23. [deleted]

I lived in a bad neighborhood, and my neighbor had shit with my mom. They argued all the time because my neighbors were apparently drug dealers, and my grandma called the cops on them a whole lot. I woke up one morning in the dining room floor surrounded by cops and investigators. The neighbor had tried to shoot my mom through her bedroom wall (the neighbor could see her silhouette through the window) and missed her head by two inches (and mine by as much because she had me draped over her shoulder, carrying me to bed.)

24. bjnshannon

I was 14 and in the Boy Scouts and we were on a canoeing trip down the Buffalo River in Arkansas. It was a 6 day trip and it was just our little crew of about 10 boys and 3 adults. We had not seen anyone outside of our crew for days. We would canoe several miles and pick some random spot to sleep each night.

This one night me and a friend decided we were not going to sleep in the tent. We wanted to sleep in some hammocks by the river. I woke up sometime in the middle of the night being eaten alive by mosquitoes and decided that this was a stupid idea and began walking to my tent that my tent buddy had set up and was sleeping in without me. The field we choose to camp on that night was quite large so the tents were spread out very far apart. I am walking by one of the tents and I see this shape huddled up next to it and I assumed it was the boys backpack but it was oddly shaped and could have been a person. It was very dark and I couldn’t see.

For some reason I decided to kick it while I was walking past to make sure it was just a bag. When I kicked it, it grunted in pain. It surprised the shit out of me. You must understand that we were in the middle of nowhere. Out in the wilderness so my first thought was that “Adam”, the guy who was supposed to be sleeping in that tent, was outside of it for some reason. So I knelt down beside him and asked “What are you doing out here?” The man replied, “I like you people”. Thats when my heart nearly exploded out my chest. This was a stranger. This was not Adam.

Fear seized me. I noticed he had a knife in a sheath on his belt loop. I was trying my best to stay calm. I will never understand why I thought that I needed to get that knife away from him. I should have run screaming but I didnt want to alarm him. I went to grab the knife and he grabbed my arm and said “You need to go to bed.” I said “OK.” and got up and walked the remaining 100 or so feet to my tent. I woke up my tent mate damn near hysterical. Just knowing he was gonna come in any second and kill us. I woke him up and told him the story and he being much braver than me went out there and walked around and came back and said he didnt see anyone and he thought I was making the whole thing up.

The next morning when I he woke me up and told me the adults wanted to talk to me. I walk out the tent and I can see peoples shit just strewn everywhere. Apparently the guy, whoever he was, was going outside each tent and going through the backpacks looking for stuff to steal, (I guess). One of the adults had an expensive camara missing. The adults went and searched for signs that someone else was on this part of the river but never found anyone or anything.

To date that is the scariest moment of my life and though I am 31 years old and my wife mocks me, I still sleep with a night light.