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  • I've told this before but.

    Once while camping alone with my dog, we had a long event less day of hiking, fell asleep soundly for a while until around 4am.

    My dog laid on top of me, and lowly growled waking me up. I calmed her down thinking she just had a bad dream or something, but then something rustled near our tent.

    I peaked out of the side window of the tent and, in the faint full moon light I saw a black blob, not the size of a bear but more like a hog. I have never been near one but I have heard horror stories about hogs

    Only thing I could do was lay down and keep my dog calm so she wouldn't bark, I've heard if you startle a hog it's more likely to charge than run away. We must have laid there for half an hour or so when I finally felt sure enough the hog had moved along.

    I spent about 3 minutes quietly unzipping the door one tooth at a time, once it was fully open I picked up my dog and booked it to the truck, tossed her into the passenger side, ran to the driver's side and slammed myself in.

    Turned on the truck and headlights and there they were. About 4-5 hogs at the edge of the brush staring back at me, the sudden light made them all book out out of there. We slept in the truck until sun up, struck the camp site and went home.

  • When I was in my early twenties, I lived with my brothers in my oldest brother's house. It was a new construction home in a fairly ritzy suburb of a large city in the US.

    During this time, I was attending college and working part time at Gamestop. One of my brothers was working at Chipotle at the time, so there were some afternoons that we'd both have off and we'd be chillin at the house together. One afternoon while my oldest brother and his wife were at work, my brother and I were in the living room playing Diablo 3. All of the sudden I hear this weird old song playing from the loft and I instantly whipped my head around towards the loft, trying to figure out what tf it was. It wasn't a song or a tune I've ever heard in my life before. The thing is, my brother whipped his heads towards the loft the exact second I did because he heard it too. We looked at each other for a second, and decided to investigate. Everything in the upstairs area was ours, too - we moved in right when my oldest brother and his wife bought the house, and they left that whole area for us. We both knew we didn't own anything that could've played the little song we heard. Haven't heard it since.

    Not too long afterwards, while i was still living with my brothers in the same house, another incident occurred. I was upstairs in my room, and it was probably around midnight. I had turned off my Xbox and TV, and was just laying in bed on my phone in the dark, when my pup started lightly growling. My dog is pretty smart, friendly, and really perceptive. He doesn't growl at anything unless he perceives a threat. He is always chill and silent throughout the night. But that night, he went from chillin' in bed with me with his head on my chest, to instantly sitting upright, intently staring and growling at a spot on the wall to my right. I didn't think much of it right away, and just tried to calm him down, but he just got more rigid and starting growling a little louder, still stating at the one spot. I sat upright, turned on my lamp, and looked around the wall to see if I saw a bug or a small critter, but there was nothing. He suddenly starts darting his eyes around that same wall as if he was following something that was moving quickly. All of the sudden, he whips his head and darts his eyes to a spot maybe 5 ft above my head. I look immediately above me, and see nothing at all. I felt an insane feeling of dread, grabbed my dog and ran to my brothers room across the hall, and asked if I could spend the night with him. I was way too fucking scared to go back to my room that night. Nothing like that ever happened again.

    Not sure what either of those, and things like that don't normally happen to me. Which is probably why it's so scary to me. I don't think I believe in ghosts or demons or anything like that, but idk what to think of these instances. Could've been nothing, or could've been something I can't see/perceive. The thought of the latter scares me.

  • I was out for a drive with 4 other friends packed into a tiny car, decades ago when we were all early twenties. I was driving, and we were just cruising the streets, turning this way and that, high spirits and chatting and laughing away. We came down off a hill joining one suburb to another, and turned off into a side street. It was a dead end street, in a pretty dark and deserted industrial area. We knew the street well, as it was short, but you wouldn't go down it if you didn't need to, as it only led to factories and such. It was late, perhaps a little after midnight. As we got about 50 metres or so in (maybe halfway), we all instantly stopped talking simultaneously, and every one of us, including myself, froze in what I can only describe as pure terror. I hit the brakes, and stopped in the middle of the road for a second, before slamming the car in reverse and stamping on the accelerator full tit in reverse, without even turning around, I couldn't even turn my head. To this day it's hard to describe why, in the normal light of day. My current wife (then just a friend) was in the car too, and she hates it if I even bring it up. All I can say is we sensed such a darkness, a dense evil beyond comprehension, right outside the car. A sense of an abysmal vanta-black presence in front and to the left of the car. Nothing visible to the naked eye, but with perfect post-event unified description by all 5 people in the car. None of us spoke for a good 20 minutes afterwards, and the night of fun was over. It was horrifying, and I will never go into that street again. A vague sense of some atrocious tortuous event that occurred there in the past maybe, don't know? And we were all very stable regular young people, no alcohol or drugs etc involved. I know spooky stuff probably wasn't on the menu, but that's sure it for me

  • Not so much scared but really freaked out to a point were we just said "fuck it, let's get out of here and never talk about it again".

    It was a really warm and nice summer day some years back. I was out with my brother strolling through the countryside with my brother. In just a t-shirt, shorts and barefoot. We took some LSD and really just enjoyed having a very scenic and relaxing walk.

    So we were just strolling along, walking between some fields and the edge of a small forest, when it started to smell quite badly. That's not that unsual near fields, so we walked on. There was a small clearing in the forest and there was a hunting stand. We continued to walk across the clearing and the smell got worse. Then one of us discovered something on the ground. It was a patch of bloody fur.

    Now we're both expirenced with LSD and hadn't taken that much, but we still confirmed with each other that we're both looking a bit of bloody fur and made sure we saw and smelled all the same things. We did. After some more walking we discovered more and more bloody bits of fur, flesh and even some bones. They were sprinkeld all over the place. It looked like some animal literally exploded. Though there was no main body, just the bits and pieces everywhere.

    At this point we again confirmed with each other that what we saw and that we're both in control and not tripping.

    We then decided that this all was a bit too much and we should head home and not worrie about it right now. On the way home we confirmed with each other again that this actually just happened. But I've rarley thought or talked about it since then.

  • Mine were a bit less acute than most cases here. It doesn't rank up to the kind of emotional trauma other people ITT have been through (though I'm not a complete stranger to that, either) but mine was when I realized my health is going to prevent me from ever doing what I want to and getting my shot at a reasonably happy life.

    The slow dread of realizing decades of miserable, exhausting, bitter, mostly hopeless, unappreciated effort is void, and has been a complete waste - realizing that things "working out" is not really on the table anymore, and neither's anything else, much: all you can do is keep existing. That is easily #1.

    Or realizing friends and family didn't have my back the way I thought and might actually join my list of a zillion problems. That was pretty scary.

    Distant third, near misses in traffic - but frankly, I've had a stronger reaction from losing my fucking house keys. Almost got hit by a tram. Meh. Would've lost my appointment, I'm sure. Some shitheel trash in a BMW (because of course it was) tried scaring me by pretending to hit me while out for a walk, I'm like "😐 ... yeah? Make my day - in fact, throw it in reverse and get a proper run-up, you little bitch".

  • Nothing as scary as some of the people have mentioned.
    The moment of terror I remember most vividly is when I helped my mom reverse park the car in our garage. I was about.. 13 I think. The car didn't have any parking sensors, so it was my job get out and stand behind the car to make sure it wouldn't hit the work desk at the end of the garage (it was a narrow garage, I couldn't stand to the side of it without getting my toes run over). I'd shout stop when the car was in far enough and that would be it, nothing special.
    I don't know what happened that day, maybe she was distracted or something, but the car didn't stop. It just kept going further back, pushing me against that desk and squeezing my organs. At first I shouted louder, thinking she didn't hear me, but the car kept coming and by then it was too late to get out of the way. I ended up frantically hitting the rear window, shouting as loud as I could. In my mind the car was broken and would crush me against the edge of that desk. I thought I was going to die right there, getting killed by some freak accident. With just almost no room to spare the car finally stopped and drove forward.
    Afterwards my mother said something along the line of "I thought you were joking". I was furious, but when I think back to it now, I suppose she was just as shocked and just didn't know what to say at the time.

  • When I woke up from flying through missiles and explosions. And the next day, when I went to get more groceries, I saw an air battle. Right over the damn supermarket.

  • I was a severe insomniac at the time, and this event lead to a diagnosis of Bipolar disorder. It happened a few times, but this was the worst. Got on meds and have been fine since. Enough prefacing.

    I was at, for lack of a more specialized term, my cousins house. The oldest one of them was right around my age, but she was out of town for a competition, so I crashed in her room. At some point in the night, I'm full on hallucinating after not sleeping much in a while.

    Dark, cloaked figures, in the corner of the room, chanting in some language I didn't recognize. I don't mean I didn't understand it, it sounded difficult to pronounce with a human mouth. This went on until the sun rose. I'd check the corners, and nothing, get back in bed and there they go again.

    For people wondering, yes, manic episodes along with their common presentations, can also present as hallucinations. It took 20 years, from a diagnosis and depression as a child, to bipolar diagnosis, to fine tuning meds, to stable.

    I'm dealing with a person resistant to any kind of therapy right now and I just want to scream at them that if their docs aren't helping, try a different one, don't give up. 20 fucking years. Over half my life struggling for a solution. It takes time and work, both.

    If you need mental health assistance, or even if you've just had a really tough patch, find the appropriate professional for you. It doesn't mean you're crazy, it just means you're struggling. They help with tools to help stop struggling. Sometimes yeah, its pills. Other times its adapting your behavior and expectations to produce better more satisfying results.

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