“Thought She Was Being Crazy”: 72 People Share The Close Calls They Still Think About

I was like 7 or 8 and I had a guy ask me for directions at the library and asked me to come outside to show him which way to go. I called my dad because I couldn’t remember and when I told the guy my dad would talk to him and help me, he got spooked and said never mind and walked off really quickly. 15 years later and I still remember it.

When I was about 3 or 4 years old I was with my mom and my older brother (5 or 6) and we were on our way home and she decided to stop at the grocery store. I was asleep in the car and she had my brother just stay with me with the doors locked as she ran in to get some milk. For some reason while she was walking into the store she decided to go back to the car and bring us in with her. Well 5 minutes later we paid for the milk and walked outside to see our car was on fire! Turns out there was a new heated seat feature on the car my parents just bought two weeks prior and it malfunctioned. I vividly remember getting driven home by a nice police officer and then my mom was on the phone with her parents for hours crying about what could of been.

In my sophomore year of high school my older cousin was getting married. I'd originally talked my mum into letting me stay home that weekend instead of travelling the 7hrs to the event. I was going to go with some friends to a basketball game for something to do on Friday night. But on Thursday my mum decided I couldn't miss the wedding and made me go with the family Friday after school. Friday night after we got to the hotel I got a phone call. My friends that I was going to ride with to the basketball game were in a bad car accident. 2 [didn't survive]. It took years of survivor's guilt to get over that because those 2 would have driven in a different car if I'd been there.

Was in Branson last week on vacation with my wife, had a thought about riding a Duck boat on Thursday. Decided to play mini golf instead. The boat capsized, [ending] 17 people, 9 from one family.

When my sister was in college her boyfriend was having a party on a yacht and all her friends were going to be there. She didn't go because she had to study for her test the next morning. Everyone on the boat got very drunk and crashed the boat. A few people including her boyfriend [passed]. When she was helping his mother clean out his dorm room, they found an engagement ring in a drawer.

I was pretty psyched to go see the new Batman movie when it was coming out. Everyone I knew from school and friends were going to go see it. At the last minute (only a couple hours before showtime) I decided I shouldn't go since I had to work the next day.

I live in Aurora, CO. My sister went with some friends, but they changed to another theater at the last minute because they couldn't get enough seats together at Century 16. Some friends of mine went, and thankfully were not in THE theater, but still were almost hit by bullets that came through the walls into their theater.

My dads best friend was taking a job interview one day in September. He lived in NYC, so he took the subway. They were blocked up, so he was 30 mins late. His interview was at the twin towers. It was September 11th. By being late to his appointment, he [survived] the attacks. He was still in an underground train station when it happened. He tells that story to this day.

Going back home from the bakery with my aunt, for some reason she decided to cross the street, wich was unnecessary cause my house was on that same sidewalk. As soon as we crossed the street, a car crashed at that very same place we were, breaking into a house. The driver was absolutely drunk. I was like 6 or 7 when it happened.

Almost forgot to wear my helmet before taking the scooter out for a ride in the country. I hit a deer that day. EMTs and Shock Trauma hospital doctors agreed that I'd be [gone], had I not worn that helmet.

When I was 2 years old back in 2001, I lived in California, but my mom and I were visiting my grandparents in New York. My dad was back in California because he was on call as an ENT. My mom and I said goodbye to my grandparents and went to Newark International Airport on September 11th, holding tickets for American Airlines Flight 93, which was of course one of the planes involved in the attacks. We only cancelled our flight and scheduled a later one because my dad was operating on a patient and wouldn't have been able to pick us up in time in San Francisco. If my dad hadn't been called to the hospital, we would've boarded Flight 93 and crashed in Somerset Pennsylvania.

Yesterday the metal awning on the food truck I was approaching collapsed to the wind and slammed into the sidewalk.

I almost got sandwiched while trying to get a sandwich.

I went to a banquet one evening after work, anyway around 9:00ish that night my moms called me and told me that weather alerts had been going off and I should probably head home soon. I told her ok that I would head home shortly. I hung out a little while then decided to roll out, I had to stop and get gas on the way out of town and while I stood there pumping it got extremely dark and the wind picked up blowing [things] around, but I didn't pay it much attention, finished pumping and headed on down the road.

My mom calls me again and asks where I am, she proceeds to tell me that she didn't want me to panic but a tornado just touched down in town. Luckily I was driving away from it and nothing happened to me. But.... had somethings delayed me for just 5 minutes or so I would've been right smack dab in the middle of a tornado.

I'm late and this'll probably get buried, but I'll say it anyway. Growing up, my father was a civil servant for the Navy. In the summer of 2001 he got a promotion and his new office was in the Pentagon. On the morning of September 11th, my dad was moving into his new office. He walked out to his car at one point to grab more office stuff to move in. As he was walking back in from his car, he watches a plane crash into the Pentagon, exactly where his new office was.

He turned around and went right back to his car and drove home. While he was driving home (usually a 2 hour drive to Southern Maryland that turned into a 4 ish hour drive) he finally gets through the cell lines to call my school to tell me he's okay. I was in 7th grade at the time, and during 6th period my teacher got a call from the office, hung up, and called me to the front of the room. She told me my dad was okay and that he'd be home to meet me at the bus stop. I bawled my eyes out right there in front of the class. We had been watching the news all morning, and I'd had this horrible pit in my stomach since seeing the plane hit the Pentagon in 3rd period.

Just to think, maybe 20 minutes earlier or later and my dad would have been in his office...and wouldn't be here today.

Typical cartoon scene of a flower pot flying off a balcony. It fell right where I was standing one minute earlier. I had since moved a couple of steps, but another guy was in that spot, it grazed his shoulder and would have been really dangerous if it hit him on the head.

We called the cops on the guy since we saw other vases on his balcony. Dude was very pissed but took them in.

When I was about 13, I came home from playing outside, entering the house into the kitchen through a side door. I walked through the kitchen and into the front of the house, and started up the stairs. Halfway up the stairs, I heard a crazy loud metallic clanging, like pots and pans were falling...and falling and falling.

I came running downstairs to find that the pressure cooker top had popped off, shooting into the ceiling and the pressure release propelled the cooker into the living room, smashing into a wall and rolled to a stop in front of my dad on the couch. The whole time it was spewing boiling chicken grease, as my mom was making chicken soup.

Had I come in 10 seconds later, I would have probably been disfigured from grease burns and maybe been hit by the flying cooker itself.

When I was about 8 or so my parents sold our house but the one they were buying fell through so we rented a beat-up place while they found a different one.

One night at about 8.45pm we were watching TV and heard this massive crash sound upstairs. We went up there and massive chunks of the ceiling we scattered all over my bedroom including a 4x2ft piece over my pillow. My bedtime was 8.30pm but my parents let me stay up late for pretty much no reason.

My family vacationed in Paris for a week in the mid 90's. I was about 10 years old. My mom and stepfather were planning to go to the Arc de Triomphe on a certain day, but I wanted to go to the Eiffel Tower. When I was told we would see the Eiffel Tower another day, I threw a fit. Don't know why it was so important to see the Eiffel tower that day and not two days later. It became a whole argument between me, my stepfather, and my mom. My mom caved (to probably just shut me up) and we went to the Eiffel tower that day, and my stepfather was pissed the rest of the day for my mom caving. We got back to the hotel and saw that a pipe [explosive] had gone off near the Arc de Triomphe and a bunch of people got hurt. The last we spoke to any other (step) family was before the fight and my stepfather told them we were going to the Arc de Triomphe that day and they were frantically calling the hotel to try and get a hold of us. So my brattiness might of saved us.

A friend and I were invited by another friend to the AUF summer camp at Utøya.
We decided not to go, she did...

Survivor's guilt was a completely foreign concept for me up until that moment.

When I worked at Six Flags, they would have employee appreciation nights where the park would close early and we would get to ride the rides and get free carnival food. One of these evenings it had been kind of stormy on and off, and there had been some thunder warnings and flash flood warnings in other parts of the city, unknown to the employees. Nobody bothered to get the word out or think "Hey let's reschedule this."

I was tired from work and opted to go home instead of riding the nearby super hero coaster. A few days later I was alerted to having to cover a shift for a coworker who had been on the super hero coaster when it was struck by lightning. Everyone had to be rushed to the ER with burns and messed up vitals. The riders were hurt pretty badly. Had I stayed and ridden the coaster I would've been shocked with everyone else.

On a lighter note, I was visiting home from school once and my plane landed early so I was able to get out of the airport 30 min earlier. Soon as we get home there's a story on the news about an escaped baboon in the airport, happening precisely at the time I was supposed to arrive. So I narrowly missed getting jumped by a monkey.

When I was 14, I slept at a friends house and his dad made us wake up early in the morning to go ride to their camp and make sure everything was secured because we had a stormy day ahead. So we leave and are heading to the camp when my buddy starts complaining about his contact so his dad busts a U turn and we head back to their house. My buddy hops out the car and runs inside and about 5 seconds later he comes running back outside with big scared eyes and waved us to come inside.

We immediately did and when I was almost to the door I smelled something burning and assumed the house had caught on fire. We start looking all over and found nothing burning until we went upstairs in my buddies room, the room I slept in the night before. There was a hole in the wall under the window and the window was broken with glass all over. There was a really heavy oak shelf that had been on the wall but had been knocked down down and was literally laying in the exact same place that my head had been when I was sleeping. The house had been struck by lightning and I don’t know if we all would have lived from the strike but I am confident that the shelf would have [ended] me instantly.