Please note: This article contains mention of violence and sexual assault.
The chilling feeling that something is just, well, wrong can come at any time, and as I’ve come to learn, should never be ignored. Recently, I’ve been delving into stories of people who had a “gut feeling” that something was totally wrong, and it turned out their instinct was right.
These stories were so compelling (and surprisingly, relatable — thank you, instincts!) that many members of our own BuzzFeed Community chimed in with “gut feeling” stories of their own. Here are some of the most chilling and compelling:
1.“I got a new neighbor at the beginning of the pandemic, and trying to be neighborly, I introduced myself over my six-foot privacy fence. Big mistake.”
“Next thing I know, the guy was in my backyard without a mask when we were supposed to be social distancing, and he kept trying to convince me to come over and see his basement that he fixed up. He creeped me out from day one…I even told my kids that I think Jeffrey Dahmer’s cousin moved into the neighborhood!
I refused to go over, and he wouldn’t stop pressing me about it, but I managed to get him to leave my yard. He bothered me frequently and for a couple of years but eventually got annoyed with me because I refused to go over to his house.
Fast forward a couple of years, I found out from my other neighbor that he got arrested for drugging and date raping a woman in his house who he met on Tinder. He’s now in jail. I knew he was dangerous. I could 100% sense it.”
Grace Cary / Getty Images
2.“My best friend and I were picking blackberries a few summers ago when we started hearing rustling in the bushes and the birds were chirping like crazy. I got a feeling we were in danger and told her we needed to go. She said it was fine and kept picking.”
“I lasted five more minutes before I told her we were leaving, and we went back to the ATV (we were in the backcountry). She was lingering and I was focusing on turning over the engine while yelling to hurry up.
When I looked up, there was a bear only a meter from her. I started screaming, she sprinted to me without looking back, and we got out of there without her ever seeing the bear. I know it wasn’t likely to attack, but I am still glad I trusted my gut even if she didn’t!”
Mlorenzphotography / Getty Images
3.“In the early ’90s I was driving to my evening shift. I observed a guy kind of stumbling into the road towards me. I knew picking up strangers was a dangerous thing to do, but he looked like he needed help.”
“He looked disheveled, even had a few bruises and cuts. Told me he had been beaten up by his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend. I had a nervous feeling and casually mentioned my husband, who was a police officer. He immediately said he wanted to be left off at the corner church having an AA meeting.
A few days later the news was reporting on the serial killer Glen Rogers. He had killed women and set fire to their cars. I have never picked up anyone ever again.”
—Anonymous
Florida Department of Corrections
4.“I work at a public library and had a guy who took a liking to me, chatting me up, hanging around, asking for me if he didn’t see me. Creeped me the F out. Coworkers started hustling me off the floor as soon as he walked in.”
“We learned later that he was a registered sex offender and forbidden to be anywhere children congregated. There’s an elementary school across the street.”
Maskot / Getty Images
5.“When I was 6, my mother took my brothers and me to the lake with her boyfriend. We swam and had hot dogs and roasted marshmallows. When it was time to leave, my mom’s boyfriend’s car would not start.”
“A group of teens drove up and offered to take me and my mother to a gas station to use the phone. I cried and begged and refused to leave with them. My mom said I was uncontrollable.
My mother, her boyfriend, myself, and my brothers ended up walking as a group to the nearest payphone. Her boyfriend called some friends and we went back to the car and slept in the back seat while he and his friends worked on the car. I was completely happy when we left at 7 a.m. the next morning and went to McDonalds.
Years later, my mother would tell us how I saved us from driving away with strangers from Speegleville Park on July 13, 1982.”
—Anonymous
On the night of July 13, 1982, three teenagers were murdered in Speegleville Park in Waco, Texas.
Wirestock / Getty Images/iStockphoto
6.“Not me, but my mom. She woke up from a dream where a car was crashed into and pushed off a cliff. That morning, she told my father about the sinking feeling she had. She begged him not to go to work that day. He still decided to go.”
“So she said, ‘If the car breaks down on your way home, don’t stop to fix it.’ My dad was one of those guys who always thought he knew how to fix everything. She told him, ‘Just walk away from the car and get a ride with someone.’
Well, the car broke down that day. Turned out as he was walking away from the car — just like she told him — another vehicle slammed into ours, hitting exactly where my dad would have been if he had stopped to check what was wrong with it. He would have been slammed down a cliff and died along with his car and the guy who hit it.”
—Anonymous
Pgiam / Getty Images
7.“Not as dramatic as some of these, but I was once waiting at a red light. The light turned green but for some reason, I didn’t pull out right away. A few seconds later, a car came up on my left and blew through the red. If I had pulled out when my light turned green, I would have been T-boned.”
8.“I was an RA my junior year of college, so I was on campus after most people had left for the summer. It was a small and very safe campus and I frequently walked around alone at night without issue.”
“One night, I walked to the library at around 1 a.m. to drop a book in the book return. It was a nice night, so I figured I would walk the long way back to my dorm. As I walked, I got a sudden gut feeling that there was someone watching me, and a sinking feeling at the realization that nobody would hear me if I screamed.
I picked a different path to cut my walk short and suddenly, a man in his 50s was a little ways behind me. He called after me. I acknowledged him with a wave, but I kept walking, keeping about 20 feet between us, and that panic was growing. “
Michael Deemer / Getty Images/iStockphoto
“He started to pick up the pace toward me when we rounded the corner of a building and there were two male students around 200 feet away. They turned our direction and he slowed upon seeing them and lowered his voice, saying he wanted to ‘show me something’ and that he had weed he wanted to sell me.”
“I yelled ‘not interested’ and turned and sprinted back to my dorm, going around to the back door and making sure he hadn’t followed me. I called campus police and reported it, but tried to laugh it off as me being sort of paranoid.
The next morning campus police emailed the school saying the man was a registered violent sex offender and that everyone should report him immediately if he was seen on campus. If I hadn’t changed the way I was walking, I may not have run into anyone else and things could have ended up way worse.”
—Anonymous
9.“I was working at an amusement park over the summer back in the 1980s. I was done with work and some acquaintances and my roommate were going to a bar. I decided it was too late for me, and I had heard the guy driving was already drinking. I went with my gut feeling and stayed at the park.”
“My roommate didn’t come home that night and I just assumed he got lucky.
The next morning I was informed that the driver had wrapped his car around a light post and killed the girl sitting in the front seat. My roommate had passed out in the back and suffered brain damage (which he never recovered from). The driver only had broken bones. I’m not sure what would have happened, but I always felt I got lucky.”
—Anonymous
Drbueller / Getty Images
10.“I’m a criminal defense attorney and a woman. The nature of my job requires me to often meet in closed-door, private rooms so I can talk to my clients about their cases and preserve attorney-client confidentiality.”
“One day, I met with a new client at the courthouse who was there for his first appearance in court. He was a younger man, maybe mid-20s, and was there for a traffic thing that was not very serious but would require a lot of time.
He was polite and soft-spoken, answered all my questions, was non-confrontational, had never been charged with anything, and seemed perfectly fine. But something was just making my intuition GO OFF loudly in the back of my mind. I ended our interview as quickly as possible, appeared with him in court, and set it for the next hearing a few weeks out.”
Fizkes / Getty Images/iStockphoto
“When I got back to my office, I went to my boss and asked for the case to be assigned to a different attorney. I couldn’t name a single thing the client had done or said that would have made anyone agree that he was frightening. I couldn’t articulate my concern other than to say, ‘Something in my gut just gave me a bad feeling; I don’t want to be alone in conference rooms with him.'”
“Thankfully my boss (also a woman) understood immediately the feeling I was talking about. She said she would assign the case to a different lawyer in the office. That case was resolved with the other lawyer handling it, and I put it out of my mind.
About a year later, I saw the client again in court. He was charged with murdering a woman who had declined his requests to go out with him. I was stunned but so glad I trusted my gut and stopped representing him on the prior case.”
—Anonymous
Chris Ryan / Getty Images
11.“I was going to take a flight to San Francisco from Oxnard. I woke up out of a dead sleep with my heart pounding thinking that the plane was going to crash, so I called up the airline and rescheduled for a later flight. Sure enough, a student pilot flew into the plane over Burbank airport and killed everyone on board.”
—Anonymous
12.“One beautiful fall evening, my boyfriend and I took my van and drove out to the local mountains to make dinner at a remote overlook. After dinner, we decided to stay the night at the overlook. At dusk, I started to get an unsettled feeling.”
“I suddenly blurted out to my boyfriend, ‘Let’s drive back to town right now. I’m feeling scared of mountain lions.’ I had never seen mountain lions or felt scared of them before, but I knew we had to leave. We packed up and drove away. A few miles out, there were two mountain lions on the road.”
—Anonymous
Jason Klassi / Getty Images
13.“When I was 17, I was a front desk receptionist at a gym. There were always guys coming in and out, flirting, mostly harmless. But one guy in particular made the hairs on my neck stand up. He was ex-military, very fit, handsome, huge. But something about him rubbed me the wrong way.”
“Finally, after months of him wearing me down for my number, I gave it to him. I instantly regretted it, but since he flirted with so many girls, I didn’t think this 30-something-year-old man, with a beautiful ex-wife and young son, would ever call me and ask me out.
Most of my friends were jealous and thought he was so handsome and didn’t understand my reservations. My best friend, however, totally got the creeps too.
He called me while I was with my family one night, late. Really late — red flag. And I told him I was with my boyfriend, and my family all gave me crap for lying. He hung up on me and was super rude and smug at the gym from then on. I didn’t care. I felt relieved. My friends thought I was an idiot and missing out.”
Maskot / Getty Images/Maskot
“Fast-forward ten years later, and my best friend (the same one who got the creeps) is now a cop and sends me his mugshot.”
“Turns out, he was a serial rapist across multiple counties who would drug women he dated and homeless women he would offer a ride to, and then rape them.
They caught him after a poor homeless woman reported him. His DNA has been linked in multiple cases. You never know. 17-year-old me got the creeps and some thought I was stupid. It probably saved my life.”
—Anonymous
14.“I lived in an apartment complex during COVID and didn’t go near people. We had four laundry rooms in our complex. One day I met this man in the laundry room, he was probably in his late 50s, about the same as me.”
“He came on really strong, which was a turn-off for me. He was wearing a Raiders T-shirt, second turn-off. Then I noticed he was wearing an earring, third turn-off. We would run into each other sometimes, and he would invite me to dinner at his place. COVID was my excuse not to go. He moved out after six months, and I saw him once at the store, but we didn’t speak.
About a year later, I was watching the news, and they were covering a man who had raped three women in the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s. It was the same man I had met in the laundry room. They had caught him with DNA left on the steering wheel of the school bus he drove, and he is now in prison for 30 years.”
—Anonymous
Freemixer / Getty Images
15.“I was feeling anxious, nervous, like something bad was about to happen. I never had that feeling before. We were headed out to a movie and I mentioned the feeling to my girlfriend, who is a healthcare professional. She checked my pulse and said, ‘Let’s go to the ER.'”
“I tried to argue as I was well otherwise, but we ended up in the ER. There, while waiting for care, I fell ‘asleep.’ A wonderful feeling of peace. And I felt my deceased mother.
Then I got this annoying feeling of people trying to pull me back. My then 15-year-old son and my girlfriend had started a code blue after my heart had stopped. A pacemaker was implanted the next day!”
—Anonymous
Douglas Sacha / Getty Images
16.“My mom used to work in San Francisco when I was little. We lived in Berkeley across the bay, and my grandparents would babysit me while she was at work. One day, she was working, and it was getting close to the end of the day, and she started to feel something was off.”
“She planned on pushing through and working the rest of the day, but she told her boss about the feeling and he told her to just go home a bit early since the day was almost over anyway. So my mom packed up and made her way home across the Bay Bridge.
As she arrived home, she had to pull over because she felt the car wobbling. This was October 17, 1989, and the shaking was the infamous Loma Prieta earthquake.
If she had left work on time as she had planned, she would have been on the San Francisco Bay Bridge when it collapsed. To this day, I am so grateful to her boss for telling her to leave! I am a California girl, I am also terrified of earthquakes to this day.”
—Anonymous
Lloyd Cluff / Getty Images
17.“I had just moved to the West Coast and had only been there a few months. Due to the move I was buying and returning a lot of things. One morning in December, I was getting ready to leave to make one of these return trips, and I had this heavy weight in my gut the entire time.”
“It slowed me down and made me reconsider going, but ultimately, I decided to go. When I got to the store to make the return, I noticed it was oddly quiet.
There was someone sleeping outside the store, and no one was in the parking lot. Walking in, there was no one in the store — quite literally, everything was abandoned.
A lone store worker found me and brought me to the back, explaining the situation. Minutes before I had gotten to the store, the ‘sleeping person’ had been shot and killed right where I would have been walking had I left when I originally was planning to. Robbery gone wrong, and all that. I haven’t ignored that feeling since that day.”
—Anonymous
Photos By Sarah Nussbaum / Getty Images
18.“When I was 18 years old I was in college and decided to take a job as a fast food restaurant closing manager, with shifts from 4 p.m. to midnight. We usually closed the dining room at 11 p.m., but the drive-thru stayed open ’til midnight. This one night, I was doing paperwork in my office about 15 minutes before closing the dining room when I got this overwhelming feeling that I needed to lock the dining room early.”
“I couldn’t explain it other than a sick feeling and a voice in my head saying, ‘Lock the doors now!’ I got up and did a quick walk around the dining room and bathrooms to make sure no customers were in the building, then went over to the doors.
Just as I locked them, a man came to the doors, asking to be let in. I politely told him I was having a problem in the dining room, but we could serve him at the drive-thru. I was face-to-face with this man, looking at him through a glass door. He wasn’t happy about it but wasn’t rude in any way.”
Tirc83 / Getty Images
“Rather than go through the drive-thru he decided to go to another fast food restaurant, right next door to us. He went in, ordered his food, ate, and then hid in the bathroom ceiling. After the manager locked the doors he robbed the place, had all the employees lay face down on the floor, and shot all but one of them in the back of the head.”
“One employee was able to run out the back door and escape. The killer was on the run with his face all over the news and town for a week or so before he was caught. Needless to say, I quit that job that very night.”
—Anonymous
19.“When I was 19, I was a telephone installer for GTE and we were putting phones in for new construction. My boss wanted me to wire in some things that were directly below other workers putting in ductwork. I had a feeling, and decided to wait for them to finish with the large piece of ductwork that they were installing.”
“My boss came over and asked me why I wasn’t doing anything yet, and I pointed up above us and stated it might not be safe until they were finished. No sooner had I said that than the large piece of ductwork they were trying to put near the ceiling came crashing down on the very spot I was told to work in.
If I had been there, I would have had severe head or neck injuries, even with the hard hat. My boss and I both went sheet white when this happened. He assigned me another task in the meantime.”
—Anonymous
Iuliia Burmistrova / Getty Images
20.“It was on a Friday evening, and I was 13 years old. That day, my group of friends and I decided to hang out in our neighborhood and go skating a bit.”
“However, in the midst of our walk towards a shady spot in the area, this feeling started to settle in my gut. Nothing good. So, I told my friends and they laughed it off, even calling me a ‘puss’.
I went back home regardless, and an hour later my mom called my cell, totally freaked out, asking me where I was. After assuring her I was home, she told me my friends had gotten robbed with a knife by two drug addicts. They took everything from my friends; phones, wallets, their skateboards…I had never been so happy about following my gut.”
—Anonymous
Louise Beaumont / Getty Images
21.And finally: “My Filipino family moved to Cudahy, Wisconsin, just a couple miles outside Milwaukee, in the mid-70s. When I was in my late teens, I started sneaking out to gay bars in the city on the weekends using a fake ID. One night, this cute blonde guy started cruising me.”
“He sat down next to me and started chatting me up. I was wearing flip-flops, and he commented that my feet were ‘tiny’ and ‘pretty.’ It was a bit weird, but I was open to it. One thing led to another, and I wound up in the front seat of his car. I thought we’d just make out a little, but he wanted to take me back to his place.”
Bim / Getty Images
“I told him I had a curfew and needed to get home, and offered to exchange numbers. He kept trying to convince me and took off my flip-flops so he could massage my ‘pretty’ feet. I insisted I needed to go, and he got angry.”
“I tried to get my flip-flops back on, but he threw them in the back seat and then grabbed me by the wrist with a really strong grip. I panicked, and started to struggle to get his hand off me. I wound up punching him and then fell backwards out of the car. He shouted angrily at me, then sped off in his car. I had to walk all the way home barefoot, and I told my parents I’d been mugged. I never saw the guy again, as my family moved to Chicago shortly after this.”
“A few years later, I was watching the news and saw a report about a serial killer who’d been arrested. It was the guy from that bar. It was Jeffrey Dahmer.”
If you ever have a gut feeling, listen to it. You never, ever know: It might save a life. If you have your own “gut feeling” story, feel free to tell it down in the comments below, or, if you prefer, you can check out this anonymous Google Form. Who knows — your story may be included in an upcoming BuzzFeed article!
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
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