16. I looked into my rapist’s eyes

“To be honest… mine was looking into my rapist’s eyes right before he attacked me. He had been a friend of mine before that, and I thought I knew him well… but in that moment, he just looked so eerily inhuman. His expression was this weird mix of completely blank and kind of manic. You know in Jaws, that line about how the shark had doll’s eyes? That’s what it looked like. If that makes any sense. I can’t describe how unnerving it is to look at someone and just know they intend to do you imminent harm.

My mother’s story, however, is probably closer to what this thread is looking for. When she was probably 16, she was babysitting for one of her neighbors after dark one night, in a quiet suburban/residential area in a small town. She heard a knock on the door, which came as a surprise because she hadn’t expected the parents to be home that early, so she called out, “who is it?” and got no response but another knock. Confused, she went to the door and looked through the peephole, only to find that she couldn’t see anyone there. But as she was looking, there was another knock…but it sounded low on the door.

Well, this house had an upstairs window that overlooked the front stoop, so she very carefully tiptoed up there, leaving the lights off, and looked down. There was a strange man crouched down off to the side of the front door, waiting for her to open it. She said she called the police, but he took off before they could get there, probably thinking nobody was home.

Before hearing this story, I had always wondered why my mom was so adamant about always checking who it was before you opened the door.” — pdxemf

17. Her uncle was sexually abusive

“I was five or six, and I was spending the night at a new friend’s house. It might have been my first sleepover ever. Her name was Tammy, and her uncle was babysitting us. I was there maybe 30 minutes when he had us climb on his lap to look at pictures. I didn’t know what I was looking at, got scared, and ran home. I didn’t know to tell my mom what had happened.

The blood chilling part was the way she got on his lap and looked at pictures (which I still don’t remember– hair and body parts I didn’t have or recognize) as if she did it all the time. Which I bet she did.” — Chickiepie

18. My mother died as I dialed 911

“On April 18th of this year, I came home from work and began working on some homework. After 30 mins of homework my aunt entered my mother’s bedroom and began screaming hysterically, ordering me to call 911. Once I was on the line with the operator, she asked what the nature of my emergency was. I didn’t quite know so I entered my mother’s bedroom to find her dead of a heart attack and laying face down on the floor, wedged between her night stand and her bed. The operator dispatched the paramedics and instructed me on how to perform CPR. In order to do so, I had to flip my mother onto her back. When I grabbed my mother’s cold, lifeless arm I realized that she couldn’t be moved as she was wedged firmly between her bed and her night stand and rigor mortis had already set in. I was unable to flip her over and I had never seen or touched a dead body before. After the paramedics came and told me that nothing could be done, the medical examiner informed my family that she couldn’t be seen as she had been laying on her face for so long. It’s assumed by my family that she hit her head on the way down as her dentures were on the floor beside her. The combination of her head trauma and the fact that she had been dead for many hours had rendered her ‘un-viewable’ as deemed by the officer from the medical examiner’s office. To answer your question, the sight and feeling of my mother’s deceased body is the most chilling thing that I have ever seen.” — char21