Have you ever been genuinely frightened & if so, what was the source of this fear?

In March this year I arrived home one day to find my ex-boyfriend waiting for me. He was drunk and had a bloodied nose and broken glasses. He had abused me a lot whilst we were together. I had my son with me at the time and my ex wanted to come inside the house and ‘chat’, when I refused he got nasty but did leave. When I got into my house with my son, my legs buckled beneath me, my heart rate shot up and was in fits of tears…I haven’t experienced something like that as an adult. It was truly awful and traumatised me for weeks… it still disturbs me every now and then when I let my imagination get carried away thinking about the worst that could happen and if it could happen again.

My daughter got hit by a car when she was 13 (she’s fine, now) but those few seconds when I saw her lying in the road and thought she was dead were the longest 6 years of my life.

I’ve had a phobia of thunderstorms/tornadoes so whenever I hear about a tornado watch or warning, I get really scared. Even more so when I was younger, I would cry if I heard about a tornado watch.

I never knew what fear was until my s/o had a bad mammogram and had to go through the biopsy procedure a few years ago. I never felt that icy feeling in the stomach until that. It turned out ok.

Yes I was once trapped in a lift for three days….... well it was only about ten minutes but it felt like three days :)))))))))))))))))))
To this day I don’t can’t use lifts

Seriously I have a HUGE Zombie phobia… I have a very firm grip on reality but for some reason zombies and the thought of the dead rising makes me literally ill and panicky. I know some may think it’s silly but it’s a genuine fear I have. It’s okay you can call me crazy…

Hearing that my family had been held up. Guns had been stuck to their heads. I wasn’t there and I feel guilty that I had been spared that experience while they had to go through it. At some point a shot was fired but luckily there wasn’t a bad ending.

During the divorce process, my ex-wife was an exceptional bluffer. She said all kinds of things to scare me into making alimony deals with her because I believed her when she said she would take me to court instead and get me to pay ungodly amounts of alimony and her own court fees etc. But once I actually realized she couldn’t do that stuff, I owned her ass. She didn’t get anything and came back begging for me to help her after it was over. Stupid bitch….

That has been the only time as an adult that I’ve been truly scared.

Yes, on numerous occasions. Most recently, it was induced by a friend who was put on psychiatric hold for five days. We had a long conversation about it when he came home.

And I worry about him every day.

I’m a scaredy cat. If I listed the number of times that I was genuinely scared, I’d run out of room… and I’m not even sure there is a character limit on responses here.

The worst is usually if there is a spider in my car. I freak the fuck out. It’s not even funny. I will wreck one of these days. :\

@TheOnlyNeffie me too I’m arachnaphobic. I absolutely hate spiders, I’m terrified of them.

@guitargirl93 I’m actually afraid of all bugs, it’s absolutely ridiculous. :) It always seems the ones that are crawling across my windshield while I’m driving are always spiders, though. A bee would be worse. A bee while driving? Oh man. It would be so ugly.

Three times I can remember being my most terrified. In descending order of how long my heart stopped beating:

Six days ago, I asked a question. I never thought I would return from it. My heart still forgets to beat when I come to Fluther.

Roller coaster broke down. The type where small cars are dispatched every few minutes. My car was at the bottom of a 70-ish foot drop, with another car waiting to come down. The operator told me everything is fine… but looking up – seeing that car waiting to plummet & kill me. I have never been on a roller coaster since.

7th rung of a ladder. About 5 years ago I was helping my father install a chimney pipe. He was on the roof & needed a hammer. I picked up the hammer, started to climb the ladder & on the 7th rung – I, for the first time in my life, realized I was terrified of heights. My knees locked up. My body began to shake. I couldn’t believe how silly & horrifying it was.

I lied – there is a fourth. EVERY time I am near an elevator, I panic. I have extreme claustrophobia. Just looking inside an elevator from a distance causes shortness of breath.

yes, I am a complete mess

I will never forget the time my friends and I were walking down the street when a group of guys in an SUV went speeding by, throwing slur after slur at us. One of my friends (a male, about 17 at the time) threw his hands up at them and yelled “What?!”. Big mistake. The guy who was driving slammed on his breaks, reversed back to us, and stopped in the middle of the road. The windows were down and I heard, “Gimme the knife! I’m gonna fuckin’ kill him!”, and then I could hear one of the other guys say, “No, man, not the knife. Just beat his ass”. Needless to say, I was freaking the fuck out. I was so scared that I didn’t know what to do.

I thought I had been scared hearing the guys talk like that, but as soon as one of them jumped out of the car, I hadn’t known what fear was. I have never in my life seen a human being move the way he was. It was so unnatural, fast and twitchy that my brain went primal and I started thinking of him like a wild animal. He ended up punching the guy with us in the face three times, knocked him into the street and started kicking him. After that, he started circling me and my other friend in wide, sweeping movements, eyes locked on us and head down. The only thing I knew to do was keep my mouth shut and look away since I didn’t stand a chance of outrunning him, and wouldn’t have left my friend behind anyway. Lucky for us, he decided to get back in the car.

I’m pretty sure he was on meth – or something else, simply because it shouldn’t have been possible for a person to move like that.

@TheOnlyNeffie oh yeah. I hate bugs, especially spiders. There was a stinkbug in the car one time. Thankfully my Mom was driving because I was freaking out! haha

Driving to work in Memphis when Hurricane Elvis struck. The wind was so strong that it rocked the car. One of those big orange traffic barrels slid across the interstate and almost smashed into the car. Ten minutes later, the worst had passed. I took the first exit and spent the next 30 minutes slowly driving through a maze of downed trees and power lines, constantly having to turn around in order to avoid blocked paths. I was shaking so hard, it’s amazing that I didn’t wreck.

I have been terrified more than once but I think the most afraid I have ever been was when I was in labor with my youngest son. I had been moving along fine when all of a sudden my water broke and he dropped. As soon as he dropped his heart pretty much stopped. They raced me in for a c-section and had him out within about six minutes. When he was born he wasn’t breathing so they intubated him but he pushed the tube out himself and started breathing on his own. They swept him up, showed him to me, and raced him to the NICU. I didn’t get to see him again for another couple of hours and had no idea what was going on. It was the scariest time of my life. FYI he is eight and is totally fine now!

I was followed in my car by a guy dressed as a vampire—that got my attention—and another time when I was out in rough weather on my boat. I lived,

Staying in a strange house overnight, I went to the kitchen and had to turn the light off on one side of the room before crossing to the other. Halfway across the completely black room, I got lost. Utter panic and vertigo set in and my system completely locked down. I felt blindly around me for a wall anywhere and every tentative step I took convinced me I was about to step over an abyss. I have no idea how long it took me to find a wall and feel my way to a door (the one I originally left, btw) but it felt like the most terrifying hours of my life.
I know it’s not much compared to so many other stories but it was my scariest experience.

Thanks for your candid answers folks, very revealing. I feel it only fair to speak of my one experience. Yeah as I say there’s only the one time I would say i’ve been genuinely frightened. When my son was 14 month old he suffered what we later learned was a febrile convulsion. Basically a seizure brought on by a fever. Of course at the time being a relatively new parent I had no idea what was happening to him. I mean he just passed out before our eyes. I tried to revive him mouth to mouth while my wife phoned for the ambulance. Truly terrifying experience. He’s absolutely fine, never did have another, apparently they’re prevalent between the ages of one & three.

Actually on 9/11 when the pilot of our plane announced that “due to terrorist activities, the entire east coast air traffic control system has been knocked out and we have been ordered to land immediately….Flight crew please prepare for an emergency landing!!”

Pucker factor 25 and then some! HS that sucked!!

When me and a buddy were hanging out in the woods a couple hundred feet from the cook out fire we sat down. We had the cat with us and out of no where he bolted and ran away as fast as he could. Then we heard something ( likely a large animal or human) behind us and we were so scared we ran faster than a cheetah on steroids. Well not literally but we were on our feet and at the fire pretty quickly.

I’ve been in a car as it almost slammed into the back of a pick-up truck on the freeway. I’ve also been in a car going almost 120 MPH. Both of those caused me to be genuinely frightened.

@DominicX that actually sounds really fun. The being in a car going 120 mph part anyway.

Several times when there was an earthquake, it frightened me, but they were mostly mild, in the 3 – 4 range. Still, the ground moving up and down is scary.

Maybe 4 or 5 times as a child, I’ve been filled with absolute stark terror because I was in fear for my very life. All of those times were at the hands of people in my family of origin.

My first and only ride on a rollercoaster. It was one without the over-shoulder harnesses, and I seriously thought that I was going to fall out and die. You could not pay me enough money to get on another one.

I was driving across country and started to get excited when I got into CA that I was almost finished with the days of driving. I driving too fast and not paying full attention – I almost drove off the road straight over a cliff. I corrected at the last minute – in fact, it was so close that I almost didn’t bother. It flashed through my mind that I was fucked and should just accept it.

Tornado warning in 1996.