lit pretty badly.
When we split, my depression evaporated. I was able to go off my medication and realize just how deep she had her claws in me. I thank god every day we didn’t get married or my mental health would have been horrendous.
The person in the next story learned not to do things that could end up causing permanent damage.
An Eye Opener
When I was a kid, about six years old, I somehow threw a piece of metal in the sky and watched it fall in my face. It opened a large and bloody cut right under my right eye.
When my mom saw me rubbing my closed eye with a sea of blood, she almost had a heart attack. But no, I was fine. I got some stitches and it was really scary, but all good.
The cut didn’t even leave a scar. If my dumb self was hit just a bit higher, I would have lost an eye.
The girl in the next story knew she had to listen to her intuition.
The Charmer
When we were younger, a guy we knew a little, who was extremely charming and debonair, asked my best friend on a date. Everybody liked him and urged her to say yes, but she had this chilling feeling about him.Â
So, she turned him down. Fast forward 20 years later, he’s all over the news because he’s been incarcerated as a serial murderer who would approach women, charm them, take them on dates, and take their lives.
He started doing this to women right about the time he asked her out. If she’d gone out with him, she would have been one of his first three victims. The detectives even interviewed her as they tried to piece together the early years of his killing spree.
The group of friends in the next story came very close to tragedy.
You’re It
We were in Italy on a school field trip. We decided to play “schweinehaufen,” pig pile dogpile Anyways, one person is declared the pig and everyone has to jump on them.Â
We played this on a beach at night. Just sand, no danger, right? Well, during the last round, we got up and realized we formed this pile next to a metal pole sticking out of the ground.
It was maybe ten centimeters away and could have easily impaled the first three or four people if we were just a bit closer. We didn’t play that game again.
The girl in the next story made the right decision by ending a relationship.
The Summer Camp Creep
I went to summer camp between my junior and senior years of high school and became friends with a group of guys. For reference, I’m a girl. I dated one of the guys in the group.Â
It was both of our second relationships ever, and so we were a little handsy with each other, but I flat-out refused to go all the way with him, because I sure as heck wasn’t losing my virginity to a summer fling I’d only known for a couple of weeks.
He was a little pushy about it but ultimately backed down after I repeatedly refused. We broke up when summer camp was over and remained friends, though he lived in another state.
After the breakup, not only did he start to emotionally harm me, threatening his own life if I stopped talking to him, saying he’d never had anyone understand him except for me, that sort of thing but I found out from one of the other guys in the group that he’d made jokes about attacking me in my sleep. I blocked him on all social media and haven’t talked to him since.
The person in the next story would be grateful they turned down a night of debauchery.
New Year, New You And Me
We were troubled teens in the mid-1990s. Me and the missus met a bunch of my mates who had done something illicit on New Year’s Eve the morning after.Â
Two of them were regaling me with tales about how great it was. They looked totally horrible. They had pale green faces, while the third was throwing up in a waste bin at the bus station where we ran into each other.
I just took in the whole situation and internally went, “Nope, I’m not doing that.” It turned out I was right because that New Year’s Eve was the start of a biblical flood of misery and death for those that didn’t turn down the stuff.
The man in the next story thought he was surely staring death in the face.
The Hawaii Incident
It was Saturday, January 13th, 2018 I was on a beach in Hawaii doing yoga. My phone pinged with an incredibly terrifying message. It said: “INCOMING BALLISTIC MISSILE. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”Â
I called my daughter and got her voicemail. I told her goodbye. I thought about my friends and family facing this missile and I watched people around me running and panicking.
I was fully prepared to die. It was 38 minutes and 13 seconds before the false alarm message was sent. It changed the way I look at the end of my life. I thought that I was going to die, and there was nothing I could do about it. I no longer have any fear of the afterlife.
The guy in the next story thought he had lost his head.
This Is It
My brother followed through with a knife and hit my neck. We were installing a piece of drywall vertically. We were staggering the boards, so he was standing on a stool or something, as there was already a half piece below.
So, this board was a few feet off the ground. I was standing to his left and he was on my right with his right hand trying to carve a hole into the board for a plug.
He is working the blade down to his left, where I am standing. My head is at his waist, as I am not standing on anything. All of a sudden, the knife slipped, and the follow-through hit me hard in the neck.
At this point, I am like, “This is it.” What a tragic way to go. Getting hit by your brother in a freak drywall accident. I immediately start feeling for my neck, think Richard Zednik.
It is completely dry. I look up, and the knife has no blade. I look further and I find the blade lodged in the piece of drywall. I walked away with an intact and sore neck.
The guy in the next story would realize that being drunk really saved his life.
Drunk And Distracted
I lived in Neiva, Colombia in the 90s. When we were getting ready to meet some friends, I think it was to watch a game or something?and by preparing, I mean drinking our butts off.
We were supposed to go and meet with some friends in a building a couple of blocks away. But, at that point, I was too intoxicated to drive, and just decided to stay in the bar where we were drinking.
I remember my girlfriend making a fuss about it when we heard an explosion. It turns out that the Guerrilla attacked the building we were going to and kidnapped lots of people, including the occupants of the apartment where we were going to visit.
The girl in the next story certainly dodged a horrible, controlling person.
Glad To Have Lost You
In 10th grade of high school, I was in love with a man who was at least 21 years old. He ended up ghosting me and dating my best friend. I was devastated, to say the least.
Well, fast forward a few months, my beautiful ex-best friend with green eyes and a pretty body suddenly started dressing in oversized men’s clothing, she stopped participating in sports and stopped going to events.
She looked tired and sad all of the time. It turns out this man was a manipulative, controlling, crazy person. He was extremely controlling of her and forbade her from talking or interacting with anyone at school, unless absolutely necessary.
He got her a cell phone and made her call him in between each class, so he could be sure that she wasn’t talking with friends.
He knocked her up our senior year and, soon after graduation, he moved her to a new town where she didn’t know anyone, basically to isolate her and further control her.Â
I look back at that and think that could easily have been me. I was a sucker in high school and boy crazy. I know I would have fallen for his trap.
The kids in the next story unknowingly had a scary encounter with a predator.
The Youth Minister
My dad worked at a church when I was elementary-aged. The youth minister was fun, had all kinds of cool stuff in his office, and my brother and I liked spending time with him and playing with his nerf guns and whatever else he had for students.
We established a tradition where, on a monthly basis, he would take us to a restaurant for breakfast.
My brother and I thought it was awesome that he paid us attention since we were younger than the students he worked with for his job.
But, he still took time for us. He took another job a couple of years into this at a different church that’s when we found out the chilling truth about him. He was incarcerated shortly after for molestation.Â
People came forward from both before and after he was at our church, but none that I’m aware of from when he was there. So my brother and I were groomed by an experienced creep and we were clueless at the time. Nothing happened to either of us, we have no idea why because the opportunity was there.
The couple in the next story should be glad there were no vacancies at a bed and breakfast they wanted to stay at.
No Vacancies
About 15 years ago, my girlfriend and I were young and she was eight months pregnant. We rented a nice apartment that was currently being built, and it was a few weeks away from being ready for us to move in.
So, we decided to stay at a hotel until then. There was a really nice small bed and breakfast that we had heard about and wanted to stay there, so we called them to make sure there was a vacancy.
There was, so we made the drive up. But, when we got there, apparently there wasn’t a vacancy according to the owner and the woman who we spoke to on the phone had made a mistake.Â
About a week or so later, the entire place burned down and several guests died in the fire. I tried to find more detailed information on it, but never could.
All I know is it was some sort of electrical fire, it started in the middle of the night when everyone was asleep, and six people perished that night. It’s terrifying to even think about.
The guy in the next story got a lucky break while battling a war.
Blown Away
While I was under bombardment in Baghdad in 2004, a Chinese-made Katyusha rocket landed a few feet away and blew me up.
I stood up, dusted myself off, and discovered I was completely unhurt. As I was marveling at this, I watched another rocket come in. I knew from its parabola that my luck was up. I stood rooted to the spot, horrified, as it came down nose first closer to me than the first one.
I’ve never been so certain that my life was over. It failed to explode.
The person in the next story received some much-needed help from a mysterious stranger.
The Beautiful Stranger
Before I moved, I got stuck in Boston overnight in the heavy rain with nowhere to stay. My phone was dead, so I couldn’t call anyone or use the maps app. As anyone who’s ever been to Boston can attest, the whole city basically shuts down after two in the morning.Â
Unfamiliar with public transport, I got on the last train that I hoped would take me to my friend outside of the city, but at the last second, I realized the train was going in the opposite direction.
I ended up asking this girl where I was, to which she then responded, “Do you not have anywhere to go tonight” Come with me!”
So, I followed her in a daze, not really sure what was happening. She was absolutely gorgeous, so I was sure I was about to get mugged. She took me to her house, blew up an air mattress, and let me use her spare phone charger.
The next morning, I thanked her profusely and offered money, but she just smiled and waved it off. We said our goodbyes and I left. I still don’t know her name.
The woman in the next story was not going to let her son interfere with her life of luxury living.
Living Lavishly
I used to be engaged and made a lot more money than my then-fiancé. She had a son and we planned on having children together, so I was supportive when she decided to quit her job as a New York City teacher to be a stay-at-home mom.
But, then she offhandedly mentions how she wants to look into hiring a full-time babysitter for her son. I asked if she was going back to work in the fall, but she said no.
She just wanted someone to watch her son from roughly when I left for work until I came home. I pointed out the whole point of leaving her job to be a stay-at-home mom was to do that very thing.
I already paid people to clean the home and do the landscaping, while I did most of the cooking. We ended up fighting a lot about this over the next couple of weeks until we broke off the engagement and broke up altogether.
She’s still friendly with my friends? Wives/girlfriends and I’ve since learned she married a guy who basically works 24/7 to keep her in a life of luxury.
The next story is about a person who got diagnosed with a rare illness.
One In A Million Diagnosis
When I was 15 years old, I was suffering from dizzy spells and constant tiredness. They figured I had some kind of anemia. I had a blood test done on me and they found an abnormally high white blood cell count.
This usually meant one of two terrible things. I either had Leukemia or Sickle Cell Anemia. Well, it turns out I had a one-in-a-million third option.
Genetically, I have much denser bones than a normal person. The doctor was suspicious of this when it took such an abnormally long time to get a bone marrow sample.
Usually, it’s done in five minutes, but it took him nearly twenty minutes to jam the needle into my sternum. Denser bones accounted for a higher white blood cell count. I was, and remain to this date over thirty years later, perfectly healthy.
In order to protect the privacy of those depicted, some names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed and are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblances to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.
