47 Times People Trusted Their Instincts And Avoided Major Regret

My older sister's high school boyfriend (also a high schooler) was someone who always put me on edge. My mother liked him because he was respectful, my two younger sisters liked him because he brought them candy, who knows why my older sister liked him and I'm not sure my dad ever met him (Dad was a long haul trucker most of my life and could only be relied on to be home for birthdays and Christmas).

Anyways, I trusted this guy about as far as I could throw him and would leave the house if he came over. My sister thought I was being mean and we fought about it a lot.

About a year later they broke up and five years after that my dad is reading the newspaper, asks my sister what her ex's name was and announces that he has just been arrested for p**dophilia.

I was walking on a block/route I'd been doing every day. It was early afternoon, not even night time. My dog got stiff very randomly and no one was around so I ignored it. Then I started feeling very anxious and uncomfortable so I turned us around and went straight home.

Pretty much right after I got home, a woman was a**aulted on that block.

The summer before my freshman year of college, a former coworker of mine asked me on a date. I didn't have anything against the guy, and figured "why not?" He offered up a restaurant and offered to drive, but I told him not to worry and that I would meet him there. Something told me not to let this guy know where I live or to get me alone.

Over the course of dinner, he made some 'off' comments that, by themselves might be strange for a first date, but together became a bit of a red flag. He offered to pay, but I told him not to worry and that I would pay for myself, also internally thinking how I did not want this guy thinking that I owed him anything.

A couple months later, when I start living in a dorm at the university about an hour away, I get a facebook message from the guy saying that he was across the street from campus and wanted to meet up. I saw the preview of the message and didn't open it because I didn't want him to see I had read the message. I hadn't told him that I would be living in a dorm or close to campus.

I met up with another former coworker of mine a week later that I was close with that used to be roommates with the guy I went on a date with. This friend asked if I had heard from that guy recently. I told him that I had received a message but didn't respond, and asked why he asked. He told me that, not long after our date ended, he went home and beat the c**p out of his mom and sister and got arrested for it. He had gotten out of jail the week prior (when he sent me the message) and started breaking into his friends' homes and leaving pokemon cards to let them know that he had been there. He also started making posts on Facebook wondering if people would taste better medium or rare... yeah I'm pretty glad that he didn't know where my parent's house was, and that I didn't meet up with him the week prior.

Not me but my mom. Growing up my grandparents had a friend who came from the same town in Italy as they did. Coincidentally, he immigrated to the same city that my grandparents did and they stayed friends. My mom says that growing up she always felt creeped out by him. She would make an effort to be out of the home whenever he visited, and made sure she was never alone with him. My grandfather always said she was crazy and that he was a good guy. When I was a toddler, he came to visit my grandparents, and tried to get me to go over to him. I guess I has a weird feeling too, so I hid behind my mom (which she was obviously happy about).

Years later it came out that he had molested multiple young girls going back decades.

My mom had an awesome job with an airline and the whole family got flight benefits. If there was an empty seat on a flight, we could take it. This meant that impromptu trips were common for us. One rainy day, my mom noticed the flights to Florida were wide open and we decided for a “beach day trip.” I usually LIVE for this stuff. Jumping on a plane with my swim suit and a pair of sandals as my only luggage? I felt like a freaking celebrity. But this day just felt...wrong. I couldn’t articulate the feeling, but I knew with every fiber that I did not want to go. I felt bad disappointing my mom, but we eventually decided to stay home. Later that evening we see a mass shooting had occurred at the airport we would have arrived to, right when we were due to leave. It very well could have been us.

I decided to get gas on my way home recently, at around 10pm. This place is right next to my apartment, and it’s always busy. It was completely empty that night, besides a couple people’s cars who were in the store. I start the pump and get back into my car, while talking to my boyfriend on the phone.

As I got into my car and locked the door (I always do) another car pulled up right behind me. I immediately felt nervous, and I realized that it’s kind of an unspoken rule (at least in the US) to park one or two spaces away from anyone else if possible, we like our space.

I almost got out of my car, thinking I was being paranoid, but decided not to, and I told my boyfriend what was going on. Then the guy in the car behind me sat there. For five minutes. He never got out, never pumped gas or went into the store. Finally he turned his car on and turned his wheel like he was about to leave, and then proceeded to wait another two minutes before finally pulling away. I almost got out again when he acted like he was leaving.

The whole event lasted ten minutes, and I was terrified. If you’re ever nervous, think about what’s throwing you off, even if you’re just being paranoid, and do not second guess your instincts.

When I was in college, I went into a gas station restroom to pee. I had this instinct to look up before I pulled my pants down, and there was a worker staring down through the vent. I screamed and ran out yelling that there was someone looking down through the vent. The woman who had just been in before me was still washing her hands, and she was mortified. My BF at the time went after the guy and had to be pulled off by his co-worker. I always check vents in public restrooms now before doing my business.

There was this man, the husband and father of a family that i went to a weekly class with (keeping this very vague on purpose). He would always sit and watch while we participated. He never took his eyes off his wife or kids. He always made me uneasy just by sitting there. His demeanor, the way he watched, the way he talked every once in a while. I always kept my distance and made sure to never be close to him or around him alone.

A while later he stopped coming to classes and I felt more comfortable, until I heard he went to prison for molesting his daughter. His wife always had bruises as well and I'm sure it was from him. I'm mostly just proud that the daughter decided to speak up about it.

I had an opportunity to move to the West Coast all expenses paid. It seemed like a great opportunity. I was deep into planning and I said to my wife "you know what, let's wait 6 months and be really sure it's what we want". Four months later, everyone at that site was laid off. I would have been in a new State with no job and no safety net.

Not me but my friend's mother. Apparently a few decades ago she went on a date with a guy from the countryside. Said the date itself didn't go too well, she didn't go home with him and didn't call him again.

The man she went on a date with was Robert Pickton.

I was driving up the street the other day, and I was approaching an intersection. The way I was coming, there wasnt a stop sign for me, but for the cars coming in from the left and right, there were stop signs. I was driving and I had this feeling all of a sudden and thought “what if a car blew right through those stop signs?”. So I decided to slow down to 20 under the speed limit. Low and behold, a biker zooms right past the stop sign 5 seconds later RIGHT in front of my car. I had to slam on the breaks and they slammed the breaks on their bike and fell off. If I hadn’t slowed down, I would’ve mowed that person down, I was in awe.

There was a neighborhood by where I lived that had really nice houses, then condos and townhouses and then small apartments. I ALWAYS got a weird feeling when driving by with my kids. But I’m an extremely overprotective mom and just didn’t take my kids on our walk there.

It’s important to note my friend lived there and was debating let’s his 10 year old daughter walk home from school ( past these apartments) and stay by herself after school for an hour or two until they got home.

I checked the s*x offender registry and there it was. A man on probation for assaulting a 9 year old girl. I told
My friend and now he has her stay at school/ after school program.

Go with your gut ( and always check the register).

Not as dramatic, but walking to uni I halted at some random point and one second later seagull poop lands right in front of me.
Felt blessed at that moment.

This isn’t really a personal situation but a couple years ago I started running into this guy in my neighbourhood. I had never seen him before and started seeing him almost daily when I was coming home from work or just going out for a walk.. something about him made me uneasy and I kept my distance but didn’t think much of it. About 2 months after seeing this guy around and not knowing anything about him, I just stopped running into him.

About 2 weeks before realizing it had been a while since I’d seen him there was someone m******d next door to me. I checked out the police report and googled the name of the victim, turned out it was this guy. He was way younger than I thought he was from looking at him, turns out it was d**g related and last I heard it was still unsolved. Really sad, there’s a small vigil where he was shot and I think about him every time I walk by it.

A couple of years ago my husband and I decided to go a hike. We live in the desert so we have to be cautious of rattlesnakes but in the 5+ years of hiking together we’d never ran into one. We started this beautiful hike and within minutes I had a weird feeling come over me and said out loud to my husband “we’re going to see a rattler today.”

He laughed it off because again, it’s probable but not likely since this was a well-marked trail with lots of traffic. At that point though my senses were turned up max and I was extremely cautious. Literally just a few minutes later we were rounding a bend and I heard a rattle and sure enough, I just about stepped on the snake. I backed away and it was in the corner of the bend/curve and because they camouflage so well, you could barely see it.

We ended up hanging out for awhile warning people coming down to go on the other side of the trail since the rattlesnake was still there and now pissed off because I almost stepped on it. A few hikers that had a pole ended up moving the snake and we were able to proceed as normal on the hike. It was a really weird experience for me to have had that gut feeling hit me just minutes before - did I put it in the universe or was I meant to sense it to warn others from harm?

I was the passenger in the car with my college roommate and we were on the interstate, in the left lane. I suddenly got a bad feeling about a car that had passed us on the right, so I asked her to get over to the middle lane. She thought it was weird, but did it. Shortly thereafter, the car that had passed us on the right caused an accident by cutting off the car that had been in front of us, causing that car to do a 180* and end up facing oncoming traffic. Everyone was okay, but if we had still been in the left lane, we would’ve run into that car, head-on.

There was a dodgy bloke outside the block of flats where I stayed down south England. I didn't like the look of him whatsoever, so I stayed where I was and just watched for an hour. This was about a year before mobiles were a thing, so I had no way to call a pal down the phone or owt like that.

Anyway, bloke leaves and I gan on home. Couple of days later one of the p**stitutes who lived opposite me told me about the bloke. He'd been arrested on two counts of kidnapping two girls. One for three hours and one for four. He got a few other charges anorl, but it was 22 years ago so the details are fuzzy.

He was proper shifty, though.

I was visiting my mom’s home country and some friends talked me into going to this party because they needed a girl in the group to get in. (Sometimes events and parties over there don’t allow groups that only have guys.)

The party was outdoors and was hosted on a massive plot of farmland some rich guy’s family owned. It was in the middle of nowhere, and none of us personally knew the host. We took an Uber to get there, but nobody had cell signal to order a ride back.

I felt really anxious the whole time. Other than the dance floor, it was super dark. People were really tripping on hard d***s, and this is a very conservative country. At the time my mom’s home country had tense relations with their neighboring country and they were on the brink of a war. This farm was only 30 miles from that border.

We finally left early because I was so anxious, but we heard the next day that a fight broke out between two guys. One of them pulled out a gun and fatally shot the other one which led to everyone else panicking and running.

This wasn't me but my mom, and everyday she would take the same route to work and get off at the same highway exit. One day she had a really strong gut feeling to stay off that exit and so she did, and used the next one to get to work. Later that day she sees on the news that there was a really bad accident that happened on the exit at the same time she would've been on it had she taken it. Essentially if she didn't listen to her feeling she at the very least would've been chronically injured.

I used to have a job where I would get off of work pretty late, like 1 or 2 am and I live in a residential area that’s also pretty rural. It’s quiet and mostly just families. So one night I was driving home and was about to turn onto my street when I thought, “What if someone is walking around, I should slow down.” Idk why that thought popped into my head or why I had a feeling that I should listen to it because no one was ever out that late, but I slowed down to basically a crawl and right when I went to turn onto my street there was a guy dressed in all black sweats walking in the middle of the road right where I was about to turn onto. Since I was going so slow I was able to stop, but I was still only like ten feet away from him. When I saw him my blood went cold because I knew that if I hadn’t been driving so slowly I would have definitely hit him. He just glared at me, (I’m guessing he was high or drunk or whatever) and kept walking, crossed the intersection and continued down the street like nothing. I’ll never forget that night and I’m so grateful that I listened to that random thought. This feeling has happened to me a couple of times since, but it’s always been deer that are about to cross in front of me.