When have you felt pure terror?

@blahblahblah23

I will play along and comment on your discussion and answer your question.

Q: When have you felt pure terror? A: Never.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.”
— Plato

Google says:

“Although spiders are widely feared, only a few species are dangerous to people.

Spiders will only bite humans in self-defense, and few produce worse effects than a mosquito bite or bee sting.”

:D

I'll tell you a story about pure terror, it happened to me over thirty years ago, but I remember it as if it was yesterday. It all started with a message left for me, at my office, a person in the western part of the county wanting an office building constructed on property they owned close to Lion Country Safari. This person owned a large tract of land and they were in business as some sort of an exotic animal broker. I had directions and a hand drawn map, this was long before GPS was commonly available. I made my way out there and arrived at the entry gate to the property, Rand the buzzer and was buzzed in, pulled my truck up a long entry drive ending in an old house with a dirt parking area. I parked my truck and gathered a note pad some business cards and pencils to take notes because that was how we usually initiated a project in those days, I did have a mobile phone but it was mounted in the vehicle, not anything like our now common cell phones with all the utility that they provide. I walked up to the entrance area and knocked on the door, eventually an attractive woman answered the door, I made the introductions and was about to start taking notes, when out of the corner of my eye I noticed some movement, a large male Lion stood up and yawned, Holy shit I'm thinking this animal is between me and my car, the woman noticed my discomfort right away and said I shouldn't worry as the lion was a house pet along with a few other big cats, at that point I didn't care I made a beeline to the other side of my vehicle. got in as quickly as I could, Told the woman I wasn't going to be able to assist her and got out of there so fast, So Blah Blah when you speak about being afraid of spiders remember this story and take to heart some advice I was given about alligators, it applies to most wild animals, If you're with a bunch of people and an animal chases you, you don't need to be the fastest person in the group, just be sure to outrun the slowest.

^ A lion for a house pet ? Yeah, right.

I don't like spiders either blah. But snakes scare me more. I grew up around rattlesnakes. I got cornered by one once in our barn and basically climbed a wall to get out of the way.

When I was 8 years old, I started riding my bike across the street and looked up and saw a car coming straight at me. I ended up in the hospital. It's that moment right before impact when you know you can't avoid it that the feeling of terror takes over.

@ Warrior this person actually was a movie actor who ran an exotic animal brokerage in the rural area of Palm Beach County, a number of years back they actually had a tiger that escaped from this compound and the county had a two week long chase to recapture that tiger, you really can't make this shit up; we are in Florida you know🤔

I’ve twice had someone point a gun at me. It gets your attention.

Happy Thanksgiving, Jamie. Hope that you and yours have a great day!🦃🍗🥧🏈💋

Sorry 'bout that post! Wrong place, but the wish holds anyway. Happy Thanksgiving, all!

Back in 2012 I raw-dogged an escort named Cherry who also worked as a dancer at a local club. So anyway, about a month after I fucked this girl, I went to the club and met another dancer and we hit it off and I asked her if she knew Cherry and she says "I havent seen her for awhile. I hope you know she has AIDS". So immediately I turned white and remembered how I barebacked this girl and we exchanged bodily fluids. So anyway, fast forward like a year and I got my annual STD screening and my doctor orders an HIV test and a week later I log into my health plan patient portal and check the results and there is this weird "contact health provider" message and my heart starts to go into palpitations. I'm convinced I'm positive for HIV at this point! So I call my doctor's office with a nervous stutter in my voice and a few minutes later they tell me my HIV test is negative and the reason the health plan portal can't report the results if because of some HIPAA law or something.

Needless to say, it was the most scared (and then happy) I been in my entire life. I celebrated the good news by raw-dogging another cute escort.

Can’t say I’ve ever faced pure terror.

Years ago I was on a short 40 minute connection flight to a larger airport - almost the entire flight was extreme turbulence. The pilot said because of heavy air traffic and because it was a short flight we had to stay at our current altitude and couldn’t climb out of it. I tried my best to convince myself that the plane wasn’t going drop out of the sky. I hated the flight and it was scary and uncomfortable but not real terror

Twice. First was stepping off the bus at Parris Island. Yikes!

Second was the time, which I've related before, I met a girl at a hotel, and she let her baseball bat armed boyfriend in before I could stop her. Fortunately, I wasn't yet undressed and had my 9mm jacketed hollow point seed dispenser right at hand.

Fortunately, they chose not to be implanted by those seeds and exited with alacrity. It could have gone much worse if they'd been stupid.

Being in the hospital room when my dad passed away. It was surreal and terrifying. The worst part was when they gave up cpr and the machines all got turned off and there was pure silence. That silence was the most haunting thing. And I was standing there talking to him and there was no reply. It feels like yesterday

Georg, what a crazy story, should have wrecked them, charging you with a baseball bat is enough

@BTE: "Georg, what a crazy story, should have wrecked them, charging you with a baseball bat is enough"

You really are clueless, aren't you?

When I saw a shark while swimming the Pacific Ocean. I was in water so deep, I could not see the bottom. There were no swimmers anywhere near me. There was no lifeguard on duty. I was snorkeling a couple of hundred yards out from shore, and was just going to turn back and body surf in when a massive, bullet-shaped shadow came out of the deep straight at me. I did the only thing I could do, I screamed, underwater, and waited for the hit that never came (obviously).

When I was in 6th grade, I was enough of a teacher's pet that if I finished a test early, my science teacher would let me help her grade the rest of the class' tests.

If I got anything wrong, I'd change it with the answer key right in front of me, rationalizing that "I was close." I changed a few friends' wrong answers to the right ones, and a couple assholes' right answers to the wrong ones. I'd gotten away with it most of the year.

Then one day in May I get my test back with a bunch of my "corrected" answers "un-corrected" and a post it note saying "T, did you change your answers?" I saw my life flashing before my eyes and awaited the inevitable death. I avoided so much as eye contact for a few days. But no one could prove anything, kept silent, and walked.

It was only a few years ago that I told my parents about this. They said it was the right decision, they would have murdered me if they knew at the time.

No physical threat, brush with the law or regulatory authority made me feel as terrified as my science teacher that day.

At 16 I accidentally shot a guy while duck hunting. He yelled “I’m hit” from across the pond we were working. I thought I had maimed him, in the end a few pieces of shot had hit his glasses and ear, causes a few drops of blood and a cracked lens. Probably some of my too-low shot had ricocheted off the surface of the pond. The few minutes between his shout and our examination of his injuries were terrifying, sickening, trapped feeling. I was a much more careful hunter after that.

@drewcareypnw has outed himself. He's Dick Cheney!

"When I saw a shark while swimming the Pacific Ocean. I was in water so deep, I could not see the bottom"

I've always hated swimming in anything besides a swimming pool. I have a deep-rooted fear of any critter coming up from below and taking a nibble on my toes or chomping a limb off. When I was 13 I was swimming at a local creek and one of my buddies screams "snapper!" and I look behind me and a friggin' snapping turtle about 2 feet long is swimming right at me. Those nasty fuckers can take off a finger with one bite. That was the last time in my life I was ever in a body of water that wasn't man-made. Fuck all those water beasts.

@GMD: LOL! I beat him to it by about 20 years. He was hunting quail, an upland game bird, which means walk and shoot when a bird pops up. Whereas duck hunting means sit and shoot when a bird drops in. His sport tends to be a bit more dangerous because people walking in a line can get excited turn and fire on their buddy pretty easily if everyone isn't 100% clear where everyone else is.

I was shooting a 12 gauge while he was shooting a 28 gauge, which in my mind makes him a badass shot because those are fast little birds and that is a little tiny load with a lot less pellets to bring them down. Then again, since he only shot a septuagenarian lawyer, I guess he's not all that! Ha. Politically, I don't like a Haliburton feeding warmongering armchair tough guy like Cheney. But in that moment, I felt for him and our shared error, and if I'm honest, our shared embarrassment. Not to mention my admiration for his marksmanship, assuming he actually got some quail with that peashooter that day.

I was 17, jogging through a curved tunnel (2 lanes, downhill) in the mountains one day trying to get to a better spot to hitchhike.

Suddenly some a****** drunk stops, rolls down the window and offers me a ride. The semi's air horn blasts, moment of terror, and roars by in the other lane. If another car had been coming up the road, I for one would not have survived the inferno.

Haha, this reminds me when I was snorkeling in Hawaii and I was a bit far out and saw a big shadow beneath me I freaked out for a second. Then I saw it was just a sea turtle :)

Opening my paito door and almost stepping on a rattle snake

Years ago while skiing, I somehow suddenly lost control and ended up a good 20 yards into the woods to the side of a steep trail. Totally thought I was going to die or at the very least break something. I was shocked and thankful afterwards afterwards as I took stock and confirmed that all four limbs were okay etc.

I remember swimming when i was a kid and not paying attention and then realizing how far out I was and panicking. Having a hard yimd time swimming back.

^

The moment that caused the most terror in iceydougee's pathetic life is the time he arrived at the taco bell drive thru and discovered that it was closed. lulz

In my twenties I broke up badly with an older woman. I came home one day and she was in my kitchen naked wielding a butcher knife.

Seemed like every other damned day when I was still in. The muj were bad enough. No fucking fear of death as long as they took one of us with them. Your everyday run of the mill hadji is almost as bad like they don’t even realize they CAN die.

And bigthirdeye sounds like a typical armchair warrior who never even fired a shot in anger much less been at the pointy end.

@BTE, figure on over a hundred thousand dollars in defense lawyers for a completely_justified self defense shooting. Fucking crazy to want to do that.

Yeah. When i was raped as a kid. Ripple effects are still playing out as an almost 50 year old.

Also, for the record, fuck these conservative asshats that pretend a drag queen represents a threat to a child. The real groomers are fat, slovenly, gray bearded morons who just present as children playing fortnite.

When I was in college I did some free style rock climbing. No ropes or safety gear. I was pretty good at it.

One day I went for a climb and it turned out to be much higher, steeper, and technical than I thought it would be. Being in my late teens and therfore a moron, I decided to just go for it. I was all alone as well.

Anyway, I got really stuck about 3/4 of the way up. No way up or down without a near certain risk of falling. And it wasn't the sort of fall that anyone survives. So I was frozen on the rock face for a good long while feeling my hands and feet getting weaker. I was pretty sure that was it for me.

Obviously, that's not how it went. I went for a handhold that I really didn't think I could get to. Thank you adrenaline and blind terror.

That was a serious stack of bad decisions.

Losing my phone and all my passwords

So youll have to pay 100k in lawyers even if someone charges you and you use a weapon? What are you supposed to do in that situation? Wouldn’t it vary widely by state

I worked in a fast food restaurant in college. After working there for a bit, I was able to pick up the cleaning shift that began after the restaurant closed for the night.

One night, as I opened the back door to take the trash out to the dumpster, two guys were waiting for me. They both had guns, wanted the cash from the registers. The cash was already counted and out of the registers. I took a pistol whipping - and a miserable beating - as I didn’t have the combination for the restaurant safe.

I passed out during the beating - as they got more and more angry as it became apparent I really didn’t know the combination for the safe. I woke up in the walk in refrigerator - that they locked from the outside.

This was back in the 1980’s - before cell phones and inexpensive video cameras - so I didn’t get out of the refrigerator until the folks came to open the restaurant in the morning.

The initial terror of seeing two crazed guys pointing guns in my face was pretty intense. When they got frustrated trying to beat the combination to the safe out of me - I knew they weren’t going to kill me. They saw an opportunity - but didn’t think it through. They ended up smashing the cigarette machine and stealing the quarters from it - and they trashed part of the restaurant trying to find anything of value.

Like Gammanu, I had a few seconds of shark terror in the ocean. It’s was intense. I was out in my ocean kayak for the first time, about 1/2 mile from shore on a nice, sunny, calm day when I see a big dark grey shape cruise fast directly under my little kayak. It looked to be about 8 feet long and had a wide body and a dorsal fin. My cave man brain’s shark alarm/panic went fro 0-100 in a second.

A couple seconds later a big porpoise surfaced and then continued on its merry way. I think it was fucking with me.

When I lived in Southern California, I was also a pretty avid surfer. Like many surfers, I had the shark vs dolphin scare. It's not uncommon.

The less common experience is when a pod of humpback whales decides to announce its presence by breaching all around you and the other surfers in the lineup. I'll be honest, it was fucking amazing up to the point where a whale fully breached and landed about 15-20 feet away from me. That's when I realized that this once-in-a-lifetime experience could end in my crushing / drowning death.

The lifeguards on the beach were losing their minds and everyone started paddling in while trying to not get whale crushed. On the beach, the lifeguards told me that it's relatively rare, but sometimes surfers die when a breaching whale lands on them, a surfboard leash gets wrapped around a fin, or a surfer gets knocked unconscious and dragged under by a near miss.

Cashman, that is an insane story, and it’s all over a few hundred bucks.

There may be risks from whale death, but it is interesting there are stories about whales or dolphins protecting people from sharks.

I remember one dancer telling me always check your bikini bottom before putting it on. A spider bit her right on one of her lips. She went to the hospital more than once and said it hurt like a mother fker. She showed me a picture of her so swelled up she didn’t look normal. She showed me since I had already seen her naked several times.

As far as myself, I would say when a tornado almost took me out. It was pretty big and went right over the structure I was in. Half my life flashed through my head. I thought that was it because of what I was seeing. Then I got spared. It was over.