12 Spine-Chilling True Stories About People Who Listened to Their Gut Feeling

Listening to what your intuition is telling you might just keep you safe from harm or sorrow. That’s what people online found out the hard way when trusting their gut feeling meant a completely different outcome in a serious situation. Their stories are an important reminder for us to believe in our own inner voice.

• I was like 5 or 6 when my mom and sisters wanted to go for a drive out of town. I cried and cried because I just didn’t want to go with them for some reason, and decided to go with my other sister in her car. Turns out, my mom and other sisters ended up crashing, and they said, «If you were in the car, you would’ve had to sit in the middle, and you would’ve died.» Luckily my family was okay though. But I sure did feel really cool after that. © SnowLeopard000 / Reddit

• My mom tells this story a lot. She was working in an office, and she suddenly had a powerful urge to leave her cube, just to leave and be somewhere else for no reason. Not a minute later, a fifteen-foot-wide section of the ceiling collapsed, burying the floor in metal and plaster. © Kaleon
  / Reddit

• My wife and I rented a really nice cabin in Big Sur, California, for a few nights. She woke up panicky and crying (which she never does) over a bad dream. I had an awful feeling after waking up and told her we could go for a drive.
  The further we went, the better we felt. We ended up staying in Monterey for the night. The cabin we were at burnt down. I still get chills writing this years later. © Unknown user / Reddit

• I asked my mother to take me home early from Boy Scout camp because I was afraid of bears. A bear ravaged the camp the night I left. Luckily, it didn’t hurt anyone. It just tore everything up from what I was told. © SenatusRomanus / Reddit

• I’m a firefighter. We got called out to a tree fire started by fallen power lines. We pull up in the truck, and I’m trusting that my driver and crew leader are doing their job and have good situational awareness. We get out of the truck, and we’ve parked next to a set of power lines (not fallen). It’s a very windy night and I can see the lines swinging, so I voice my concerns to my crew leader who says it’ll be fine.
  We get our hose out (the risk of the tree fire catching onto a house outweighing the potential risk of arcing plus the line disconnected when it fell) and I’m on the branch ready to start putting it out with two others near me when I get a chill. I look up to see the lines swinging violently and yell, «Everyone move». As the three of us sprint and dive out of the way we hear a thwip and crack and sure enough the line we were under came loose and stayed connected to the power pole. If I hadn’t got that chill chances are we would all have died. © DYESMOD / Reddit

• My daughter was a year and a half at the time. She had a cold, but bedtime went off without a hitch. I woke up in the middle of the night that night, really uncomfortable and anxious. Something was off, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I got up, had a midnight snack, and tried to calm my nerves. I decided to check on my kids, who shared a room, before trying to go back to sleep.
  I get in there, and immediately I hear a light sound coming from her crib—wheezing. It was so quiet, there was no way to hear it outside of the room. I got her up and saw that her breathing was fast and labored. I took her to the hospital, where she ended up with an overnight stay, oxygen, and nebulizer treatments because her oxygen had dipped. She was diagnosed with Reactive Airway Disease due to the cold (which triggered an asthma attack). © Thr33wolfmoon / Reddit

• I was riding my motorcycle with a friend on the back. We were going down a country road behind a truck hauling a bunch of old car tires when all of a sudden I decided we shouldn’t be there, so I slowed way down to let the truck go ahead of us. Just as I did, one of the tires fell off the truck and landed right where we would have been. © d***eyeAZ / Reddit

• When I was two or three, I had nightmares. One night I woke up, went to my foster parents’ room, and informed them that there was a bee under my pillow. «No, there’s not, Arwen. Go back to sleep,» they said. Cue the rivers of tears. Finally, my foster mom goes into my room, switches my light on, and says, «There aren’t any bees in here. Look!»
  As she picked up my pillow lo and behold, a bee flew out. My mom shooed the bee out the window as I was sobbing hysterically. She gave me the strangest look and asked how I knew the bee was there. I had no idea. My nightmare was completely unrelated. © Unkown user / Reddit

• I was mowing my backyard with a ride-on mower, and I began to get an overwhelming feeling of being watched. I started looking around and thought I saw a figure in the upstairs window. I tried ignoring this as no one was home and continued with mowing when I started to feel an unbearable sense of dread.
  This made me immediately stop. As I did so, the ground in front of me gave way forming a 15-foot wide 12-foot deep sinkhole. If I hadn’t stopped immediately I likely would have been crushed by the tractor. © MujimIsYou / Reddit

• I was driving on the road one night and I saw a car in the middle of the road with two people lying on the ground. My gut feeling was that something was suspicious here, and I decided to act on it by driving past the car and the two people.
  I stop to take my phone out and call the police and I look at my rearview mirror to see the two people lying on the road stand up with five other people coming out of the bushes. © Naweezy / Reddit

• I met this cute girl on Halloween night, so I invited her to a party I was going to later. She drove with me to the party and I took her two friends too. We talked a little, but we ended up working the room and got split up. I had this sudden overwhelming urge to find her and I ended up getting a little worried.
  Some guy had moved in and had brought her outside and taken her to a semi-private area underneath a patio balcony. I didn’t really care what he thought, grabbed her by the hand, acted like it was important, and led her out of the party and into the front yard. We both heard a massive crash as the very large patio collapsed above where she was standing three minutes before.
  I know most certainly that if I hadn’t grabbed her, she wouldn’t exist today. I ended up marrying her, and imagining how it almost never happened in such a dreadful way terrifies me. © Unknown user / Reddit

• I would always walk down the hallway in the night without turning the lights on. One night I get to the end of the hallway and have a sudden urgent feeling that I need to turn the lights on.
  I go back to my room turn the hallway light on and go back.
  Just in front of where I had decided to turn around was a huge and deadly Taipan snake making its way from one room to another across the hallway. If it had bitten me in the dark they wouldn’t have been able to get me the correct antivenom. © risska / Reddit

All of us have stories we’re too scared to tell anyone. But some find comfort in sharing these spooky experiences online without revealing their identity. In this article, we’ve compiled a selection of such stories, showing how even the most skeptical can be profoundly shaken by eerie encounters.