I grew up in St Catharines Ontario, home of Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo the serial killing couple who abducted, raped and killed teenaged girls, including her 12 year old sister, for a while in the 90s. It was EVERYTHING in my world for a long while. I was extraordinarily fanatically careful about where I went from then on, never travelling anywhere alone, etc. Bernardo also raped a great many women at bus stops before escalating to murder.

And one night I hit my twenties and said fuck it and decided to walk home from the bar we were doing karaoke at, and isn’t there a man with a car idling at the top of the small hill I was climbing waiting for me for what seemed like hours. It was plain he intended to take me, and I think it was only the stark terror on my face that made it clear I’d be a very unwilling victim and fight back and that I was sober as a judge. He told me he was just going to offer me a ride, and I said no, saucer eyed, and he paused for a minute and then said “sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you” and drove off.

As a baby, my son went through a period of febrile seizures. Basically, if he got a fever, it could cause him to have seizures. Even after learning what was happening and that it was “harmless,” it was an absolutely chilling/gut-wrenching experience, but the first time was particularly nightmarish.

A sudden, relatively small ice patch on a curvy mountain road with no road barrier and a car coming towards me. I swirled towards abyss, then a rock wall, then back to the abyss, and the other car somehow passed me too. Thankfully neither me nor the others were hurt.

Unironically, I cannot remember.

That time I ate way too much cubensis and was molecularity taken apart and put together again by the void, that was fun.

Waking up to Trump’s day-one anti trans EO calling me an “anti American Ideology” and waging war on trans people. My partner and I made the decision then and there to escape.

Close second is choking on a piece of baked potato while home alone as a kid

Not affecting me, came back from a trip to find my friend nearly comatose on my couch. She had been watching the apartment. Her blood sugar was over 1000.

Fell on the road with a car going straight at me, I slipped in panic when I tried to get up, I don’t know if I was actually in danger but it was close

On a trip to Iceland, was hiking with my mom. I see a spot I want a photo in so I hand her my phone and trek out there. It was a small outcropping at the same height of the trail, overlooking some gulleys. Others had been out there because there was a worn path.

I’m standing out there for my photo, and some wind blows through. It picked me up off my feet. Like, I was weightless and severed from the ground for a few seconds.

I knew in that moment I was going to die. The wind would carry me over the edge and down to the gully below. Luckily, it didn’t last long enough to do that, and dropped me back on my feet, but I was so close to death, I could feel it.

People, the Icelandic wind is no joke. There was no uptick to warn me, no dirt or grass or whatever whipping around. It wasn’t A windy day. It was just no wind, then sudden wind strong enough able to pick up a 190lb woman clear off the earth.

I kept to the main trail after that.

My six-year-old and my eight-year-old started fighting and chasing each other around on a skinny trail at the top of the Grand Canyon with very long drop-offs and no fences to either side.

They didn’t die, then, but each time I remember it again they are at risk of being murdered

Possibly my biggest adult fear moment was when my cousin was in the hospital having had a brain bleed.

I was going back to school in a dumbass bid to alter course in my career, it was the last day of the semester, lunchtime. I was sitting in my truck eating lunch with my girlfriend at the time, I get a call, it’s from my oldest cousin. “Hey, [middle cousin] is in the hospital. Duke hospital. In the ICU.” That was a rough winter, spending a month watching someone you grew up with as their brain very gradually reboots. She survived, by the skin of her scalp. She lost some vision, has near constant headaches, had aphasia pretty bad but that’s eased a bit. At first it was like the nouns fell out of her dictionary. My uncle said to her “What do you want for dinner, babe?” And she said “Oh I want the, you know the, with the, ugh!” and she got up and started boiling some spaghetti.

The most certain I was going to die was one night when I went up for a night currency flight.

Some of the rules pilots have to follow are weird; pilot’s licenses in the US don’t expire, but you have to log certain recent experiences to be eligible to fly solo or to carry passengers. To carry passengers at night, you have to have performed 3 takeoffs and landings to a full stop at night. I was 18 or 19, I took off to do exactly that, just three quick trips around the pattern…it was windier than I’d ever dealt with. I took off and that Cessna bucked in ways that I’d never experience before, in the pitch black of night. I remember thinking “I’m going to die tonight. I’ve always wondered how, now I know.” I did make it to downwind, basically training had kicked in, I was going through the motions, and I noticed out ahead of me in town some flashing blue lights, and I thought to myself “Uh oh, someone’s getting a ticket down there.” And that little moment of casualness allowed me to re-center. I thought about it for the rest of downwind, came in with 20 degrees of flap and a LOT of left rudder for a textbook upwind wheel landing. Taxied back to the ramp, tied the plane down, then sat in the cockpit until my hands stopped shaking and I could write down the hobbs and tach times.

My dog and I got attacked by a sausage pitbull a couple days ago for the second time (same dog). I was able to discuss the situation without any major injuries to either dog, and just some scuffs from rolling around on the ground. It was still terrifying and he ambushed us.

When I woke up blind from surgery. Years ago I had FFS. Mine involved significant reshaping of the brow bone among other things. And like any surgery, beforehand the surgeon makes sure you’re aware of the potential risks and complications. The rate of complications is low, but the risk isn’t zero. If you’re doing substantial work on your face, that can result in nerve damage, loss of feeling, loss of facial motor control, etc. The vast majority of people turn out just fine, but the risks are not zero and are always on your mind. Oh, and I did this in Buenos Aires cause I was a broke-ass 24 year-old not so long out of college. So add that to the fear of potential complications. I wasn’t just getting major surgery. I was getting discount major surgery.

So I go in for surgery. Put the gown on, lay on the hospital cart, the whole nine yards. They give me the gas and I quickly go off to nowhere. Several hours later, I slowly regained consciousness, the surgery complete. And to my horror, I saw…nothing. Absolute darkness. Nothing at all. Pitch blackness. I command my eyes to open, but still nothing. Absolute inky blackness. I’m still hopped up on pain killers, but I’m quickly jolted to heightened awareness. I was aware of the risk of potential loss of feeling, but this? Blinded? Complete blindness in both eyes? I was in complete panic. Absolute terror.

Thankfully however this state did not last too long. A nurse realized what was wrong and helped me out. My eyes or ocular nerves hadn’t somehow been damaged. My eyes were swollen shut. They were able to rinse out my eyes and help me to open them a bit, and it was clear that I would see just fine.

Ultimately, I didn’t have any nerve damage and made a complete recovery. But that moment remains one of the most terrifying I have ever experienced. Alone in foreign country, thousands of miles from home, and I woke blind.

Had to jump about 30 feet off a cruise ship (into water of course) in a “gumby” suit as part of training to work on said ship

My first deployment in a fast-attack submarine, in the fall of 1991. We were working under British operational control, and they ordered us to cruise surfaced, in the North Sea. I was standing watch as a lookout, with another lookout and the Officer of the Deck (OOD), in the sail superstructure of the boat. We were wearing body harnesses and lanyards, clipped into the superstructure - normal procedure.

I was a sailor aboard USS SUNFISH (SSN549), a Sturgeon Class boat, where the sail superstructure was 25 feet tall. We were in 48 foot seas.

The 3 of us on watch that night were washed overboard more than 10 times each. Often all 3 of us at the same time… flung overboard, hanging by our lanyards, trying to roll around and grab onto the ladder rungs, or one another, to get back into the bridge pooka. None of us broke any bones or lost any teeth, but we were pretty battered and bruised by the end of it.

That was the first time I got to see the entire boat out of the water… at the top of the wave, I could see the stem planes, stabilizers, the end of the towed-array housing, and the propeller. At the bottom of each trough, we’d see just a tiny hole of sky, through the water, as it all crashed down upon us, and we all hold on, trying to stay inside the superstructure.

We pulled into the Navy Base at Rosyth Scotland the next afternoon. The windshield, booked in for surface operations, was completely missing, as well a the port running light. We sustained damage to our observation periscope and main communications antenna as well.

The experience was both scary and exhilarating.

Sudden low blood pressure after seeing my own blood. I went temporarily blind and my hearing was weird for a bit. Thankfully, my father rescued me.

The reason I didn’t faint was because, when I felt my blood pressure dropping, I immediately kneeled to avoid further injury.

That was most certainly the scariest thing I’ve experienced. Somehow, it was scarier than actually fainting.