Reddit user No_Calendar4193 recently asked in r/AskReddit if people ever had a serious “we need to leave now” moment, and if so, to share their thrilling and intense stories. Here’s what people of the sub revealed:
1.
“I was traveling alone in Bangkok, taking a tuk-tuk (open-air taxi) somewhere. A common scam I’d been warned of was for drivers to ‘make a stop’ somewhere and basically lock you in a shop until you bribe your way out. My driver started asking if I was doing any shopping, and suggested we stop at his cousin’s store. No thanks. He starts begging, please, you’ll really like his store. More emphatically, no thanks, take me to my destination. He says we’re just going to stop there quickly on the way. So I just waited until he stopped at a red light, then got out and walked away. He was screaming at me to come back, but he couldn’t exactly leave his tuk-tuk in busy traffic. Nuh uh, sister, don’t play those games.”
2.
“I was on a train in Berlin. Some dude was crawling through on all fours, barking and growling at people. Which isn’t really the weirdest thing for Berlin. But that dude’s eyes screamed ‘Drug induced psychosis’ and I was like ‘Nope I’ll wait for the next train.’ A couple of minutes later, I see police running in because the dude bit a random woman who was sitting there.”
3.
“At a house party in college, some guy pulled out a katana and said, ‘Wanna see something cool?’ That was my cue. Grabbed my drink, grabbed my friend, and said, ‘We’re leaving before this turns into a Netflix true crime special.”
4.
“In 2002, I was at the Laughlin River Run sitting at a slot machine in Harrah’s. I saw a couple of Hells Angels walk in and told my friend, ‘Cash out! Angels are here.’ He had this WTF look on his face when I pushed the button on his machine, grabbed him, and said we had got to go. We walked right past a couple of them heading out the door, and we were partway down the hill towards the riverside before the shooting started.”
5.
“I was alone and driving to work in my Dodge Omni. Suddenly, I started feeling sleepy, dizzy, and a tad bit sick. I realized just in time, after almost nodding off twice, that I was huffing exhaust fumes because my exhaust pipe broke directly under where I was sitting. I immediately had to pull over, get out, and call my parents to take me the rest of the way to work while they towed my car. I still think about how many ways that could have ended, very, very badly.”
6.
“When I was a kid, I saw a guy pushing his broken-down car, so I gave him a hand to push it. He then proceeded to smash the grill open with a screwdriver to get the bonnet open, and that is when I realized I was helping a car thief, so I got out of there real quick.”
7.
“About two months ago, I’d stayed up past my usual bedtime, and as soon as I got in bed, I smelled something odd and heard some inconsistent banging and clattering from downstairs. I don’t live in a great neighborhood, so none of this was unusual, but I got out of bed to check anyway and saw flames licking up the side of the building. Yelled at my wife to get out of bed, threw on some clothes, and we high-tailed it out. Our building has a shared wall with the next, and that one had an apartment on the ground floor, fully engulfed by the time we made it outside, which ended up condemning the whole building. I was the first one to call 911. Have been jerking myself awake in the night pretty consistently since then.”
8.
“When my daughter was in third grade, she came home talking about a new friend she had at school called Sally. It was Sally this and Sally that for weeks. Towards the end of the term, she came home and said that Sally was having an end-of-year performance at her church, and she asked if we wanted to go to watch it. We thought, why not? We went to the church to watch it, and almost as soon as we walked in the door, we regretted it. It was in a warehouse for one. Plus, someone was clearly assigned to recruit us. We had a woman named Morgan who stuck with us for the whole time we were there and kept speaking about the church and the church’s beliefs. (Which they believed that God was a woman, whom they referred to as ‘mother.’) We were shown introduction videos for the church, and finally were shuffled into a room for a ‘family’ photo. At this point, my husband and I were clutching our kids and basically ran to the nearest door and to our car to exit.”
9.
“2009ish — When I was 19 and in college, someone messaged me on Facebook saying they found my ID. He told me his address and said I could come pick it up. When I got there, his front door was slightly open, and the TV was the only light on. I said ‘Hello! I’m here to pick up my ID.’ No one responded. I started to push the door open bc I was young and dumb, but then realized this was a super sketch situation and booked it out of there. When I got home, I messaged him saying I came by to get my ID and told him the story, but he never responded. Thankfully, my address on my ID was still my parents’ house in another city.”
10.
I once got separated from my group while camping in South Africa. It was about 2 a.m., and we were walking back to the main camp. All of a sudden, I hear hyenas next to me (btw, the hyenas that make the laughing sounds hunt in packs), and when I shone my light around, I saw at least two pairs of eyes. I have never run so fast in my life. Thankfully, I caught up with the group pretty fast. The hyenas probably thought I was a weak straggler and easy prey. I will never forget that sound or those eyes. What scares me the most is, had they not laughed, I would not have noticed. They must have either been confident or just doing it for fun.”
11.
“I was in a pub in London in the mid-nineties, at one end of the bar, left alone by every other patron, was a bunch of guys in Chelsea strips, sinking pints like it was going out of fashion. The door opened, and in walked a bunch of guys in what I would later learn were Millwall tops. Everyone in there started making a dash for the door, and the pub staff started shoving stuff off the bar onto the floor and slamming the bar shutters down. I left with everyone else. Sometimes the signs don’t have to be subtle.”
12.
“At a busy diner, a rough-looking dude walks in. The waitress saw and alerted the other waitress. She yelled at the two line cooks who STOPPED COOKING AND GRABBED SKILLETS while the guy walked to the edge of the kitchen. I threw cash down, made eye contact with the waitress, and ran out of there.”
13.
“Last year, I called Lyft to pick me up from a bar. The car shows up, and it matches the car on the app. I said the driver’s name, and he said it was him. Before I got in, I went around the back to check the license plate. It did not match the app. I told the driver his plates didn’t match, and he told me to get in anyways. I said absolutely not, and he sped off incredibly fast.”
14.
“BFE Wyoming (yes, it exists), and the wife is on a dinosaur dig. I’ve got my two youngest kids (4 & 6), and we go out hiking while she digs. Not far from the vehicles, we make it to the top of the tallest hill in the area. Stop to take some pics and notice my son and daughter’s hair starts standing on end. One of my all-time greatest pics is of my daughter pointing and laughing at her brother’s “crazy hair” while hers is going nuts as well. As soon as I snap the pic, I remember a cartoon from Boys’ Life Magazine from like 30 years prior about frizzy hair while on a mountain means a lightning strike is imminent. I put the phone away, grab them both, and run off the mountain. We get back to the vehicles just in time to see the storm roll in and take shelter from the lightning storm. Could have been a thousand times worse.”
15.
“Halloween night 1989, my ex-wife and I went to Hollywood for kicks, people watching, etc. It was insanely crowded. The street was closed down, and cops on horseback were walking up and down the center. We were there maybe an hour, and I saw a bottle fly out of the crowd and hit a cop. I grabbed the wife and said, ‘We gotta go.’ We parked off a side street, not too far from where we were. Made it to the car and split just before the riot happened.”
16.
I was hiking in New Hampshire, and everything got quiet. Then I noticed that the bark of the trees seemed to be rippling. When I looked closer, I saw that the trees were covered in harvestman spiders that were running down to the ground by the thousands, on every tree that I could see. When I looked at the ground, it was covered in a moving carpet of harvestmen running away, down the mountain. I’ve never seen anything like it. I am not afraid of those spiders; I even handle them occasionally. They are just the daddy long-legs of the forest. But this was terrifying. I told my family we needed to leave NOW because when animals behave like this, something is coming, and you’d be a fool not to take warning. We rushed back to the trailhead, got in the car, and drove away from the mountain. Shortly after we left, it was hit by a massive lightning storm. There had been nothing forecast, and the sky was still clear when we left.”
17.
“1993. We go back to someone’s flat after the pub has kicked us out for spliffs, wine, and Ozric Tentacles. My friend and I are sitting on the couch talking shit, and the guy whose flat it is says, ‘I’m just going to get changed, won’t be a moment.’ About 15 minutes later, we’re wondering what happened to him, he comes into the living room, unzips his gimp mask (which is attached to his latex gimp suit) and says, ‘Does anyone fancy some cheese on toast?’ I have never left anywhere faster, before or since.”
What was your “we need to leave NOW” moment? Share your responses in the comments or use this anonymous form, if necessary, and your story could be featured in an upcoming BuzzFeed Community post.
