35 People Who Felt That Something Was Off Shared How Listening To Their Gut Saved Their Lives
Some people have experienced that taking too much time and trying to consider “all the factors” doesn’t always result in a better decision. This is because many times, the decision is there, in the back of our mind, if only we are brave enough to trust it. Or because there simply isn’t enough time for indecisiveness. Examples of such situations are often seen in sports when a sportsman has to catch or hit the ball before they have time to actively think about how they are going to do it. These Redditors are sharing experiences when trusting one’s intuition turned out to be even more vital by answering one Redditor’s question, “What was the ‘gut feeling’ that you listened to that saved your life?”
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Not my life but my son's. I was 33 weeks pregnant and I noticed my son wasn't moving as much as usual. I waited a day and nothing changed. Despite advice by doctors and family saying I should just stay home and he wasn't moving as much because he was just running out of room to move I went into the ER and had my son that night due to fetal distress. He had his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck 8 times and weighed just 3 lbs. He spent 30 days in the NICU and now is a happy 2 year old.
I heard many doctors and nurses say, I'd rather you come in and it be a false alarm, than you to think you'll bother us and something bad actually happens
I was pregnant in the very early weeks (5/6 weeks), and started getting these intense pains on the right side of my abdomen. Like so extremely painful that I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t make noise or move. Went to my doctor the next day, and he said I was being hysterical and it’s completely normal to be in pain when you’re pregnant. He refused to get me to an OBGYN, and said I could go private if it was such a big deal. Went to a private scan, and my pregnancy was ectopic (stuck in my fallopian tube), and my tube had ruptured and I was bleeding internaly. Was rushed to hospital, and had surgery to remove my tube that night. If I hadn’t booked that scan I would have died in my sleep that night due to internal bleeding.
Driving uphill behind a flatbed truck carrying I-beams and I envisioned them sliding off the truck and hitting my windshield. I changed lanes so I wasn’t behind the truck and two seconds later, the I-beams were sliding off onto the road where my car would’ve been, sparking and gouging the pavement. Terrifying. To this day, I won’t stay behind a truck with anything that’s “strapped down.”
I refused to get in the car with the guy who said:" i can still drive" after the party.
3 people crashed into a bridge and died.
Lucky me i guess
DAMN, I'm glad they are safe but I also feel bad for the people who died...
I was 18, freshly out of high school and got a job at a newly opened pizza place. The crew was all younger kids around my age, I quickly befriended another girl working there but there was a guy, maybe a year or two older than me, who just gave me the weirdest vibes. I just felt uncomfortable being around him. He didn't really do anything outright strange, he hit on me and kept asking for my number, but I had a boyfriend (now my husband) and kept turning this guy down, he was never rude or about it or anything, so I had no real reason to feel anything was off about him, but I did.
Sometimes while I was working, I'd feel like someone was staring at me and I'd turn around and he'd be watching me from the other side of the kitchen. I remember telling the girl I had befriended that I just felt something was *off* about that guy and he made my skin crawl. Another coworker, who had gone to school with the guy, overheard the conversation and told me that he understood, his friend could be intense and off-putting but he was mostly harmless. The other girl and I just kind of tried to laugh it off but she agreed that something just didn't feel right.
I always worked the late shift, so I could start after my college classes and I worked until close, one night the creepy guy got off work maybe an hour or two before close and I was scheduled to close. So he leaves at his scheduled time, and I work until close and then go to leave and walk to my car. It was around 1:00AM at this time and super dark, as I'm walking to my car I notice someone else in the parking lot, it was the creepy guy and he was just... standing there. Watching me. His car was still there so he wasn't waiting for a ride, he had just waited for me to leave. I got in my car and felt just incredibly weirded out by the entire thing so I left, went home to my apartment, told my partner what happened and then sent my manager a text and said I was sorry, but the creepy guy was making me uncomfortable to the point that I couldn't work there anymore and that had been my last night. I never went back.
About a month later, I see on the news that the creepy guy from the pizza place had followed the other girl from work, the one I had been friends with, one night after a closing shift. He had waited outside her house in the dark, broke in when everyone was asleep, [unalived] her dad, and held her hostage/assaulted her for hours while the police and swat team tried to get him out of the house.
I still think about her a lot, and at the time I felt genuinely guilty about what happened to her, as if I could have done something to prevent it.
Oh my God, this is truly horrible. Nothing he did was your fault, please don't torture yourself. You expressed your discomfort about him, and you had to do what was necessary to take yourself out of that situation. I pray that you and your friend can someday find some peace after such a traumatic event.
It was very late driving & there were minimal cars on the road, I came up to a red light & as it turned green something inside me said “don’t go yet” & a van blew through their red.
Went to the gas station for snacks & something just told me to park in the spot second from the door instead of the one directly in front. About, 15 mins later, a truck comes flying through that very spot & into the door & out the back wall. Most surreal moment of my life.
My wife was going to go on a road trip with friends down to a bigger city for a concert. She had done this several times before. Friends were close friends of ours but for some reason, I felt off about it that one day. I said to her ‘babe, I don’t know why and you can ignore me if you’d like. but I don’t think you should go. I don’t know why, but i feel like something is going to happen’ She knows I’d never tell her not to do anything she wanted. It was out of the blue and out of character for me. So she decided to stay home and watch movies with me.
About 2 hours later after the rest of the crew left, we got a phone call that they had gotten into a severe accident. 2 friends in the hospital and someone from the other vehicle dead on scene. Had she gone along, she would have been sitting in the seat where they had been hit by the other driver and most likely [unalived].
Someone, somewhere, somehow was warning me. And I’m glad we both listened to it.
The lump wasn't a cyst and the rib pain wasn't just from coughing too hard. That was cancer.
After many rounds of fertility treatments (during which a voice in my head repeatedly said 'Dont do this. You will get cancer' I continued...4 months after stopping The Voice returned saying ' There's something wrong with your left breast'. Mammo. All clear. Biopsy of old cyst all clear. Voice more insistent. I decide to have the cyst removed, just in case... Cyst benign. Metastatic breast cancer on chest wall behind the cyst. Bless the voices of f you hear them. Cancer free after 18 years
Husband went to pick up takeout in the winter while it was snowy. As he was leaving he got a feeling to stay inside the restaurant and not go to his car. So he stayed for an extra minute and right then a van slid on the ice and hit his car on the driver's side where he would have been had he gone out.
Many, many people who are still alive will tell you about that "feeling" because it was obeyed; still yet more who are dead will say the very same thing - except that they regret they didn't listen.
In middle school, I was up late one night. Mom and brother asleep, dad gone on business. I had let the dog out, and when I went to go get him, I got a bad feeling like someone was out there. There wasn't really a reason to feel this way, it was just dark, and I got spooked, so I put the chain lock up on the back door when we got back inside. Back then, we never locked our doors. A few minutes later, the dog is drinking by the back door, and he suddenly stops and starts growling (like a low grumble) at the door. I was sitting where I could see the dog but not the door. Then I hear the door pull open and the chain lock catch. The dog started barking like crazy and I ran upstairs to wake my brother up. He went out and looked around, but no one was there. I think the dog's barking scared them away, but I dont know who it was or what would have happened if I hadn't locked the door.
We never used to lock our doors either…. then an ex-employee of ours came to our house at 5am, rammed his truck into our garage, jumped over our fence, and came into our house through the (unlocked) back door. He assaulted my elderly mom and may have even progressed to unaliving her, my disabled dad (whose bed was in the front room), and my dad’s night caregiver; ex-employee was a big guy. Luckily the caregiver was able to sneak a call to 911 while ex-employee was assaulting my mom. Lesson: ALWAYS lock your doors XD
About 2 years ago me and my dad loved going on night walks, It was something we’ve always done more less every night. One night however as were about half way through our daily route we got to an alleyway. Now normally I’ve never thought anything of it but something this night just told me not too walk through , I had a really bad feeling and I urged my dad to just go back home. He kept brushing it off and saying I was just scared of the dark and nothing was going to happen. After a couple of minutes of arguing we finally turned back and walked home.
Turns out about 20 minutes after we left there was a completely random attack in that exact alleyway that left a poor young girl stabbed thankfully not to death but with life changing injuries . I still dread to think what would of happened if we didn’t walk back.
For those (like me) who may have immediately thought, "Well, OP and their dad could have SAVED that poor girl!" ...yes, but logically thinking, it also could have turned out that THREE people got stabbed so badly that they sustained life-changing injuries. :/ ...It's still my first instinct to think "you guys could have saved her, though."
I was in a straight city road in the late evening with no cars and few intersections and was driving along with my friend following in the car behind. I was on autopilot more or less and I saw my friend flash their lights, and looked up and saw a car broken down with no lights in my lane. I was able to break and get out of the way in time but would have totally collided if my friend hadn't flashed their lights. After we get where we're going, I thank them for flashing and tell them how I hadn't seen, only for them to say huh I didn't flash my lights.
I think they had gone over a bump and their lights had just directed up briefly. And I was just really really lucky.
My grandmother accidentally saved my mom's life by not allowing her to go to a sleepover when she was young. During the night the father [unalived] his entire family and would likely have [ended] my mother had she been there.
Not saved a life but definitely serious injury, we had a workshop in our place and we had to book them in.
So Brad (not real name) thought it'd be fun to hold a nail gun in for repair on someone's hand.
We both told him off for it, but he retorted "it's alright I checked its got no nails in it"
And then used it on the table instead, and *bang* goes right through the table.
Turns out while it didn't have any nails, the firing pin had snapped inside and that nailed into the table before being reset back into the nail gun.
He never messed about with nail guns again.
At... least... Brad... learned something? I'm trying to take a positive from this, but I knew dudes like Brad back in school and Brads usually never stop Bradding.
Not me, my mom.
Going through a divorce. Drinking heavily. Fighting with my dad a lot. Really toxic environment. She started drinking one night but something in her gut just wasn’t feeling right. Not sick, but the alcohol just wasn’t sitting right.
She stopped drinking. Went to bed. Woke up to the house completely on fire. She made it out. Our pets did not.
Had she been drinking like she usually did (a bottle or more per night), there’s a strong chance she never would have woken up. Her ex husband (my dad) set the fire in an attempt to [end] her and cut ties.
Weird intuition runs in my family. I have tons of stories of super weird s**t I "predicted" when I was a kid that I ended up coming true. And of course instances as an adult of being right about gut feelings many times, but my favorite story is:
Everyone was at home but my brother. I was chilling in the living room and my mom was in her room. My mom comes BARRELING out of her room out of breath in absolute panic. Grabbing my arms and going "When's the last time you talked to brother?!?!" I told her to relax and that he had JUST left for a ride on his motorcycle. She wouldn't relax and made everyone call him and she called him multiple times. At first he wouldn't pick up, but then he finally did. He had been hit by an SUV maybe five miles from our house and the SUV took off. He ended up in a ditch, but he was wearing his protective gear and thankfully the car hit the bike not him. Just a couple bruises, thankfully. But somehow she knew the moment it happened.
Mothers truly know everything. She said a lot of stuff that seemed extremely odd and like she was completely out of it when she was dying in the hospital, and some of that ended up being true too.
My mum keeps getting worried about this. I've had to share my Google Maps location with her so she doesn't fret so much.
Not mine but my mothers
I was five and walking with my mom to visit a friend. We were going to have lunch and see her new kitten.
We walked up the driveway and my mother stopped to look at the front of the house. She noticed all the windows facing the street were closed with the curtains down. Very unusual for her friend who enjoyed watching birds at the feeders placed throughout the yard.
She quickly picked me up and began back down the driveway. I protested that I was hungry and wanted to see the kitten. My mom hushed me and carried me home.
This was in the late 70’s before cellphones. She called her friend several times and then called my father and asked him to check on her friend as she was worried.
My mom was right to be worried. Her friend had been r***d and [unalived] by an intruder. He was never caught.
Something about those closed drapes warned my mother away from that home and may have saved us from an encounter with an evil person.
My husband and I were snorkeling in the late afternoon/early evening in Hawaii on our honeymoon. It was this beautiful bay, and the marine life was unforgettable. My husband got excited and waved me to swim out further to where he was. He is a very strong swimmer and likes to push boundaries as well.
When I got there, there were all these fish tightly packed into the rocks. Hundreds of them squishing in as tight as possible. When I saw that my gut feeling was "we need to get the f**k out of here".
He didn't realize this was a fear response from the fish and was so excited to see so many. I begged him that we need to get out of the water, something is wrong, fish don't behave like this. I got desperate and even tried pulling him with me. Finally instinct took over and I took off back to shore. He followed me around ten minutes later--annoyed that I had cut the swim short.
Next day it was on the news that a tiger shark had been in the area and attacked two locals. One man lost a leg. Now, I'm not saying the tiger shark was there licking its chops, it could have been something else that spooked the fish, but now my husband listens to me when I say "gut feeling says no".
As soon as you said "late afternoon/early evening", I was like, "IDIOTS!" Things hunt at dawn and dusk. They just do. The ocean isn't a theme park.
When I was ~13 I was walking to the bus stop in the morning. A car was going through my neighborhood *very* slowly, which made alarm bells go off in my head. When it passed me, I glanced over my shoulder to keep an eye on it and saw it was doing an immediate U-turn.
Nope'd right out and dove through the bushes, crossed a bunch of driveways, and found a neighbor who was washing his car. I looked back to where I had been standing. The strange car had stopped, a seriously scary looking dude had gotten out, and was looking in the bushes.
Idk if I would've died exactly, but I would not have had a good time.
These stories make me sad. I have a 4 year old niece that means everything to me, and we're already starting martial arts classes. She doesn't know that it's for self defense. It's going to break our hearts explaining how awful people can be.
Had a weird feeling in my chest, experienced some shortness of breath, decided to drive to the ER and have it checked out. Was having a heart attack. Fixed me up with a stent.
Heart attacks are said to present differently in different people. Particularly in women. Good call on your part!
I felt completely normal, but had a gut feeling something was off, I was sick, *something* was wrong and I should go to the doctors. After spending the entire day asking my dad to take my temperature, he finally did and I had a 105.3°F fever. Literally almost dead. He rushed me to the ER and I spent my Easter in the hospital for a kidney infection.
My ex wife attempted to invite me to a get together "to help mend old wounds". I felt off about it and turned it down. I found out a week or so later from a friend she had a falling out with that she wanted me there so she could say I tried to r**e her.
As a female, I REALLY loathe other females who lie about things like getting assaulted and getting the r-worded.
Was on a date with a guy years ago, and had met with him before in public with no red flags or anything weird happening. To all intents and purposes he seemed totally fine and was perfectly polite, if a little bit of an odd nerd (I’m a nerd too). Was hanging at his place one day and got a weird gut feeling that said go home NOW and don’t let him drive you. I listened and left, made up some excuse at the last second when Uber arrived and got out. He switched from being normal to obsessive, begging me to come back, to date him, to then angry and gross. Found out from some people in the community he was on his way off the deep end (mental health issues I wasn’t aware of and he didn’t disclose and masked very well when I was with him) and I jumped ship at the last second. Guy ended up being a stalker to another person who had to move because of him, thank god he never found out where I lived
A friends feeling saved me from my gut.
I had just finished hosting a meeting (I swear it was productive) and a friend said "you dont look so good". I had just come off a weekend boat diving in the Red Sea and figured I was just tired. My friend said "nah man, Im taking you to the doctor." The doctor at our clinic poked me a few times and said "take him to the ER and tell them its his appendix". I was in surgery less than 90 minutes later. My surgeon said I was 2-3 hours from it blowing up. I lived alone and no one would have missed me until the next day.
Was driving to work one morning and my phone buzzed a few times. I only know one person that messages me like that but I thought it was weird because she would have been on her way to school so I dunno what she could possibly need from me at that time. Pulled over and checked, she'd sent me pictures of her English homework (ESL) and asked me to help asap. Looked up from my phone and there was a massive car accident that I very likely would have been in the middle of had I not pulled over.
Guy asked me for help with bus fare, offered to take me to an ATM. I got a bad feeling and dipped. Saw him on the news a week later for robbing somebody at gunpoint.
Once I was walking back from a store with my friend. We were already in a neighborhood area near a little park, it was pretty safe where we were, she had her headphones in but I didn't. At this point, I'd noticed a white van that'd been trailing behind us since the Trader Joe's parking lot, I did not think much of it..but I realized that the windows were TINTED, like DARK. Now this was a red flag for me, where the gut feeling started. We walked for about 2 more minutes and it was still there. There were 2 guys in the car and one of them rolled down their window, he smiled at me and then turned to the driver. He spoke Spanish, but so did I. I swore I heard him say "This should be easy, hm?". Then I noticed the van about to park next to us. At this point, my friend noticed too, and glanced at me. One of the men was about to speak to us, but we ran full sprint down the sidewalk to the park at the end, there were always people with dogs there so it was the safest place at the moment. This was at about 4PM, so it wasn't that late. I don't know what would've happened, but if we would've kept walking like normal, id have an idea of what wouldve.
3-5 pm is creeper time. The more residential the neighborhood the creepier that time of day is. It's the time of day most adults aren't home and children are out unattended.
I was driving along a rough mountain road heading home from work. The mountain pass ends at a lake, and you drive around the lake to meet up with the main road.
I got to the bottom of the mountain and started down the lake road, and saw this stunning bright rainbow over the lake. I had this weird gut feeling and urge to stop and look at it, with the way the sun was shining it didn’t make sense that there would be a rainbow but it was mesmerizing. So I stopped and stared at it in awe.
A couple of seconds later, as soon as I looked back at the road, a massive boulder came barreling down off the cliff above about 20 metres in front of me, hit the road, and smoked all of the concrete barriers as it went into the lake. I 100% would have been [unalived] if I hadn’t stopped.
This guy invited me over for wine when I was new in LA. When I got there, he was just being weird, and said let’s wash your feet. Took me by surprise, and I took off. Years later and he is currently in jail waiting for trial for [unaliving] two women he apparently drugged in his apartment.
https://nypost.com/2022/07/05/david-pearce-charged-with-deaths-of-model-christy-giles-and-hilda-marcela-cabrales-arzola/ For those who wonder.
I was walking home in the dark one night, and as I approached my building I seen a man cross the road to follow me. I had a bad feeling and ran up to the close door and made sure it had locked behind me. Shortly after, the man was banging against the glass trying to get in. Don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t ran.
When I was in grad school, I took the bus back to Chicago after spring break, but we got delayed and it was 3am when we got to Chicago. I didn't have cab money so I was stuck walking to the El, dragging my suitcase.
The backstreets were deserted that time of night, so I was hurrying. Then a car came up behind me and started following me, just a bit slower than I was walking so I couldn't quite see them. They would drop back and then roll up again.
I considering running. At the time, I was in the best shape of my life. My intuition told me to just turn around. Turn around and look them in the face. I don't know what my face actually looked like to them but they drove away after that.
I was riding my bike around my school building on a weekend, there was nobody else around. I liked to zoom along the sidewalks and hop off the curbs into the parking lots, it was fun to have the place to myself. At one point I was going along one side of the building, and I would usually have just continued off the curb and gone straight ahead. For some reason, I decided to brake hard and try to make the 90 degree turn to stay on the sidewalk at the corner.
A garbage truck rumbled by, exactly where I'd just decided not to be. I wasn't aware of hearing it coming, I was kind of zoned out, but some part of me must have. That really rattled me.
This is why I stopped listening to music when out walking. Too many close calls with big speedy metal boxes. I was a silly child who rarely paid attention to my surroundings.
Walked away from a bomb in 2001 (no one [died], and injuries were fewer than intended); I'd been dithering about going home when something in my head said "don't hang around, head for the station now". Heard it go off a few minutes later.
Medically, kept telling GP something wasn't right despite reassurances, and begrudgingly they sent me for a scan. Spinal tumours. When I got the same not-right feeling a decade later and pushed for tests, a different GP believed me. It was still luck the sonographer found the pancreatic tumour so quickly, as the first scan was booked for lower GI/pelvis, not upper GI, but at least she did!
I was a rower (like the rowing that’s on the olympics where everyone is sitting backwards) in high school and college.
We practiced an a massive river in my city and there where tourist boats, rowing teams, sailboats, you name it.
One day I was leading a 4 seater and sitting at the stern of the boat, when i noticed a small sailboat coming towards us with some serious speed, but I didn’t say anything because those boats can turn on a dime.
I looked over again a few seconds later and thought to myself “they aren’t going to turn” even though they easily could have. I screamed for more pressure and everyone was confused, but did it anyways.
Less than 10 seconds later the sailboat crashed into us, missed my torso by about 6 inches, snapped my oar in half bruising 2 ribs, and crushed the stern of the rowing shell.
Without the extra bit of power I would have died, and some of my teammates would have most likely been seriously injured.
Note: this post originally had 42 images. It’s been shortened to the top 35 images based on user votes.
Must be a record for "[unalived]" and its variants in this thread
Orwell was out by 40 years in the title of his novel.
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IDK, some of these stories sound questionable, and I would take them as a grain of salt
Consider yourself lucky your life is so bland that these recounts sound odd. They're plausible, and you have nothing to disprove them but your own lack of weird experiences. Shake your own hand.
Load More Replies... Must be a record for "[unalived]" and its variants in this thread
Orwell was out by 40 years in the title of his novel.
Load More Replies... IDK, some of these stories sound questionable, and I would take them as a grain of salt
Consider yourself lucky your life is so bland that these recounts sound odd. They're plausible, and you have nothing to disprove them but your own lack of weird experiences. Shake your own hand.
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