Kinda sorta copy/pasted question from Reddit. But wanted to see what your answers are like on here!
Me and my brother lived at our grans in our mid to later teens, we lived in the living room, and as teenagers do, we would be up till late playing video games and browsing the web on our laptops, my brother had the latest macbook and we had the latest consoles. Late one night in the AM, I had been gaming and my brother was probably making music on his mac, the living room was not well concealed from the outside, gaps in curtains, windows on the foot path and being on the ground floor. A knock on the door, young and dumb, I answered, it was a tall mid to late 20s guy, a little sketchy looking, he asked if we knew of a party near by, he had been looking for it and wasn’t able to find this party. Me and my brother had no clue about a party. He left and we closed the door, and that was that, but then another knock at the door, same guy, but this time his eyes were darting about through the front door, he asked us if he could come in, which was an obvious no, on attempting to close the door, he wedge his foot in the gap. Me and by brother had to shoulder the door to close it.
We didn’t leave, just felt freaked out and a little trapped. It was one of those moments where I hadn’t reflected all that much at that time, but now in my 30s, I do find myself thinking what if.
I was living with my sister in a condo. We frequently played pool at a place across the street. It was a sort of yuppy pool place, not a biker bar. It was located on the end of a strip mall. To get there, we walked to the end of the row of single story condos, then through some bushes and into the sidewalk, jaywalked across the street and into the parking lot.
So we’re doing this and just as we reach the sidewalk on the other side of the street, a car pulls out of the parking lot, like normal, and turns in our direction. Just behind it another car pulls out very quickly, not like normal, it overtakes the first car and forces it up onto the sidewalk where we are walking. Suddenly like three other cars pull in from multiple directions. We are literally standing in a police arrest scene. So glad when the perp went up on the sidewalk, he took care not to run over us. I guess the cops never expected people to suddenly emerge from the bushes and cross the street just at that moment.
I was like 12 and I was baby sitting two ~eight year olds. Went to the local elementary with them to use the big toy. There was a group of three boys there and one had what looked like a real gun, yes this was in America. I said NOPE! and immediately turned my kids and myself around and got out of there as fast as possible
The other one was when I was about the same age and my best friend and I were walking around in the neighborhood by her house. It wasn’t a nice area but it’s not like anywhere I spent time was. Some man in his like 40s probably rolled up to us in his big yellow car and started talking to us to get in his car and go to his house, he was drunk, we told him if he told us where he lived we would walk there if he would go buy us beer. He kept hitting his chest like in the wolf of Wall Street and talking nonsense, I tried to scoot away to look at his license plate but he snapped at me to come back. Eventually we got him to agree to go buy us beer in exchange for us walking to his house. As soon as he started driving away we ran as fast as we could back to her house and called the cops and told them everything, including where the guy lived since he told us
I was just moved to Italy. I knew no one and I had to do some history assignment for Uni. I went to the city archive looking for some documentation and I was incredibly lost.
Some middle age man approached me and starting helping me around. He talked with everybody there and they all respected them. He was really nice to me all the time. I got into the archive and got everything I wanted. But I was more creepied out each minute. The guy had starting talking about how spaniards(me) and italians needs to be friends because our shared history of friendship with Franco and Mussolini. At the end he asked for my number, he really looked like he was trying to recruit me. I gave him a fake one and moved away. Never got near that location again in all the the time I spent in the city.
20 yrs ago…
Driving through upstate new york with my family. Passed through a small town looking for some food and/or gas.
One house had nazi banners hanging openly on the front of the house. Not flags, they were like those big vertical banners behind hitler during speeches.
Nope. We can hold our pee and get gas later… drive a little faster and get out.
As a canadian, i was shocked… i thought stuff like that only existed in the deep south… we were 3hrs from the canadian border or something.
In hindsight, it explains a lot about the current state of affairs in the US
I live in Albany, NY. It’s a city of about 100K people, and it’s pretty diverse. I’ve found lots of pro nazi shit on peoples houses within 10 miles of the city limit.
I sort of think, people were always Nazi douche nozzles, but trump made them brave about being open and upfront with their hate.
1 downvote is the house owner
In upstate New York one of my college friends borrowed my car and was driving around with it. My car had a Norwegian flag decoration on it and some guy pumping gas at a gas station mistook it for the Confederate flag, pointed at it and said, “yeah the South will rise again!!!” while my (Asian…) friend was also filling up. When she got back she had a lot of questions for me about what kind of flag it was since she wasn’t familiar with the Norwegian one.
Never ever seen a Nazi flag in person and I’ve lived in the Deep South for about a decade. Confederate ones are super common though, albeit less so than just a few years back.
A New Yorker so dumb he doesn’t even know NY wasn’t part of the confederacy.
Well I’m not entirely surprised. Rural areas just tend to lean right. Even in a wider region that is more liberal like California and New York, their rural parts are more right leaning.
And remember, those are just the dumbest handful of them.
Driving out west in Canada from the prairies to see the ocean years ago. Went through Golden, BC and decided to go into the town proper for a dinner, rather than the roadside chains. It was about 6:10 PM. When we walked in there were about twenty locals who immediately all went quiet when we walked in. We grabbed a table and proceeded to get stared at by the whole room. I nodded at a few with no response. My wife looked terribly uncomfortable. We got up, apologized to the waitress and got the hell out of dodge. Even looking back years later I am still weirded out by that scene. I’m sure that, if we stayed, we would’ve wound up in some sort of Stephen King short story.
I’ve had something similar happen. Old school mom n pop diner type of restaurant in a “big suburb” level city, sorta “local famous” kind of place, had seen cars with their bumper stickers around town for years, figured we’d try it one day just for shits and grins. The feeling was not bad enough to leave, we went ahead and ate and paid and left. But definitely had the feeling that we were being, not necessarily watched overtly, but they were keeping an eye on us. Everyone. Wait staff, other customers. No idea why. The whole time just vaguely uncomfortable feeling that you can’t really put your finger on. After we left, my wife and I both at pretty much the same time were like “ok that was creepy right?”
Stephen King was what I thought of too. Specifically the scene in (I think) one of the Dark Tower books where they go into the restaurant that is owned by vampires or whatever they were.
Is that like the Canadian version of a Sundown town?
any idea what the cause was?
Could be something as simple as discomfort due to road strangers coming in or, we may have interrupted the start of some sort of ritual sacrifice. 😁
Does anyone else find it odd that a lot of day old accounts make their first post here specifically, or is that just a coincidence?
If they post interesting stuff, who cares?
We need to leave … now.
Well just about every askreddit post I’ve made was removed and then reposted by a mod. I can see why people would want to try here.
that’s not a bad idea, though
askreddit so overmoderated by the sub filters and reddit AI.
Could be a lot of lurkers finally found something worth posting too.
…or as history has taught me, BOTS
There was a pretty noticeable moment a few years ago when lemmy seemed to spring to life with activity. Mainly those screenshot posts from other social media or those newer image macro things. I’m 99% sure that’s when somebody turned on bots to make lemmy look more lively.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuurwerkramp_in_Enschede
I live in this city. We were watching the fireworks depot burning from what we thougt was a safe distance…After the first explosion we knew we were waayyyy to close and left right away. Just minutes later the whole neighbourhood was gone.
There are vídeos on YouTube showing the disaster, it’s scary to watch really
I knew there was a mountain lion somewhere in the area once when I was hiking. Got tf out immediately.
I kinda had the opposite happen.
I was working for a charity doing some reconstruction in an ex war zone. That weekend was a major festival. I’m not of the area nor the religion so I volunteered to keep an eye on our camp instead that weekend.
I finished my breakfast in the canteen and was about to walk the perimeter and do my checks when, inexplicably, I decided to stall and have a second coffee. Something I never did.
As I went to sit down a massive explosion happened outside, shattering the entire area me and my clipboard should have been in. I wouldn’t have stood a chance. The canteen we were in was made out of shipping containers and probably saved our lives.
I’m feeling that right now for this planet, really badly.
“Get out, now!”
Fuck, well let me invent interstellar transport rq…
Yeah…it’s gonna take a while, but I have this idea with bloons-
Three hours down a very remote hike with no phone service, a schizophrenic guy asks what we’d do if someone tried to kill us right now
Only correct answer: “What are the chances that there’s two people here with that intention”
I’d laugh maniacally and kill them with my man eating machete.
And then?!
Wished him good luck on his journey, hauled ass out of there and picked up a really nice pointy skull crushing rock for companionship. The hike back was a lot less scenic and we nailed it in half the advised time. Made a police report when back in phone reception.
We later worked out he just wanted advice because he thought HE was being chased
We later worked out he just wanted advice because he thought HE was being chased
I feel bad for laughing at this. I can just imagine the guy being scared out of his wits and then the guy he asked for advice running away.
Like two sides of the story both going home to post it on LetsNotMeet 😂
I require context.
Yelling Bird is a staple of filler comics for Questionable Content. It’s generally ornery. This was a guest comic about two single characters being playful together, the depicted panel was the punchline.
In our local pub in Scotland, they had a DJ in the back room on a Friday / Saturday night. One night some guy bumped into me and I felt something hit the floor by my feet, I looked down and it was a 12 inch serrated kitchen knife with tape on the handle, i looked up and it was some wee wideo ned. So I went over to my mate old him to finish his drink quickly as possible because we’re getting the fuck out of there tonight.
I trust my spidey sense. When the hairs on the back of my neck go up and i get that feeling in my chest, i listen to it.
Its gotten me out of an armed store robbery, 2 ither street level robberies, 2 houses that just didnt feel right, multiple encounters with dangerous animals ( gators and 1 panther).
My wife just thinks im paranoid.
How many false positives for your spidey sense?
Dont know… i dont hang around long enough to find out.
We get that feeling for a very good reason. It’s our intuition telling us something our instincts already know. Many people don’t get it and are conditioned into telling themselves “it’s probably nothing” because they don’t want to look silly in public. It can lead to paranoia, if you’ve been in enough hairy situations, but most of the time you’ll want to listen to that intuition and do something about it as soon as you get that feeling.
I was hiking with my buddy and felt a bit uneasy. Like my skin felt fuzzy, it was hard to explain. I yelled “Run!” To a friend, we ran down the mountain and dodged getting hit by lightning a few seconds later.
That fuzzy uneasy feeling was the static before a strike 😅
Correct. Although it feels different than just static. It feels like you are touching pillow filling and static. It’s hard to describe.
You just got to play lightning rod.
People think lightning rods are meant to attract lightning, but that is incorrect. Buildings are often covered with a whole bunch of little 1 foot copper spikes. The idea is a multipoint spray of electrons from the ground up to a charged cloud to balance the charge and reduce the chance of a strike.
During a storm, you can sometimes hear them making a hissing sound as they work.
When lightning is about to strike, anything kind of tall and conductive will do the same. If you feel that static charge building up on you, get your ass as flat as you can. You cannot predict where the strike is going to hit, so running is silly–you might well run toward a strike. Just lay flat and stay away from tall stuff. Don’t be the tallest thing either.
I believe youre supposed to crouch with your feet pressed together and your arms wrapped around your knees. This reduces contact with the ground and pressing the feet together reduces risk of the charge going up one leg and down the other.
When you lay down you are increasing the potential of the strike from one end of your body to the other.
Correct. What you’re trying to do is make sure the strike doesn’t go through your heart where you will almost certainly die. Your body can survive a lot, as long as your major organs don’t get fried.
yeah, if i understand it right the majority of the damage from a lightning strike is that you get a burn where the bolt goes. if it goes through your heart, your heart gets one hell of a burn. then you have to heal a burn from the inside out, which your body is not used to doing
The burns are one part, but with the heat, it’s the electrical current you need to avoid, since it can not only stop your heat, but cause arrhythmia which can kill your hours later if you don’t get to a hospital.
I did get down when I felt it. I heard stories online of how lightning felt before it hit. I just never thought it would happen to me. We were almost at the top of the cliff. I stopped to take some pictures. So, when we got away. We decreased in elevation quickly, probably 15 feet in under 20 seconds? Then we got to the tree line.
To me it felt like walking through invisible spiderwebs, strike was 50 feet away seconds later.
That’s a perfect description actually.
I was on a small hill when it started rumbling, we all felt the static in our hair. We quickly went down the hill.
Where did it strike then?
If I had to guess, about 50-75 feet from where we were standing. There was some kind of radio tower near us. We didn’t turn around to figure it out. We ran.
Whew. Sounds loud as hell
Ironically, I don’t remember it being too loud. I do remember running down a mountain as fast as I could. I think I was just hyper focused on that though.
Sounds possible. Memory can be weird like that
When its very close it just sounds like a snap. I think because it overloads the eardrums.
Unless it hits a tree, and the tree explodes. That happened to me last week right outside my house. I’ve never heard anything quite as loud nor with such a large thump in my body. Felt a bit like my bell got rung for the rest of the day.
That would probably make sense. I genuinely remember it being loud, but not by hearing it, more of feeling it. You feel it in your lungs. My guess is due to the rapid pressure change. I was a bit too focused on getting off of the cliff/mountain we were at.
Where did it strike then?
the earth, somewhere ;-)
I had a similar experience once. Lightning is crazy, man
