Ask Lemmy

Me and my brother lived at our grans in our mid to later teens, we lived in the living room, and as teenagers do, we would be up till late playing video games and browsing the web on our laptops, my brother had the latest macbook and we had the latest consoles. Late one night in the AM, I had been gaming and my brother was probably making music on his mac, the living room was not well concealed from the outside, gaps in curtains, windows on the foot path and being on the ground floor. A knock on the door, young and dumb, I answered, it was a tall mid to late 20s guy, a little sketchy looking, he asked if we knew of a party near by, he had been looking for it and wasn't able to find this party. Me and my brother had no clue about a party. He left and we closed the door, and that was that, but then another knock at the door, same guy, but this time his eyes were darting about through the front door, he asked us if he could come in, which was an obvious no, on attempting to close the door, he wedge his foot in the gap. Me and by brother had to shoulder the door to close it.

We didn't leave, just felt freaked out and a little trapped. It was one of those moments where I hadn't reflected all that much at that time, but now in my 30s, I do find myself thinking what if.

20 yrs ago...

Driving through upstate new york with my family. Passed through a small town looking for some food and/or gas.

One house had nazi banners hanging openly on the front of the house. Not flags, they were like those big vertical banners behind hitler during speeches.

Nope. We can hold our pee and get gas later.... drive a little faster and get out.

As a canadian, i was shocked.... i thought stuff like that only existed in the deep south.... we were 3hrs from the canadian border or something.

In hindsight, it explains a lot about the current state of affairs in the US

I was just moved to Italy. I knew no one and I had to do some history assignment for Uni. I went to the city archive looking for some documentation and I was incredibly lost.

Some middle age man approached me and starting helping me around. He talked with everybody there and they all respected them. He was really nice to me all the time. I got into the archive and got everything I wanted. But I was more creepied out each minute. The guy had starting talking about how spaniards(me) and italians needs to be friends because our shared history of friendship with Franco and Mussolini. At the end he asked for my number, he really looked like he was trying to recruit me. I gave him a fake one and moved away. Never got near that location again in all the the time I spent in the city.

I was like 12 and I was baby sitting two ~eight year olds. Went to the local elementary with them to use the big toy. There was a group of three boys there and one had what looked like a real gun, yes this was in America. I said NOPE! and immediately turned my kids and myself around and got out of there as fast as possible

The other one was when I was about the same age and my best friend and I were walking around in the neighborhood by her house. It wasn’t a nice area but it’s not like anywhere I spent time was. Some man in his like 40s probably rolled up to us in his big yellow car and started talking to us to get in his car and go to his house, he was drunk, we told him if he told us where he lived we would walk there if he would go buy us beer. He kept hitting his chest like in the wolf of Wall Street and talking nonsense, I tried to scoot away to look at his license plate but he snapped at me to come back. Eventually we got him to agree to go buy us beer in exchange for us walking to his house. As soon as he started driving away we ran as fast as we could back to her house and called the cops and told them everything, including where the guy lived since he told us

Driving out west in Canada from the prairies to see the ocean years ago. Went through Golden, BC and decided to go into the town proper for a dinner, rather than the roadside chains. It was about 6:10 PM. When we walked in there were about twenty locals who immediately all went quiet when we walked in. We grabbed a table and proceeded to get stared at by the whole room. I nodded at a few with no response. My wife looked terribly uncomfortable. We got up, apologized to the waitress and got the hell out of dodge. Even looking back years later I am still weirded out by that scene. I'm sure that, if we stayed, we would've wound up in some sort of Stephen King short story.

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuurwerkramp_in_Enschede

I live in this city. We were watching the fireworks depot burning from what we thougt was a safe distance...After the first explosion we knew we were waayyyy to close and left right away. Just minutes later the whole neighbourhood was gone.

I kinda had the opposite happen.

I was working for a charity doing some reconstruction in an ex war zone. That weekend was a major festival. I’m not of the area nor the religion so I volunteered to keep an eye on our camp instead that weekend.

I finished my breakfast in the canteen and was about to walk the perimeter and do my checks when, inexplicably, I decided to stall and have a second coffee. Something I never did.

As I went to sit down a massive explosion happened outside, shattering the entire area me and my clipboard should have been in. I wouldn’t have stood a chance. The canteen we were in was made out of shipping containers and probably saved our lives.

Does anyone else find it odd that a lot of day old accounts make their first post here specifically, or is that just a coincidence?

I was hiking with my buddy and felt a bit uneasy. Like my skin felt fuzzy, it was hard to explain. I yelled "Run!" To a friend, we ran down the mountain and dodged getting hit by lightning a few seconds later.

At the very start of COVID. When many of my online and IRL friend groups started internalizing what I now recognize as Russian/Chinese influence ops (which were being spread by unwitting Western Useful Idiots -- Conservatives and Libertarians)

They started not just opposing lockdowns, but actively spreading virus: no mask, it's just a flu, CDC is lying, Fauchi is an idiot, etc.

It felt like being in a burning building. I grabbed my family, ran for the exit by cutting ties with the Influenced, and left them to burn. Now many of them are utterly consumed by propaganda and no longer recognize reality. 😢

I was living with my sister in a condo. We frequently played pool at a place across the street. It was a sort of yuppy pool place, not a biker bar. It was located on the end of a strip mall. To get there, we walked to the end of the row of single story condos, then through some bushes and into the sidewalk, jaywalked across the street and into the parking lot.

So we're doing this and just as we reach the sidewalk on the other side of the street, a car pulls out of the parking lot, like normal, and turns in our direction. Just behind it another car pulls out very quickly, not like normal, it overtakes the first car and forces it up onto the sidewalk where we are walking. Suddenly like three other cars pull in from multiple directions. We are literally standing in a police arrest scene. So glad when the perp went up on the sidewalk, he took care not to run over us. I guess the cops never expected people to suddenly emerge from the bushes and cross the street just at that moment.

Three hours down a very remote hike with no phone service, a schizophrenic guy asks what we'd do if someone tried to kill us right now

Once I was in a holiday crowd when the people per square meter got too high, and the beginning stages of crowd crush started happening. Waves of kinetic energy were being transmitted through the crowd without anyone even trying, it just wasn’t possible to stop yourself from getting shoved forward. I told my now-husband we need to get out NOW, and we did. Nothing happened to my knowledge, no fatal crush or anything like that. But it was scary as hell during what was supposed to be a good time.

I trust my spidey sense. When the hairs on the back of my neck go up and i get that feeling in my chest, i listen to it.

Its gotten me out of an armed store robbery, 2 ither street level robberies, 2 houses that just didnt feel right, multiple encounters with dangerous animals ( gators and 1 panther).

My wife just thinks im paranoid.

Oh my god. My friends and I were doing a road trip around the US when we got lost somewhere crossing the border into southern California. We took some weird back road into the woods looking for a campsite that was on Google (we were roughing it as much as possible to be cheap), but it became super apparent that we took the wrong turn somewhere and we went deeper and deeper into the woods. It started to get dark and at this point my ex and I were like, "Let's just go to a hotel, it's already too dark to camp." My friend, the driver, was convinced we were almost there and the campsites were just around the next corner and wanted to save the money.

At some point, we saw this tree across the road and the only way to keep going forward was into what looked like just a clearing where some rusted out cars were. Immediately my ex and I felt this overwhelming, hair-raising "it's time to go" vibe and we started telling him to turn around. My friend pulled into the clearing saying something like, "No, this might be it, there's cars parked here". We pull into the lot and kinda do a loop, just to put the headlights on the surroundings and see what's all there. Like I said, it's an island of gravel, short, dry grass, and some rusted out cars in the middle of dense, mountainous forest.

My friend is juuuuuuust about to park and gloat about 'finding the campsite' when some feral looking dude comes barreling out of the woods like a cryptid, sprinting at the back of the car. My ex and I start screaming like loons as this dude closes the gap and my friend punches it and starts driving back down the road we came in on. The dude just stood in the road behind us with something metal (I think a pipe) and watched us go in a cloud of dust and taillights.

Absolutely HORRIFYING experience and we still have no idea what the fuck the situation was there.

When I was around 11 I was at the McDonald's down the street from my house with a couple of friends. It was just three 11/12 year old girls chilling eating in the back of the restaurant. It was dark out but not late, probably 7 or 8 at night. After a bit my friend leaned over to me and said the guy at the table next to us "looks like (her abusive stepfather)". Realistically it could not have been her abusive stepfather and she was across the other side of the country.

However, he was creepy and sitting alone and watching us VERY closely. We started getting nervous and at some point I said loudly enough for him to hear "okay, my dad is coming to get us". He wasn't, but I was hoping that would make the man leave us alone. He immediately got up and went to go stand just outside of the back door into the parking lot.

We panicked even more and walked to the front entrance of the McDonald's, called my dad from a payphone. I remember how panicked we must have looked because a random person who was in line came over and asked if we were okay. Thankfully my dad was home and came to get us from the front entrance and we left together.

Another time I was on the last train home from work, I was around 18. A man had gotten on the train near my stop, first sat on a further seat and then moved closer as the trip went on. From my stop, I had to walk about 50 meters to a not-very-well lit taxi pickup area. This man got off at my stop, and as I approached the well-lit exit of the train station I could feel him following me. I almost went outside and then thought better of it. Turned back and thankfully found a transit worker on the platform. I asked him if he could walk me to the taxis and he did. As my taxi was driving away I saw the man who had been following me walk back further into the train station. As I mentioned, it was the last train of the night so he had no reason to have gotten off at the stop if it wasn't his stop. There were no businesses or anything else around. Anyway my favourite part of this story (not favourite) is that when the transit worker was walking me over to the taxis he said something along the lines of "oh you're just too cute thats why that man is following you". No thank you.

Always trust your gut, kids.

I'm feeling that right now for this planet, really badly.

2010 Loveparade. First we got told that there would be a different entry, which there wasn't, which meant we needed to walk quite a while. On the way we had a few situations, where people pushed a lot and it's not a nice feeling, when you have a considerable mass and you get pushed easily. We made it to the last big check and we where greeted with a clear view to the tunnel. At this point there weren't big queues visible and it was just a short walk. I said to the 2 friends I was with, that NOW I want to go home. It was not a gut feeling or something, I just knew I don't want to continue and I want to go home. One friend decided to stay, as we where this close and another agreed with me and left with me.

The friend who stayed, did cut his visit shorter, lucky for him. For people who don't know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Parade_disaster It was one of the biggest crowd crushes disasters. 21 dead, 652 injured. It happend in that tunnel, which I looked into and decided to go home. That criminal trial is considered one of the most complex ones of the post war period. In 2020 they dropped the trial. The issue was for these crimes, they only had 10 years and they said due to the limitations of covid, they said they will run out of time.

In the early 2000s, I had just joined the US military right out of high school and found myself stationed in Japan for my first assignment.

I loved Japanese culture and had started a college course on basic Japanese language so I could communicate with the locals and find my way around without getting lost in a foreign country.

One day, one of the civilians in my office was retiring and he chose a fancy hotel in the next city over to host his retirement ceremony. They had a bunch of meeting/party rooms we could host our ceremony in. It was fun, but I'm a bit introverted, so at some point, I stepped out into the grand lobby of the hotel to recover some energy by myself. There was a grand piano in one corner with some petite Japanese lady playing soft music on it. I learned against a large pillar and quietly listened for a bit.

All of a sudden, a meeting room door nearby banged open and some Japanese businessman stormed out on his phone. He was agitated and speaking angrily into his flip phone (smartphones didn't exist yet). He stopped on the other side of the pillar from me and continued his loud discussion.

I had gotten absorbed into some Japanese drama TV shows and had learned to identify the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) slang. This guy was using the same dialect. I got a chill down my spine; it was my first time running into a Yakuza member in real life.

The guy finished his call and turned to leave... and stopped when he saw me standing practically next to him. His anger flared up and he started speaking aggressively at me in Japanese. Probably pissed that I was listening in on his call.

I caught a few words here and there, but my Japanese wasn't good enough for full sentences yet, especially spoken rapidly at me in an angry tone.

When he paused, I said in English, "Um... I'm sorry, I don't understand." I knew how to say it in Japanese, but I didn't want to give him any inkling that I knew Japanese.

His entire demeanor changed. He grinned from ear to ear and said, "Ah! America-jin, ne? Good! Good guy!" He gave me a rough pat on the shoulder and then turned and went back to his meeting room.

I thought he was gonna drag me into the meeting room with his buddies and I'd never be found again, so I was relieved when he smiled and left me be. I went right back to my party and made sure not to go anywhere by myself for the rest of the evening.

was doing a building search of a flooding (from water leak) multi story building and as i was looking around the living room, i felt “time to move to next room” and yeah glad i did. ceiling fell in the living room as i rounded the corner.

Being an american around 11 or so years ago. Hasn’t gone away.

In our local pub in Scotland, they had a DJ in the back room on a Friday / Saturday night. One night some guy bumped into me and I felt something hit the floor by my feet, I looked down and it was a 12 inch serrated kitchen knife with tape on the handle, i looked up and it was some wee wideo ned. So I went over to my mate old him to finish his drink quickly as possible because we're getting the fuck out of there tonight.

In this case, I was the one that caused the gut feeling. For context, I'm a middle aged disheveled-looking dude.

My kids made a play date with their friends at a local park. The park is big and has two entrances, but they didn't know where their friends were so I just went to the first entrance I came to. At this entrance there was a playground where only a woman and her two kids were playing - no one else in sight. I drove past them to see if it was my kids' friends (it wasn't), and the woman gave me a weird stare. In hindsight, she probably couldn't see my kids in the back seat - she just saw some rando slow-rolling past the playground. Anyway, I drove around to the other entrance, but no one was there either. So we called up the friends' parents and learned that they were running late and that we should meet at the first entrance with the playground. As soon as I pulled back in to the playground entrance, the woman saw me and gathered up her kids in a panic and ran for her car. I was trying to figure out WTF she was worked up about when it dawned on me. I parked, my kids got out, and when she saw them she calmed down. I'm sure I gave her a heart attack for a minute though.