43 Fascinating Stories When Gut Instinct Turned Out Spot On

I strongly disliked a coworker’s partner. Everyone else said he was a great, engaging guy, but he didn’t come across that way at all to me - it was like we were seeing two different people. Well, surprise surprise, he turned out to be an a****ve a**ehole. I was right.

In the early 90s there was a huge wind storm in California. Friend and I were driving south on a highway. Visibility gets close to zero due to all the dust flying around.  We decided to pull over to the shoulder of the highway. I still have an unsettled feeling and say I think we should pull into the field next to the highway. After about 20 minutes the dust begins to clear enough for about 50 feet of visibility.  Right near where we had been were several cars that had collided. My friend still brings it up and wonders how I knew.

When I first started dating my now husband, I went to a wedding with him. It was for someone that he worked with. There was a guy there that he introduced me to and I immediately knew he was bad news. I told my husband, there's something wrong with that guy. He said, "No he's a good guy." Turns out, he had been beating his girlfriend quite badly. There was more stuff that came out and that I forget now as it was awhile ago. But he ended up getting fired. He was a real AH.

Far more mundane than these other examples, but I almost always have a really strong sense of time. I will set a timer on my oven to cook things, and without checking the start time I will get up to go back to it about 30 seconds before the alarm sounds. I'm not trying to or anything, something just tells me I should probably go check it out.

Not me but my mom. She was set to marry my step dad in a few weeks (invites out, etc) but she had a feeling she needed to cancel. She told my step dad she just had this feeling that they should not get married on that day. So the called it off temporarily. Turns out her best friend ended up dying tragically in a car crash the night before the day her wedding was supposed to be and she spent that day experiencing that loss.

We were at a friendly gathering with my ex. It was a big table, and everything seemed fun. People were cheerful, joking, and smiling.

Then, I got this weird feeling for no reason and asked to leave. I had to insist over and over, and my girlfriend gave me a hard time on the way out, acting like I was being paranoid.

Two hours after we left, a guy at our table beat another so badly that he was hospitalized with life-altering injuries.

I was driving home late at night with a friend. We were listening to music and just enjoying the drive. As I drove down a hill, I told my friend I felt really uncomfortable and that something bad was going to happen. Even though it was a very quiet night.

I drove a little slower and kept my eyes focused on the road. All of a sudden, I see headlights coming towards me but not in the correct lane. Next thing I know, my car was completely turned perpendicular to the road about an inch, if not less, from a telephone pole on my passenger side.

Immediately started screaming for help because my leg was stuck. I was really confused since the airbag went off, and I accidentally punched myself in the face. My window was gone, and glass was everywhere.

A woman came running out to help me get out of the back of the car because she smelled gas. I sat in her car with a blanket as I called my mom to come get me. She was super pissed because i didn't know the extent of the accident. I saw the other vehicle in the middle of the road. The woman's husband and son were both running into the woods because the other driver ran.

Somehow, I didn't break anything. I sprained my ankle, got a huge bruise on my leg, bloody nose, and a concussion. The sheriff told me he was shocked I was still alive. My car was totaled. My engine was no longer in my car. When my mom arrived, she was horrified and felt terrible that she wasn't nicer.

Sadly, the man only got a hit and run and not a DUI. He was in his forties and had done this before. He should never have been allowed to drive again. But the EMTs and Paramedics were amazing, and I'm so grateful that I work for a company that works with ambulances.

My brother’s dad had a off-roading vehicle and he, my brother, my mom and I were off in the woods having a great time. We came across this super steep hill and they all wanted him to gun it. They were all cheering and yelling for him to go.
I felt something was wrong so I got out the vehicle, walked in the middle of the path so they couldn’t pass me and ran to the top of the hill. I looked down a 50+ foot drop into rocks. There was no cell service and no one else knew we were out there. We simply just would have died at the bottom of that cliff.

I saw rain clouds rolling in and decided I needed to get my dog out to go to the bathroom RIGHT THAT SECOND. It didn’t look like it was super close, and we could have waited until after the rain passed. 

But, for some reason, I made us run to the backyard and then run back in. About 30 seconds later, straight line winds came through. The electrical pole in the backyard landed where we would have been standing if we had been any slower, and we couldn’t get outside because electrical lines were hanging over the doorway. 

It’s always felt so crazy to me that I had that inexplicable need to rush through that. But it might have saved both of our lives. .

When I was 10 years old, my dad was burning leaves along our elevated driveway. I felt sick to my stomach all day but knew I wasn’t sick. We left to go to a birthday party at the ymca shortly after and I kept having panic attacks and kept telling my little sister something was wrong at the house. My dad kept getting angry every time I said something about it. I couldn’t play, I couldn’t eat cake, I couldn’t do anything.

At the end of the party we got a call that our house was engulfed in flames. We lived in the Ozarks and you could see the house at the top of one of the hills just burning to high heavens as you went down the highway to get to the neighborhood entrance. My dad laughed and was like “my house is on fire again” (we had 3 previous incidents, one was a lightning strike, one was a field fire that got our porch from our neighbors pasture, and the other was my fault from knocking a candle over, obviously all got put out fairly quickly).

The house was a total loss. Luckily my parents were divorced and most of our stuff was at moms, but all of our childhood photos and memories were at that house.

Anyway turns out it was arson and my dad wanted a pool. He was not a good person. I was reading his body language and behaviors and knew something was wrong but couldn’t figure it out.

Edit: this got more attention than I thought it would but I figured I’d clarify some things and include some photos.

Our elevated driveway that he was burning leaves against led to a latticed gate underneath our front porch that housed the lawn mower and the gas tanks. The FD deemed it reasonable that he just didn’t put the fire out completely and it crept into the gated area under the porch.

He was a firebug with a pyro license. He had tried insurance fraud before when he was younger by burning down an old barn with one of his cars inside, but nothing came of it AFAIK. I was not alive then and don’t speak to what’s left of his side of the family, nor do I care enough to ask.

We lived on top of a “mountain” (also see, a glorified big a*s hill) and our OG contractor built it on a high foundation so that it could be seen all majestic and s**t from the highway. My dad hated the exposed foundation from the get go. Part of it being seen from the mountain was that we had a “grand staircase” that never got used, and that’s where the pool went.

anyway, here are photos of the house. I don’t have any from before, as they all burned in the fire, and my relationship with him very quickly deteriorated after the new house rebuilt so I don’t have any pictures of the after besides a few on the inside.

I wish I was making all of this up, but my whole life feels like a fever dream. The more lore I drop, the more people think I’m lying. I wish I was lying and I wish I didn’t have so many “stories” to tell. I made my therapist cry telling him about the hell that was my childhood when the stories kept coming.

Not once but twice a woman has been talking to me and I’ve snapped my fingers and declared:

>“You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

Both times I’ve been right; 4-6 weeks along, far too early to be showing.

It’s the world’s most useless superpower.

In a regular morning in north Florida my partner and I were getting ready for work. I was running late and texted my manager. My partner got an alert on his phone saying bad weather ahead.No biggie we live in Florida bad rain storms are normal. I got this sick uneasy feeling though. I wanted to grab a foam mattress topper from a bed and hang out in the hallway. My partner thought differently he let the dog out. As I see the stillness outside then popping getting closer my partner got the dog inside. Not even 10 seconds after closing the back door for the dog a two tornados merged and directly hit us. I just remember a wall of rain, dark and our huge oak coming towards the house as we jumped into the hallway. We were safe but our neighborhood was wrecked and homes lost. This area hadn’t had a direct hit by a tornado in 300 years and so the whole town was shocked what that rain storm turned into very quickly and randomly.

It’s one my told you so’s to my partner. He believes me more now.

I was 15 and had a friend that was a complete a*****e. He shows up at my house one night and asks if I want to go for a ride. I said no; just had a bad feeling about it.

Hours later, they were all arrested; car turned out to be stolen.

My first child was normal but small, in a way that I was disturbed by. Asked at each pediatric visit if she was really all right and was told she was fine. Even took a book out of the local public health library about how to evaluate a very young infant or child. She was so young (only a little over a month) that the only test I could do was about head lag and I noticed she wasn't really holding her head up as much as she should have. Then when she was 6 weeks old, I was holding her and she suddenly had a weird moment which I learned only later was actually an epileptic seizure in an infant. Turned out she had a super-rare condition from birth and ended up extremely intellectual delayed (never even learned to talk). So my instinct that there was something really wrong was right, even though no one else noticed it.

I always have a strong gut when I meet a person for the first time. Instantly makes me like or dislike them - never in neutral area.
When I mentioned about instantly disliking a friends spouse to my husband, he was shocked and taken aback. But months later when he came to the same conclusion.

Realized that my gut about judging a person is spot on.

Not me but my Grandpa's story. He was dabbling in palmistry and tarot readings in his retirement. They had around 6 friends over for dinner and he was doing some readings. He did 4 people and then stopped at one of his female friends and went to make a coffee. My grandma went in and asked why he stopped and he had a terrible feeling about reading this one person's cards. He said he refused to do it. It kinda put a dampener on the night and she was upset about it but they went home.
About a week later she started feeling rough and went to the doctors. She had cancer. My grandpa said he didn't know it would be that, but had a gut feeling something was negative about reading for her.

I was at a party in college (pre-gaming a football game so it was early in the afternoon). I got this weird uneasy feeling and told my girlfriend that I think we should go home (I lived like 3 blocks away).

As soon as I walked into the house my phone rang from a number I didn’t recognize, but the area code was my hometown. It was one of my best friends dads. My friend had died the night before and they had just found him.

I was an out-going member of the condo association's steering committee and was introduced to an non-resident who was put forward as the incoming leader of the steering committee. My gut instinct regarding him was so strong, it felt like a punch. The man was a complete stranger to me and very pleasant. I had no idea why I had such a strong reaction but trusted my gut.

A month later, we had our general assembly and one of the things we voted on was financial compensation to members of the steering committee, with the non-resident voted in as the new leader. There was a request for extra compensation for him as his role was to help us "get back into shape". I was the only one in a room of about 100 people to vote no by a show of hands. I did not change my vote.

9 months later, our association was in a crisis. Large sums of money had gone missing, but we couldn't prove how, so couldn't report the issue to the police. But at our extraordinary assembly, we all agreed to boot members from the steering committee we couldn't trust, including the non-resident leader (who had ultimate responsibility). It was then decided that he was also not to get his extra financial compensation. I remember one neighbor glanced over at me at that moment, wondering how I knew.

I had a bad feeling that had started at night and had been persistent throughout the day, I thought I was just feeling anxious because of some false perception but no, my mother and baby brother were in a pretty significant car accident. As soon as I heard the news that feeling dissipated but I had been on edge all day.

Back in the mid-late 1990's, I was on house arrest for some pending d**g charges. I didn't have an ankle monitor, so I of course didn't stay home. At one point some friends and I were on the way to a dealer's house to pick up some weed. One the ride there, I suddenly has this really strong feeling like I shouldn't go. I asked my friends to drop me off at the next corner (we were in the city), which they did. Turns out, the dealer's house was being surveilled by the police. They were pulling over and arresting everyone that left it.