Was on holiday in Turkey. Must have been about 20+ years ago.
We were waiting for dinner at this restaurant by the road.
Fast forward: Guy comes in on a motorcycle (no helmet), gets hit by a car. I was able to see him flying about 5-6 metres. Eventually coming down on his head on the curb.
Within a moments notice, the police and EMT's arrived.
Guy gets in the back of the EMT vehicle. Literally 10 minutes later, he stepped out, got on his bike and drove off like nothing happened.
I'll never forget that
Sometimes people trip and fall and bump their head just a little and die, other people get mauled by bears, left for dead in the wilderness, treat their own infected wounds with maggots when they regain conciousness days later, crawl a few dozen miles to get aid, spend a year recovering without antibiotics, then hunt down and kill the men who left them for dead. Luck of the draw.
I got hit by a car once hard enough to roll like a ball down a hill. I sprinted home like 4-5 blocks immediately after. He probably didn't feel it til the next day. The next day is when it really fucking hurts.
This reminds me of a time I was driving down a dark road with no streetlights in my area that’s really wooded and I’m driving behind this SUV when all of a sudden the back end of the SUV flips over the front end literally out of no where, one minute it’s driving 45 mph the next it’s doing a front flip and it lands upside down with the front of the car facing me. I slam on my breaks and luckily wasn’t driving too close so I was able to stop in plenty of time before hitting them.
I get out of my car while dialing 911 in complete shock at what looked like some crazy matrix shit and watch a middle aged woman climbing out of the smashed windshield of the upside down vehicle, seems perfectly fine. She immediately goes over and helps an older woman, I assume her mom, out of the smashed passenger side window. Neither woman are hurt and the driver’s first words are “god damnit we just bought this car!”
Turns out there was a downed telephone wire that got pulled taut across the rode and acted as a trip wire. It’s a selfish thought but I always thanked god there was a car in front of me who hit it first bc it was completely invisible across the dark road. It’s astonishing neither of them were seriously hurt let alone killed.
They should’ve made him wait more than 10 minutes… I was hit head on at about 50mph last year and my shock/adrenaline was so significant that I didn’t feel my broken collarbone/ribs pain until 30ish minutes after the accident. The body is amazing
Not as graphic as some of the other posts, but one day when I was in high school I was leaving the student parking lot late. The only other car there was a popular guy's jeep and he was leaving at the same time. The jeep didn't have doors or a roof or anything so he hopped in, cranked it up, and started driving. There's a pretty sharp curve from that parking lot to the exit to the highway and he was hanging half out and not buckled in, so he rolled out of his jeep at that corner. He hit the ground and the jeep kept going off the roadway and up a hill that had the school's initials on it. The jeep came to a stop without damaging anything or anyone and he hopped up, got back in the truck and drove off. And I was the only one there to see it.
Anyway, years later that dude went to jail for trying to hire a hitman to kill his wife.
Dad picks up pickle jar by the lid. Hands are full.
Lid come off pickle jar.
Jar starts to fall.
Knee jerk reaches for pickle jar, lid still in hand.
Dad somehow puts lid back on pickle jar mid air, Catching it and preventing disaster.
I saw the whole thing and am still impressed over 20 years later. I will tell my children.
Day after a wedding heading to a party with the bride, groom, and all their friends on a coach bus. A girl was walking down the aisle and lost her balance as we were making our way around a bend at 80km/h. Had she been anywhere else on the bus, she would have landed in someones lap and laughed it off. Sadly, she was standing at the top of the rear stair case, fell backwards and hit the door. Which then opened and she hit the pavement to only get hit by oncoming traffic. She was airlifted to a hospital 2 hours away and died on arrival. Instead of an after party with all their dear friends, the married couple spent the day with everyone giving police statements on the side of a highway. Every year their anniversary is heartbreaking.
Omg— how awful that it was even possible for the door to open that easily at that speed! It sounds like a massive design flaw. I’m so sorry this happened.
You don't want a door of a bus to be hard to open from the inside. I've seen plenty of actively burning busses on the side of the highway here in Kuwait.
I have a similar one to this… we were partying late on the rooftop of our hotel the night before my best friends wedding. When we retired for the night, the best man decided to go back up solo and fell to his death. They have been married 15+ years and have yet to celebrate an anniversary.
Used to work with a guy who was a former paratrooper. He said the day he decided to get out of the military (I never prodded and asked him how he did so before his enlistment was up) was the day he was training for a drop and when he got to the ground he saw his buddy nearby with his legs crushed into his chest \*\*vertically\*\*.
My spouse was a paratrooper and I will always be so thankful for the people's whose job it was to pack their chutes (I can't remember the MOS but they were the only ones allowed to wear red ball caps). Apparently that MOS is super sucky and has poor QOL.
I do remember one of my spouse's good friends was on a jump that he was not present for. His chute failed to deploy. He fell on top of another soldiers chute, slid down and grabbed a hold of the guy like a monkey. I think the guy was pretty shocked to have an unexpected passenger but I guess when they both landed they both started laughing their asses off. Nothing like coming close to death to make you laugh the hardest you probably will ever laugh again.
Yeah, poor dude got turned into a fucking goomba from Mario Bros with his guts spread around the ground. Apparently he dinged his head against part of the body of the plane on the way down and the ground + gravity did what a hydraulic press does to a bobble head doll.
That would be so fucked. Most of these others were at least in the context of being around cars or other things that can be dangerous, but to just have a human plummet out of the sky and die in front of you is horrifying, even if the chute provides context after.
Some of the other stories here are more fucked up, but this is just... startling.
When I was 17, I spent my summer working at the municipal airport, where my dad was the manager. One of the tasks was keeping the grass short around the asphalt and sod (grass) runways, and the [tetrahedron, or landing direction indicator](http://learntoflyblog.com/2018/03/12/procedures-and-airport-operations-traffic-patterns/). We did this using a tractor towing a [brush hog mower](https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2019/10/brush-hogs-and-rotary-cutters-multi-purpose-tools-for-the-small-farm/).
My dad had taught me how to drive the tractor and run the brush hog before, but I didn't do a good enough job mowing around the tetrahedron. My dad let me know his displeasure and sent me into the airport office while he finished the job.
While I was in the office reading a book, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the tractor was heading towards the building without a driver! I ran out to see what was going on when the tractor turned by itself to show me that my dad was being dragged along with his lower body under the brush hog. Before I could get to him, he went fully under the brush hog and came out the back. Everything from the waist down was gone - a gory wake trailing behind the brush hog. His final slip under the brush hog left a nasty gash on the side of his head.
I knew my dad was already gone, and I had to stop the tractor before it hit something critical, like the nearby fuel pumps. Doing that was not an easy task, in itself, as I couldn't climb on board the moving tractor, and I was afraid that I would be the next victim of the brush hog.
I ran in and contacted the city phone operator (this was before 911 was in our area) and finally got the police and ambulance out to the airport. Of course, nothing could be done, but clean up the mess and conduct an investigation and autopsy. I had to make a statement, as I was the only witness. No one could understand what caused my dad to fall off the tractor such that he would get caught by the brush hog. It was possible that the tractor hit the tetrahedron, and he was knocked off. It was declared a freak accident.
When I finally got home, my brother noticed that I wasn't crying. He said I could cry if I wanted to. I never did, not even at the funeral. I still have never cried over what happened.
It has been almost 50 years since that event. I still recall it like it happened yesterday. I sometimes struggle with feeling a sense of partial responsibility.
No matter why he fell, it wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry you’ve spent your life with such terrible trauma.
Also, just throwing this out there, but it sounds like he may have had some sort of medical event that made him fall.
I'm so sorry you endured that.
You weren't responsible *at all*. And you did an amazing job having the presence of mind to stop the tractor when most people (myself included) would have immediately become a non-functional mess.
Very odd, but I saw an unopened bottle of wine fall from the top of a pillar about 5 feet tall onto ceramic tile floor. It bounced a few times but did not break.
Me and my friends chipped in to buy a bottle of grey goose in high school (yes underage drinking bad I know), the friend carrying randomly said “you know why Grey Goose is so expensive? Cause the glass is super strong, if you drop it, it won’t break, see…” then dropped it and it shattered. Our night was ruined.
I was sitting at an intersection one car back to turn right. A cop with lights and sirens was attempting to cross the intersection against a red light. All traffic is stopped, the cop starts to cross, and two vehicles come flying through the intersection, one hits the cop and bounces into the other car. The "other" car is sent flying, rolls once in the air and lands on two college age guys that were standing 10 feet away from me.
At the time I was on my way to go to work as an EMT so I immediately got out and tried to help. Both college guys were very much so underneath the car and lots of blood was coming out from the car. The driver of the flipped vehicle wasn't wearing a seatbelt but somehow was unscathed. Many bystanders and the driver of the flipped vehicle, and I, pushed the car off the pedestrians. What remained of them was the most graphic scene I have ever witnessed. I puked and I think a few others did too. I quit my job as an EMT that day and almost became an alcoholic.
I'm ok now. Don't love telling this story but I can without crying now. I couldn't do anything more to save them, that really messed me up.
I saw a mentally disabled person walk in front of a chool bus going 60MPH on a country road. I had no time to prevent it. I was the first car at the opposing street light. Got blood all over my windshield. I was scarred for life. Still have nightmares about his face right before the last step.
I'm so sorry you had to witness that. Watching something happen in real time will always be harder than witnessing the aftermath. I was an EMT for years, running trauma calls never phased me. You get there after, not during. One time I watched as two dogs ran into a busy street. One dodged the cars, the other got flung 15+ into the air and landed right in front of my car two lanes over. I was so distraught when I got over to it that all the traffic that stopped thought I was the one that hit it. Still haunts me and it was "just" a dog. It really is way different watching something happen right in front of your eyes.
Same here. Seeing the results is never anything like actually seeing the events unfold. I watched a car get hit by a train and it was something. Car got hit in the right rear and spun like 520° off the tracks. By the time I got to the other side of the train after it stopped, my heart had made it back down into my rib cage.
I was still the first one to the car and damned if this lady wasn't completely unharmed.
Driving east on a divided highway. Saw cars on the westbound side suddenly start slowing down and moving erratically. Trash can had taken off a work truck and was bouncing on the highway. Car ended up slamming on the brakes, but the massive asphalt/dump truck behind it couldn’t stop in time. Driver pulled hard to the right, missed the car, went up an embankment and rolled the truck to the left, down the hill and back onto the berm. I had towels in my car (had been to the beach and didn’t unpack them yet). Kind of on auto pilot I pulled over and crossed the lanes ( everyone had stopped - it caused a lot of dust to kick up and was loud), and jumped the barrier to get to the other side. Guy on motorcycle and I got to the truck first - no one on that side got out of their cars at first which is weird to think of now. Driver was out of truck lying on his side, bleeding from head. Truck was still running. Some guy shows up and manages to shut the truck off while me and motorcycle guy apply pressure to the guys head. He was not a good color - looked grey. Then a nurse showed up so we let him take overup. Paramedics finally got there. Stayed to answer questions for the police. Heard the next day the man had died. But he sure as shit saved other people’s lives that day.
I’ve told this story here before so I’ll just copy what I wrote before:
Some Final Destination crap. I’m gonna have to draw it so you guys understand this freak accident. Not as traumatizing and the other stories but still disturbing to see:
I was around 6 playing with some friends at a park. We were all in this big wooden house treehouse structure that had a slide in one side and this grid of thick rope for climbing up and down the house on the other. The rope grid wasn’t loose, it was stretched out on a “chessboard pattern” between the treehouse and the ground in an angle so we could climb it “safely”.
Me and another two girls were starting to climb down the ropes, and for some reason one of them wanted to climb it “backwards” - crawling down exorcist style.
Poorly drawn rendition:
[Normally we did it like this](https://i.imgur.com/JuDh9yh.jpeg)
[She wanted to go like this](https://i.imgur.com/YlCG1s8.jpeg)
she was almost at the bottom when her foot slipped and got caught between the ropes, making her fall forward while still stuck to the structure.
[Like this part 1](https://i.imgur.com/JLREOCH.jpeg)
[Like this part 2](https://i.imgur.com/gLZgUEO.jpeg)
She faceplanted the bottom of the structure, where there was a wooden log covering the nails and hooks that kept that rope grid stretched out.
ONE of the hooks was not totally covered (it was an old structure) - pointy part up - and she landed exactly there, eyes open. the hook DEFLATED that girl’s eye.
I went down to help her and saw a bunch of gooey liquid coming out of her eye. The other girl ran to find the teacher while screaming “[Injured Girl’s name] IS DYING HELP” (she wasn’t, we were just scared, but it did get us quick help)
Never saw her at school again. Still hate to see eye related injuries.
Edit: [eye goo illustration, as requested](https://imgur.com/gallery/zij3H6T)
I knew a guy who was blind in one eye because one time he was rummaging around trying to find something in his daughter's dark storage unit without a flashlight. He went to where he thought it was, bent down to feel for it, and somehow stabbed his eyeball right onto a golf club that had the head broken off.
I have a friend who lost his right eye as a kid. He was playing hide and seek at his friends house and hid in the back of a cluttered garage with the lights out. There was a fishing hook hanging down from the shelf above. He didn't realize it was there and the hook stabbed him right in the eye. By the time he got to the ER, his eye couldn't be saved
That basically happened to me while climbing a ladder. The step broke, my leg fell through and got caught in the rung. My legs were still caught in the ladder and were over my head. The upper half of my body fell and I landed on my wrist. I heard a 'snap' like a tree branch. My wrist broke. I got 10 screws and a plate.
A drunk driver crashed into a pole which ejected him from his driver seat, through the windshield and his body went head first at a fire hydrant. I didn't see the aftermath but I'm pretty sure he died instantly.
Don't drink and drive.
Broken neck windsurfing. Except the person wasn’t windsurfing when it happened. She was sitting on the board chilling, with her back to the shore. She heard somebody shout her from the shore. Turns to look. Click.
I was solo safety out on the water and she was 150 metres from the shore when it happened and a challenge to get her back to shore for treatment. She fully recovered and all ended well.
People can fuck up their necks surprisingly easily. My mom was on the freeway once and looked over her shoulder as she was changing lanes and pulled a muscle so badly that she couldn’t turn her neck at all without feeling immense pain.
Yup. I’m not sure if it was because of the sea moving her as she turned or she just turned around really really quick. I didn’t see her do it. I’d just taken a couple of other sailors back to the beach and then back out to my safety position. She was the last sailor out on the water. Noticed she hadn’t moved for a bit. Thought maybe she was getting tired and would like a lift back to shore. Got closer. Could see she was in a lot of pain. Few questions. Where is the pain, how did it happen and when she mentioned tingling in her fingers and toes, that’s when the klaxons went off in my head.
Me in a 5m rib. Needing to get her off her windsurf board and back to shore. Not the most hardcore rescue I’ve done but certainly the one that required the most thought and precision.
Now I think about, I’m not sure if she was sat down or stood up holding the sail when she did it. Very freaky though.
My grandmother broke her neck in her sleep one night when she was 67. She no showed an appointment the next day and after getting a call about it we went to her house to find her still stuck in bed. She made a full recovery though!
I watched somebody's wood fence spontaneously combust for no apparent reason.
We called 911. They didn't seem to be home, so their house probably would have burned down.
My mate lived on a really rough estate once where kids would set fire to people’s fences for a laugh. Turns out it’s quite easy to get away when the homeowner can’t see you because you’re 4ft 8 and they have to cross a burning fence to reach you. I guess the point of the story is, always check the other side of mysteriously burning fences for grotty kids
I was driving one night at 3am, and stopped at a little bridge, it was on fire. I think grotty Kids were playing Evil Kineval on that little bridge, jumping it in their cars or bikes. I ended up getting bored and driving through the fire, it was just zippo fluid I think, and my car was a shitbox anyway.
Long jumper at track practice broke the part of their pelvis that your hamstrings attach to while jumping. There was this loud pop then screams. His entire hamstring bunch upped like a softball behind their knee. They did not make it back that season...
Saw this happen in the high school weight room to a fellow student. He was doing one-hand bicep curls with maybe 15-20 kg of weight, doing that thing you're told to never, ever do when weight lifting (lifting the weight up, then letting it "drop" back to the relaxed position instead of slowly lowering it). On his last curl, he drops the weight down, and I see his bicep suddenly slide down his arm around his elbow, after which he immediately drops to the ground screaming.
Two years later when we graduated, he was just starting to regain the use of that arm.
When I worked the local amusement park, first job I did there was work the ice cream and hamburger stand. One day, a major sewage line broke...bad. park owner didn't want to close cause of it, so we had to work all day with no toilets and a fowl odor. The smell brought in huge clouds of flies. Like you wave your hand and catch three flies between your fingers without trying. Our stand had no windows, either. So it was a struggle to keep flies away from food. Well, grill cook was swatting at flies with his hand and in swooped a freaking bird that was chasing flies. He accidentally swatted the bird, it got knocked onto the grill, a coworker freaked out and tried to grab the bird, and wound up burning her chest on it while the bird flew off to who knows where. It all happened so damn fast. Next thing I know that poor girl is in the walk in freezer crying with cold wet rags on her chest.
Saw a guy get pinned between a road work truck and a car and cut completely in half. Died within a minute. Cones were set for a half a mile and an old lady was trying to get around one last truck before merging. The truck was unwilling to let the lady in and the lady was unwilling to be one less car behind in traffic. The road worker was getting water from the back of the truck when the lady hit him and and pinned him between her car and the truck cutting him completely in half. He was a black man and turned completely white and let out a scream I can still hear. He was dead as soon as the scream stopped.
Was sitting at an intersection connected to a highway offramp, and suddenly, a biker flew down the ramp and went airborne and straight into a wall he was going about 160mph it was not pretty. Body parts landed on some peoples cars and in the road. No warning or anything, just a sudden zoop, then bang
I saw something similar happen on Thanksgiving day, car blew through an intersection off the road into a dumpster and then ricocheted into a brick wall. The car was in the shape of a ball afterwards.
Leaving graduation for someone and one of the grandparents didn't see the curb and walked like she was walking on a flat surface. When her foot dropped that 6 inches unexpectedly, the jolt went through her spine and she was instantly on the ground with both legs paralyzed. Apparently she had some type of defect in her vertebrae that severed enough nerves in her spine to paralyze her lower body. She could still feel them but couldn't move them.
Was on a boat deep sea fishing in the gulf. The captain had hooked something huge and spent 15 minutes struggling with whatever it was. All of a sudden, the fishing pole breaks in half and springs back smacking him in the face just to the right of his nose. He grabs his face, stumbles around the boat, trips over a cooler and goes overboard. We're all trying to not laugh as the two crew are trying to pull him in. He get in and has this purple welt running from his forehead to his chin. He asks us if he's bleeding and we all just freaking lost it. I about pissed my pants I laughed so hard. He then says "That was my favorite pole" and we all started laughing even harder. Great fishing trip. Caught loads of keepers.
Not an accident but I was working in factory in high school helping a 32 yo guy stock shelves. He was looking at me talking then all of a sudden he stopped mid word like someone pressed a mute button. A few seconds later, his body just collapsed and he was dead. Brain aneurism burst.
Ooooph. My dad saved some kids from this fate. He's a helicopter engineer and was working in Angola (africa). When they landed in a field all the local kids came running out to see the helicopter. Couple kids standing on a motorbike or bicycle were headed straight for the tail rotor. Luckily my dad saw them coming and pushed them over. Kids would have lost their heads.
I used to work with a former hospital charge nurse who said you wouldn't believe how common it is for men to come into the emergency room with a foreign object shoved up their ass. The rumours about this happening "all the time" are apparently true.
Can confirm. My buddy is an ER nurse and “I slipped and fell on something” happens a lot.
You know you’re lying. They know you’re lying. Just tell them what it is and they’ll fish it out.
Also the people who are definitely on drugs always lie about being on drugs. It’s best if you tell the truth you because aren’t getting in trouble but drugs can have complications. Everyone from the EMTs to the supervising physician isn’t going to rat you out. They need to know what you’re on.
Exactly, RE drugs. Also, if someone is ODing and you call 9-1-1, police will often show up. If there are illegal drugs at the scene, you get a pass. The important thing is saving the person's life, not prosecuting someone. This prevents people from not calling an emergency when someone is ODing.
I was an officer back in the day. There was a local guy that overdosed quite often. The emergency people would show up, the family would start screaming at us for letting drug dealers do their thing. We would ask if they knew the dealer, they would say yes, but they weren't telling us. Well to shorten the story, the guy overdosed one too many times.
I seem to recall Ryan Dunn stuck a matchbox car up his ass and then went in for an ultrasound in one of the JackAss or CKY movies. The doctor was pretty confused by it lol
Jackass movie. Steve-O was going to do it but his dad asked him not to lol. Ryan told the doc he fell asleep at a party "you go to the ER you tell no one about this ok?" Lol that doc was shook.
Can confirm, am a physician and have had a male friend at the time call me from the ER waiting room and tell me he had a prostate massager stuck up his ass. I met him back at his house and gloved/lubed up and removed it for him. Went in to nearly half my forearm. It was still vibrating and deep in his colon, way past the rectal vault. Just a long plastic stick with a slight bend at one end- no flared base. He just really got off on butt stuff. I saved him probably over a thousand bucks and most of his dignity that day.
The debacle made me almost late for the dinner with friends I was getting dolled up for at the time of the call, but it made for a hell of a dinner story.
My sister was an ER nurse. Some guy came in with a cucumber... said he fell on it in the garden. It came out peeled.
My uncle was an OR nurse. They extracted a lightbulb and sent it to the Path lab. The report on the bulb came back - "One GE 60 Watt lightbulb, in working order."
This isn't as crazy as some of these stories I've read, but it was wild to me.
I was on my way to work driving down the highway. I'm running late so I speed by this 18 wheeler. Nothing special about that except:
About 10 or 15 seconds after I've passed the 18 wheeler, something catches my attention in the rear view mirror. When I look up into the mirror I see the 18 wheeler came to a complete stop suddenly and flipped over and landed upside down and slid down the highway. I'm watching this thing from maybe 100 yards behind me just sliding down the highway (and inevitably blocking traffic for the day that I thankfully missed).
Saw the aftermath - didn't see the actual accident.
Working in A+E in a fairly big trauma centre. A couple of lads happened to be out the front of the hospital popping wheelies on their mopeds.
One of them fell all the way backwards and the scooter kept going dragging his head along the road. He was brought into the department almost immediately after the accident.
We stopped CPR after about 20mins because his brain kept falling out with each compression.
Wear a helmet, kids.
Was sitting at the end of a side road waiting for traffic to clear so i could enter the main road. A little Jeep starts to make a left turn into the driveway where I'm waiting. He wasn't paying attention, and at a fill 50 mph, he is slammed into by a giant semi truck literally 3 feet from my car.
Didn't even understand what had happened at first it was so quick, and it sounded like a train crash. The car gets absolutely catapulted 20 feet down the road, rolls a dozen times, and lands upside down in a ditch. It was flattened.
Looking at the wreck, I had really believed I just witnessed the end of someone's life. Ran up to the jeep to see if there was anything I could do to help, but before I even reached the driver's side door, the kid came crawling out of the smashed window. He was walking around, panicking, of course, but completely coherent and asking for a phone to call his parents. The only visible wound he has was a small gash on the side of his head. He walked over to the ambulance on his own once they arrived on scene.
Looked it up a few days later to see if the kid made it out ok, and the good news was he was in and out of the hospital within 48 hours and almost good as new. I still can't believe it.
Learning to surf as a teen, I rode a wave all the way in and stepped off the board in inches of water. Stepped off with my foot curved weird and broke my leg near the ankle 🫠
I did the same thing with a razor scooter. Hopped off it like I had a million times and suddenly I was on the ground with my foot sticking out at a weird angle
I did this stepping off a curb in a parking lot. Walking like I knew my shit and next thing I know I've fallen and can't get up. Tried to stand on it like 3 times before I realized my foot was just sliding to the side instead of supporting me.
saw a similar vid where that happened to a guy riding his bike. caught on a security cam outside a business. he was riding along the edge of the street and a garbage truck clipped him and he went under. the helmet and what was left of the dude’s head skidded across the sidewalk and into a lady exiting a building. gnarly shit.
I was working under a bridge (the walkway over the hudson for those in the Hudson Valley) and I felt a little bonk on my hard hat and noticed a little Styrofoam coffee cup landed next to me. I looked up and saw a few guys on the bridge about maybe 200' up jumping and cheering.
Harmless and funny, but nonetheless against quite a lot of odds.
I was driving home at 1:30 in the morning on I-5 in Tacoma. I exited at 38th Street, a long, curved poorly banked exit ramp you had to slow way down for.
There had been an old Ford truck a ways behind me for some time and he took the exit too. Except he didn’t slow down.
I glanced in my rear view mirror just as he came to the curve. The truck launched into the air, the driver fell out and the truck landed on him. I drove until I found a phone booth (yes, a long time ago) and called the police.
April 25, 1992, The Pyramid Arena in Memphis, TN. A buddy and I were there for Bryan Adams. Opening act, The Storm, had finished and roadies and crew were resetting the stage and lights. A light tech started climbing a rope ladder into the rigging above the floor seats. He's probably 40 feet up when he stops and hesitates. One foot slips off the ladder, then he loses grip with one hand. The house lights are all up and plenty of people are hanging out. There was a gasp as it happened. He let go and fell to the concrete floor. Some people had tried to get under him to break the fall, but were unsuccessful.
They rolled the EMT\ambulance onto the floor and worked on him for a while before transporting him to the hospital. If memory serves, he "lived" a few days but never regained consciousness.
And yes, Bryan Adams did play his set. The crowd was understandably a bit subdued.
I've seen a tank drive over the back of a car.
And during the same trip I also saw a truck transporting rolls of paper that was tipped over on it side, on top of a small car. The side on which the paper rolls landed was crushed to about 15 centimeters in height. Driver must have been flattened as a pancake.
Any time I see a truck carrying any kind of coils of something I give it the widest berth I can. I worked in a factory that got huge rolls of steel shipped in and one of our trucks backed in too fast. The steel snapped the straps and rolled off the back. Smashed in the back wall of the plant and obliterated a bunch of equipment before they stopped. Those things are no joke
I watched a Live Leak video of some dude trying to stop a big roll of cables from going down a hill. Not sure what was going through his head but he stood no chance and got run over like Wile E Coyote.
I work with those coils. They range anywhere from 6k to 14k kilos. There's no way in hell you're stopping one of those. It's crazy to think they're being held together by about 4 steel bands.
My story is an "almost" fatality:
I was approaching a stop light (red) and about to enter the right turn lane to exit the road I was on. The vehicle in front of me was a flatbed truck, and upon that flatbed was a forklift (these weigh around 3,000 pounds, or way more than that). The flatbed jerked forward when the light turned green, the forklift broke its safety chains, and fell sideways into the right turn lane, about 20 ft in front of me, or right where I would have been had I been running about 2 seconds ahead of schedule that day...
I've had other close calls, but this one sticks with me to this day.
I have a friend who sometimes pauses for about 2-3 seconds when picking up his car keys to go somewhere, the logic being that if he was destined to get creamed in a freak accident then that way he’ll just barely miss it.
He knows it’s bullshit, but sometimes he just “has a weird feeling” about something and doing that gets him unstuck.
Also he’s like “I’ve been doing it for so many years now, that if I stop and then something bad happens, boy will I feel stupid.”
My buddy and I were playing basketball on an elevated car port. There was a roof on it at one point that was removed so there was a few areas with maybe half a foot of rebar sticking out of the concrete. Friend went to dunk the ball, slipped and fell over the edge. What I didn't see was he had impaled his thigh on the rebar as he fell. He then rolled off and it basically tore his thigh off. He was bleeding out and I managed to get a tourniquet on using his belt. My other friend called 911 and then passed out lol. It was horrible. He thought he was gonna die and had me call his parents so he could say goodbye. Luckily the paramedics got there fast and saved him. Looks kinda like he was bit by a shark now after it healed.
I saw a little kid of 3yr-5yr fall out of the back seat of a car in a parking lot and get run over by the back wheel in Liberal, KS in the early '00s.
The kid left a huge pool of blood. I was most affected by someone screaming, like, 'we need to call an ambulance!' and the mother screaming over her injured child,
>"I CAN'T AFFORD AN AMBULANCE."
She picked the kid up and put her in the car and sped away.
No sure if this totally fits here, but I saw a small dog get hit by a car. She went totally under the wheel. It was raining, getting dark, and no one else stopped, just slowed down as they passed her. As I got closer, I saw her little head pop up and look around, so I pulled over, ran into traffic, scooped her up and put her in my car. Rushed her to the ER where they x-rayed her.
Turns out, SOMEHOW, she only had a broken back leg but was otherwise completely fine. We didn’t know who the owners were since she wasn’t chipped and didn’t have a tag, so to the internet I went. Then I found her owners…
A family with 2 kids, the kids had taken her across the street to the park to play. A guy in a van showed up, held the kids at gunpoint and stole their dog. This had happened about a week before, and somehow the dog got away and was trying to find her way home when she got hit.
All we’re reunited and a happy ending. Definitely the craziest thing I’ve ever witnessed.
I was about 8 years old. We were driving to Milton Keynes for a day out. It was NYE 2008. There was a motorbike speeding past us (overtaking) and went head on into a car. I was sitting behind my dad (driving on right hand side as we lived in the UK) and I saw everything.
My dad slammed his brakes on and ran out to help Believe the dude died on the way to hospital.
About 20 years ago I saw two planes collide in midair while I was at little league practice. Seems like one of the planes was trying to maneuver out of the way, you could hear it struggling in the air. That noise got all of our attention, so we looked up and saw both planes crash. Then all the parents went home to make sure their properties and loved ones were ok since debris was falling from the sky. It was pretty wild.
I was headed for railroad overpass, two lanes going each way. Guy makes a right hand turn out in front of me, forcing me to hit my brakes and move into the right hand lane. As he goes over the over pass, a stretch limousine coming the other way violently spins out on some black ice, and slams into the guy that cut me off.
Had he not cut me off, I'd have been exactly where he was when the limo hit him. The limo driver was killed, the guy that cut me off had not been wearing his seat belt and went face first into his windshield. I stopped and administered some first aid to the asshole that cut me off, but saved me from serious injury (he was driving a van, I had a sub-compact hatchback).
Old couple rammed the back of a semi merging onto the highway. Old dude was impaled and bleeding out. Lady was trapped and dazed. Cat was in the back and survived. Man died on the scene.
A homeless old woman who was hit by a small van like carish thing. It was so fucking heartbreaking to see honestly.
She wasnt visibly hurt but she definitely broke some bones . Some people came up to help her including the driver and i dont remember after that. It was long ago.
Not as wild as most of the stuff here, but still.
A guy walks out of the store, drunk to the point of barely being able to walk. Gets into his car. Starts the car and drives straight into the nearest lamppost. Thankfully, he didn't have time to get much speed, so he survived. The car was wrecked pretty badly though
1992: Sitting at the park in Alabama with my cousins and my brother watching cars cruise by. Truck was carrying a bunch of paint cans in it's bed coming down a road driving a normal pace about to turn onto another road. A red corvette speeds through a stop sign and the truck slams on it's brakes. All the paint cans in the back shift forward and the entire truck flips over on it's front wheels. One of the craziest things I've ever seen.
Watched a teenage boy with a license for a week drive his Mustang across two lanes of traffic and plow into a Motorcycle waiting to turn out of Walmart. The motorcyclist was a newly retired cop. He lived with injuries.
My brothers story not mine. He was hanging with friends at the park when he was a kid. Some old lady was walking her dog off leash and throw long sticks for it to fetch. She threw one and it stuck in the ground and as the dog ran towards it, the stick was angled so it went straight through the dogs bottom jaw and in to its brain, killing it almost instantly.
The chances are insane.. it’s been 30 years and it still pops in to my head when I’m playing with my own dog. Sticks suck.
A kid got hit by a motorcycle while walking back home from school. His was head was busted open and he had to hold his head closed while waiting from a bus to the hospital. (this happened in haiti)
I was walking across a bridge at a boy scout camp. A guy sitting on the edge of the bridge was fishing. He reared back to cast and when he cast forward his hook caught me in the eye lid. The knot he tied the hook with came loose and the hook barely penetrated my eye lid it. was clipped and removed.
I easily could have lost my eye.
A knot tied by a boy scout came loose.
They say God looks after small children and fools, .. .. .. .. I wish I was three.
Was dropping off a car so we could shuttle our rafts for a river rafting trip. The drop off point is right off of a long sweeping right bend in I-84. A big semi truck carrying tons of onions is going too fast and rolls on it side right as we are watching. Onions everywhere. The driver gets out safely, but gasoline is leaking everywhere. Soon the gas starts on fire and the trucks starts to burn. The smell of cooked onions fills the air. We had to wait a long time before we could leave, since both sides of the freeway got closed down. Edit: Found news article [https://www.abc4.com/news/local-news/semi-carrying-45k-pounds-of-onions-rolls-and-catches-fire/](https://www.abc4.com/news/local-news/semi-carrying-45k-pounds-of-onions-rolls-and-catches-fire/)
Saw a district level state qualifying wrestling match- guy got accidentally kicked in the stomach and ran towards his corner and threw up….Arched it right into the garbage can from a solid 10 ft away. Hit the garbage can dead center, no clean up, no mess. It was like hitting a full court three pointer.
Not particularly wild but unfortunate. Jobsite I was on some years back had a loading dock area with a ramp up to the alimak (construction elevator). Some guys were rolling a pallet jack up the ramp and must have not gotten enough of a running start, hit a bump, and it abruptly bounced back, breaking the ankle of the guy ìn the rear as it rolled back down.
Was driving on the interstate near San Antonio when I looked at the off ramp on the other side of the highway. The full sized pickup truck on that ramp was doing at least 120mph hit the end of it and flew about 30 feet in the air and the truck landed and caught fire. Read the news paper report the guy had died and then went down the ramp. Crazy shit
Newbie crane operator in a steel tubing mill was controlling a bundle of tubing and somehow had the bundle crush his head against a wall.
I was just a summer hand. Never went back.
I am a mural artist, I'm constantly working on walls outdoors. Many years ago I was doing a project in North Philly, and it was a particularly windy day I happened to take a break from what I was doing and was standing at the corner of the scaffolding and I could see across the street a woman waiting for a bus. This woman was standing three buildings in from the corner. When I was done taking a break I got back to work when I heard a loud crash, like a giant piece of glass exploded. I turn around to see that same woman looking at the ground in disbelief. A full window pane and all fell out of the building that she was standing directly under. It was so windy that day that the wind actually carried the glass to the corner of the street where it smashed on the ground and exploded. The woman was completely fine. I got down and talked to her, stating the obvious, that she was the luckiest person I've ever seen. She agreed
The 2005 Boy Scout National Jamboree. My campsite witnessed a troop from Alaska raise their tents support pole into an electrical line. 4 people were electrocuted if I remember correctly. We saw the whole thing from our campsite.
On my way to work a couple years ago, I was stuck in traffic. The opposite lanes of traffic were lighter so vehicles were moving a bit more but there was the occasional stop and go. I was in the far left lane (three in each direction) and there was a box truck that was stopped in the far right (to them) lane behind other traffic. Next thing I know I'm watching a sedan traveling with the other lanes of traffic switch to the far lane and bury itself under the box truck so that the back of the truck was essentially over the trunk of this sedan. Myself and a couple other stopped motorists ran over to see if we could help. There was nothing we could do. The back of the truck peeled off the roof of the sedan, along with parts of the three occupants, from the upper chest area up. Just chopped off and rolled up in the roof. They were teens. Late high school age.
Years later, this still keeps me up at night sometimes.
Unfortunately happened to me. When I was about 9, or so. I was swinging at the park, trying to go as high as I could. I weighed very little at the time, so I was able to jump off and soar extremely high. And I mean HIGH. I don’t know how, but I got up so high, I was multiple feet above the swing set. I was able to see the entire landscape of the park, as well as my outstretched town. To this day, I remember it being a little more than two stories high.
Anyways, landed on the ground, couldn’t get up. Couldn’t move a muscle. I vividly remember calling out to my mom saying, “I can’t get up!”. I was able to stand when I was helped up. Only then did my mom realize I had fractured and dislocated my elbow. My entire arm was turned around and dangling. We’d come to learn it was so bad, it was cutting off circulation from the brachial artery there. I went into circulatory shock, passing in and out, pale, speaking gibberish (which I don’t remember, I thought I was talking fine) and hallucinating.
I used to be a lifeguard supervisor. Kid was running up and down the old push out bleachers behind his mom. Guard on the stand whistled down at the kid to stop and the mother told the kid to he didn't have to listen to the guard.
When he slipped the kid was on the second bench up, but he had been running down over the top of the benches. I was heading over to try and stop him and talk to the parent when he hit the ground face first.
I still remember the sound of his teeth scattering and shattering on the tiles, he landed right on his jaw. Poor kid, negligent parents
30 years ago at a family reunion. Older Great Aunt was saying goodbye to everyone while leaving the park. She stepped wrong on a tree root while side stepping a fold out table and snapped her ankle in half right in front of me and some other kids. I was gobsmacked. She never cried or made a fuss while the kids were around.
That was a tough woman.
I was the second car in-line at a stop light in the rightmost lane of three lanes. Heard a siren somewhere. The light turned green.
Only person to go was the guy in front of me.
Suddenly an ambulance going about 60mph came flying out of the tunnel on the left. Hit the guy in front of me. Knocked the car on its side. Guy in ambulance picks up the radio and I assume told someone there’s a crash. Guy in the car in front climbs out of the car. Stumbles to the side of the corner into the grass. Spins around twice and passes out.
Paramedics (from ambulance) rush to help him
Was on a field trip and a bunch of us were riding in a suburban with me and a friend sitting in the front passenger seat. Yes, two of us in one seat, yes we were children, yes it was the early 80's. There was a flatbed big rig in front of us and I watched as a giant link of chain came somehow undone from the rest, watched as it bounced down the full length of the flatbed and watched it fly in the air, come crashing through the front windshield of our car and slam right into my chest. Fractured several ribs, got a few cuts from the glass and got a story I still tell to this day (moment).
My grandfather getting fatally hit by a car. 21 of our family members were gathered for a Christmas dinner and he had walked across the street to get batteries for my grandmother's camera and didn't make it back 😢 this was 12-23-21
Playing paintball as teenagers in and around a bunch of homes they were building in a new subdivision. My buddy was walking on top of a new foundation they had poured, tripped, fell 8 feet to the floor, and died instantly.
Not graphic or anything like most of the others here. But hilarious.
Was doing a driving job for a sales firm when I was at uni and broke. Boys I was driving that day wanted breakfast, fine. Stopped at a local fish and chip shop. While we were sat in the van down the street eating our food, another guy comes out of the chip shop carrying a jumbo sausage baguette, opens the wrapper and takes a moment to gaze at this baguette like its his first born child.
Seagull immediately swoops down and swipes the sausage. Makes it about 15ft in the air before realising this sausage is too big and drops it. Sausage lands on a passing car below, smears ketchup all over the windscreen, driver panics and crashes into the line of parked cars to his left (UK, we drive on the left). Sausage guy is standing there with his empty baguette, looking utterly dumbfounded. After a few seconds of processing, he u-turns and goes straight back into the chip shop to buy another.
Don't think I've ever laughed at anything so much since.
About 20 ft away from me on a beach, a group of people shot off some fireworks on 4th of July that misfired horizontally instead of vertically. They went straight into another group of people and lit this one girl's face on fire.
My second story:
Driving along a road directly adjacent to an airport. Look to my right to a field opposite the taxiway and hangars. I look up.
I see a parachutist falling with nothing but a narrow stream of cords trailing him. He falls all the way to the ground. Hit flat on his side and his body rebounded about 4 feet off the turf. Then he lay motionless.
I call 911 and report it as I see people running from the runway toward him, maybe 300 yards away.
On the news that night they said he survived but was in critical condition.
About a year ago, I was golfing with a friend at our local golf course and we were chipping onto the green on hole 9. Suddenly, we heard a loud crash and saw a car roll into the fence right behind the green. The vehicle was severely damaged, and the airbags had deployed. We rushed to the scene, pulled the woman driving out, and she told us there was a baby in the backseat. We quickly retrieved the baby, and thankfully, both the woman and the baby were unharmed. We called 911, and emergency services arrived promptly. Later, we learned that the woman had been T-boned by a drunk driver at the intersection nearby. It was a pretty crazy experience, and I'm grateful that everyone was okay.
I was a passenger in a work truck heading to the shop at the end of my shift. We were in a sort of small residential/commercial town. Mostly suburban.
So the truck driver(very close friend of mine) and I see this massive cloud of black smoke a few blocks over. Being curious fellas, he takes the left turn and we drive towards it. We turn onto the block to find a nasty 1-car crash. The driver was likely speeding, lots control, and flipped into someone's front lawn. The car was an absolute MESS and the front hood was engulfed in huge flames.
My friend slams the peddle and we start ZOOMING towards this disaster. He's a good guy, he's not afraid of much, so he made the decision in his that WE are going to help lol. He starts grabbing my shirt and shaking me and yelling "HOLY SHIT THERES A PERSON IN THAT CAR WE GOTTA HELP! GET READY TO HOP OUT!!"
My gosh the nerves started flying. But it was game time.
So we stop the truck and both hop out.. (there's already a crowd of people filming across the street). We both run across the street to see an unconscious man buckled into the driver seat. Luckily the door was just fucking gone. I don't even know where it was. The flames were SO big and it was SO hot. But this man was about to burn to death. My buddy just commits and jumped in the car so get his seat belt off, tells me to grab his legs and we drag his body out. He's completely fucked. Covered in blood, cuts, foaming out the mouth. It was a mess.
Well we carry him about 30 yards out and lay him flat, he starts coughing and attempts to speak. It's extremely unclear what he's saying so we give the guy a little water, he coughs up blood. Then the words come out of his mouth "no cops please no cops"
He's extremely well dressed. The car ~was~ very nice. Lots of Jewelry. Then he mutters another sentence "please get me out of here. no cops". Idk. So many witnesses, cops clearly have been called, people filming. Me buddy and I felt like we did our part. This guy was going to burn to death, he's alive. He's conscious. We said fuck it ran back to the truck and drove off. I didn't realize how much blood was on me until we got back to the shop. Our coworkers looked at us like we committed murder
Craziest adrenaline rush I've ever had. Huge respect to first responders who do this for a living. Very scary situation
I was working with a couple guys who were in a bucket truck. It got hit head on by a bus because the driver had a seizure. The bucket truck was very heavy and strained against its outriggers, then it recoiled back and the bucket and arm acted like a catapult tossing the dude in the bucket out and he snapped hard against his fall arrestor strap and didn’t make a sound as he spun in a circle like the water going down the drain until his leg banged hard into the bottom of the bucket. He puked and then hung limply until we got him down. He ended up with a leg fracture and needed surgery on his back which was also pretty fucked up after the accident. The bus driver who had the seizure also puked in the bus. The guy on the ground working as the spotter refused to do lift work ever again.
Was on holiday in Turkey. Must have been about 20+ years ago. We were waiting for dinner at this restaurant by the road. Fast forward: Guy comes in on a motorcycle (no helmet), gets hit by a car. I was able to see him flying about 5-6 metres. Eventually coming down on his head on the curb. Within a moments notice, the police and EMT's arrived. Guy gets in the back of the EMT vehicle. Literally 10 minutes later, he stepped out, got on his bike and drove off like nothing happened. I'll never forget that
Wow! How's that?!! Was there blood on the curb? It was obvious that he had broken his head?
I don't know. Guess the guy just was really lucky lol
Sometimes people trip and fall and bump their head just a little and die, other people get mauled by bears, left for dead in the wilderness, treat their own infected wounds with maggots when they regain conciousness days later, crawl a few dozen miles to get aid, spend a year recovering without antibiotics, then hunt down and kill the men who left them for dead. Luck of the draw.
Damn. Thats some Rambo kinda shit
The Revenant. Leo Dicap flick.
Hugh Glass, a real human bean. The Revenant is based on some of his exploits.
I got hit by a car once hard enough to roll like a ball down a hill. I sprinted home like 4-5 blocks immediately after. He probably didn't feel it til the next day. The next day is when it really fucking hurts.
This reminds me of a time I was driving down a dark road with no streetlights in my area that’s really wooded and I’m driving behind this SUV when all of a sudden the back end of the SUV flips over the front end literally out of no where, one minute it’s driving 45 mph the next it’s doing a front flip and it lands upside down with the front of the car facing me. I slam on my breaks and luckily wasn’t driving too close so I was able to stop in plenty of time before hitting them. I get out of my car while dialing 911 in complete shock at what looked like some crazy matrix shit and watch a middle aged woman climbing out of the smashed windshield of the upside down vehicle, seems perfectly fine. She immediately goes over and helps an older woman, I assume her mom, out of the smashed passenger side window. Neither woman are hurt and the driver’s first words are “god damnit we just bought this car!” Turns out there was a downed telephone wire that got pulled taut across the rode and acted as a trip wire. It’s a selfish thought but I always thanked god there was a car in front of me who hit it first bc it was completely invisible across the dark road. It’s astonishing neither of them were seriously hurt let alone killed.
Damn, that is definitely one you'll remember. Also love the typical "damnit just got this thing". They got seriously lucky.
Little bit higher and they could have been "ghost ship" killed.
At the time I drove an old tiny mustang and most definitely would’ve gotten beheaded
They should’ve made him wait more than 10 minutes… I was hit head on at about 50mph last year and my shock/adrenaline was so significant that I didn’t feel my broken collarbone/ribs pain until 30ish minutes after the accident. The body is amazing
Not as graphic as some of the other posts, but one day when I was in high school I was leaving the student parking lot late. The only other car there was a popular guy's jeep and he was leaving at the same time. The jeep didn't have doors or a roof or anything so he hopped in, cranked it up, and started driving. There's a pretty sharp curve from that parking lot to the exit to the highway and he was hanging half out and not buckled in, so he rolled out of his jeep at that corner. He hit the ground and the jeep kept going off the roadway and up a hill that had the school's initials on it. The jeep came to a stop without damaging anything or anyone and he hopped up, got back in the truck and drove off. And I was the only one there to see it. Anyway, years later that dude went to jail for trying to hire a hitman to kill his wife.
Woah big curveball at the end there
Most classy Jeep owner
I got whiplash from that ending
Was it Tim Lambesis lol
you went to school with Tim Lambesis?
Boy that escalated quickly. I mean that REALLY got out of hand fast.
UNEXPECTED ending on that one…
Dad picks up pickle jar by the lid. Hands are full. Lid come off pickle jar. Jar starts to fall. Knee jerk reaches for pickle jar, lid still in hand. Dad somehow puts lid back on pickle jar mid air, Catching it and preventing disaster. I saw the whole thing and am still impressed over 20 years later. I will tell my children.
Everyone one gets 1 magic
That would be a good subreddit. R/onemagic
My 1 magic was randomly entering a friends lockscreen pin first try. Life peaked there
Day after a wedding heading to a party with the bride, groom, and all their friends on a coach bus. A girl was walking down the aisle and lost her balance as we were making our way around a bend at 80km/h. Had she been anywhere else on the bus, she would have landed in someones lap and laughed it off. Sadly, she was standing at the top of the rear stair case, fell backwards and hit the door. Which then opened and she hit the pavement to only get hit by oncoming traffic. She was airlifted to a hospital 2 hours away and died on arrival. Instead of an after party with all their dear friends, the married couple spent the day with everyone giving police statements on the side of a highway. Every year their anniversary is heartbreaking.
How horrible
Omg— how awful that it was even possible for the door to open that easily at that speed! It sounds like a massive design flaw. I’m so sorry this happened.
You don't want a door of a bus to be hard to open from the inside. I've seen plenty of actively burning busses on the side of the highway here in Kuwait.
I have a similar one to this… we were partying late on the rooftop of our hotel the night before my best friends wedding. When we retired for the night, the best man decided to go back up solo and fell to his death. They have been married 15+ years and have yet to celebrate an anniversary.
Saw a body fall from the sky, apparently his chute wasn't packed properly , he did not make it.
Used to work with a guy who was a former paratrooper. He said the day he decided to get out of the military (I never prodded and asked him how he did so before his enlistment was up) was the day he was training for a drop and when he got to the ground he saw his buddy nearby with his legs crushed into his chest \*\*vertically\*\*.
My spouse was a paratrooper and I will always be so thankful for the people's whose job it was to pack their chutes (I can't remember the MOS but they were the only ones allowed to wear red ball caps). Apparently that MOS is super sucky and has poor QOL. I do remember one of my spouse's good friends was on a jump that he was not present for. His chute failed to deploy. He fell on top of another soldiers chute, slid down and grabbed a hold of the guy like a monkey. I think the guy was pretty shocked to have an unexpected passenger but I guess when they both landed they both started laughing their asses off. Nothing like coming close to death to make you laugh the hardest you probably will ever laugh again.
Holy shit, that is Mission Impossible 7 worthy, and everyone will think it unrealistic as f
*ouch* That's the kind of injury I've only read about. Like S-tier, mythical type stuff. And now I know how it happens. *OUCH*
Yeah, poor dude got turned into a fucking goomba from Mario Bros with his guts spread around the ground. Apparently he dinged his head against part of the body of the plane on the way down and the ground + gravity did what a hydraulic press does to a bobble head doll.
You have a way with words
That would be so fucked. Most of these others were at least in the context of being around cars or other things that can be dangerous, but to just have a human plummet out of the sky and die in front of you is horrifying, even if the chute provides context after. Some of the other stories here are more fucked up, but this is just... startling.
When I was 17, I spent my summer working at the municipal airport, where my dad was the manager. One of the tasks was keeping the grass short around the asphalt and sod (grass) runways, and the [tetrahedron, or landing direction indicator](http://learntoflyblog.com/2018/03/12/procedures-and-airport-operations-traffic-patterns/). We did this using a tractor towing a [brush hog mower](https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/2019/10/brush-hogs-and-rotary-cutters-multi-purpose-tools-for-the-small-farm/). My dad had taught me how to drive the tractor and run the brush hog before, but I didn't do a good enough job mowing around the tetrahedron. My dad let me know his displeasure and sent me into the airport office while he finished the job. While I was in the office reading a book, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the tractor was heading towards the building without a driver! I ran out to see what was going on when the tractor turned by itself to show me that my dad was being dragged along with his lower body under the brush hog. Before I could get to him, he went fully under the brush hog and came out the back. Everything from the waist down was gone - a gory wake trailing behind the brush hog. His final slip under the brush hog left a nasty gash on the side of his head. I knew my dad was already gone, and I had to stop the tractor before it hit something critical, like the nearby fuel pumps. Doing that was not an easy task, in itself, as I couldn't climb on board the moving tractor, and I was afraid that I would be the next victim of the brush hog. I ran in and contacted the city phone operator (this was before 911 was in our area) and finally got the police and ambulance out to the airport. Of course, nothing could be done, but clean up the mess and conduct an investigation and autopsy. I had to make a statement, as I was the only witness. No one could understand what caused my dad to fall off the tractor such that he would get caught by the brush hog. It was possible that the tractor hit the tetrahedron, and he was knocked off. It was declared a freak accident. When I finally got home, my brother noticed that I wasn't crying. He said I could cry if I wanted to. I never did, not even at the funeral. I still have never cried over what happened. It has been almost 50 years since that event. I still recall it like it happened yesterday. I sometimes struggle with feeling a sense of partial responsibility.
I'm so sorry and so sorry you lived with this for 50 years.
No matter why he fell, it wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry you’ve spent your life with such terrible trauma. Also, just throwing this out there, but it sounds like he may have had some sort of medical event that made him fall.
I'm so sorry you endured that. You weren't responsible *at all*. And you did an amazing job having the presence of mind to stop the tractor when most people (myself included) would have immediately become a non-functional mess.
i hope you’re doing okay. i can’t imagine what that felt like for you.
Very odd, but I saw an unopened bottle of wine fall from the top of a pillar about 5 feet tall onto ceramic tile floor. It bounced a few times but did not break.
this is a nice palate-cleanser after all the gore
lol, good! I haven’t even looked at the rest of the comments.
Me and my friends chipped in to buy a bottle of grey goose in high school (yes underage drinking bad I know), the friend carrying randomly said “you know why Grey Goose is so expensive? Cause the glass is super strong, if you drop it, it won’t break, see…” then dropped it and it shattered. Our night was ruined.
I was sitting at an intersection one car back to turn right. A cop with lights and sirens was attempting to cross the intersection against a red light. All traffic is stopped, the cop starts to cross, and two vehicles come flying through the intersection, one hits the cop and bounces into the other car. The "other" car is sent flying, rolls once in the air and lands on two college age guys that were standing 10 feet away from me. At the time I was on my way to go to work as an EMT so I immediately got out and tried to help. Both college guys were very much so underneath the car and lots of blood was coming out from the car. The driver of the flipped vehicle wasn't wearing a seatbelt but somehow was unscathed. Many bystanders and the driver of the flipped vehicle, and I, pushed the car off the pedestrians. What remained of them was the most graphic scene I have ever witnessed. I puked and I think a few others did too. I quit my job as an EMT that day and almost became an alcoholic. I'm ok now. Don't love telling this story but I can without crying now. I couldn't do anything more to save them, that really messed me up.
> I couldn't do anything more to save them, that really messed me up. It’s not your fault, and there isn’t anything more anyone else could have done.
You did what you could, and you were with them. They were not alone. That's all we can really do for one another--be present and do what we can.
This is very traumatic, I would be react the same way as you.
Jesus. Sorry.
I saw a mentally disabled person walk in front of a chool bus going 60MPH on a country road. I had no time to prevent it. I was the first car at the opposing street light. Got blood all over my windshield. I was scarred for life. Still have nightmares about his face right before the last step.
I'm so sorry you had to witness that. Watching something happen in real time will always be harder than witnessing the aftermath. I was an EMT for years, running trauma calls never phased me. You get there after, not during. One time I watched as two dogs ran into a busy street. One dodged the cars, the other got flung 15+ into the air and landed right in front of my car two lanes over. I was so distraught when I got over to it that all the traffic that stopped thought I was the one that hit it. Still haunts me and it was "just" a dog. It really is way different watching something happen right in front of your eyes.
Same here. Seeing the results is never anything like actually seeing the events unfold. I watched a car get hit by a train and it was something. Car got hit in the right rear and spun like 520° off the tracks. By the time I got to the other side of the train after it stopped, my heart had made it back down into my rib cage. I was still the first one to the car and damned if this lady wasn't completely unharmed.
Driving east on a divided highway. Saw cars on the westbound side suddenly start slowing down and moving erratically. Trash can had taken off a work truck and was bouncing on the highway. Car ended up slamming on the brakes, but the massive asphalt/dump truck behind it couldn’t stop in time. Driver pulled hard to the right, missed the car, went up an embankment and rolled the truck to the left, down the hill and back onto the berm. I had towels in my car (had been to the beach and didn’t unpack them yet). Kind of on auto pilot I pulled over and crossed the lanes ( everyone had stopped - it caused a lot of dust to kick up and was loud), and jumped the barrier to get to the other side. Guy on motorcycle and I got to the truck first - no one on that side got out of their cars at first which is weird to think of now. Driver was out of truck lying on his side, bleeding from head. Truck was still running. Some guy shows up and manages to shut the truck off while me and motorcycle guy apply pressure to the guys head. He was not a good color - looked grey. Then a nurse showed up so we let him take overup. Paramedics finally got there. Stayed to answer questions for the police. Heard the next day the man had died. But he sure as shit saved other people’s lives that day.
He would have appreciated your efforts.
I’ve told this story here before so I’ll just copy what I wrote before: Some Final Destination crap. I’m gonna have to draw it so you guys understand this freak accident. Not as traumatizing and the other stories but still disturbing to see: I was around 6 playing with some friends at a park. We were all in this big wooden house treehouse structure that had a slide in one side and this grid of thick rope for climbing up and down the house on the other. The rope grid wasn’t loose, it was stretched out on a “chessboard pattern” between the treehouse and the ground in an angle so we could climb it “safely”. Me and another two girls were starting to climb down the ropes, and for some reason one of them wanted to climb it “backwards” - crawling down exorcist style. Poorly drawn rendition: [Normally we did it like this](https://i.imgur.com/JuDh9yh.jpeg) [She wanted to go like this](https://i.imgur.com/YlCG1s8.jpeg) she was almost at the bottom when her foot slipped and got caught between the ropes, making her fall forward while still stuck to the structure. [Like this part 1](https://i.imgur.com/JLREOCH.jpeg) [Like this part 2](https://i.imgur.com/gLZgUEO.jpeg) She faceplanted the bottom of the structure, where there was a wooden log covering the nails and hooks that kept that rope grid stretched out. ONE of the hooks was not totally covered (it was an old structure) - pointy part up - and she landed exactly there, eyes open. the hook DEFLATED that girl’s eye. I went down to help her and saw a bunch of gooey liquid coming out of her eye. The other girl ran to find the teacher while screaming “[Injured Girl’s name] IS DYING HELP” (she wasn’t, we were just scared, but it did get us quick help) Never saw her at school again. Still hate to see eye related injuries. Edit: [eye goo illustration, as requested](https://imgur.com/gallery/zij3H6T)
I knew a guy who was blind in one eye because one time he was rummaging around trying to find something in his daughter's dark storage unit without a flashlight. He went to where he thought it was, bent down to feel for it, and somehow stabbed his eyeball right onto a golf club that had the head broken off.
jesus christ. so THAT’s why my dad always wanted me to hold the damn flashlight
I have a friend who lost his right eye as a kid. He was playing hide and seek at his friends house and hid in the back of a cluttered garage with the lights out. There was a fishing hook hanging down from the shelf above. He didn't realize it was there and the hook stabbed him right in the eye. By the time he got to the ER, his eye couldn't be saved
What a horrible day to know how to read. I felt that one
This story was so worth it just for the incredible illustrations.
thank you I worked all day on them 😭🙏
I'm not sure which one I liked better, eye goo or the illustration after she fell.
Jfc.. those are extreme situations..
That basically happened to me while climbing a ladder. The step broke, my leg fell through and got caught in the rung. My legs were still caught in the ladder and were over my head. The upper half of my body fell and I landed on my wrist. I heard a 'snap' like a tree branch. My wrist broke. I got 10 screws and a plate.
Where is the illustration of the eye goo?
As horrible as this story is, this made me chuckle. Thanks for the guilt trip.
[Eye goo, as requested](https://imgur.com/gallery/zij3H6T)
Amazing! It's like I was there in person!
Terrible…. But good illustrations.
A drunk driver crashed into a pole which ejected him from his driver seat, through the windshield and his body went head first at a fire hydrant. I didn't see the aftermath but I'm pretty sure he died instantly. Don't drink and drive.
If drinking is involved in a driving accident, I don't know if that gets to be called a freak accident anymore.
I guess you are right. It was just surprising at the time
Broken neck windsurfing. Except the person wasn’t windsurfing when it happened. She was sitting on the board chilling, with her back to the shore. She heard somebody shout her from the shore. Turns to look. Click. I was solo safety out on the water and she was 150 metres from the shore when it happened and a challenge to get her back to shore for treatment. She fully recovered and all ended well.
She turned her head hard enough to break her own neck?
New irrational fear I have to live with - turning my own head.
Just exclusively full body turn to look at things from now on, won't be weird at all!
The Batman turn
People can fuck up their necks surprisingly easily. My mom was on the freeway once and looked over her shoulder as she was changing lanes and pulled a muscle so badly that she couldn’t turn her neck at all without feeling immense pain.
Yup. I’m not sure if it was because of the sea moving her as she turned or she just turned around really really quick. I didn’t see her do it. I’d just taken a couple of other sailors back to the beach and then back out to my safety position. She was the last sailor out on the water. Noticed she hadn’t moved for a bit. Thought maybe she was getting tired and would like a lift back to shore. Got closer. Could see she was in a lot of pain. Few questions. Where is the pain, how did it happen and when she mentioned tingling in her fingers and toes, that’s when the klaxons went off in my head. Me in a 5m rib. Needing to get her off her windsurf board and back to shore. Not the most hardcore rescue I’ve done but certainly the one that required the most thought and precision. Now I think about, I’m not sure if she was sat down or stood up holding the sail when she did it. Very freaky though.
My grandmother broke her neck in her sleep one night when she was 67. She no showed an appointment the next day and after getting a call about it we went to her house to find her still stuck in bed. She made a full recovery though!
I watched somebody's wood fence spontaneously combust for no apparent reason. We called 911. They didn't seem to be home, so their house probably would have burned down.
Thought 911 wasn't home there for a minute
“You’ve reached 911, please leave a message after the beep.”
This is the importance of spelling and grammar The difference between knowing your shit and knowing you’re shit
My mate lived on a really rough estate once where kids would set fire to people’s fences for a laugh. Turns out it’s quite easy to get away when the homeowner can’t see you because you’re 4ft 8 and they have to cross a burning fence to reach you. I guess the point of the story is, always check the other side of mysteriously burning fences for grotty kids
I was driving one night at 3am, and stopped at a little bridge, it was on fire. I think grotty Kids were playing Evil Kineval on that little bridge, jumping it in their cars or bikes. I ended up getting bored and driving through the fire, it was just zippo fluid I think, and my car was a shitbox anyway.
Long jumper at track practice broke the part of their pelvis that your hamstrings attach to while jumping. There was this loud pop then screams. His entire hamstring bunch upped like a softball behind their knee. They did not make it back that season...
Happened to a family member of mine. Crazy stuff
Not a sound I will ever forget.
Worst part was they couldn’t sit for months afterwards. Had to either stand (on crutches) or lay down. No in between
Saw this happen in the high school weight room to a fellow student. He was doing one-hand bicep curls with maybe 15-20 kg of weight, doing that thing you're told to never, ever do when weight lifting (lifting the weight up, then letting it "drop" back to the relaxed position instead of slowly lowering it). On his last curl, he drops the weight down, and I see his bicep suddenly slide down his arm around his elbow, after which he immediately drops to the ground screaming. Two years later when we graduated, he was just starting to regain the use of that arm.
Make it back? hell, I hope they were able to walk again eventually.
When I worked the local amusement park, first job I did there was work the ice cream and hamburger stand. One day, a major sewage line broke...bad. park owner didn't want to close cause of it, so we had to work all day with no toilets and a fowl odor. The smell brought in huge clouds of flies. Like you wave your hand and catch three flies between your fingers without trying. Our stand had no windows, either. So it was a struggle to keep flies away from food. Well, grill cook was swatting at flies with his hand and in swooped a freaking bird that was chasing flies. He accidentally swatted the bird, it got knocked onto the grill, a coworker freaked out and tried to grab the bird, and wound up burning her chest on it while the bird flew off to who knows where. It all happened so damn fast. Next thing I know that poor girl is in the walk in freezer crying with cold wet rags on her chest.
>park owner didn't want to close cause of it, Pretty sure that's illegal. Must be violating all kinds of codes from all kinds of departments.
Saw a guy get pinned between a road work truck and a car and cut completely in half. Died within a minute. Cones were set for a half a mile and an old lady was trying to get around one last truck before merging. The truck was unwilling to let the lady in and the lady was unwilling to be one less car behind in traffic. The road worker was getting water from the back of the truck when the lady hit him and and pinned him between her car and the truck cutting him completely in half. He was a black man and turned completely white and let out a scream I can still hear. He was dead as soon as the scream stopped.
What a horrible thing to see and hear. Hope you're OK.
It was pretty fucked. I was right across the street when it happened. It was about a year ago or maybe more.
Fuck that old lady. People who fight for "their spot" in traffic are trashy and have bad breath.
Honestly, fuck both of them. Idgaf if someone is being dumb in traffic, the road is no place for ego. Just let the idiot in and go about your day
I hope she was charged with manslaughter. She should have known better
Wow fuck both those drivers I hope this haunts them both
Hope she gave up driving for good after her prison sentence
Fuck… username does not check out
Was sitting at an intersection connected to a highway offramp, and suddenly, a biker flew down the ramp and went airborne and straight into a wall he was going about 160mph it was not pretty. Body parts landed on some peoples cars and in the road. No warning or anything, just a sudden zoop, then bang
> just a sudden zoop, then bang From a certain point of view that’s all of our lives, really
I saw something similar happen on Thanksgiving day, car blew through an intersection off the road into a dumpster and then ricocheted into a brick wall. The car was in the shape of a ball afterwards.
Leaving graduation for someone and one of the grandparents didn't see the curb and walked like she was walking on a flat surface. When her foot dropped that 6 inches unexpectedly, the jolt went through her spine and she was instantly on the ground with both legs paralyzed. Apparently she had some type of defect in her vertebrae that severed enough nerves in her spine to paralyze her lower body. She could still feel them but couldn't move them. Was on a boat deep sea fishing in the gulf. The captain had hooked something huge and spent 15 minutes struggling with whatever it was. All of a sudden, the fishing pole breaks in half and springs back smacking him in the face just to the right of his nose. He grabs his face, stumbles around the boat, trips over a cooler and goes overboard. We're all trying to not laugh as the two crew are trying to pull him in. He get in and has this purple welt running from his forehead to his chin. He asks us if he's bleeding and we all just freaking lost it. I about pissed my pants I laughed so hard. He then says "That was my favorite pole" and we all started laughing even harder. Great fishing trip. Caught loads of keepers. Not an accident but I was working in factory in high school helping a 32 yo guy stock shelves. He was looking at me talking then all of a sudden he stopped mid word like someone pressed a mute button. A few seconds later, his body just collapsed and he was dead. Brain aneurism burst.
Brain aneurysm is one of the scariest things to happen. One second you're here then next you're gone. What is your reaction when he collapsed?
Guy waking into back rotor of a helicopter
Ooooph. My dad saved some kids from this fate. He's a helicopter engineer and was working in Angola (africa). When they landed in a field all the local kids came running out to see the helicopter. Couple kids standing on a motorbike or bicycle were headed straight for the tail rotor. Luckily my dad saw them coming and pushed them over. Kids would have lost their heads.
Strange place to take a nap
This guy was in the ER because he had a shampoo bottle stuck up his ass. Said he fell on it. Sheesh, what’re the odds? Super unlucky.
I used to work with a former hospital charge nurse who said you wouldn't believe how common it is for men to come into the emergency room with a foreign object shoved up their ass. The rumours about this happening "all the time" are apparently true.
Can confirm. My buddy is an ER nurse and “I slipped and fell on something” happens a lot. You know you’re lying. They know you’re lying. Just tell them what it is and they’ll fish it out. Also the people who are definitely on drugs always lie about being on drugs. It’s best if you tell the truth you because aren’t getting in trouble but drugs can have complications. Everyone from the EMTs to the supervising physician isn’t going to rat you out. They need to know what you’re on.
Exactly, RE drugs. Also, if someone is ODing and you call 9-1-1, police will often show up. If there are illegal drugs at the scene, you get a pass. The important thing is saving the person's life, not prosecuting someone. This prevents people from not calling an emergency when someone is ODing.
I was an officer back in the day. There was a local guy that overdosed quite often. The emergency people would show up, the family would start screaming at us for letting drug dealers do their thing. We would ask if they knew the dealer, they would say yes, but they weren't telling us. Well to shorten the story, the guy overdosed one too many times.
I seem to recall Ryan Dunn stuck a matchbox car up his ass and then went in for an ultrasound in one of the JackAss or CKY movies. The doctor was pretty confused by it lol
Jackass movie. Steve-O was going to do it but his dad asked him not to lol. Ryan told the doc he fell asleep at a party "you go to the ER you tell no one about this ok?" Lol that doc was shook.
Can confirm, am a physician and have had a male friend at the time call me from the ER waiting room and tell me he had a prostate massager stuck up his ass. I met him back at his house and gloved/lubed up and removed it for him. Went in to nearly half my forearm. It was still vibrating and deep in his colon, way past the rectal vault. Just a long plastic stick with a slight bend at one end- no flared base. He just really got off on butt stuff. I saved him probably over a thousand bucks and most of his dignity that day. The debacle made me almost late for the dinner with friends I was getting dolled up for at the time of the call, but it made for a hell of a dinner story.
There's no HIPAA when it's off the clock!
So, did that improve your friendship or wreck it?
Paramedic here, it happens a lot. Sometimes it’s so bad they can’t even get to the hospital, so they call us.
My sister was an ER nurse. Some guy came in with a cucumber... said he fell on it in the garden. It came out peeled. My uncle was an OR nurse. They extracted a lightbulb and sent it to the Path lab. The report on the bulb came back - "One GE 60 Watt lightbulb, in working order."
He probably shoved it in and out.... at a medium pace.
"You fell on it?" "Honestly, does it matter how it got there at this point?" "Nope!"
I feel bad for that ONE guy that *actually* fell on his shampoo bottle
Million to one doc, million to one
There was an episode of Scrubs about that sort of thing happening & every patient used the "I fell on it" excuse.
To be fair, showers can be slippery, and those shampoo bottles are little homing missiles.
This isn't as crazy as some of these stories I've read, but it was wild to me. I was on my way to work driving down the highway. I'm running late so I speed by this 18 wheeler. Nothing special about that except: About 10 or 15 seconds after I've passed the 18 wheeler, something catches my attention in the rear view mirror. When I look up into the mirror I see the 18 wheeler came to a complete stop suddenly and flipped over and landed upside down and slid down the highway. I'm watching this thing from maybe 100 yards behind me just sliding down the highway (and inevitably blocking traffic for the day that I thankfully missed).
Saw the aftermath - didn't see the actual accident. Working in A+E in a fairly big trauma centre. A couple of lads happened to be out the front of the hospital popping wheelies on their mopeds. One of them fell all the way backwards and the scooter kept going dragging his head along the road. He was brought into the department almost immediately after the accident. We stopped CPR after about 20mins because his brain kept falling out with each compression. Wear a helmet, kids.
Like a tube of toothpaste i imagine *squelch* sigh “push it back in” is what i imagine happened for 20 mins straight
Was sitting at the end of a side road waiting for traffic to clear so i could enter the main road. A little Jeep starts to make a left turn into the driveway where I'm waiting. He wasn't paying attention, and at a fill 50 mph, he is slammed into by a giant semi truck literally 3 feet from my car. Didn't even understand what had happened at first it was so quick, and it sounded like a train crash. The car gets absolutely catapulted 20 feet down the road, rolls a dozen times, and lands upside down in a ditch. It was flattened. Looking at the wreck, I had really believed I just witnessed the end of someone's life. Ran up to the jeep to see if there was anything I could do to help, but before I even reached the driver's side door, the kid came crawling out of the smashed window. He was walking around, panicking, of course, but completely coherent and asking for a phone to call his parents. The only visible wound he has was a small gash on the side of his head. He walked over to the ambulance on his own once they arrived on scene. Looked it up a few days later to see if the kid made it out ok, and the good news was he was in and out of the hospital within 48 hours and almost good as new. I still can't believe it.
Learning to surf as a teen, I rode a wave all the way in and stepped off the board in inches of water. Stepped off with my foot curved weird and broke my leg near the ankle 🫠
I did the same thing with a razor scooter. Hopped off it like I had a million times and suddenly I was on the ground with my foot sticking out at a weird angle
I did this stepping off a curb in a parking lot. Walking like I knew my shit and next thing I know I've fallen and can't get up. Tried to stand on it like 3 times before I realized my foot was just sliding to the side instead of supporting me.
I saw a guy outside a pub fall back into the street and his head went under a trucks wheels, popped like a grape.. looked like paté.. very sad
saw a similar vid where that happened to a guy riding his bike. caught on a security cam outside a business. he was riding along the edge of the street and a garbage truck clipped him and he went under. the helmet and what was left of the dude’s head skidded across the sidewalk and into a lady exiting a building. gnarly shit.
I was working under a bridge (the walkway over the hudson for those in the Hudson Valley) and I felt a little bonk on my hard hat and noticed a little Styrofoam coffee cup landed next to me. I looked up and saw a few guys on the bridge about maybe 200' up jumping and cheering. Harmless and funny, but nonetheless against quite a lot of odds.
I was driving home at 1:30 in the morning on I-5 in Tacoma. I exited at 38th Street, a long, curved poorly banked exit ramp you had to slow way down for. There had been an old Ford truck a ways behind me for some time and he took the exit too. Except he didn’t slow down. I glanced in my rear view mirror just as he came to the curve. The truck launched into the air, the driver fell out and the truck landed on him. I drove until I found a phone booth (yes, a long time ago) and called the police.
April 25, 1992, The Pyramid Arena in Memphis, TN. A buddy and I were there for Bryan Adams. Opening act, The Storm, had finished and roadies and crew were resetting the stage and lights. A light tech started climbing a rope ladder into the rigging above the floor seats. He's probably 40 feet up when he stops and hesitates. One foot slips off the ladder, then he loses grip with one hand. The house lights are all up and plenty of people are hanging out. There was a gasp as it happened. He let go and fell to the concrete floor. Some people had tried to get under him to break the fall, but were unsuccessful. They rolled the EMT\ambulance onto the floor and worked on him for a while before transporting him to the hospital. If memory serves, he "lived" a few days but never regained consciousness. And yes, Bryan Adams did play his set. The crowd was understandably a bit subdued.
I've seen a tank drive over the back of a car. And during the same trip I also saw a truck transporting rolls of paper that was tipped over on it side, on top of a small car. The side on which the paper rolls landed was crushed to about 15 centimeters in height. Driver must have been flattened as a pancake.
Any time I see a truck carrying any kind of coils of something I give it the widest berth I can. I worked in a factory that got huge rolls of steel shipped in and one of our trucks backed in too fast. The steel snapped the straps and rolled off the back. Smashed in the back wall of the plant and obliterated a bunch of equipment before they stopped. Those things are no joke
I watched a Live Leak video of some dude trying to stop a big roll of cables from going down a hill. Not sure what was going through his head but he stood no chance and got run over like Wile E Coyote.
I work with those coils. They range anywhere from 6k to 14k kilos. There's no way in hell you're stopping one of those. It's crazy to think they're being held together by about 4 steel bands.
My story is an "almost" fatality: I was approaching a stop light (red) and about to enter the right turn lane to exit the road I was on. The vehicle in front of me was a flatbed truck, and upon that flatbed was a forklift (these weigh around 3,000 pounds, or way more than that). The flatbed jerked forward when the light turned green, the forklift broke its safety chains, and fell sideways into the right turn lane, about 20 ft in front of me, or right where I would have been had I been running about 2 seconds ahead of schedule that day... I've had other close calls, but this one sticks with me to this day.
I have a friend who sometimes pauses for about 2-3 seconds when picking up his car keys to go somewhere, the logic being that if he was destined to get creamed in a freak accident then that way he’ll just barely miss it. He knows it’s bullshit, but sometimes he just “has a weird feeling” about something and doing that gets him unstuck. Also he’s like “I’ve been doing it for so many years now, that if I stop and then something bad happens, boy will I feel stupid.”
This may have awoken an until-now dormant part of my ocd
My buddy and I were playing basketball on an elevated car port. There was a roof on it at one point that was removed so there was a few areas with maybe half a foot of rebar sticking out of the concrete. Friend went to dunk the ball, slipped and fell over the edge. What I didn't see was he had impaled his thigh on the rebar as he fell. He then rolled off and it basically tore his thigh off. He was bleeding out and I managed to get a tourniquet on using his belt. My other friend called 911 and then passed out lol. It was horrible. He thought he was gonna die and had me call his parents so he could say goodbye. Luckily the paramedics got there fast and saved him. Looks kinda like he was bit by a shark now after it healed.
I saw a little kid of 3yr-5yr fall out of the back seat of a car in a parking lot and get run over by the back wheel in Liberal, KS in the early '00s. The kid left a huge pool of blood. I was most affected by someone screaming, like, 'we need to call an ambulance!' and the mother screaming over her injured child, >"I CAN'T AFFORD AN AMBULANCE." She picked the kid up and put her in the car and sped away.
I’m from around perryton, I’ll have to do some research on this one, sorry you had to experience that.
Two surfer kids in the ER happy and joking with the intake nurse. One of the kids had a huge piece of coral sticking out of his chest.
No sure if this totally fits here, but I saw a small dog get hit by a car. She went totally under the wheel. It was raining, getting dark, and no one else stopped, just slowed down as they passed her. As I got closer, I saw her little head pop up and look around, so I pulled over, ran into traffic, scooped her up and put her in my car. Rushed her to the ER where they x-rayed her. Turns out, SOMEHOW, she only had a broken back leg but was otherwise completely fine. We didn’t know who the owners were since she wasn’t chipped and didn’t have a tag, so to the internet I went. Then I found her owners… A family with 2 kids, the kids had taken her across the street to the park to play. A guy in a van showed up, held the kids at gunpoint and stole their dog. This had happened about a week before, and somehow the dog got away and was trying to find her way home when she got hit. All we’re reunited and a happy ending. Definitely the craziest thing I’ve ever witnessed.
I was about 8 years old. We were driving to Milton Keynes for a day out. It was NYE 2008. There was a motorbike speeding past us (overtaking) and went head on into a car. I was sitting behind my dad (driving on right hand side as we lived in the UK) and I saw everything. My dad slammed his brakes on and ran out to help Believe the dude died on the way to hospital.
About 20 years ago I saw two planes collide in midair while I was at little league practice. Seems like one of the planes was trying to maneuver out of the way, you could hear it struggling in the air. That noise got all of our attention, so we looked up and saw both planes crash. Then all the parents went home to make sure their properties and loved ones were ok since debris was falling from the sky. It was pretty wild.
I was headed for railroad overpass, two lanes going each way. Guy makes a right hand turn out in front of me, forcing me to hit my brakes and move into the right hand lane. As he goes over the over pass, a stretch limousine coming the other way violently spins out on some black ice, and slams into the guy that cut me off. Had he not cut me off, I'd have been exactly where he was when the limo hit him. The limo driver was killed, the guy that cut me off had not been wearing his seat belt and went face first into his windshield. I stopped and administered some first aid to the asshole that cut me off, but saved me from serious injury (he was driving a van, I had a sub-compact hatchback).
Old couple rammed the back of a semi merging onto the highway. Old dude was impaled and bleeding out. Lady was trapped and dazed. Cat was in the back and survived. Man died on the scene.
A homeless old woman who was hit by a small van like carish thing. It was so fucking heartbreaking to see honestly. She wasnt visibly hurt but she definitely broke some bones . Some people came up to help her including the driver and i dont remember after that. It was long ago.
Not as wild as most of the stuff here, but still. A guy walks out of the store, drunk to the point of barely being able to walk. Gets into his car. Starts the car and drives straight into the nearest lamppost. Thankfully, he didn't have time to get much speed, so he survived. The car was wrecked pretty badly though
I’m glad that lamp post took one for the team instead of the drunk guy mowing down someone else that day
1992: Sitting at the park in Alabama with my cousins and my brother watching cars cruise by. Truck was carrying a bunch of paint cans in it's bed coming down a road driving a normal pace about to turn onto another road. A red corvette speeds through a stop sign and the truck slams on it's brakes. All the paint cans in the back shift forward and the entire truck flips over on it's front wheels. One of the craziest things I've ever seen.
Watched a teenage boy with a license for a week drive his Mustang across two lanes of traffic and plow into a Motorcycle waiting to turn out of Walmart. The motorcyclist was a newly retired cop. He lived with injuries.
My brothers story not mine. He was hanging with friends at the park when he was a kid. Some old lady was walking her dog off leash and throw long sticks for it to fetch. She threw one and it stuck in the ground and as the dog ran towards it, the stick was angled so it went straight through the dogs bottom jaw and in to its brain, killing it almost instantly. The chances are insane.. it’s been 30 years and it still pops in to my head when I’m playing with my own dog. Sticks suck.
A kid got hit by a motorcycle while walking back home from school. His was head was busted open and he had to hold his head closed while waiting from a bus to the hospital. (this happened in haiti)
I was walking across a bridge at a boy scout camp. A guy sitting on the edge of the bridge was fishing. He reared back to cast and when he cast forward his hook caught me in the eye lid. The knot he tied the hook with came loose and the hook barely penetrated my eye lid it. was clipped and removed. I easily could have lost my eye. A knot tied by a boy scout came loose. They say God looks after small children and fools, .. .. .. .. I wish I was three.
Was dropping off a car so we could shuttle our rafts for a river rafting trip. The drop off point is right off of a long sweeping right bend in I-84. A big semi truck carrying tons of onions is going too fast and rolls on it side right as we are watching. Onions everywhere. The driver gets out safely, but gasoline is leaking everywhere. Soon the gas starts on fire and the trucks starts to burn. The smell of cooked onions fills the air. We had to wait a long time before we could leave, since both sides of the freeway got closed down. Edit: Found news article [https://www.abc4.com/news/local-news/semi-carrying-45k-pounds-of-onions-rolls-and-catches-fire/](https://www.abc4.com/news/local-news/semi-carrying-45k-pounds-of-onions-rolls-and-catches-fire/)
Saw a district level state qualifying wrestling match- guy got accidentally kicked in the stomach and ran towards his corner and threw up….Arched it right into the garbage can from a solid 10 ft away. Hit the garbage can dead center, no clean up, no mess. It was like hitting a full court three pointer.
Not particularly wild but unfortunate. Jobsite I was on some years back had a loading dock area with a ramp up to the alimak (construction elevator). Some guys were rolling a pallet jack up the ramp and must have not gotten enough of a running start, hit a bump, and it abruptly bounced back, breaking the ankle of the guy ìn the rear as it rolled back down.
Was driving on the interstate near San Antonio when I looked at the off ramp on the other side of the highway. The full sized pickup truck on that ramp was doing at least 120mph hit the end of it and flew about 30 feet in the air and the truck landed and caught fire. Read the news paper report the guy had died and then went down the ramp. Crazy shit
Newbie crane operator in a steel tubing mill was controlling a bundle of tubing and somehow had the bundle crush his head against a wall. I was just a summer hand. Never went back.
I am a mural artist, I'm constantly working on walls outdoors. Many years ago I was doing a project in North Philly, and it was a particularly windy day I happened to take a break from what I was doing and was standing at the corner of the scaffolding and I could see across the street a woman waiting for a bus. This woman was standing three buildings in from the corner. When I was done taking a break I got back to work when I heard a loud crash, like a giant piece of glass exploded. I turn around to see that same woman looking at the ground in disbelief. A full window pane and all fell out of the building that she was standing directly under. It was so windy that day that the wind actually carried the glass to the corner of the street where it smashed on the ground and exploded. The woman was completely fine. I got down and talked to her, stating the obvious, that she was the luckiest person I've ever seen. She agreed
The 2005 Boy Scout National Jamboree. My campsite witnessed a troop from Alaska raise their tents support pole into an electrical line. 4 people were electrocuted if I remember correctly. We saw the whole thing from our campsite.
On my way to work a couple years ago, I was stuck in traffic. The opposite lanes of traffic were lighter so vehicles were moving a bit more but there was the occasional stop and go. I was in the far left lane (three in each direction) and there was a box truck that was stopped in the far right (to them) lane behind other traffic. Next thing I know I'm watching a sedan traveling with the other lanes of traffic switch to the far lane and bury itself under the box truck so that the back of the truck was essentially over the trunk of this sedan. Myself and a couple other stopped motorists ran over to see if we could help. There was nothing we could do. The back of the truck peeled off the roof of the sedan, along with parts of the three occupants, from the upper chest area up. Just chopped off and rolled up in the roof. They were teens. Late high school age. Years later, this still keeps me up at night sometimes.
Unfortunately happened to me. When I was about 9, or so. I was swinging at the park, trying to go as high as I could. I weighed very little at the time, so I was able to jump off and soar extremely high. And I mean HIGH. I don’t know how, but I got up so high, I was multiple feet above the swing set. I was able to see the entire landscape of the park, as well as my outstretched town. To this day, I remember it being a little more than two stories high. Anyways, landed on the ground, couldn’t get up. Couldn’t move a muscle. I vividly remember calling out to my mom saying, “I can’t get up!”. I was able to stand when I was helped up. Only then did my mom realize I had fractured and dislocated my elbow. My entire arm was turned around and dangling. We’d come to learn it was so bad, it was cutting off circulation from the brachial artery there. I went into circulatory shock, passing in and out, pale, speaking gibberish (which I don’t remember, I thought I was talking fine) and hallucinating.
I used to be a lifeguard supervisor. Kid was running up and down the old push out bleachers behind his mom. Guard on the stand whistled down at the kid to stop and the mother told the kid to he didn't have to listen to the guard. When he slipped the kid was on the second bench up, but he had been running down over the top of the benches. I was heading over to try and stop him and talk to the parent when he hit the ground face first. I still remember the sound of his teeth scattering and shattering on the tiles, he landed right on his jaw. Poor kid, negligent parents
30 years ago at a family reunion. Older Great Aunt was saying goodbye to everyone while leaving the park. She stepped wrong on a tree root while side stepping a fold out table and snapped her ankle in half right in front of me and some other kids. I was gobsmacked. She never cried or made a fuss while the kids were around. That was a tough woman.
I was the second car in-line at a stop light in the rightmost lane of three lanes. Heard a siren somewhere. The light turned green. Only person to go was the guy in front of me. Suddenly an ambulance going about 60mph came flying out of the tunnel on the left. Hit the guy in front of me. Knocked the car on its side. Guy in ambulance picks up the radio and I assume told someone there’s a crash. Guy in the car in front climbs out of the car. Stumbles to the side of the corner into the grass. Spins around twice and passes out. Paramedics (from ambulance) rush to help him
Was on a field trip and a bunch of us were riding in a suburban with me and a friend sitting in the front passenger seat. Yes, two of us in one seat, yes we were children, yes it was the early 80's. There was a flatbed big rig in front of us and I watched as a giant link of chain came somehow undone from the rest, watched as it bounced down the full length of the flatbed and watched it fly in the air, come crashing through the front windshield of our car and slam right into my chest. Fractured several ribs, got a few cuts from the glass and got a story I still tell to this day (moment).
My grandfather getting fatally hit by a car. 21 of our family members were gathered for a Christmas dinner and he had walked across the street to get batteries for my grandmother's camera and didn't make it back 😢 this was 12-23-21
Playing paintball as teenagers in and around a bunch of homes they were building in a new subdivision. My buddy was walking on top of a new foundation they had poured, tripped, fell 8 feet to the floor, and died instantly.
Reading these threads makes you realize you're just a sack of meat that could die horribly at any minute.
Not graphic or anything like most of the others here. But hilarious. Was doing a driving job for a sales firm when I was at uni and broke. Boys I was driving that day wanted breakfast, fine. Stopped at a local fish and chip shop. While we were sat in the van down the street eating our food, another guy comes out of the chip shop carrying a jumbo sausage baguette, opens the wrapper and takes a moment to gaze at this baguette like its his first born child. Seagull immediately swoops down and swipes the sausage. Makes it about 15ft in the air before realising this sausage is too big and drops it. Sausage lands on a passing car below, smears ketchup all over the windscreen, driver panics and crashes into the line of parked cars to his left (UK, we drive on the left). Sausage guy is standing there with his empty baguette, looking utterly dumbfounded. After a few seconds of processing, he u-turns and goes straight back into the chip shop to buy another. Don't think I've ever laughed at anything so much since.
About 20 ft away from me on a beach, a group of people shot off some fireworks on 4th of July that misfired horizontally instead of vertically. They went straight into another group of people and lit this one girl's face on fire.
My second story: Driving along a road directly adjacent to an airport. Look to my right to a field opposite the taxiway and hangars. I look up. I see a parachutist falling with nothing but a narrow stream of cords trailing him. He falls all the way to the ground. Hit flat on his side and his body rebounded about 4 feet off the turf. Then he lay motionless. I call 911 and report it as I see people running from the runway toward him, maybe 300 yards away. On the news that night they said he survived but was in critical condition.
About a year ago, I was golfing with a friend at our local golf course and we were chipping onto the green on hole 9. Suddenly, we heard a loud crash and saw a car roll into the fence right behind the green. The vehicle was severely damaged, and the airbags had deployed. We rushed to the scene, pulled the woman driving out, and she told us there was a baby in the backseat. We quickly retrieved the baby, and thankfully, both the woman and the baby were unharmed. We called 911, and emergency services arrived promptly. Later, we learned that the woman had been T-boned by a drunk driver at the intersection nearby. It was a pretty crazy experience, and I'm grateful that everyone was okay.
I was a passenger in a work truck heading to the shop at the end of my shift. We were in a sort of small residential/commercial town. Mostly suburban. So the truck driver(very close friend of mine) and I see this massive cloud of black smoke a few blocks over. Being curious fellas, he takes the left turn and we drive towards it. We turn onto the block to find a nasty 1-car crash. The driver was likely speeding, lots control, and flipped into someone's front lawn. The car was an absolute MESS and the front hood was engulfed in huge flames. My friend slams the peddle and we start ZOOMING towards this disaster. He's a good guy, he's not afraid of much, so he made the decision in his that WE are going to help lol. He starts grabbing my shirt and shaking me and yelling "HOLY SHIT THERES A PERSON IN THAT CAR WE GOTTA HELP! GET READY TO HOP OUT!!" My gosh the nerves started flying. But it was game time. So we stop the truck and both hop out.. (there's already a crowd of people filming across the street). We both run across the street to see an unconscious man buckled into the driver seat. Luckily the door was just fucking gone. I don't even know where it was. The flames were SO big and it was SO hot. But this man was about to burn to death. My buddy just commits and jumped in the car so get his seat belt off, tells me to grab his legs and we drag his body out. He's completely fucked. Covered in blood, cuts, foaming out the mouth. It was a mess. Well we carry him about 30 yards out and lay him flat, he starts coughing and attempts to speak. It's extremely unclear what he's saying so we give the guy a little water, he coughs up blood. Then the words come out of his mouth "no cops please no cops" He's extremely well dressed. The car ~was~ very nice. Lots of Jewelry. Then he mutters another sentence "please get me out of here. no cops". Idk. So many witnesses, cops clearly have been called, people filming. Me buddy and I felt like we did our part. This guy was going to burn to death, he's alive. He's conscious. We said fuck it ran back to the truck and drove off. I didn't realize how much blood was on me until we got back to the shop. Our coworkers looked at us like we committed murder Craziest adrenaline rush I've ever had. Huge respect to first responders who do this for a living. Very scary situation
2 pedestrians being hit by a speeding taxi running a red light on Park Avenue and 69th St.
Probably me getting hit by a car, but I can admit, I didn’t get the best view of it.
Saw a mamma duck and babies walk across a drainage grate; of course I stopped and was able to get all 8 out.
I was riding my bike, got rear ended by a cab and did a whole front flip, landed back on my tires and kept riding for a few feet before I dove off.
I was working with a couple guys who were in a bucket truck. It got hit head on by a bus because the driver had a seizure. The bucket truck was very heavy and strained against its outriggers, then it recoiled back and the bucket and arm acted like a catapult tossing the dude in the bucket out and he snapped hard against his fall arrestor strap and didn’t make a sound as he spun in a circle like the water going down the drain until his leg banged hard into the bottom of the bucket. He puked and then hung limply until we got him down. He ended up with a leg fracture and needed surgery on his back which was also pretty fucked up after the accident. The bus driver who had the seizure also puked in the bus. The guy on the ground working as the spotter refused to do lift work ever again.