Warning: This post contains mentions of violence, death, gore, domestic abuse, overdose, and suicide.
For those who experience traumatic events, it can be healing to be vulnerable and share their stories, as I learned when I wrote about the most horrifying things people unfortunately witnessed. Even more of you shared your own experiences, and it's a reminder of how powerful it can be to listen to what's uncomfortable rather than turn away from it.
1. "I've only seen one person die. I was at the end of a long skydiving day, and they sent about 12 people on sunset load. I overheard someone say 'cutaway.' When someone cuts away their main and comes down on reserve, we all try to see where the main ends up landing so we can go retrieve it. I went outside and started looking around for a stray parachute, but instead happened to see a car swerve into a deep ditch, flip, and roll over into our landing zone as skydivers were coming in to land."
"The car rolled about six times, and the driver was ejected at some point as the car rolled to a stop, upside down. Fortunately, the skydivers managed to land away from the wreckage as the rest of us called paramedics and attempted rescue.
I had initially thought another car was involved, as another car pulled over as he was rolling, but luckily they pulled over as he swerved into their lane and he missed them. He didn't make it." —safire2
2. "I whispered to my dad on his death bed that he could go if he was ready. He hadn’t woken up in three days...but his eyes shot wide open. He cried and said, 'I’m not ready; I can feel them taking me!' I’d never seen him weep and shake like that before. It traumatized my view of death."
3. "Many years ago, I was walking home from a night out with friends. When we reached the backstreets near home, I heard a woman screaming in terror. I'm only a 5' 2" female, though my instincts kicked in and I ran toward the screams. I saw a man catch a young woman and start to strangle her. He was absolutely huge, over 6 feet tall, and one of the biggest men I'd ever seen. He looked like a body builder. The woman was small like me. I don't know how I did it, but I talked him down. I refused to leave until the girl was with me. I remember him staring down at me and realizing I might die. His eyes were glazed with rage, but he could see I wasn't giving up. The woman was on a mini break with him and was terrified. I got her to safety. Later, I recognized his face in the news — I believe to this day that he was a now-famous UK murderer who tried to kill his girlfriend, went on the run, and shot a policeman in the face."
4. "I used to work at a car financing company in my early 20s. One day, my co-worker that had his desk across from mine suddenly collapsed to the ground and went into cardiac arrest. I froze in shock, couldn't move, and then started crying hysterically — my mother had recently died, and I hadn't recovered from it. I was horrified to see firetrucks and ambulances surrounding the office building. The EMTs worked on him for what seemed to be about an hour, and they miraculously got a pulse. He came back to work a few weeks later like nothing happened."
5. "I was over at my ex-best friend’s place 'celebrating' her birthday. Throughout the course of the night, I had to hit my friend with Narcan once and her wife twice — Narcan counteracts an opioid overdose. The next day, I was checking their location all day while I was at work, 'cause I was worried they might try to get more stuff. When I get home that evening, I got a call from my friend that she woke up and her wife was lying next to her, dead. I rushed straight over to be there for her. When the coroners finally came to get the body, we went out on the deck. I made the mistake of looking in the window, and saw them dragging her body down the stairs."
6. "The worst thing I’ve ever seen was my own injury. I was crushed inside of a car after being hit by a wrong-way driver. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. My subconscious fortunately spared me a lot of the details, so I only remember a few minutes before the accident and a few seconds of the aftermath when I regained consciousness and spoke to the officer that arrived on scene."
7. "I’ve been a hospice nurse for 15 years. CPR isn’t something we do much since most of our patients have directives in place for no aggressive measures when they die. But there are exceptions. I had a young woman dying of end stage kidney disease. She'd been on dialysis for a long time and could no longer endure it. Her kidneys had faults due to early onset of high blood pressure that she didn't care for, and she had a near fatal drug overdose that killed what little function her kidneys had left as a teen. Her family had started the process for Do Not Revive paperwork but hadn't completed it yet. She went into cardiac arrest and, per the law in my state, we had to call EMS and start CPR. I remember her bones crushing, and knowing she wouldn’t come back from it."
"There was no point in torturing her body with CPR, and it's something I’ll never forget." —mizztina
8. "When I was a teenager, there was a war between my country Israel and Lebanon. I live in the northern part of the country, and we were constantly being bombed with rockets from Lebanon. It was terrifying. This was before iron dome and rockets literally fell a few meters from our house. You never knew when the alarm would go off, and you'd have to run to a bomb shelter. You keep hoping that the next rocket won’t land in your backyard or on your house. I didn’t sleep for days. I just sat in my living room waiting for the alarm. I couldn't go outside, I was scared to walk my dog, and I was terrified when my parents needed to go out to get groceries. War is terrible."
9. "I watched my fiancé bleed out on our basement floor after being stabbed. I was yelling at him to get up, and he tried, but I knew by how his skin looked and the sound he made that he wasn't going to make it. Ten years later and I still remember it like it happened yesterday. Going home afterward to see all the medical equipment used to try to save him and his blood still on the floor just added to the trauma for me."
10. "I was crossing the street toward my apartment building. My vision isn't the best, and I didn't have my glasses on me, but it caught my eye that a huge SUV was struggling to get through the exit driveway of the parking lot due to some obstruction. To my horror, I realized the obstruction was a woman he had already rolled over with his front tires and was now struggling to get over on his back tires. The driver thought she was a speed bump."
11. "I nursed my father through the final stages of asbestos cancer. Over the course of two short weeks, I witnessed him going from about 168 lbs. to 104 lbs. on the day he died. It was and always will be the most traumatic experience of my life, watching the light go out of his eyes as he died."
"Since that day, I've been close to death myself more times than I care to count. I'm in advanced heart failure. I nearly drowned to death on dry land twice. I spent six days, including my 50th birthday, in a coma in the first failed attempt at open heart surgery, and when I eventually had the surgery, it almost killed me. Still, watching my dad die has been the worst experience of my life." —rowlesheather
12. "I was climbing the large dead volcano in Edinburgh, Scotland, with my family. I was about 12 years old at the time. As we were climbing, we rounded a corner and saw many emergency vehicles parked along the road — a man had fallen off the cliff way at the top of the mountain. We watched the man be taken down the mountain on a stretcher. He was alive, but I distinctly remember his bloody covered head and how he shifted around on the stretcher. I remember a wave of heat rolling over me. It was pretty traumatic."
13. "When I was in my last year of high school, my friends and I were a few hours out of town exploring a sort of mountain that's a unique and popular spot for camping and day trips. We were driving back to town in separate cars, and I'd left first, probably a couple minutes before the others. As I was going around a bend, I felt my back wheels start sliding out, so I turned the steering wheel the other way but went too far. The over-correction caused me to start sliding the other way. I tried to correct it again, but over-corrected again and ended up side-swiping a tree at 70 mph. The car fell over, and I ended up on my side, facing back the way I came from."
"Shortly after realizing I was still alive, I heard my friends drive past without realizing I had crashed. I couldn’t help panicking that I had to get out, so I climbed out the back door and flagged down the second car of my mates, and they drove me back to town." —kriscrane1331
14. "My sisters and I were at my parents house, and I was in the spare bedroom typing up a paper while my sisters and parents were in the kitchen with my nephew. All of a sudden, I heard my baby nephew start coughing, and his mom start hitting his back. She kept saying his name over and over, then I heard her yell for someone to call 911. I jumped up, grabbed the nearest cordless phone (landline days), and immediately dialed. My sister was screaming, so I ran out on the porch to tell the operator my nephew was choking and to get an ambulance to our home. I heard the other cordless phone pick up and someone start to dial. The door opened, and out ran my mom. I told her I had it, and to go help — she's a nurse. In the midst of the chaos, she didn't hang up the phone and just threw it down on the floor. All I could hear were my sister's screams and sobs through the phone: 'My baby, my baby, please save my baby...' It was absolutely horrific."
15. "I was on vacation in a foreign city with my best friends. We were on the way to the club when I realized I'd misplaced my wallet. My friends went ahead while I took a taxi back to our hotel to look for my wallet with my ID. When I pulled up to the hotel, it was about 1 a.m., and a party bus full of about 10 guys pulled up. I was the only person outside walking to the front entrance. They started cornering me, making comments on my dress, and asking me to come to their party bus. I started to feel terrified and sick. I think one of them noticed — he seemed to get some sick enjoyment from it. They told me they could tell I was 'ready for it.' I completely froze and realized something horrible was about to happen. I braced myself, when suddenly someone came out of the door. I took the chance to run. I escaped."
16. "The sound of a subway train approaching had me looking at a tunnel entrance at the end of the platform, as always — I love the way a train emerges from the darkness of a tunnel. But halfway down the platform, a petite brunette woman in her 20s or 30s jumped down to the rails. Some in the crowd shouted, urging her to come back. She shouted something back in what I think was Italian. When the train started to emerge from the tunnel, she tried to run back to the platform. I didn't see the train hitting her, but heard it. A lot of screaming and shouting from the crowd. On our way out, I saw two people holding up a sobbing and utterly devastated man. I think he saw the impact as he was at the spot where she tried to climb up."
"As a 14-year-old, I didn't tell my dad when I got home. In hindsight, I should have — the woman changing her mind, the impact sound, and the sobbing man messed me up for a while." —superkay
17. "I recently held my father's hand as he took his last breath. Watching the color drain out of his skin, his chest no longer rise, and his fingernails turn blue was absolutely horrifying to me, even though I knew he was finally no longer suffering. Our immediate family is very close, and we were all there together. As someone who faints at open-casket wakes, I'm proud of the strength I had that day to sit with him for several minutes after. I miss him."
18. "I was really little, playing in my front yard with a little boy from across the street. We were around 4 years old. He found a nickel in the grass, and got up to run across the street to show his mother. Suddenly, a lady in her car came flying around the corner, and he got hit by her. He died. While his parents were still at the hospital, I cannot forget his sister wrapped up in my mother's arms in our front room and crying so hard. It was so horrible."
"Watch those little ones around the street!" —luckyangel30
19. "I'm a nurse. My first code was on a patient my age. He didn’t make it. Turned out some friends I knew on Facebook were good friends with him, so I saw them posting about him frequently after, and it broke my heart every time. I so badly wanted to tell them that we did everything we could. We ran that code for hours. The worst part was that as I was leaving the room, I saw his father running down the hallway. We don’t even get time to process what happened or be sad. We just have to move on to the next one, and often be berated by patients for having to wait for something."
20. "I was walking home from an evening class in college when I heard a loud bang, like a large metal plate hitting the ground. As I got close to the source about a minute later, I noticed smoke coming out of a mosque and heard a lot of screaming. I went to investigate and saw the mangled bloodied body of a dog on the floor just inside the gate. Something dropped on my head. I grabbed it, and it was a piece of meat, the size of a strawberry. It suddenly came into focus that the dog was wearing a police uniform. The mosque had just been hit by a suicide bomber, and the meat in my hand was human."
21. "I woke up late for class one day and was in a rush to get out the door. I was still half asleep by the time I got out the door. My apartment is next to a viaduct over railroad tracks that double as a pedestrian bridge. I got to my car and noticed something felt off. I looked up and saw a woman teetering on the top of the fence that lined the pedestrian bridge. There were a handful of people gathered around, trying to talk her down. Half asleep, all I knew was I needed to get to class, but as I pulled away, I called my dad and asked, 'Is this real? Am I still asleep?' because the sight was so shocking that I thought I was dreaming. After my dad confirmed I was indeed awake, I called 911, even though I was sure others already had. When my class ended, I called the non-emergency line and asked if they could just tell me whether she got down or not — an officer called me back and told me she was safe."
