"Without The Extra Bit Of Power, I Would Have Died": People Are Sharing Stories Of When Their Gut Feelings Saved Lives, And Now I'll Forever Be Going With My Gut First
Trusting your gut is such a vital life lesson that everyone learns in their own time. It's so important to take that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you find yourself in an undesirable situation and listen to it.
So when Reddit user u/guywhousesreddit09 posed the question, "What was the 'Gut Feeling' that you listened to that saved your life?" in r/AskReddit, I knew it was going to be full of incredible displays of human instinct:
1."My mom and grandpa were putting out a kiddie pool for my siblings and me in our backyard when we were little. My grandpa had set it up, and my mom kept insisting that, for some reason, she felt like they should move it to a different spot. Thankfully, they did, and while we were all playing in the pool, a huge branch from a tree in our yard snapped and came crashing down exactly where the pool had originally been."
2."I was driving uphill behind a flatbed truck carrying I-beams, and I envisioned them sliding off the truck and hitting my windshield. I changed lanes so I wasn’t behind the truck, and two seconds later, the I-beams were sliding off onto the road where my car would’ve been, sparking and gouging the pavement. Terrifying. To this day, I won’t stay behind a truck with anything that’s 'strapped down.'"
3."When I was 13, I was walking to the bus stop in the morning. A car was going through my neighborhood very slowly, which made alarm bells go off in my head. When it passed me, I glanced over my shoulder to keep an eye on it and saw it was doing an immediate U-turn."
"I nope'd right out of there and dove through the bushes, crossed a bunch of driveways, and found a neighbor who was washing his car. I looked back to where I had been standing, and the strange car had stopped. A seriously scary-looking dude got out and was looking in the bushes. I don't know if I would've died exactly, but I would not have had a good time."
4."This guy invited me over for wine when I was new in LA. When I got there, he was just being weird and said, 'Let’s wash your feet.' It took me by surprise, and I took off. Years later, he is currently in jail waiting for trial for the murders of two women he apparently drugged in his apartment."
5."When my mother was in high school, she and her best friend were arguing over who was going to take a ride on the back of their guy friends' new motorcycle. My mom lost the argument, and her friend got on the back of the motorcycle and rode away. She never saw them again because her friend and the guy were both killed in an accident during that ride."
6."I was up in Northern Pennsylvania and had a gut feeling I needed to turn around and walk out of the woods I was hiking. It turned out to be a good idea because I saw the big cat that was tracking me on my way back out."
7."I was 18, freshly out of high school, and got a job at a newly opened pizza place. The crew was all younger kids around my age. I quickly befriended another girl working there, but there was a guy, maybe a year or two older than me, who just gave me the weirdest vibes. I just felt uncomfortable being around him. He didn't really do anything outright strange; he hit on me and kept asking for my number, but I had a boyfriend (now my husband) and kept turning this guy down. He was never rude about it or anything, so I had no real reason to feel anything was off about him, but I did."
"Sometimes, while I was working, I'd feel like someone was staring at me, and I'd turn around, and he'd be watching me from the other side of the kitchen. I remember telling the girl I had befriended that I just felt something was off about that guy, and he made my skin crawl. Another coworker, who had gone to school with the guy, overheard the conversation and told me that he understood that his friend could be intense and off-putting, but he was mostly harmless. The other girl and I just kind of tried to laugh it off, but she agreed that something just didn't feel right. I always worked the late shift, so I could start after my college classes, and I worked until close. One night, the creepy guy got off work, maybe an hour or two before closing, and I was scheduled to close. So he leaves at his scheduled time, and I work until close and then go to leave and walk to my car. It was around 1 a.m. at this time and super dark. As I'm walking to my car, I notice someone else in the parking lot; it was the creepy guy, and he was just standing there. Watching me. His car was still there, so he wasn't waiting for a ride; he had just waited for me to leave. I got in my car and felt just incredibly weirded out by the entire thing, so I left, went home to my apartment, and told my partner what happened. I then sent my manager a text and said I was sorry, but the creepy guy was making me uncomfortable to the point that I couldn't work there anymore, and that had been my last night. I never went back. About a month later, I saw on the news that the creepy guy from the pizza place had followed the other girl from work, the one I had been friends with, one night after a closing shift. He had waited outside her house in the dark, broke in when everyone was asleep, murdered her dad, and held her hostage/assaulted her for hours while the police and SWAT team tried to get him out of the house. I still think about her a lot, and at the time I felt genuinely guilty about what happened to her, as if I could have done something to prevent it."
8."There were four of us in the car. My friend was driving, and our friend in the back yelled to stop the car immediately, even though we had a green light we were coming up on. A semi ended up blowing through a red light. He later said he felt like it wasn’t even him saying it, and he had no idea why he yelled it other than a bad feeling."
9."Everyone was at home but my brother. I was chilling in the living room, and my mom was in her room. My mom comes BARRELING out of her room out of breath in absolute panic. She grabbed my arms and said, 'When's the last time you talked to your brother?!' I told her to relax and that he had JUST left for a ride on his motorcycle. She wouldn't relax and made everyone call him, and she called him multiple times."
"At first, he wouldn't pick up, but then he finally did. He had been hit by an SUV, maybe five miles from our house, and the SUV took off. He ended up in a ditch, but he was wearing his protective gear, and thankfully, the car hit the bike, not him. Just a couple bruises, thankfully. But somehow, she knew the moment it happened. Mothers truly know everything."
10."In middle school, I was up late one night. My mom and brother were asleep, and my dad was gone on business. I had let the dog out, and when I went to go get him, I got a bad feeling like someone was out there. There wasn't really a reason to feel this way; it was just dark, and I got spooked, so I put the chain lock up on the back door when we got back inside. Back then, we never locked our doors."
"A few minutes later, the dog is drinking by the back door, and he suddenly stops and starts growling (like a low grumble) at the door. I was sitting where I could see the dog but not the door. Then I hear the door pull open and the chain lock catch. The dog started barking like crazy, and I ran upstairs to wake my brother up. He went out and looked around, but no one was there. I think the dog's barking scared them away, but I don't know who it was or what would have happened if I hadn't locked the door."
11."I went to the gas station for snacks, and something just told me to park in the spot second from the door instead of the one directly in front. About 15 minutes later, a truck comes flying through that very spot, into the door, and out of the back wall. The most surreal moment of my life."
12."My husband and I were snorkeling in the late afternoon/early evening in Hawaii on our honeymoon. It was in this beautiful bay, and the marine life was unforgettable. My husband got excited and waved for me to swim out further to where he was. He is a very strong swimmer and likes to push boundaries as well. When I got there, there were all these fish tightly packed into the rocks. Hundreds of them are squishing in as tight as possible."
"When I saw that, my gut feeling was, 'We need to get the fuck out of here.' He didn't realize this was a fear response from the fish, and he was so excited to see so many. I begged him that we needed to get out of the water; something was wrong; fish don't behave like this. I got desperate and even tried pulling him along with me. Finally, instinct took over, and I took off back to shore. He followed me around 10 minutes later, annoyed that I had cut the swim short. The next day, it was on the news that a tiger shark had been in the area and attacked two locals. One man lost a leg. Now, I'm not saying the tiger shark was there licking its chops; it could have been something else that spooked the fish, but now my husband listens to me when I say 'gut feeling says no.'"
13."I was driving along a rough mountain road, heading home from work. The mountain pass ends at a lake, and you drive around the lake to meet up with the main road. I got to the bottom of the mountain and started down the lake road, and I saw this stunning bright rainbow over the lake."
"I had this weird gut feeling and urge to stop and look at it. With the way the sun was shining, it didn’t make sense that there would be a rainbow, but it was mesmerizing. So I stopped and stared at it in awe. A couple of seconds later, as soon as I looked back at the road, a massive boulder came barreling down off the cliff above about 20 meters in front of me, hit the road, and smoked all of the concrete barriers as it went into the lake. I 100% would have been killed if I hadn’t stopped."
14."I was a rower in high school and college. We practiced on a massive river in my city, and there were tourist boats, rowing teams, sailboats — you name it. One day I was leading a 4-seater and sitting at the stern of the boat when I noticed a small sailboat coming toward us with some serious speed, but I didn’t say anything because those boats can turn on a dime."
"I looked over again a few seconds later and thought to myself, 'They aren’t going to turn' even though they easily could have. I screamed for more pressure, and everyone was confused, but they did it anyway. Less than 10 seconds later, the sailboat crashed into us, missed my torso by about 6 inches, snapped my oar in half, bruised two of my ribs, and crushed the stern of the rowing shell. Without the extra bit of power, I would have died, and some of my teammates would have most likely been seriously injured."
15."Not me, but my mom when I was a kid. She came home in the middle of the day, and our family dog just seemed off when she greeted her at the door. She wouldn’t settle down, wouldn’t leave my mom alone, and just seemed agitated. Now she was an extremely anxious dog who’d get terrified by the most innocuous things, so my mom easily could’ve just written this off as our pup being her anxious self."
"But my mom couldn’t shake the feeling that she was desperately trying to TELL her something, so she loudly declared in a sing-song voice that it was time to go for a nice long walk, then she left the house and called my dad. When he got home, the door to our basement was wide open, a bunch of electronics were missing, and the stereo in my bedroom upstairs had been partially disassembled. So we figure that when she walked in the front door (on the main floor of the house), there were at least two burglars in the house with her. One in the basement below who ran out the back door, and another that was in my room upstairs who ended up trapped by my mom’s arrival and didn’t leave until my mom loudly announced she was leaving with the dog. Who knows what would’ve happened if she hadn’t listened to her instincts and ended up running into the burglar upstairs."
16."I was pregnant in the very early weeks (five or six weeks) and started getting these intense pains on the right side of my abdomen. It was so extremely painful that I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t make noise or move. I went to my doctor the next day, and he said I was being hysterical, and it’s completely normal to be in pain when you’re pregnant."
"He refused to get me to an OBGYN and said I could go private if it was such a big deal. I went to a private scan, and my pregnancy was ectopic (stuck in my fallopian tube), my tube had ruptured, and I was bleeding internally. I was rushed to the hospital and had surgery to remove my tube that night. If I hadn’t booked that scan, I would have died in my sleep that night due to internal bleeding."
And finally, this person shared an incredible yet extremely sad story about how important it is to always trust your gut and pay close attention to your surroundings:
17."Not mine, but my mother's story. I was 5 and walking with my mom to visit a friend. We were going to have lunch and see her new kitten. We walked up the driveway, and my mother stopped to look at the front of the house. She noticed all the windows facing the street were closed with the curtains down. This was very unusual for her friend, who enjoyed watching birds at the feeders placed throughout the yard."
"She quickly picked me up and began back down the driveway. I protested that I was hungry and wanted to see the kitten. My mom hushed me and carried me home. This was in the late '70s before cellphones. She called her friend several times and then called my father and asked him to check on her friend, as she was worried. My mom was right to be worried. Her friend had been raped and murdered by an intruder. He was never caught. Something about those closed drapes warned my mother away from that home and may have saved us from an encounter with an evil person."
Do you have a story about when a gut feeling saved you or a friend's life? Let me know in the comments!
Note: Responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
