Ask Lemmy

During Helene, I had a tree fall through my house while I was in bed, and it stopped about 6 inches from my face

When a car ran over the person who walked right next to me.

For about three weeks I was having bad thoughts going round and round in my head all day long, and I was barely able to do my work.

Hydroplaning on a motorcycle

Brexit

My first deployment in a fast-attack submarine, in the fall of 1991. We were working under British operational control, and they ordered us to cruise surfaced, in the North Sea. I was standing watch as a lookout, with another lookout and the Officer of the Deck (OOD), in the sail superstructure of the boat. We were wearing body harnesses and lanyards, clipped into the superstructure - normal procedure.

I was a sailor aboard USS SUNFISH (SSN549), a Sturgeon Class boat, where the sail superstructure was 25 feet tall. We were in 48 foot seas.

The 3 of us on watch that night were washed overboard more than 10 times each. Often all 3 of us at the same time... flung overboard, hanging by our lanyards, trying to roll around and grab onto the ladder rungs, or one another, to get back into the bridge pooka. None of us broke any bones or lost any teeth, but we were pretty battered and bruised by the end of it.

That was the first time I got to see the entire boat out of the water... at the top of the wave, I could see the stem planes, stabilizers, the end of the towed-array housing, and the propeller. At the bottom of each trough, we'd see just a tiny hole of sky, through the water, as it all crashed down upon us, and we all hold on, trying to stay inside the superstructure.

We pulled into the Navy Base at Rosyth Scotland the next afternoon. The windshield, booked in for surface operations, was completely missing, as well a the port running light. We sustained damage to our observation periscope and main communications antenna as well.

The experience was both scary and exhilarating.

The cops had a shoot out with my neighbor in the apartment next to mine. I wasn't positive it was gunfire, and I walked into my living room to get a better assessment. I was about a foot away from whizzing bullets, but I still wasn't 100% sure lol. I decided to not risk it and take cover on the floor of my bathroom, until about 20 minutes later when the cops busted my door down and kicked me out of my apartment for 2 days. When I came back, I had 17 bullet holes in my wall (all from the cops) and my fridge and cabinets were all shot to hell. I definitely almost died that day

Heartbeat stopping in the night. Luckily, the heart has mechanisms to restart itself, and the last one finally kicked in. According to the doc, this only took five to ten seconds, but it felt longer than the complete last class on a Friday afternoon.

Working up a radio tower that is on top of a hill where 2 quarries are slowly cutting their way into.

Everything was fine until I hear a large bang and rumbling noises. Then the entire tower starts vibrating with the shockwave of explosion.

I was about 20M up the tower that day.

Also we now know why our millimetre wave radios will sometimes have jitters in the signal strength.

Either when my first baby fell out of bed followed by a big clonk, or when I tried to get someone out of a car in flames.

My eldest is fine, that guy didn't make it and I will never forget the smell.

8 way skydive. Two friends were getting married and they wanted to do a formation skydive as part of their wedding ceremony. They were going to get married, then 8 of us would get into the plane and do an 8 way formation dive. Land and eat cake.

The problem was they were both low time jumpers, with about 70 jumps each. The other 6 jumpers were all highly experienced, so we tried to make it work. The jump in question was a practice jump about a month before the wedding.

The bride fell out of the formation and went low. Meaning she was below everyone else and was continuing to get even lower. People in a formation will fall more slowly than an individual.

The formation of 7 other jumpers gets to about 5000ft and she is about 500ft below us and just sitting there. She is making no moves to track out and it is becoming a very dangerous situation. Then she starts waving off, which is what you're supposed to do right before deploying your parachute. We all see it, break the formation turn and burn. The jumper to my right videoed the whole thing. By happenstance I was the closest to her. The video shows me in a full track when she and her deploying main parachute come into frame. I might have missed her by about 20ft. Later she told me I sounded like a jet airplane passing by.

Everyone needed a change of underwear after that jump. I grounded her except for coached jumps, which I took on myself. I did about 15 jumps with her over the next month with increasing number of people until it clicked with her on how formation skydiving actually works.

We did not get to do the jump the day of the wedding unfortunately. Just after the nuptials were completed and we were to head to the airplane an intense thunderstorm blew in grounding the planes. We still held the reception in the hanger though and it was a good time. We did the wedding jump a couple of weeks later and sent the video to all the wedding guests.

But yeah, it was pretty fucking scary.

The time I was charged by a grizzly bear in western Alberta

Got launched off the side of a boat near Tokyo in January. Wasn't very buoyant due to heavy winter clothing and the cold water was... something else. Felt like I was sinking down forever. When I did resurface, it took a long time for them to rig up a ladder for me to climb aboard the adjacent ship.

Paragliding, I was literally on the last step from the clif, the next step would be off the cliff. Right as I took that last solid step, I got a collapse (meaning my wing folded, this basically turns it from a parachute to a shopping bag in the sense of keeping you from falling to the ground)

Luckly I noticed, took a few steps back and started going "what the fuck was that???" Sat down for 15 minutes while figuring out what I did wrong. After the 15 minutes I took off again, this time safely.

I'm pretty good at handling scary and dangerous situations so even though I was a literal step away from probably death, definitely life long disability, I can't really say that I was extremely scared.

What's weird is how everyone reacts differently. Someone talked about spinning out in a car; once, my girlfriend was driving, in the winter, and we tried to pass someone on the freeway, going near freeway speeds. The roads were icy, and we spun around multiple times, and ended up coming to a stop on the other side of the freeway facing oncoming traffic. Throughout the entire episode, I remember only thinking, "Ok, this is happening." I wasn't afraid, my heart rate was normal, I was completely calm. I think I may have put my hand on the dashboard, as if that'd do anything. I think, for me, it was the utter inability to do anything about the situation that made me calm. I've lost control on ice while I've been driving, and that's nerve-wracking. But that one time was the worst, and yet I had no fear. It's really strange, isn't it?

So, my answer is being up on the town hall tower in Rothenburg, Germany.

I know I'm acrophobic, but not pathologically, but I figured I'd be a little scared and that would be it, and I wanted to do it. So we climb about 800 floors of stairs and crawl through this little submarine-like hatch onto a mayor walkway around the tower literally wide enough for one person, as long as they're not too fat. The railing is a metal bar about waist-high, and I am not joking, you didn't have enough room to turn around. So you shuffle around the entire spire - there's just a column behind you - until you make the circuit and can climb back in the man-hole. It was not great; I was already anxious, except that after I got out, people just kept coming out of the hole. It was literally impossible to go back - you had to make the circuit, and there were people on both sides of you. You shuffled as fast as everyone else was, which was slow, because you'd stop when someone would finish and climb back in the hole.

I was about three people out of the hole, and thinking about the warning sign about the walkway being rated for only 4 people at a time, and how by my count there were at least a dozen, and I panicked. It was one of two or three times in my life when I felt like my brain had run off and was doing its own thing, and I had no control. I didn't make a scene, but internally, I was completely terrified, and probably wouldn't have been able to move if I hadn't been part of a press of people on both sides inexorably shifting around the walkway. I don't think that utter loss of any rational control can be adequately described unless you've experienced it.

The view was, apparently, beautiful, but I have no memory of it; all I remember is that it took 6 hours and all I could think of the entire time was getting back inside.

Very currently scariest, the night before yesterday a neighbour almost got killed by her son. She's in her 50s and he's in his 30s, I woke up to half the apartment building being closed off and police everywhere. He had called SOS himself and told them he killed his mom, and they found him outside the building at 3am, he was covered in blood and barely there mentally. The entryway still had blood on the floor and the door to the apartment building is broken to shit. It's still so recent that we haven't heard anything more, she's in hospital in critical but apparently stable condition.

First time I had severe anaphylactic shock, only juuust got given adrenaline in time apparently, don't rate.

7.7 magnitude earthquake from the 33rd floor. It happened 2 weeks ago. I will never go in a tall building again.

Sudden low blood pressure after seeing my own blood. I went temporarily blind and my hearing was weird for a bit. Thankfully, my father rescued me.

The reason I didn't faint was because, when I felt my blood pressure dropping, I immediately kneeled to avoid further injury.

That was most certainly the scariest thing I've experienced. Somehow, it was scarier than actually fainting.

I've been in some scary situations, but I don't think anything has ever compared to the fear + PANIC feeling of getting separated and then lost from my parents inside a busy store when I was a child. I feel like I can handle fear and get ahold of it pretty quickly as an adult, even in dangeroussituations, but panic is an entirely different animal and as a kid you have zero reference for that kinda thing.

Now.

Almost spun out because I hit a pothole, luckily the oncoming lane was empty and I managed to recover though

When my son had scarlet fever.

Going from an employee to self-employed was fucking terrifying. It felt like risking my entire future even though I rationally knew that not to be the case.