There was a woman who worked in a science lab who spilled two drops of organic mercury on the back of her gloved hand. Those two drops destroyed her entire nervous system and brain.

I spent my first 10 years in New Delhi. Back then, we would find dead women (burnt with acid or set on fire) and it used to be so "normal". Like oh look, another one of those dowry cases where her family didn't pay the husband enough money so they killed her. Many years later i revisited those memories and realised how insane that actually was! I'd totally forgotten about all that.

Two off duty US soldiers were on a train in France. When walking past a toilet they recognised the loading noises of rifles coming from inside. They waited outside and jumped the guy when he came out. He was a terrorist who was about to go through the train killing people.

An acquaintance of mine sent his son to triathlon camp in Texas. A week later, his son came back from camp. The next day, the son was complaining of a headache. Four days later, he was dead. Healthy, happy, fit 12 year old one week, dead the next. Turns out the lake had [Naegleria fowleri], the brain-eating amoeba. Nothing scares me as irrationally as already being dead and waiting for your body to catch on.

When my aunt was about 16 she was working at a grocery store and had a boss in his mid twenties. One day he called the house and was begging her to sneak out and hang out with him. She was considering it because it was her boss and she didn’t want to say no. My mom, who is two years younger than her, always gets these incredibly spot on “gut feelings”. She had one that night and begged my aunt not to go out with him. Thankfully she listened to my mom and told him no which made him really angry. He ended up going out that night and meeting another girl. He took her out to some cliffs and r*ped her and pushed her off. Somehow she lived through this and was able to get him sent to prison. I feel so sorry for that girl and so thankful for my mom and her gut feelings. Always trust your gut.

My friend's boss bought an Audi A4 convertible, back when they were new and interesting. One of the talking points was the pop-up roll hoops that were hidden unless you rolled it. A few months after buying it he got to test those roll hoops out, as he lost control and skidded down a steep bank about 10m (~35ft) deep. The roll hoops did their job, and he survived with just cuts and scratches from the bushes he'd plowed through. The car ended up the right way up and he got out, walked back up the bank to the side of the road, then got on the phone to the police to report the accident. While he was standing there a driver from a car that had seen the accident came over to speak to him. Approaching from behind the other driver asked if he was okay. My friend's boss turned around to reply and dropped dead. His neck had been fractured, but was in one piece right up until he turned his head, when it severed his spinal cord.

Nutty Putty Cave in Utah was sealed up in 2009 after John Jones was trapped upside-down in a small crevice while spelunking. When rescue teams finally arrived he had been upside-down for so long that his legs were drained of blood. The only possible way to have gotten him out was to break his legs, which would’ve sent him into fatal shock. He died after being trapped for 28 hours. His body’s still in the cave.

A guy i worked with was riding his dirt-bike through the woods and somebody hung a cable between two trees. My buddy caught his throat on it and saw the dude steal his dirt-bike. Woke up in the hospital with a lacerated throat and a broken larynx. Pretty crazy what somebody will do for something so cheap.

Was working the evening shift at a gas station. Man comes in all disoriented. I go to help him out. he has a gash on his head and doesn't know where he was. I couldn't see any crashes around so assumed he had fallen or something. Normally we are supposed to stay inside the glass shielded register area whenever anyone is in the store. I, being a nice human being, went to help while calling the police/EMS. They got there and checked him out. They thought his head may have been fractured. Took him to the ER. I went back to work. Cops stopped back by for some coffee a few hours later. They told me the guy got hit by a baseball bat trying to break into a little girl's bedroom and was wanted for r*pe and murder in two other states. I never left the register area at night again.

Years ago when I was 8 my family lived in this big weird house kind of on the edge of a small town. The school district was in the middle of a big restructuring so even though we were only a couple grades apart my brother and I went to different schools and took different buses. This left me as the last person to leave in the morning and the first person to get home in the afternoon, which meant it was my job to make sure all the lights were off and the door was locked. One morning I noticed the basement door was open and the light was on so before I left I turned off the light and closed the door. When I got home that afternoon the light was on and the door was open again. I just assumed that I’d forgotten to actually take care of it when I noticed it in the morning so I went over to turn off the light and close the door. When I got to the top of the basement stairs I looked and there was a big shadowy male figure towards the bottom of the staircase. I freaked out, slammed the door and pushed a bunch of boxes against it and then went and hid in my closet. For months I didn’t tell my family because I was positive what I had seen was a ghost and didn’t think anyone would believe me. Then about a year after that incident my mom and her boyfriend realized that small amounts of money had been going missing for months (totaling around $800-900, but never more than $60 at once). So we all walked around the house with flashlights trying to figure out how they could have gotten in. Turns out some creep was climbing in through a small hole in the outside of the house, shimmying through a crawl space, then coming up into the house through the basement. Realizing I had been alone in the house with him on at least one occasion was one of the worst, most terrifying moments I’ve ever had.

My mom was driving, and a guy ran out in the road, so she stopped so she couldn’t hit him. It was night time, so it was pretty dark out, and 3 other men emerged from the forest around, all trying to use the door handles of her car to get in. She locked them luckily, and gassed it to the nearest town. Remember to always lock your car after you start it, because if it wasn’t unlocked who knows what would’ve happened to her.

My friend tripped and fell onto the tracks, landing his face onto the 3rd rail. We kinda stood there in absolute shock because we thought he was dead, but then he said, "can I move? Will I be electrocuted?" We told him to move instantly and he did, we got him off the tracks, and no less than 2 minutes later a train went zipping by. I think the 3rd rail turned on seconds after his face came off of it. I know that's not scary to a lot of people, but to me it was because I would have lost a close friend back when I was about 12.

I would call it creepy more than scary, but my mom's friend had a small house and lived alone. She noticed weird things: a batch of soup depleting faster than usual, missing eggs, damp towels in the hamper when she hadn't used any, extra dishes in the dishwasher, etc... This went on for months, she thought she was just being forgetful. One day she heard some thumping around in her attic and went to investigate. She found some make shift living quarters. Small radio, hot plate, sleeping bag, pillow, food wrappers, etc... She called the cops who came to keep an eye on the place. They ended up catching a homeless man climbing a tree, trying to sneak into her attic window. He had been doing this almost daily. He would wait for her to go to work, then go down stairs and help himself to food and amenities. The funny part about this story is they got to know each other throughout the ordeal, and the guy was actually very respectful, just down on his luck. She didn't press charges, instead, let him move in, helped him get a job, and he lived in the attic until he got back on his feet. Creepy s**t with a happy ending.

Artimus Pyle the drummer from Lynard Skynard survived a plane crash and walked to a nearby house only to be shot by the homeowner. The homeowner saw a bloody long-haired man and winged him. Pyle survived that as well and made a full recovery.

This is a hometown story that stayed with me. It happened literally right around the corner from where I grew up, maybe a two minute drive away. Judy Kirby murdered six children and one adult by intentionally driving the wrong way on a divided highway in an attempt to commit suicide. She had been hospitalized for depression, but had also just ended a relationship with her ex husband's brother and was by some reports involved in drug trafficking and fearing an imminent arrest. She picked up her sister's son, who was celebrating his tenth birthday that day. She then loaded her three children into the car, supposedly to pick up a gift for the nephew. Instead, she went missing with the carload of kids. A short time later, calls started coming in to 911 about a car going the wrong way down the highway at a high rate of speed. They made it about 90 seconds before a head-on collision with another vehicle, driven by a father with two children and another child along for the ride. The crash annihilated both vehicles. The only survivors were Kirby herself, and the child who was along for the ride in the other car. There were pieces of children all over the highway. She was sentenced to 215 years in prison.

The Lake Nyos Disaster. The lake periodically belches a cloud of invisible carbon dioxide gas that suffocates everything within a 16 mile radius. In 1986, over 1700 people and all their livestock died without even understanding what was happening to them.

One of my friends had someone following her home, hiding in the bushes so they couldn't be seen. She booked it to her house, got inside, and he was watching the house from the outside. She called the cops. They come along quietly and got the jump on him. He had condoms, handcuffs, and a knife. When they got his DNA, it turned out that he was linked to a half dozen r*pes in the area. She credits her regimen of running sprints to outrunning him that night and firmly believes she would have been r*ped if she couldn't outrun him then.

i was in a c**ppy motel. the room had bedbugs. i was too exhausted to go to the front desk. i just needed to make it until the morning. i slept in the tub. hours later i hear someone breaking through the window. i had a big knife with me and ran out into the room to find a man halfway through my window. we stared for awhile at each other in shock. i think we both were scared. then he says," is this your room?" im like," yes, this is my room man!" more staring. then he slowly starts backing out while cursing me for leaving my window unlocked and not expecting him to break in. motel on watt ave, sacramento.

The 1904 Cincinnati Privy Disaster. In 1904, nine schoolgirls drowned in an outhouse after the floor collapsed. They literally drowned in human waste.

The story of Mary Vincent always stands out to me. In 1978, 15 year old Mary was hitchhiking. A man named Lawrence Singleton picked her up. He brutally r*ped her, and eventually made her get out of the car. She planned to run, but he noticed, and cut both her arms off. He threw her into a ditch/ravine and left her to die. She packed her stumps with mud to stop the bleeding and spent all night crawling out. She eventually makes it to the highway and starts walking, naked and covered in blood. The first car that saw her sped away in fear. The second car was a couple on their honeymoon. They picked her up and she survived.

That there's a guy casing the bar that I work at literally right now, and I can't do anything to stop him. He's been in asking what time/days we're open, and what days we have security. Caught him feeling the corners of our windows and doors too. Unfortunately, until he breaks in and robs us, the police won't do a thing.

Tough to pick just one because there is true evil in humanity out there. Stuff like the blood eagle ritual is pretty awful. But in terms of really scary...probably stuff that just kind of happens on accident. Like the story of Kyle Plush. Just awful. He was in a minivan that has one of those back seats that you can push backward to lay flat in the trunk for extra storage space. He went to grab something in the trunk, leaning over the seat, and it tipped backward and pinned him, upside down, against the back of the car in a position such that he couldn't get himself out. He called the police TWICE. The second time he called and gave them a very clear description of the car. "Plush called 911 again at around 3:35 p.m. Police said this time he provided a description of the vehicle as he desperately pleaded for help but couldn't hear the dispatcher. Isaac said the information didn't get relayed to officers at the scene. "This is not a joke," the teen said over 911. "I'm almost dead." He asked the dispatcher to "tell my mom I love her if I die." Just a horrible, random accident that could have happened to anybody. This kid didn't go looking for trouble, like he didn't try and go down a chimney or go caving like other people who have gotten stuck and suffocated. He was just reaching for something in his trunk, got pinned, and then was not found in time. Nightmarish for the kid and his family.

Amateur rugby. Guy gets hit pretty hard and dislocates his hip. While waiting for the ambulance, a guy runs up saying he's a physio and can at least relocate the joint. He cracks the hip back into its socket and the guy SCREAMS. One of his testicles had been jolted out of place in the accident - and had been chilling out in the empty hip socket. Squish.

In my town in the early 90's there was a notorious killer that had all of BC, Canada on watch. My wifes mother (years and years before I knew them) had been home alone while her Husband was in England doing tree surgeon work (arborist) She was in her laundry room when a man walked up from her basement, completely scaring her, she freaked out and said what the hell are you doing here? He said he was friends with her husband and was just coming to see if he was here, apparently he told him he could just walk in. Which she knew was b******t. She was smart enough to tell him that he was just at the store and would be back any minute. He said he would wait outside for him, as soon as he left she called the police, but he was long gone by the time they got here. Two weeks later, the killer was caught, his mugshot put on TV and it was the guy in her house.

Neishabur train dissaster is something that reminds me how death can come at any moment. A train with 51 wagons of sulphur, fertiliser, petrol and cotton wool somehow broke loose and rolled down the track about twenty kilometers until it derailed in the town of Khayyam, Iran. There were no humans on board. Chemical leaks ensued and authorities tried to extinguish whatever fires broke out. At one point, the whole thing explodes. And it really explodes. The whole town of Khayyam is literally demolished, 3 nearby towns are badly damaged and it was heard 70 km away. The wreckage continued to explode for several days after. Around 300 people died and more than that injured. An earthquake of 3.6 on Riechter scale was produced

My dad and some friends got drunk and went for a drive on some back roads and were going as fast as the truck would go as teenagers. My dad was slightly less drunk than the others and eventually demanded they let him get out. They pulled over and he and one other girl got out. He and the girl started walking to town while the other three sped off in the opposite direction. Well less than a mile up the road from where they got out is an extremely sharp turn, which they missed and hit a tree going pretty close to triple digits (miles per hour). Two of them died on impact and the only reason the third survived is because they crashed in front of a house that two doctors lived in. The survivor was paralyzed and lost his leg and part of his arm and was in the hospital for eight months before dying. This was in the ‘60s so medical care wasn’t what it is today. When I first got my permit my dad took me to that corner to explain the importance of safe driving. It gave me goosebumps about how close he was to being in the truck. He said that the dad of the driver got what remained of the truck to be hung up in the center of town for months after to be a warning to all.

I'll tell you one that happened to me, or rather, I was witness to. One night, I was out at a bar with a friend I was visiting in New Rochelle, NY. We went outside for a cigarette, and a car came flying past the bar. The car burned through a red light, and started going up this hill that was on a curve. We watched as he veered over the double yellow, and smashed head on with another car coming from the other direction. Both car's hind ends lifted up, then slammed down. The car that was driving correctly burst into flames. I ran inside and grabbed the fire extinguisher, then yelled to the bartender to call 911 and say there has been an accident. My friend, a few other patrons, and me ran to the cars. Now, I used to think this was a fictional trope, but I was pretty drunk before this happened, and I swear it sobered me up instantly. I tried spraying the fire, but it did nothing. The fumes and heat were awful, and all we could do was stand back. The worst part was, and this will haunt me forever, was that the woman in the burning car was screaming as she died. My God, it was the worst sound ever. The fire department came and put the fire out. The police took us back to the bar and took statements. I found out the next day in the news, that the car that was not speeding was being driven by a young woman coming home late from work. She was a block away from home, and I think she was either newly married or a new mother. The rotten m**********r driving the other car was some rich drunk c********r. He lost a leg, but otherwise was physically unharmed. I have no clue if he did time, as I left to go back home a day or so later. I'm trying to find a link for the news story, but I can't, as this was maybe 6 or 7 years back. I remember it being reported on Lo-Hud and Channel 12 News.

The driver one of the Semis we took in on trade died in the truck. The sleeping area is a "bunk" with a mattress that can be flipped up and under it is a seat and a table. So during the day it's a Dinet set up. And at night, you pull a lever and pull the bunk down to sleep. Well something happened and the bunk flipped up while the driver was sleeping and it pinned him against the wall. He couldn't get it to drop back down and suffocated. He was stuck there for somewhere around 12 hours. Someone had noticed that he was parked for an unusually long amount of time for the kind of deliveries he did. The company that built the sleeper did something to the bunk so that couldn't happen again and supposedly recalled all of that sleeper style.

My brothers ex-gf had two older sisters (they died before she was born). One day they decided to play hide-and-seek or something, so anyway, they both climbed inside a chest and accidentally locked themselves in. They suffocated.

John List killed his whole family-wife, mother, daughter and two sons. He meticulously planned the whole thing-cancelling all delivery services, excusing the kids from school, and even turned the air conditioning as low as possible to preserve the bodies for as long as possible. After he killed them all, he placed the bodies in sleeping bags and lined them up. He then wrote a letter to his pastor explaining why he had to kill them. He then leaves and isn’t heard from again. 18 years later he’s remarried and doing the same job as before but this time he doesn’t have any children. He’s finally arrested after a tip was given to the FBI. Crazy thing is that because he planned it so well, the bodies weren’t discovered until a month after the murders so he had a huge head start and essentially started a new life in the same career and was heavily involved in a new church down in Virginia. Took 18 years to capture him.