People From Around the World Share the Time Their Spidey Senses Worked Perfectly
Have you ever just known that there was trouble ahead? It might sound crazy, but sometimes, people can tell when something is wrong even without knowing why.
These are the stories of people detected danger before they had any reason to think it was at hand. Whether the trigger was big or small, these people received a warning from the universe. This is what they did with it.
Footprints in the Snow
When I was 15, I hung out with some friends after school and got a ride home that night. No one had been home all day, so there were no lights on inside or out. The friend that drove me home didn’t stick around to see if I made it in, and as I startied to make my way up the walkway to the front door, I sensed someone waiting to meet me there. I calmly stopped after taking a couple steps and said “Nope!” loud enough for the potential criminal to hear me. I then briskly turned around and walked swiftly down the street, cut through a neighbor’s backyard, and made my way to the nearest pay phone. I dialed the police and told them I thought there was someone trying to rob the house.
I came back with a police officer. He shined his flashlight around the door and saw footprints in the snow leading around the house. He followed them and saw that they went around the entire house. There was, in fact, someone waiting for me to open the door that night. I laugh at the thought of their surprise at having some teenage girl acknowledge them from a distance and tell them not today.
Stopping a Suicide
I had a friend that would essentially answer a text message during anything because he was just that attached to his phone. He didn’t get back to me one day, and I noticed his social media profile hadn’t been updated yet. I tried hitting him up a few more times, but something didn’t feel right. I told a few friends, but most wrote it off as nothing because this guy always seemed happy. He also lived like an hour away. Finally, I got someone to go with me to hang out with him. Worst case scenario, we’d say we were gonna be in the neighbourhood that’s why we were hitting him up.
We showed up, and he just started crying immediately and saying that he needed help. We outright intervened in a friend’s suicide. He was always so active on social media as a way to hide his depression. It chills me to this day that if I hadn’t written to him and gotten a strange feeling, that a friend might not be here today.
A Cop Killer
I used to clean vacant houses for a living. One day, I was working at a house near the end of a dead-end street six or seven houses from a major intersection with a stoplight. I was cleaning the property when my Spidey-Sense went off the charts. I was inside the house and couldn’t see anything, but I pretty much dropped everything, got in my car and started to drive away. On the corner, I saw a weird-looking guy that gave me a nasty feeling.
When I got home, it was all over the news: the man had killed a cop right on that street corner just 15 minutes after I hoofed it. I told my boss that I wasn’t going back to that property. He understood.
Suspicious Couple
Four students of mine won the first-place prize in a major scholastic contest for a project they did, and we all got a free trip to London. We had spent the day sightseeing and were exhausted, so we got some ice cream and sat on a bench in a park to relax. A couple of minutes later, I noticed this couple slowly walk by, staring at us. My spidey-senses went mental. I did not like these people for some reason. The woman walked by and sat on the bench next to ours, and he sat on the bench across from hers. They aren’t talking, just looking at each other. And that is when I noticed her reaching into her pockets.
I jumped up, grabbed my students and ran out of the park. My poor students were incredibly confused and wondering what was wrong with me when all of a sudden, we heard screaming. The woman had stabbed a couple walking through the park, trying to rob them. It scares the heck out of me knowing that had I not gotten my students out of there, we would have been stabbed and robbed.
Doom Detection
There really is such a thing as a feeling of “impending doom” when your body is like, “Yo, you are about to die.” It’s a real thing.
Sometimes, there really is such a thing as a feeling of impending doom. I hadn’t been feeling well when all of a sudden, I sat up and had a distinct feeling that I was going to die soon if I didn’t do something. I drove myself to the ER, and on the way, I developed chest pains. I went in, told them the situation and was taken to the back. After I took some tests, a crowd of people injected me with a lot of different stuff.
It turns out that I’d had a pulmonary embolism — a blood clot in my lung — which at any second could have gone into my lung and killed me then and there. The doctors said that if I had left it any longer, I would have been dead. Thanks, brain!
Almost Picked Up a Serial Killer
I used to pick up hitchhikers in the ’80s and early ’90s. I was into Jesus and wanted to do good deeds. One day, I saw two women who looked rough hitchhiking on the side of I-295 in Jacksonville, Florida. Based on their appearances, I thought they were leaving an abusive situation or something. I pulled over to pick them up.
As they walked up to my van, they exchanged creepy looks — sort of an “Are we gonna do this?” expression. I got bad vibes and drove off right as they were reaching for my door. I felt bad later and beat myself up for it. What if they really needed help?
A few days later, I saw sketches of them on the news. It was Aileen Wuornos (the serial killer from the movie Monster) and her girlfriend. Trust your gut!
Obsession
I had a student in an adult course I was teaching. She was quiet but bright and responsible. However, I started to get these incredibly long, personal love letters from her every week about how she just knew I was checking her out and how thrilled she was. In the letters, she said that her marriage was in shambles and she needed love.
I had never once spoken to her, and she was obviously not seeing reality. I tried multiple times to bring her back to the real world and shut her down. I reported her at the end of the semester, but nothing happened, and I never heard from her again.
Years later, after moving to a new neighborhood, a woman just a block away from my new house killed her husband and herself. Guess who it was?
I Love You
During finals week of my junior year at university I received a text from my father at 1:30 a.m.
“I love you.”
My heart sunk. My family is not affectionate. My family doesn’t say “I love you.” My father does not text me. For some reason, I woke up 3 mins after receiving the text while my phone was on silent. I called to see if he was okay. No answer.
I immediately got in the my car and tore off to my dad’s place. I let myself in and found him ready to commit suicide. He immediately broke down in tears, and I held him for what seemed like an hour.
I saved my father’s life that night, and I’ve always checked in on him since. He’s in a much better place now.
Shouldn’t Have Brought the Motorcycle
A few years ago, I was out drinking for a friend’s bachelorette party. I knew I was too intoxicated to drive, so I called my then-boyfriend for a ride. As I was hanging up the phone, I thought to myself that I should ask him to drive his car instead of his motorcycle, but I didn’t say anything.
On the way home, we were side swiped by an intoxicated driver in a Chevrolet Suburban. The front wheel of my boyfriend’s motorcycle got caught in her wheel well, and she dragged us down the street for about a block and a half. The only reason she stopped was because a cop pulled her over. She was so wasted that she didn’t even notice that she ran us over.
To add to the “trust your gut” thing, my boyfriend only had one helmet. I tried to get him to wear it, but he insisted that we weren’t going anywhere until I was wearing it. My head hit the pavement pretty hard during the accident, but his didn’t. If I hadn’t been wearing the helmet, things would have gone much differently that night.
Jinxing Yourself
I was walking home late at night and jokingly told my friend we were going to get mugged due to just a weird feeling. A few minutes later, bang! Me and friend get mugged. I kind of jinxed myself by making that remark, but I’d already given myself bad luck in other ways.
First, it was my brother’s birthday, but I’d opted to go play for football instead. Second, my parents had offered to pick me up due to it being late at night, but I’d foolishly declined. Sometimes there are warning signs before those weird feelings.
Missed Call
I was staying the night at someone else’s house, maybe an hour from where I lived. That night, I was so tired, but I couldn’t get to sleep. I was super anxious all night, which was very unusual for me, and I just couldn’t relax. I came so close several times to just grabbing my things and driving home in the middle of the night, but I convinced myself not to.
It turns out that I should have. If I’d gone home that night, I would have had the chance to say goodbye to my dad before he passed away the next morning. I still regret that to this day, and I promised myself that the next time I get a feeling like that, I’ll listen to it.
Change in the Air
My parents were at a festival when my dad felt some sort of change in the air, like something bad was going to happen. He and my mom got out of there quickly, and wouldn’t you know it, some intoxicated dude with a gun started firing at the crowd.
Cars Aren’t Meant to Sit in Park
When I first started driving, I got the old family car. After a couple of months, I noticed it had this weird shake whenever I set it to park. I told my parents, but they ignored me. To be fair, I probably would have too if my brand-new-to-driving child complained to me about the car feeling weird. At one point, my mom got annoyed with me mentioning it and told me to ignore it because “cars aren’t meant to sit in park.”
It turns out that three out of the four engine mounts had completely eroded away.
To-Go Order
I was working at a fast food restaurant when I got a phone call from my dad, who was feeling antsy and telling me to come home as soon as possible. There was a storm on the way, and he was nervous about the timing. I thought he was being paranoid until I got this really uneasy feeling as well. Every nerve in my body was telling me to get home right away.
I irritated the manager when I left without mopping the floors. but I didn’t care. I rushed home and barely got in the door before a tornado hit our house.
Looking back on it, if I hadn’t left when I did, I would have been driving along the road the tornado followed, and I probably wouldn’t be here. I got written up at work for leaving without completing my tasks, but a write-up is better than being dead.
July 16
For some reason, everything in my life kept falling on July 16. I had appointments rescheduled to that day, there was a barbecue that got moved to then, everything. I said to my boyfriend at the time that everything was pointing me to the 16th, and something was sure to happen.
Well, that morning, I took my friend to an appointment she had. It ran a bit late, but I still had time to return to work. However, I didn’t feel like going to the barbecue anymore, so I went home early. I got home about three hours earlier than I usually do, just in time to witness my father have a massive stroke. I knew something was going to happen that day.
On top of that, I got pregnant a month after my father died — two months after the stroke. My daughter was born on July 16, one year later.
Lane Change
Years ago, I was driving north on the 101 in California. It was around 2 a.m., and back then, the area was in the middle of nowhere. I was in a rush because my entire family had been in a car accident, and they were all hospitalized in the bay area.
I decided to stay in the fast lane so that if I fell asleep, I’d be woken up by the “bumper lights” that stick up on either side of the lane. As I was driving, I had a bad feeling that my life was in danger. Out of the blue, I heard a voice from the passenger side of the car say, “Move over to the other lane.” I was so startled that I replied “What?!?!” out loud. It repeated itself: “MOVE OVER TO THE OTHER LANE!” I didn’t think; I just changed lanes.
As soon as I changed lanes, a car going south — the wrong direction — came over the hill while going at least 100 mph. It flew right past where I’d been. I pulled over at the next exit and found a pay phone to call the highway patrol. They said that they’d heard about an intoxicated driver and had been trying to locate him for a while. I sat in my car a good 15 minuets until I finally stopped shaking and continued on. I’ll never forget that experience as long as I live.
Flower Shop Shelter
I had a funny feeling on the bus on the way back to my parents’ place from college. The next day, same feeling. I found out there was a guy watching me from the back of the bus. I changed my routes that week, but somehow, he always appeared in the same bus as me no matter which one I took. I told my parents, but they just brushed me off as paranoid, probably because they were busy with their divorce.
Finally, at the end of that week, I decided to hop off at a different stop that was a lot more busy than my usual one. When I did, the guy tried to grab me by my backpack. I ducked away, ran into a flower shop and told the sales people that a creep was following me and had tried to grab me. They let me in the back, where I called my mum, who came to pick me up.
Thankfully, I was able to get a car after that, but to this day I’m hypervigilant while using any sort of public transportation!
Cut the Cord
My mom works at a power plant. During some routine maintenance, they needed to cut through a high voltage cable. For reference, this is the main line that runs from the generator to the outside world, meaning it could kill you so fast that you wouldn’t even have time to know you were dead if you touched it while it was live.
A big part of safety at a power plant is that the guy in danger verifies everything beforehand. This time, however, the supervisor at the plant ordered the wire cut without letting the contractor verify it was safe. Instead, they told him to just cut it. He refused and was reprimanded by his supervisor.
It turned out the cable was, in fact, still live.
The supervisor was fired on the spot. Paperwork was filled out, and the contractor was given his job back along with a small bonus for taking action to avoid a major safety incident.
Mother Knows Best
My wife had just given birth to our first child, and we’d been discharged to rest at home. As I settled down to bed, my wife said that our new son was making strange sounds. We called the hospital, but they told us that the sounds were normal. She still wasn’t satisfied, however, so she kept calling the hospital and getting told the same thing. After a few more calls, they said that either a midwife could come later in the day or we could head to emergency care if we insisted on wasting our time. My wife was now convinced that something wan’t right, so we headed over to get child checked out.
The on-call pediatrician took one look at our son and immediately ran off with him while telling the nurse to lead us to the neonatal intensive care unit. As we arrived, our son flatlined, and a horde of doctors and nurses did everything they could to resuscitate him while were taken to a side room and told to prepare for the worst. Thankfully, they got him going again, and after 11 days in intensive care, we took him home again.
If we had been any later in getting to the hospital, our son would have died in our home or the car. My wife’s intuition was spot on, and I’ll never second-guess her again.
Rock Beats …
I was in a bad mood and already feeling anxious as I walked home. Right before I turned into my complex, there was this guy who passed me going the opposite way. My body shied away from him as it had been shying away from everybody else, but his attention seemed to lock onto that movement, and I felt him watching me out of the corner of his eye as we passed each other. As I turned into the courtyard of my building, I was suddenly afraid of him.
I found myself running on autopilot as I scooped up a big rock — about the size of a grapefruit — from the garden. I picked it up, turned around and stood there.
The guy came around the corner — meaning he’d turned around to follow me — and stopped dead. He looked at me as I focused on feeling the weight of the rock on my hand.
“What are you doing with that?” he said.
“I’m just standing here.”
“Why?”
“I live here. Do you?”
“… No,” he finally answered, and he went on his way.
I knew that guy was going to turn around and follow me. I’m glad I trusted my gut.
Afterparty
Back in high school, a couple of my friends and I were downtown being dumb, irresponsible teenagers when someone invited out us to a party across town. We were all set to go and were getting into the car when I suddenly had this awful feeling and told everyone we were already being irresponsible and should just go home. Surprisingly, I managed to convince everyone to go home.
The next day in school, we found out that another guy who we weren’t even hanging out with had ended up driving to that same party while super wasted and wrapped his car around a tree in an accident, dying instantly. He was on the same road we would’ve been driving on. During lunch, all of us just sat in silence while knowing that could’ve been us. It almost seemed like it should’ve been us.
Red Light, Green Light
When my mom was pregnant with my older sister, she and my dad were sitting at the light. My father was driving, but when the light turned green, he felt this huge, overwhelming pressure to not go just yet. So he sat there and waited, and a second later, a guy came flying in from the side. If he hadn’t waited, the guy would’ve T-boned him at more than 70 mph, and I wouldn’t have been born. Thank God he waited.
Pocket Dials
After my wife told me she was going out with some friends, I got this very, very long pocket dial voice mail from my then-wife’s phone. I listened to it for a while because I thought it would be fun to eavesdrop and later tell her something she said as a harmless prank. As I was listening, however, I got the distinct impression that she was flirting even though I couldn’t understand anything she said. I saved it for later, and then after tracking a couple more weird “outings” she had, I drove right up beside her car at a local restaurant where she was making out with a DJ from one of her weddings. (She was a hotel wedding planner.)
I wasn’t even mad. I had an incredible sense of clarity about our relationship over the last eight years, and we separated right away and then divorced a year later. Soon after, I met the girl of my dreams, had kids and now have a life that even I can’t believe I’m lucky and blessed enough to have. I apply everything I learned in my previous marriage to my new one, and we have a healthy, honest and loving marriage that makes the one before seem ridiculous. Best voice mail ever!
A Better Deal
I was on a three-week camping vacation in Newfoundland. We had driven out from Ontario and were making our way across the province. Our tires were getting worn out, and we hydroplaned in a few places. One day, I told my husband that we needed to get our tires replaced immediately because I had a bad feeling. He agreed that they needed replacing but wanted to wait until we hit a larger city because he didn’t want to get ripped off by a small-town garage.
Later that day, we hydroplaned off the highway, spun 180 degrees and landed two meters down in a ditch. I was 14-weeks pregnant at the time. All three of us were okay, thankfully.
Lights in the Dark
I was in high school and driving home one night after curfew. I was going 39 mph on a 35 mph road when I saw lights start flashing in my rearview mirror. Now I was going to be in trouble for a ticket as well as curfew.
I put the car into park as the other vehicle pulled up behind me. The headlights were blinding, and it wasn’t until the guy close that I could even see him walking toward me in my mirror. As I said, I’d been pulled over a few times before, and as I watched the officer approach, I noticed that the lights looked different than usual. They were playing off the sun visors and ceiling of my car in the way that police lights do, but not in the way I was used to. Suddenly, everything felt wrong.
The officer was almost at my window when for some reason, I looked at my passenger side mirror. I saw it immediately: someone was sneaking up on the other side of my car! I didn’t hesitate for a second. I threw the car into drive and mashed the pedal to the floor. My car wasn’t fast, but it was quick enough to get me out of there before they could get back into theirs and follow. I switched off my headlights and turned into the nearest neighborhood. As soon as I was a few houses in, I pulled into a semicircle driveway and cut the engine. A couple tense minutes later, I saw a car drive slowly by and keep on going. I don’t know if it was them or not.
I waited a few more minutes before driving out of the neighborhood and back home. As soon as I got into the house, I told my mom what had happened. It was pretty clear that she didn’t believe me, but she gave me a pass and let me go up to bed. The next morning, she woke me up with tears in her eyes. The morning news was abuzz with the story of two men who were caught after robbing a woman they had “pulled over.” That could have totally been me if I hadn’t recognized something was off and checked my mirror.
Stroke of Luck
Back in college, I was home for the summer and had an unsettling urge to drive across town and crash at my parent’s house. I couldn’t explain why, but I knew I didn’t want to stay at my friend’s place. I got home around 3 a.m., crashed on the sofa and woke up at about 4:30AM to my father saying in a very mumbled voice, “I think I need to go to the hospital”.
His voice and difficulty walking put me in automatic ‘uh-oh-mode.’ I broke every traffic law on the books getting him to the hospital, and when we got there, we learned he’d had a stroke. He made a full recovery, thankfully. I was the only family member in town, let alone driving distance. It really makes me wonder sometimes.
Noted
I came home one day, walked into my apartment and came to a dead stop. Something was off, but I couldn’t immediately tell what it was. The door was locked like normal … nothing was out of place. There was nothing I could see that would make me think something was wrong.
I did some looking around and still couldn’t find anything wrong until I found a note on my counter saying that maintenance had stopped by to make sure a leak from the floor above hadn’t also affected my apartment. I still have no idea what caused me to know that something was different, but clearly my subconscious picked up that something was out of place.
Warned Through a Dream
In 2010, the daughter of our long-term family friend began a steady relationship with a guy. The family was constantly talking about how kind he was, but when I saw pictures, he absolutely gave me the willies. Shortly after their relationship began, I had a vivid dream in which the girl, Mariah, was getting abused by the guy. I called up my mom and asked her to call Mariah’s mom to see if she was okay. She did, and everything was alright … until five years later, on Mariah’s wedding night. Immediately after the ceremony, when her and her new husband got back to the hotel room, he attempted to kill her. It turned out that he had made a tremendous life insurance claim in her name.
The Fake Phone Call
When I was 19, I was walking home at midnight from a tram stop when I suddenly got the feeling that I should pretend I was on the phone. A minute after doing so, a car pulled up next to me on the empty road.
It was four guys, all leering at me. The one in the passenger side starts saying things like, “How about we take you for a good time?” in a predatory tone.
I didn’t want to seem vulnerable, so I started telling my ‘friend’ on the phone that there was a group of guys in a car harassing me, and I described their car. I heard the driver say something about my conversation on the phone to his friends, and then they took off. I ran home faster than Usain Bolt with the emergency number ready on my phone in case they changed their mind and came back.
Afterward, I told my work what happened and refused to take night shifts unless they paid for my taxi home. I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn’t pretended to be on the phone that night.
A Daughter’s Determination
I lived an hour south of my dad. He’d been sick that week, so I called to check in on him. He sounded bad, so I insisted on coming up to take him to the hospital. Being stubborn, my dad turned me down and said that my step brother was there if he needed anything. My husband and I got in the car and went up anyway. When we got there, my stepbrother wasn’t even home. Eventually, my dad let us take him to the ER. He’d had a pulmonary embolism and was told he wouldn’t have made it through the night if he hadn’t gone in.
