When a friend of mine was a little kid, someone drove past, jumped out of their car, and ran over and grabbed him trying to kidnap him.
He was just confused about what the guy was even doing, but grabbed onto a chain-link fence and wouldn’t let go, so the guy was yanking him and yelling at him to let go, but he was able to hold on. Eventually the guy gave up and ran back and sped away. While he was being yanked on the fence, he was worried because the ball he’d been playing with was rolling down the hill, and he was worried it would go somewhere he wouldn’t be able to find it and he would lose his ball.
When the guy left, he went and retrieved his ball, psyched that he was able to get it back. He thought no more about it and kept playing, and then later that day told his mom about what happened.
She lost her mind. For some reason, he thought she had also been worried about the ball, and he kept telling her he’d been able to get it back after, so it was all good.
I can’t find the statistic any more, but it was something like 80% of people who are kidnapped and are taken in the kidnapper’s car are killed. Like this kid’s situation, fight, scream, do everything possible to not be taken.
This is what I do every time and it always works
Wait, what do you mean every time?
They’re so fun to try and kidnap, I’ve given it a burl a few times, they gotta fucking tight grip tho, never been able to get em loose.
You mean killing the person you’ve just snatched into your car right?
Works like a charm
Was his parents separated? Most likely it would be dad with a restraining order or some other family trying to “get him back”.
When I was 13 I helped the local burnout mow lawns. He was late 20’s and hung out with us teenagers from the same block. Got us weed, bought us beer. The 16yo guys I looked up to were friends (?) with him, he’d hang in the backyard fort of the lead 16yo, and he basically ran the local lawn mowing cartel of all us kids. I wanted money and it was easy and fun, hangin’ with the boys. We shoveled walks in the winter.
One snowstorm morning he wasn’t at the fort where we’d meet so I volunteered to run across the street to his house. Knock. Knock loud. Try the door, he didn’t mind if we came in his basement entrance to his parent’s house. It’s dark, light on in the bathroom. 13yo me saw his first dead body that day; full bathtub with slit wrists and neck.
E: oh, reason for suicide seemed to be that he had a DUI wreck a couple months prior where a young girl (like 7 or 8) didn’t die but wouldn’t ever be the same… like couldn’t walk or brain damage or something. He couldn’t handle what he did, I guess.
Damn. You understood the assignment. Also, I was sure that story was going somewhere else horrifying.
When I was a kid (18?), one night a friend of my friend called us to come give this drunken girl a ride. They said they were at a party and the guy took some time to babysit her and take her home but he couldn’t handle her anymore.
We went and picked her up and were going to take her wherever in the area she wanted to go as a solid for this guy. She got in the car and started berating us and trying to turn up the volume and complaining about the music. She said she had sucked dick and whatever other mess and wasn’t going to put up with our shit this evening. She was much more intoxicated than I thought she would be. She requested to be taken to her car and she started giving us directions. She said she was going to sleep it off in the car so her parents wouldn’t know. We planned to take her keys and come back later or something. We were honestly blindsided by how ridiculous everything got so quickly.
Turns out her car was parked at a local recycling center or something and when we pulled in there, there was a brand new Cadillac, lights came on car started. She said it was probably her grandpa. We let her out and started driving away so that they could figure it out, we wanted to be done. Grandpa didn’t even stop to let her in the car or get her in her own car or anything. He immediately started following us. He tailgated us all the way down the highway back to my friend’s house with his brights on. We drove normally but tried to concoct a plan. We pulled up the driveway at my friend’s place about 15 minutes later and he stops short a few car lengths into the driveway.
I kind of lost it at that point and walked down the driveway to ask him what the hell he was thinking and he steps out of the car standing behind the driver side door. As I come up to him to give him a piece of my mind he raises his hands and he has a pistol pointed right at me. I guess being young and full of adrenaline I absolutely went off on him yelling what the hell did he think he was doing pulling a gun on this we were just trying to give his granddaughter a ride we didn’t even really know her. I mean I got right up in his face. I can’t believe I did that in retrospect, I would never do that now. After I yelled at him he dropped his hands and looked confused. Said “What was I supposed to do?” I’ll never forget those words.He quickly got in his car and started to turn around. I tried to block his car so I could call the police but as I started to get on the phone he punched it and ran over my foot. Thankfully I moved to just enough to the side that it didn’t really do anything. Cops showed up later and the officer stood around for a while talking to us and getting statements. He said that we have to go down to the magistrate downtown to do anything about this.
We went there and the magistrate asked us a bunch of the same questions. He did some paperwork stuff and essentially concluded that the guy who pulled a gun on me had already come by and filed a report that we were threatening him and that the two conflicting statements would cancel each other out - nothing would happen to either of us. Come to find out later on that the man who pulled a gun on me was a retired police chief from the area, very well known, who owned a local car wash. He had a sketchy past and I guess this was just another day in the life of a police officer abusing power.
I look back and think what the hell was that girl doing? Was she actually being taking advantage of? Did the friend of a friend know that would happen so he set us up to take the fall for it? Was he the abuser? Was she just being sloppy and shitty and he didn’t want to get in trouble? How in the world did those things cancel each other out especially with no investigation into it. They couldn’t have. I’ll never forget that. I never talked to that idiot friend of a friend again and I never saw police officers the same either.
I’m aware your questions are rhetorical, but I’m going to answer them anyway. Your questions are just so spot on.
Was she actually being taking advantage of?
80/20
Did the friend of a friend know that would happen so he set us up to take the fall for it?
Maybe. It doesn’t have to be that Machiavellian. Maybe he didn’t know what to do and was just looking for an out. Not an excuse. Could be similar feelings whether he’s the abuser or relatively innocent.
How in the world did those things cancel each other out especially with no investigation into it.
Cops don’t like paperwork. Paperwork can mean accountability. If nothing’s written, they can’t get lectured for doing it wrong.
I half expected this to end with jumper cables. Quite a ride, though.
Nothing personal, kid. Alternator’s out.
I (aurally) witnessed a kindergartener get run over by her school bus. I was on a different bus and our bus drivers were talking over the radio, then there was this ungodly wailing from the other bus. The other bus driver just kept screaming “I killed her, I killed her”.
Turns out the little girl barely missed the bus, ran alongside it to catch up, tripped, and fell under the wheels of the bus.
Once we got to high school, students on the killing bus were offered counseling. I, not being on the killing bus, didn’t talk to anyone about it until I went to therapy decades later.
Yellow school buses freak me out still, for that and abuse reasons.
Omigod that’s awful.
Yeah, there’s also the confusion of not having literally seen or felt the kid being crushed, so chastising myself that it shouldn’t have been that traumatic. It took me years to accept that just hearing something can also be witnessing it.
My bus hit some poor unhoused guy last year. That was a terrible thump. Thankfully all he got was a head laceration.
I’m sorry and I’m glad he wasn’t majorly injured.
I’m, in fact, not a horse. I only pretend to be one on the Internet.
Wow. How fucking dare you? I trusted you.
Nice try Ed.
This is America, 1971
I had half of my face ripped off by a dog when I was a kid. Skin and flesh was just hanging off of my face and I almost lost my right eye.
Doctors did a great job patching me up and you can’t even tell that anything happened unless you know where the super subtle scars are.
Oh wow. They did great work then. My niece has her face attacked by a pit bull, has had several surgeries and some laser work, and you can still tell unfortunately. She kind of developed some transient anorexia about it unfortunately, which my asshole MIL went out of her way to aggravate. Glad you did well though.
I’m so sorry your niece went through that. I hope that she can find some peace and heal someday.
I think she’s much better now, thanks. Not thanks to the malignant narcissism of my MIL though. Ugh family.
Family can be the best and worst
I have scars around and on my genitals. When I was young my mom told me that I had surgery just after I was born. Now as an adult, I think I may have been born with some sort of intersex condition but I am afraid to talk to my parents about it.
I…what the fuck! Exact same with me, and I’ve always kinda felt like I’m stuck between sexes.
I just never thought about this possibility…Might want to get hormonal blood work done. Are you female? You could have androgen insensitivity syndrome or something.
Probably not, from someone who worked in pediatric urology and endocrinology. They don’t tend to do surgery until you are older because you need to be old enough to determine what your gender identity is very clearly, which is not clear sometimes with intersex conditions. It’s a really bad decision to make too early. Probably what you had was an undescended testicle or hydrocele or something.
They don’t tend to do surgery until you are older
Yeah, today. But not 40 years ago.
It’s a really bad decision to make too early.
You say that like parents wouldn’t make the decision and find a doctor to do it.
No haha. Did you read the book about the boy whose penis was burned off so the infamous Dr John Money told them to make him into a girl. They did and it was terrible.
Yeah that happened about the same time as OP’s story
Were the standards any different in the 80s? I’ve heard stories of people getting “corrective surgery” in infancy but the cases that I’ve heard are not from the US or are much older.
Outside of North America maybe, that I don’t know. But in North America they tell the parents they won’t know the gender for a while, to name and dress and groom the child as the parents choose, but they let them know it might change. It’s so rare though, I’ve seen one case in 20 years of hospital work.
Human Rights Watch was pretty concerned about prematurely assigning gender to intersex children, back in 2017. I expect there’s more regional variation in this than you’d think.
After taking a car door to the head during heavy winds, I experienced immediate and recurring night terrors/sleep paralysis for two years. They started out pretty extreme, with me waking up on my stomach with some kind of creature pinning me to the bed. I’d struggle enough to lift my head a few inches, only to find my pillow was filled with distorted, open-mouthed faces stretching out at me from the material.
As time went in the hallucinations gradually waned in extremity, though never becoming anything comfortable. I would open my eyes to see a phosphorescent grid encompassing my walls, or millions of flies on my bedroom ceiling. Once my cat was staring up at them too, and I believed what was happening was real, only to wake up a moment later facing a different direction, and my cat fast asleep at my feet.
Eventually it’s as though my soul became heavy or something. I slept on the top floor of a two-story home, with a very old colonial-era basement below it. I would constantly find myself one or two floors directly beneath my bed, all but glued to the ground and trying with all my might to crawl out of the damp, dark cellar toward the stairs, but too sluggish and/or paralyzed to do it. I felt terrified down there in the darkness. Eventually the adrenaline would wake me up safely in my bed.
Throughout the entire ordeal I would somewhat frequently open my eyes to see some sort of ghostly or transparent entity looming over my bed, leaning over or staring down at me. The last night I ever experienced an episode, I woke up to see that very entity, but I realized suddenly that the entity was me. It was me standing there, looking down at myself. I became angry. I felt like these episodes had ruined my life, and made sleeping something I no longer looked forward to. The rage came to a head. I activated every nerve in my body to try to break free of the paralysis. I gritted my teeth as I succeeded, groaning the words “FFFFRUUUUCKK YYRRROOOOUU!!!” as I bolted up from my bed and lunged through my own ghost. Then I never saw it again. In fact, I never had another night terror since. It’s been years now. A decade at least.
I love your story. I overcome attempted nightmares in a very similar way.
I rarely get anything close to a nightmare nowadays, but I used to get dreams where someone/something would chase me. Then one night, I felt it was about to happen, and thought, “I’m so tired of this. You know what? I’m done.” And… the thing disappeared.
Ever since then, if any scary shit starts happening in a dream, I just tell it to fuck off. Sometimes that moment leads to a small bit of lucidity, and I go, “Oh hey, I can fly away.” Run, jump, take off, and it’s pleasant dreams from then on out.
The power of the mind is incredible.
I actually just had a moment like that (sudden lucidity during a dream) in my last sleep. Probably would have lost that memory entirely if this comment hadn’t reminded me. Even still, I can’t remember the context, just that something was happening that was mildly annoying and I realized I was dreaming.
I just said, “wait a minute, this is my dream, I’m in control here” and then I think the dream shifted into something else or something because the memory fragment ends there.
It’s weird, as soon as I became aware of my sleep paralysis I became able to control it and I’ve never had another either
I still experienced it after I knew what it was, but not nearly as often. The last time I remember it happening, I dreamed I was at work. Laid down in a hallway to nap. Woke up from the dream nap with one of the execs standing next to me, looking down his nose. Couldn’t move. “Hell of a time for sleep paralysis,” dream-me thought.
Then real me woke up with sleep paralysis. At work, with my head down on a conference table at 3am.
I do not miss those sensations.
I have always had hypnagogic dreams but no paralysis. The scary hallucinations only happened when I was stressed
Normally the hallucinations were benign
Sleep paralysis is so terrifying. I get episodes when I’m under incredibly severe stress, so I’ve only had about 4 episodes. When it first happened, my heart was thumping so quick and fast that I thought I’d for sure have a heart attack.
I’ve been sick at home for a few days. I blew my nose into some toilet paper, checked, then tossed it in the toilet. Saw myself in the bathroom mirror and had snot all over my mustache.
Then it hit me. This isn’t the first time I’ve blown my nose with a mustache — it’s just the first time I’ve immediately looked in a mirror afterward.
Oh my god
Yea it happens if you have facial hair unfortunately. Went for a meal with my family last night and drinks after. Got home and realised there was quite a bit of dried soup in my beard. I do normally check myself after eating in my phone camera but totally forgot. Made me glad I’ve already made an appointment with the barber to get it trimmed.
Probably not as interesting, but I was woken up as a kid (teen?) by my mom screaming and running into my room/in my bed. Woke up to see my dad standing in the doorway with a steak knife. She had asked him to go to rehab. That was it. We’re good though 🤙🏾
They tried to make me go to rehab 🎶
I think in hindsight, we can all agree, that Amy Winehouse should have indeed gone to rehab.
There’s literally a video of her doing coke while performing. Like mid song.
rehab doesn’t “fix” people. do you have any experience with addiction? if there was a magic cure, there would be no addicts.
It’s a joke you cabbage
one that perpetuates an acceptable level of ignorance. Addiction is hell. You’re joking about people being in unimaginable pain. It’s disgusting.
You’re in unimaginable pain
Banned from my instance. Have the day you deserve.
rehab is a lot better of an idea than nothing
Rehab can work for those who want to use it, it very rarely works for those forced to go to it.
There, feel better now?
and I said 🔪🔪🔪
I witnessed a fatal lathe accident. The kind that would have easily been featured in rotten.com back in the day. They shut the whole shop down and noone worked for a month. It was awful.
Yikes, remember kids no loose items near the violently spinning things.
I used to be a plumber and spent a lot of time running a pipe threader all I ever thought about while using it was if I mess up this thing will force my body through a 5 in gap.
if i mess up, this thing will force my body through a 5 in. gap.
Jesus. What a way to go
like a hotdog in a shop vac, crummy way to go really
At least the hot dog is still edible
I’m sure some sea creatures were more than happy to eat pureed human
I’ve never worked with a lathe, but PTOs on the farm were terrifying. I was taught to be afraid, and I was.
Basically the same ideas for safety, but those PTOs tend to have way more horsepower behind them. I don’t care how cold you might be, loose clothing is bad.
My cousin got his arm ripped off by a tractor PTO when he was a kid. Some quick thinking by his dad got him a tourniquet and his detached arm on ice in a cooler, drove him to the hospital and they were able to reattach it. He doesn’t quite have full function with it but you’d never know. This would have been around 1990 so pretty impressive medically.
Lathes are fucking scary man. Sorry you had to see that.
Not “Russian lathe incident”? Sounds like it might potentially be identical if it’s not that one.
Nah, I’m in the US. And, honestly (this is painful to recall) it wasn’t an arm stretched around the lathe chuck. It was mostly red mist that left some organs around. This was on a large machine that had a 30 foot long bed, and around 90 HP to drive it. The guy was trying to turn down a cam shaft for a ship at about 100 rpm. The forces involved are insane. He kind of… disappeared.
Sounds like he didn’t even have time to realize he fucked up. Jesus, it’s hard to believe anyone would knowingly do a job like that.
We were shown videos during my apprenticeship and that was already horrible. I don’t want to imagine what it’s like to see it live.
I used to be Mormon
I used to be jehovas witness. Hello cousin!
I used to be baptist. Hello fellow abuse victim.
I used to be catholic. I wasn’t abused, but I stopped going to church when I moved out.
I used to be an atheist. I still am but I also used to be.
Thanks Mitch 👍
You don’t have to be abused to still have a valid pride for removing yourself from the nonsense. Good for you!
I used to be a Jesus Freak. They were actually really nice.
Once put one of those plastic wrapped potatoes in my uniform apron to put back in produce at my first retail job (got abandoned in the mac and cheese section). I then completely forgot and took it home. Took it out of my apron and put it on my desk next to my car keys because “I’ll remember to take it back”. I did not. Lived with me for a week or something when I finally put it in my apron again because I wasn’t remembering. I took it to work. I completely forgot about it and never returned it. It made this trip several times. I put it back on my desk because this wasn’t working out, surely I’ll remember if I see it.
Then I forgot about it for like three months. One day I look over at my desk and it’s a shriveled potato with a new potato growing from its own husk…
In essence, potatoes are amazing and horrifying. Just like my short term memory lol.
Then you plant the potato, determined to pay it back with interest. Months later, you harvest 5 potatoes that make it back to work but end up forgotten and back at home again. You even remember them at work frequently, but never when you’re in the right section of the store.
You do remember to plant them the next year though. The first year, you just put them in a pot in your back yard, this year they get a small dedicated place in the ground. The 5 potatoes turn into 34 and no longer all fit in your apron pockets. But you do remember to return the 4 you have on you one day at work, and then forget to grab more before the other 30 are all sprouting the next year.
So the potato garden gets bigger year 3. You build a small shed to store the couple hundred you harvest. You’re getting good at growing potatoes.
You eat one, not because you think you deserve it, but to make sure the potatoes you still want to return to the produce section are up to the high standards your employer’s customers expect.
It’s pretty good.
No, not just good. Your potato is amazing, the best you’ve ever tried. Wait, no, your work’s potato is the best you’ve ever tried. You vow to repay that potato, hardening your resolve. You bring a whole bag in on your next day.
It only takes you three days to remember to drop off the bag of potatoes with the others (after a colleague asks about the bulge on your back where you were carrying them under your shirt). But then you realize with horror that the colour of the bag you made doesn’t match the others. They are beige while yours is a bright beige. You return home that day with your bag plus a work bag, just so you can match the colour properly.
It takes you two more years to finally master the potato bag making craft. It wasn’t just the colour that was off, you also had to match the font and placement of the text and then noticed that your stitching holding the bag closed was pretty different.
Your potato garden had taken over your entire back yard by then and you knew with dread that you wouldn’t have enough space to plant them all next season. But your neighbour lets you use some of their 50 acres in return for two potatoes a day. You feel a bit guilty because they aren’t your potatoes, but you justify it because it’s an investment.
You don’t forget about returning potatoes at work anymore. You can’t forget. Potatoes have all but taken over your life at this point. You bring in a bag and fill your pockets with them each day and take each chance you can get to casually pass through the produce section and leave some potatoes without anyone noticing (which is difficult because you’d been promoted to the deli counter).
You’ve grown strong from getting used to carrying a bag of potatoes while still walking normally, not to mention the slight of hand tricks you use to pull it out of its hiding spot and leave it with the other bags without anyone noticing.
But you’re still gaining potatoes overall, filling the shed and the storage building that replaced it. You consider high jacking the truck that delivers potato orders to your work, but you know Ed in receiving would notice something was up if there was an extra delivery they didn’t pay for. You had already heard some confusion about potato shrinkage being negative and worried you’d never be able to repay your debt.
Then a complaint came in and you thought it was all over. A customer bought a bag of potatoes and they were all trash compared to the last one. The store was going to trace the batch number, which you had just been making up and even having a bit of fun with.
You felt a confused relief when you heard that the trace had led to nothing unusual being discovered. Turns out the trash potatoes were from the usual source and you wondered if that earlier bag was the one from you.
And then one day your nightmare comes true. You had just stealthfully placed three potatoes with others–that were much smaller and didn’t look nearly as good (you were considering sending some anonymous tips to the producer so yours wouldn’t stand out so much)–and made eye contact with one of your colleagues who was standing by the carrots. She saw. It’s over. My whole potato empire is about to crumble to nothing and I’m going to prison for theft.
She looked dumbfounded. A little too dumbfounded, actually. You were wondering if this was a bigger deal than you had thought when you notice a bright orange object fall from her sleeve to the ground. It was a carrot. And it looked significantly better than most of the carrots your work had on display.
I see you’ve seen my Stardew Valley games lmao thanks for the laughs this was great!
You might have ADHD lol
Potato: the traditional ADHD houseplant. (Reminds me, I should see if any of my bag of potatoes have volunteered to be planted/have sprouted yet)
I have definitely wondered the same myself lol I am also pretty shit with time management…
Why didn’t you just eat the potato?
Honestly never occurred to me lol I was 17 and that was Work’s Potato, it needed to go home to Work.
So pure of heart
The guy who first showed me D&D when I was a kid went on to rape and murder a 90 year old woman who lived down the street during a botched robbery.
That’s because D&D is how you let the demons in, duh. How’s your possession going?
I bet he was searching for material components.
I was very close to either dying or having permanent brain damage due to a stun grenade in a protest in my country. While being a completely unarmed, non-violent and basically running away/hiding protestor.
I was with a friend and a bunch of people outside our campus. Everything was peaceful and then, out of nowhere things got bad, with stun grenades and tear gas everywhere. We were used to it, but that time the tear gas was so bad that the neutralizer we brought was doing nothing. We took cover with a wall (bad idea, but we were panicking badly), and I wasn’t able to breath, so I wanted us to run away from there. I told my friend to let’s just run certain way, and I was so full of adrenaline and ready to run, but he stopped me. 1 second later, a stun grenade fell from the sky just 1 m away of us, in the direction I wanted us to run; no doubt it would have hit me in the head.
After that I just took his hand and we ran away, not able to see nor breath. Me holding his hand was a huge saver for both of us, as we could, more or less, guide each other. We ran some 20-30 m and just fell to the ground, but in a somewhat safe place. We crawled some 10 m more and just rest there. It took us some solid 15 minutes to catch our breath. Never said a word to my family about the whole incident.
Fun times.
