“We Need To Leave… Now”: 35 Stories Of People Who Trusted Their Gut And Were Right

Father-son creep team accosted me in a nearly-deserted public park.   the boy was around 10 and I want to say I was around 8?  he no-question-about-it asked me several times if I wanted to [furtive hand gesture] while his dad just sat nearby scanning the park for potential witnesses.  it felt like the dad was the one in control.


I was *deeply* freaked out.  I'd never seen a 10yo with nicotine stains like that kid had.  or seen an adult provide/offer smokes.  .

Was on LSD with three friends passing by Anton Levay’s (leader of the satanic church) house in San Francisco, and we all heard an incredibly low growl from behind the fence in his front yard. Clearly, Satan. Totally freaked us out.

Thirty years later I learned it was in fact a tiger behind the fence.

A long long time ago, I worked evening shift. I came home late at night and saw a random guy walking around our parking lot. My gut told me he was up to no good. So I stayed in my car until he was gone. When the coast "was clear," I walked to my apt and noticed he was across the street. He was startled to see me and came towards me. I ran in my apt. You know how in the movies, they fumble with their keys? Well that was me. But I was able to get in quickly. Later that week, I found out that a guy was walking around the complex breaking into apartments..

I live downtown in my city and I was taking a walk on my day off. A few blocks from my house, there was a man a few feet ahead of me, who was yelling at another guy across the street. They continued yelling back and forth at each other as they walked and I finally caught up to the guy at the corner, as I waited for the light to change for me to cross.

The two guys were still yelling at each other and getting louder and I got real uneasy, thinking what if one of them started shooting. The light was taking forever, so I just dodged traffic and ran across the street to get away. As soon as I was on the other side of the street, I heard gun shots! I started running, along with the other pedestrians, and we ducked into the closest building. I later learned that a bystander was shot in his hand, but luckily, he wasn’t seriously injured. The shooter missed his target, but he was arrested.

When i was 12 ,my ex stepfathers car haf broken down so my mam piled her 5 kids into the car to go tow it and bump start it,we get there she gets out leaving me (the eldest) in the front passenger seat and the other four in the backseat,so im messing abt trying to find a radio station that wasnt playing love is all around by wet wet wet coz i was sick of it,when a little voice in my head says look up ,i look.in the mirror and see lights but go back to silencing wet wet wet ,seconds later that same voice says look up now,i look up and realise the light are coming too close i had enough time scream everyone get down and throw the top half of my body over my siblings to keep them held down as a tow truck smashed into the broken down car at such a high speed tjat the broken down hit our car with enough force to send us over the other side of road and down an imbankment, i ended up being thrown forward at that point and briefly knocked out but my siblings were all unharmed.

My dad had abused me all my life until he was arrested for sexual harrassment of a lady at church, trying to run over the Deacun and abusing me in front of the church then speeding off with me in the car. The court threw everything out but the child abuse and the reckless driving. They said that a son needed a father in the court so they sent me to therapy to build my relationship with my father. If my mother did not take me she would see problems so I had to go. What I did is I has a review system and I never left alone with him and give him 1 and 2 out of 10 every time. Eventually the therapist changed his review system to out of 5 but it still never passed 1 or 2 where a 3 out of 5 would be considered average. I just ran him down for a year where my father and the therapist realized they were not making any progress and tried to have a meeting with me where I just bashed him telling everything he did wrong with the abuse. He called me a liar and he never wanted to see me again. Only times I heard from him after was 2 crazy notes trying to reconnect and from the coroner after he hung himself because he was being convicted of attempting to b**b the sheriff office. Uh clearly I was in the right to play it out. It was a situation I could not just leave though because that would have put us in a worse situation.

When I used to live in New Orleans, I went out with a friend to watch a Saints game. We went to a bar after and this guy started talking to my friend really aggressively and my friend was trying to talk him down. I could instantly tell that something was off, paid for our beers and convinced him to go outside for a cig. We’re out there maybe 3 minutes and the other guy shoved someone through the window while screaming “I just got out of OPP (Orleans Parish prison) mother f****r!” But yeah the energy in the room was HEAVY right before it happened. I think anyone that has been in a fight or grew up with abusive parents can be attuned to the energy shift of a room and more easily say “let’s get tf out of here”.

I'm a few years retired after a 32-year career as a Bronx elementary School teacher. My school was in the Yankee stadium area and I took unbelievable pride in the number of field trips I took my third or fourth grade classes on. 40 trips in a year were not out of the question. 


Any trip that I could take by walking my class I was more than happy, although taking the subway was no problem for me. Walking across the bridge to Manhattan there were several nice museums on 155th Street including the Puerto Rican museum. There was  also a museum on money/coins, and a native American museum. I made sure to hit each one up every year and then end up at the park to let them run around all day. It was unbelievable how t discipline improved in my class when I burnt up their collective energy. 


Anyway in the early 1990s while going to the American Indian museum I got caught  in the Washington heights riots. Walking two classes back to school I knew I was in trouble the minute I saw police cars with tape crisscrossing windows so if the car glass was broken it wouldn't shatter and injure the officers. On the way back to school I saw Molotov cocktails being thrown at the police, bricks being thrown off roofs, and gunshots in the distance. Let's just say that my nerves were shot after this. 


Two things were even more frightening. The first was my principal didn't even have the human decency to relieve me for a couple of periods while I recovered my nerves. The most frightening thing was the children were not even upset. It was like riots were every day events for them. They immediately opened up their journals and started to write about their trip and also draw about things they saw in the museum. 


While thinking about this I've come to the conclusion that mayor David dinkins New York was so out of control in the early 1990s that it actually made sense that the children wouldn't be panicked by witnessing violence. The poor ghetto children endured things that most Americans only read about, and I had at least the opportunity to go home to a sane neighborhood while the students in my class were stuck in this madhouse. 


On a side note this was a year where three or four times I walked to the bodega near my school to buy a turkey sandwich for lunch and saw chalk outlines of dead bodies on the sidewalk.

Back in my short and sweet punk days, my gang of theater nerds and misfits used to crash parties and attend some illegal shows (as in, the shows were held in places they didn't have a license to perform in, were serving booze to minors, no door checking, etc). This would have been early 1980s. In our friends group was someone named "Kathy."

Kathy had this weird sixth sense about cops. I don't know what it was, exactly, but when Kathy "got that look," we all knew: RUN. Twice I was hanging out with her and witnessed this first hand. She would be just herself, and then suddenly, have this disconnected look on her face, like a minor seizure. Then she'd say, "we gotta go." Sometimes it would happen in mid sentence. "So, then Tony was like, all over her and... .... we should leave." At first, she had a best friend who knew what that meant, but quickly, we all did.

First time this happened, we were at a show at an abandoned movie theater. We were hanging out in the lobby in a sea of pot fumes, and she had just gotten out of the mosh pit and was having her friend look at a cut on the side of her head. Then. "I don't know, I was in the pit, and some guy with a knife... cops. COPS!" and we grabbed everyone from our group, got in our cars, and JUST as we turned on the main road from the parking lot, half a dozen black and whites pulled in and blocked everyone in. Huge bust. Missed it by maybe 10 seconds.

Second time was at some house in Potomac (a really rich area around here). Some college clown held a party at his parents house, and it was like something out of a John Hughes film. I was with Kathy and some other folks in the living room, where someone had used permanent marker to draw rude things all over this huge portrait over the fireplace. I was telling Kathy about how this guy gave me $10 in a bet that he was Jesus Christ (he was high on something, lost the bet when he tried to fly by jumping off the porch landing) and Kathy's face just... dropped. "Kathy? Should we go?" her friend asked. Kathy "snapped back in" and said "NOW." We golted like hell out of there, and sure enough, a cop car showed up right after we left.

Those are the ones I witnessed, but others told of similar stories. We asked her about it, and she shrugged. "I don't know. It's like suddenly, I just ... know? Like my head goes quiet for a sec and then I am filled with dread?" Was her dad a cop, did she have some shortwave in some filling on police channels, what? She just didn't know. Spooky.

My husband and I live at the base of Runyon Canyon. We ditched when the Sunset Fire broke out because it was at the end of our street.

We were in LA and went for a ride through The Los Angeles Mountains. It was beautiful and we were taking pictures at one spot when this guy pulls up on a motorcycle and stops next to us. I could feel the unease start when he got off the bike and as he started walking towards us.He struck up a bizarre conversation with us. Asked what we were doing, where else are we going, is there anyone else with us. But this time I was in going into full panic mood and my sensors were going off and telling me to get away from this man. Quickly try to get out and away. I whispered to my clueless husband that I was getting bad vibes about the whole experience.Our daughter was 7 and I just didn’t feel safe at all and felt very uneasy. I’ve never felt so relieved getting anywhere. When I got back to our home, I read about all of bodies buried in there and how there is still stuff going on in the park. I just knew something bad was going to happen. I kept getting flashes of bad stuff appearing in my head. I almost didn’t think he was going to follow us. He really didn’t want us to leave. His demeanor was so odd and freaky. I’ve never been so scared. I was truly terrified about that whole incident.

Just happened last week. Friend and I were in a Lyft. Driver literally didn’t know how to drive. I don’t know how he even got to us from wherever he started from. Didn’t understand the GPS or how to follow it. Barely managed to get out of parking lot. After barely getting onto highway (and then just driving into the breakdown lane going 25) we told him to pull over at nearest bar. He almost didn’t but we near screamed. Got out quickly and the driver wouldn’t leave the bar parking lot. We hid in the bar until he finally drove away.

When I was involved in a large criminal organisation back in the mid 80's I met a guy who wanted a large amount of the stuff we sold. I arranged a pick up and went with my driver to the address and he's inside the property. Waving us inside I stopped got back in the car and drove away. I knew if we went in that house we wasn't coming out.

I had stayed overnight in Oregon in September 2020 and the morning of the almeda fire it was so windy that it knocked over a gallon of water I had on the ground while loading my car up, and the grass was so dry it shattered under your feet. Then the smell of smoke, and seeing hundreds of birds flying out of it in the opposite direction of where I was. I drove south on I5 all the way to Southern California only stopping for gas because there were fires on both sides of I5 down the entire west coast. It was honestly terrifying.

My aunt used to live in this house with a very unsettling atmosphere. I was always scared there. I would babysit my cousin on weekends while she bartended so I was there basically alone at night a lot. I made a little bedroom in the attic and one night while I was reading my J-14 magazine suddenly a voice in my ear told me to get out. I went flying downstairs, completely terrified. Another time I saw something very strange in the shadows of the dining room that I could have sworn was a figure that looked like branches were coming out of its head. One night during a storm the power went out and that was one of the most terrifying nights of my life as I sat huddled in the kitchen by the window calling my aunt over and over again but she never answered. In their next apartment I was watching Amityville Horror of all things when one of his toys goes off by itself. I s**t you not it said “peekaboo I see you”. This toy was at the bottom of a basket of toys and he was asleep. I threw it away in the neighbors garbage can immediately. I know there was something bad in that house and I think it tried to follow them.