AskReaders: What is downright the scariest thing that has ever happened to you?

We asked our regular contributors through e-mail, What is the downright SCARIEST thing that has ever happened to you, be it paranormal or otherwise? We got many interesting responses. Here are some of them. We have just copied and pasted their responses, not editing them in any way and most of the respondents have requested to stay anonymous, so no names will be published.

1-5 Scariest Life Stories

1. I was about 5 or 6 years old living in Dallas and I was in the nurse’s office when the tornado warning siren went off. The nurse ran out of the room towards the other side of the school, leaving me behind. The lights had gone off and I didn’t want to be alone so I went to follow her and ended up on this ramp that connected both sides of the school. To the right of me was the cafeteria and on my left was a wall with floor-to-ceiling windows. It was so dark outside that I could barely see anything out the window. The sound of the siren combined with the intense wind scared me the most. By this point I was in tears and I just stood there for who knows how long because I was so scared. Then the vice principal came running up the ramp, scooped me in her arms and asked whose class I was in. I remember walking into the classroom and seeing my teacher with a flashlight in her hands huddled with the other students in the middle of the classroom. 16 years later Ms. May is still my hero.

2. When I was 16 I was at a local mall by myself. I noticed a large man kept going where I would go, and just gave me a bad gut feeling. After about 15 minutes of him following me around I go into a Starbucks and sure enough he follows. This Starbucks was right next to the mall’s public restroom, and I so stupidly decided to go into the women’s room, thinking he wouldn’t follow, I go in to a stall, lock the door, and pull my feet up so they can’t be seen since the stalls lot didn’t continue to the floor. No more than 10 seconds later I hear the bathroom door open and someone walking in. The man stopped in front of my stall door and just stands there, facing it for what felt like minutes. He was so close to the door his boots were protruding into the stall. Then, without any words spoken from either of us, he left and I never saw him again. Scariest few minutes of my life and I’m still so mad at myself for isolating myself in a bathroom.

3. I was out doing a “survival” night for my wilderness survival merit badge in Boy Scouts. My buddy and I built a lean-to type shelter out of sticks to sleep in. In the middle of the night, I woke up 15 feet from the shelter just lying in the middle of the woods. I was confused and a bit scared but I realized what happened, so I headed back and went to sleep. I woke up a second time sitting propped up against a tree. No history of sleep walking and only time it has happened in my life.

4. Flying from Denver to NYC, about 30 seconds after the plane leaves the ground the left engine explodes (likely a bird they said). I’m pretty calm, but start getting freaked out when I notice the stewardesses are all crying. Completely freaked out when we are getting close to landing and there are fire trucks all up and down the runway, and the runway we are landing at is way the hell away from the terminal and everything else.

5. I was watching The Exorcist when I was 16 and my grandmother came home and told me to turn it off because that was the last movie my grandfather watched the night he died. About twenty minutes later I saw him rocking in the chair next to my couch and no matter how many damn times I pulled the blanket over my head he stayed there until he looked at me, smiled and vanished. Still can’t watch that movie to this day without freaking out about it and that was 18 years ago.

6-10 Scariest Life Stories

6. Two of my friends were spending the night at my parent’s house. We were all still in high school. My bedroom was a room away from the kitchen, connected by a pantry and hall way. I heard the backdoor handle jiggle, which meant a cat wanted to go outside. So I went to let it out and get a drink. As I walked into the kitchen I noticed there was no cat there, and the door to the basement was wide open – which we always left closed and locked. So I closed and locked the basement door, a tad unnerved but it didn’t matter. Next to the basement door was a staircase that went upstairs to the second floor (this is relevant later). A couple hours later I hear the fridge door close. I noticed that because I didn’t hear it open, but it was in a different room so that’s not too weird. What made it weird was that I didn’t hear anyone walk down the stairs, or by my bedroom from the front of the house. The back stairs to the second floor are really loud and creaky, so I would’ve heard something. Unnerved, I took a knife and went into the kitchen. I see no one in there, but immediately notice smoke coming up from under the basement door. I opened it up and it was filled with smoke. Closed it, got my parents up, called the fire dept, got ready to sleep in my car for the night as it was about 4 AM at this point. A fire fighter comes and tells us it’s okay to go back into the house now. For some reason the furnace had caught fire inside, and was filling the house with carbon monoxide. Had my friends and I went to sleep we’d all be dead. Still have no clue what jiggled the door knob or closed the fridge, but it kept me alive.

7. I was kidnapped when I was 9 years old. I was walking to my friend’s house, which was right up the street, maybe 6 houses down or so. Not far at all. My mom had told me to be home for dinner at 6pm. Well, when I was walking I noticed a man following me in his car. I naturally get anxious any time I see someone while I’m walking to this day. Anyway, I started walking a little faster. Kept thinking to myself, only a few more houses… 3… 2… then he stopped, got out, and grabbed me. Quicker than you can say- actually, I can’t think of anything. But it happened really fast. Luckily, my friend’s dad was sitting on the porch and saw this happen. So he started chasing after the car, running as fast as he could. The man had me sitting in his lap while he was driving, holding me down with one hand, covering my screaming mouth with the other and kept shouting “SHUT UP!” Well my friend’s dad eventually caught up to the car, about 10 blocks down, out of breath, holding onto the side mirror running with the car, trying to get the door opened. He finally decided it was best to straight up punch through the window, and pulled me out of the car with his then bloody hand. He carried me back to my house while I was crying and shaking, and told my mom everything. I was traumatized. She reported it to the police but to this day we don’t know who that man was.

8. So I was a fire fighter. We got called out to this gas station one evening at the beginning of summer. This was a big gas station with a restaurant and shop and there were a couple of rooms for rent on the second floor, this thing was not your typical little corner shell station. So my best friend and I have been in and out of this building for the last hour fighting a pretty decent blaze. I want to say we were both on our 3rd hot swapped 30 minute air bottle. We were making good progress fighting the flames back and we were pretty deep into the building when we hear the air horn on the truck blare 3 long blows (this is the emergency evacuate signal) and our fire chief come over the radio kind of frantically calling for an immediate evac. This usually happens when the structural integrity of the building is starting to fail and the building is about to collapse. Since the fire did not seem that bad, my friend and I were very confused but trusted there was something happening that we did not know about so we started to make our way back towards the door. Unbeknownst to us, about 2 minutes earlier the business owner showed up on scene and asked if there was any chance we could save his fireworks. See this was about 3 weeks before the 4th of July and he had just gotten in an 18 wheeler full of fireworks that were currently filling the back store room. Now our fire chief, not worrying about saving the fireworks, realized that there were several thousand pounds of gunpowder and explosives IN A BURNING BUILDING that happened to be full of his guys including your humble narrator. Two minutes after that, my friend and I turn a corner about the same time the fire made it to the back store room. Now for those of you, I am going to guess all of you, who have never been inside the middle of a fireworks display, it is even more impressive from 10 feet away than it is from the few hundred feet below that you usually get to see one happening. It was absolutely one of the most intense things I have ever seen. There were bright vibrant colors and deafening pops all around us. I had no idea what the hell was happening, but I knew it was not good. We grabbed at each other and tried to pull each other to safety. The floor in the restaurants kitchen was slick from the thin layer of grease that had built up on the floor over the years being heated by the fire and then covered with water from the hoses. It was like a nightmare slip and slide getting out of there. Fortunately the fire had only hit a small batch of the fireworks when we were in the building or I would probably not be here to tell you this story. We pulled every one out of the building, set up deck guns and aerial mounted deluge guns and performed, what we call in the business, a surround and drown, and watched the rest of the fireworks.

9. When I was younger and visiting my parents, I took my stumpy, never-met-a-stranger Lab mutt out to go potty around 5 a.m. At the end of the super long driveway I ran into a guy just kind of hanging out in the pine trees. He asked for a cigarette and when I said I didn’t have one he wished me a good night. The whole time my happy little dog (she must have been about 10 months old) was straining towards him for attention. I get half way up the drive way and she suddenly lunges behind me, practically ripping my shoulder out of the socket. Just going absolutely ape s**t, something I have never and still haven’t seen from her to this day 8 years later. When I spun around to get her under control I see the guy is just beyond her reach booking it away. He was following me up the driveway. Later I remember my family remarking over the few days I was there that it smelled like cigarettes around the front porch and garage. This guy had probably been hanging around our house. I don’t know what would have happened had my dog not flipped her s**t.

10. I was on a girl scout trip staying in this older house in Sandy Hook, I think I was around 11 or 12. We were all in bed, and for some reason I wanted to go downstairs. I remember hearing the parents talking in the downstairs kitchen, and I was walking toward where I saw a lit up room. Then it all disappears, and I’m standing in the middle of an empty dilapidated room, random c**p, plaster on the floor, no furniture. I freak out and try to retrace my steps back to where I thought the adults were. I wander around for a bit and finally find a staircase. Weird. The staircase was blocked by a couch at the bottom. Then I realize I had been sleepwalking, and somehow managed to go up to the third floor where we were told not to go.

11-15 Scariest Life Stories

11. So one night I’m carpooling with my friend to work. Just her and I driving down this rarely used back road that just so happened to be a shortcut to work. I’d have to say it was about 10 in the evening, and there weren’t any other cars in front nor behind us. The road we were on was a very old one and hadn’t been renovated in years. There were no lights on this road whatsoever. Just the ones coming from the car’s headlights. So we’re driving along for a good fifteen minutes, and then we suddenly come to a stop sign that’s literally in the middle of nowhere. My friend who happens to be a very careful driver, slowly pulls up to this stop sign, for fear of possibly running past it. Heaven forbids we make a rolling stop in all this traffic, right? So the car is fully stopped, and I’m looking out the window. It’s about this time that I see this lady standing there on the corner. She looked to be about in her mid-forties and was in something that resembled a white coat and pants. Because there wasn’t much lighting, I really couldn’t make out much of her face or anything of that nature. But seeing someone standing there struck me as being extremely odd. I’m thinking to myself “who in their right mind would be out here in the middle of the night?” So I turn to my friend and ask her if we should maybe see if she needs a ride or something …to which my friend replies “she??!!” And I say “cmon you can’t tell me that’s a man now!” Then silence. Suddenly my friend looks me dead in the eye and proceeds to tell me that she has absolutely no effing clue as to what I’m talking about. I think she’s joking around and I say “You can’t be serious!! I’m talking about that woman over there.” As I’m saying this, my eyes pan over to where the lady was standing and …nobody was there. No lady. No nothing. So there we were idling at a stop sign in the middle of nowhere, with absolutely nobody else around. I suddenly get this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and I start to freak out a bit. I’m not crazy!! I know exactly what I saw. I then muster up enough energy and yell “GO!! Let’s get the heck out of here.” And we take off like a bat out of hell. From that point on, I refused to look in the rear view mirror and pretty much kept my eyes closed for the duration of that ride. Not much was said after that. Nothing at all. The following week I tell this story to one of our co-workers, and he proceeds to tell me about how several years ago this lady had been brutality murdered around that area. Apparently, this person was a nurse and was either on her way to or coming back from work, when she was attacked and subsequently killed in the middle of the night. The more he continued with this story, the more freaked out I got. I just kept remembering the white outfit that I saw this lady in. It was very similar to that of one that was either a nurse or one that worked in the medical field. Seriously, I’m getting the chills thinking about it now.

12. I was followed by a man in a car one night and I’m 100% certain he would have tried to abduct me. This was in Chicago after I helped chaperone a debate team trip. I was walking back to my car and the guy passed me then circled back and passed again. I honestly thought he thought I was a hooker and remember thinking he’d be disappointed if he stopped. Then he started driving next to me at walking speed but had to move when another car came. I crossed and crouched behind a parked car for a minute and when I stood up he was gone. Kept walking and when I got to the next intersection he was hiding on a cross street. I was almost back to my car and he was still following me when I ran into a group of teenage-ish girls. I blurted out “I think that man is following me.” Meanwhile, dude parks behind my car waiting for me to be alone again. Thankfully the girls walked me to my car and texted me his license plate but I don’t think I’ve ever felt so unsafe in my life.

13. One time I woke up and my eyes were SUPER dry. Like, beyond description. I opened them and it was pitch black, couldn’t see a thing, but I knew there was light in the room since my alarm went off so it must have been 8 a.m. at least. I literally felt my eyelids to make sure they weren’t closed. I shut them and rubbed/cried for like a minute to moisturize them and I could see again. So yeah, waking up blind is not a fun thing to have happen.

14. I was asleep in bed one night and my mom, who had recently taken interest in home security had put a wooden dowel in my bedroom window and forgot to tell me about it. It was obviously a red neck version of a window lock because we lived in an old house and didn’t have locks on the Windows for some reason. Anywho, I found out later that there was an electrical fire in the hallway outside my bedroom, and I woke up to smoke slipping into my bedroom from beneath my door. Being a little kid, I was scared sh**less and had no idea what was going on at the time, and so being smart, I thought to try and get out my window, but I couldn’t get the dowel out. I spent what felt like 10 minutes trying to get my little fingers around it and slip it out of the window seal but couldn’t. Finally, my mom got into my bedroom, grabbed me and wrapped a wet towel around me, and super mom’d us out of the house, and me safely out of trouble. Best part? She went back in, got our fire extinguisher from under the kitchen sink and put that fire out herself. Thankfully, it wasn’t some huge, home destroying catastrophe.

15. We had a baby monitor that, besides sound, also monitored the baby’s breathing and set off an alarm. The alarm would go off on the baby’s side to jar them, and also the parents remote. One night we forget to turn up the sound and in the middle of the night I roll over and see the lights pegged. I freaking fly out of bed screaming to my wife. Darting into the nursery I suddenly find NO FU**ING BABY IN THE CRIB. I suddenly realize my wife must have brought the little guy to our bed and forgot to turn off the alarm. I wheel around and pass her coming in and say “he’s in our bed” and she screams bloody murder because of this, she knows for a fact, is not the case. My whole world just stopped with absolute abject terror. She screams “WHO TOOK MY BABY?” Somehow, through massive adrenaline rush and massive fright, I Sherlock Holmes’d it: house alarm is still armed, no windows or doors could have been opened; the nursery door was closed. He must still be in the room. Glance around and see the only place he possibly could be is behind/under the crib. I fall to my hands and knees and low and behold little dude is on his belly looking at me, smiling (even though mom is hysterical). I reach under and gently pull him out by his ankles and mom meanwhile sees this and assumes he’s not alive- because HOW THE HELL DOES A ONE-YEAR-OLD climb out of a high sided crib when he can’t even stand, AND manage a four-foot fall unharmed? She scooped him up and cried for an hour rocking him. I didn’t sleep that night- the little monster has had us guessing ever since.

16-20 Scariest Life Stories

16. Me and three buddies were hanging out late one night in a car on a dark street… you fill in the blank… I picked this particular street because my grandma lived on it and I was very familiar with the neighborhood. I knew the families that lived in most of the houses on that block…elderly people. When we pulled up I surveyed the houses… everyone’s lights were off… we should have no trouble parking here for as long as we want. I had the driver park in front of my grandma’s friend’s house on the corner. My grandma’s friend, a lot like my grandma, was an old woman, who went to bed early. No family lived with her, no husband. Knew her most of my life. Anyway, my grandma’s friend lived on a medium sized lot and her house was upon a small hill. The hill was small, but it was pretty steep. A nightmare to mow. I’m sitting in the back behind the passenger seat. The car is still running at this point… we hadn’t been there for more than 2 or 3 minutes…we had just begun our “activities” when I catch a glimpse of something moving in the passenger side mirror. I look out the window and what I saw scared the fu**ing s**t out of me then and it still scares me to this day, over 10 years later. I saw the silhouette of a person… laying on their stomach… doing an army crawl REALLY fu**ing fast on the side of the hill and it was headed right for us. This thing was moving QUICK. I’m telling you, I don’t know how it’s even possible on flat ground to crawl that fast, let alone on the side of a hill… it wasn’t going down the hill, it was moving parallel to the side of it… Anyway, I screamed for the driver to “GO! GO! GO! NOW!!! GO!”. This thing had covered some serious fu**ing ground in a matter of seconds. It was within 5 or 6 feet of my door when we squeal-tired the f**k out of there. As we got to the end of the street and turned onto the main road, the driver and my buddy next to me in the back were yelling. “What the f**k, man?! Was it the cops?” I couldn’t speak I was so badly shaken up. It had only been 10 or 15 seconds since we bolted down the street… I just wanted to get as far away from that road as possible… I couldn’t process what I had seen… I didn’t really want to… that’s when it happened. I looked to my good friend, “P” in the passenger’s seat up front and he had an absolutely terrified look on his face. I blurted out, “you saw it, too! Didn’t you?” He didn’t say anything. He just kept looking in the side mirror and then back to the dashboard. By this time my other two friends were pretty mad and emotions were starting to escalate. I told them I saw somebody or something crawling toward the car really fast. I asked “P” to back me up… all he did was a nod and then he asked us to drop him off at home… I wanted him to tell us what he saw, but he refused. All he would say is that he saw, “something.” At the time that was good enough for me. I was just relieved I wasn’t the only one who saw it and was freaked out by it. To this day I don’t know who or what it was. I hated going to my grandma’s house at night after that. And I never really wanted to be her friend after that, either. The thought of a 60 something-year-old woman army crawling that fast at 1:00 am scares me even more.

17. A few weeks ago, my friends and I were spending the night at her house since she was alone all weekend in a big house and terrified of it for lack of words as her parents left somewhere for the weekend. At first, I thought it wouldn’t be that bad; three teenage girls having the house to themselves all weekend, access to food and Netflix; it was good. The first night around 10 pm, we were upstairs and completely alone, the basement door downstairs slammed so loud that the friend who owns the house locked herself in the bathroom profusely apologizing for dragging us into this mess and crying. Fast forward to roughly midnight, we heard an insane amount of whispering emerging from the corner of her dining room and the closer we got to the spot, the louder it became, and violently the voices got. I really had to pee right after this incident and went to the bathroom; the lights flickered and the bathroom sink’s tap started gushing out water like no tomorrow; I was so done with this house showing us who is the boss. The next day we came downstairs to the living room completely trashed; I’m talking about the coffee table flipped, the papers on said table threw about the room, random water spots everywhere; it was just a mess. Needless to say, she and her parents are moving next week, still in the same area; just fu**ing away from that house of horrors.

18. It was about 10:30 pm and I’m lying on the couch jamming out through my earbuds and playing on my iPad. I close my eyes while listening to Lithium by Nirvana when I notice the song just cut out. I open my eyes and I’m outside, in the cul de sac at the other end of my neighborhood (about half a mile) wearing nothing but pajama bottoms in just below freezing temperatures just staring out into a cornfield. I walk back to my house, and when I get to my room I saw it was like 3 a.m. Still, no clue what happened, but I had apparently scribbled in my school notebooks and put out the fireplace during my little nighttime adventure. I had thought it was all a dream until I woke up the next day and my mom asked about all the grass I had shaken off my pants onto the floor, so that freaked me out pretty bad. Sleepwalking can be scary.

19. I was out snorkeling with some friends off the eastern coast of Nicaragua. I noticed a shark on the ocean floor just going about his business so I pop out of the water to yell at my friends that there is a shark just below us. Suddenly I see the shark coming up towards me… which at first I thought was awesome. But as it got closer, I could see it was coming directly at me, which was not awesome. I proceeded to freak out, swimming as fast as I can at the surface of the water, lose a fin and my goggles while I rush to safety. At this point, the shark is just a few feet from me as I hurl myself onto the boat only to see the Nicaraguans and my friends laughing hysterically. The shark was apparently caught on one of their lines and the local guy was just slowly dragging him up to the surface to get a better view. I am not normally scared of anything, this was by far the scariest moment of my life.

20. I saw something weird/fu**ing creepy. So have you ever seen what you thought looked like a person out of the corner of your eye? But they disappear before you get a good look at it? Well while I was on Netflix and browsing the internet when I saw a head peeking out from the stairwell when I looked at it, it was still there. It slowly moved its head back behind the wall, I got a good enough look at it that it seemed to be charred/burned. The thing that creeps me out the most is that my puppy who was with me at the time looked at that spot for the next 5 min with his hair and ears perked up.

21-25 Scariest Life Stories

21. I was coming home really late one night and I backed my car into the driveway as usual. It was a cloudy, dark night and the porch light was off. The front porch of my house is old and made out of wood; it’s about 3-4 feet off of the ground with space to crawl underneath. As I climbed the stairs, I felt my ankle get caught on something, tripping me up a little. I looked down and there was a hand grabbing my ankle. I gasped and kicked my leg back as hard as I could, breaking the grip. I then ran and frantically unlocked the front door. I finally managed to open the door and get in. I was freaked the f**k out but I looked out the front window through a crack in the curtains while finding the number for the police department. The cops showed up later but didn’t find anyone and they said they’ve never heard of this kind of thing happening before. They said they didn’t see any footprints or anything underneath the porch either. This was a couple of years ago and I still live in the same house. I tell myself that it was some kids from the neighborhood fu**ing with me or maybe my friends (no one has ever admitted anything though) but I’ll never know for sure I guess. I did buy a motion activated light for the front porch since then.

22. So one time one of the horses at work got herself stuck in a fence. I was trying to calm her down and was calling for help from the other staff. I was on the other side of the fence, inside one of the pens where two more horses lived, the stuck horse was in one of the turnout fields. So one of the other horses in the field decides to be a b***h and kick her. The mare pitches forward, knocking the panel over and into me, so I fall down and hit my head pretty hard. I just remember being terrified that she was gonna land on me when she was jumping over me, almost stepped on me too. Took me a good 45 minutes to calm down.

23. I used to live on the fifth floor of a building. It was at an intersection, and down below me, across the street, were about five dumpsters that everyone from this side of the street would dump their trash. I mention this because it might maybe be related. Anyway, one spring I have an all-nighter. Just sitting at my PC, by the open windows. Around 5 am, I start hearing weird buzzing, but I write it off as just hearing things due to lack of sleep and too much sugar. As the minutes crawled by, and the buzzing got louder. Angrier. And something black and yellow flew in front of my face. At this point, I don’t want to believe that it’s real, but I start paying attention to the noise and figured it was coming from the windows. I pull back the curtains, and on the other side of my ripped ish bug screens are just… Just a s**t load of wasps. On my screens, on my windows, trying to get in. A fu**ing s**t load. Not bees. Wasps. I’m pretty sure I managed to wake the neighbors with my screaming, despite the wall being cement or brick or whatever thick s**t Armenians use to make walls. I grabbed my laptop, ran to the bedroom, and locked myself in there until late afternoon. By that time, they were gone. It turns out that, for whatever fu**ing insane reason (maybe because of the trash nearby?), wasps would always gather by my windows early in the morning, and leave by noon. Regardless, I didn’t feel safe ever having my windows open until we finally replaced the bug screens. F**k wasps, man. I probably wouldn’t have been that terrified if it wasn’t for an earlier, moderately more interesting event, but… S**t, this was scarier than that to me.

24. Back when I was 18, I was working as a Health Care Assistant at my local hospital whilst living at home. I was working an afternoon shift one day, so I was in bed at 11 in the morning. I was lying awake in bed when I heard a noise downstairs. 99 out of 100 times, it’s just in your head/ the central heating. Unfortunately, this time it wasn’t. I heard more noises, and though, f**k, this is real, there are genuinely people in my house. I had no idea what to do, so I got out of bed, and was stood in front of my bedroom door in just my boxers. Cue the door opening, and me finding myself face-to-face with a random Filipino. I stood there, frozen with fear, and he did the same, for about half-an-hour (okay, maybe three seconds), before he turned and noped the f**k out of my house along with his accomplice downstairs (whose existence I was blissfully unaware of until I saw them running out of my gate). That s**t was fu**ed up.

25. When I was 18, I used to work graveyard shifts at a yacht club, and one night on sun down time I watched The Exorcist III. The yacht club at night was creepy enough, lots of creaking boats on their moorings, long, dark, poorly lit docks, no one around, and a fire station every 50 feet that included a fire axe, so a potential killer would always have a weapon handy if he needed one. So I was doing my rounds, quietly walking the perimeter of the club, the empty club house and the lengths of the docks, trying not to freak out after so thoroughly freaking myself out. As I was almost finished, I was in a section of dock where some larger boats were moored, so visibility was even worse as I couldn’t see the boats. I walked past one boat, when this huge figure, which had been totally quiet until that moment suddenly lunged toward me screaming incoherently and coming fast. I completely freaked out and for some reason, my survival instinct thought it would be a good idea to dive into the water. So it’s three AM, I’m already terrified and now I’m underwater, can’t see any lights and then can’t find the surface because I came up underneath a floating dock. I started panicking and somehow managed to find my way to a gap where I could breathe. I took a breath and then despite still being in a complete state of panic, I found my way to the edge of the dock and looked up. There stood a crane, still slowly opening and closing its wings in a threat display and still making some shrill loud noise. It must have been sleeping while standing on a post between some boats and since it was elevated, it looked even bigger than it was, and it was pretty big. I hauled myself out of the water and as the tension and adrenaline left my system, I threw up into the water. I’ve never felt that kind of primal terror before, both when the crane initially scared me and then when I realized I was underwater, in the dark and couldn’t find the surface.

(This article was originally published on September 18, 2015)