The CLOSEST you've ever been to death, without actually getting injured?

[Darius Brogan]

I'm not sure how many people will have moments like this, but it's been rattling around in my head for quite some time.

Now. What is the absolute closes you have EVER been to death, without actually being injured in the process? Near miss by a car? Fall three stories onto a conveniently placed mattress? Gas explosion sends a shard of glass hurtling towards you, only to be embedded in the tree three inches to your right?

I'm sure that there are SOME people that have had these moments, and I myself have had several.

The most recent of mine was only about a year ago: Working at taking down an old wind-shelter on my Moms recently purchases hobby farm, I couldn't get one rail to come loose from the roof. I pulled, hammered, pulled some more, ect... Until an idea came to mind. Since the loose end of the rail was far heavier than the one still spiked down, I just pushed the rail sideways until it was pressing against the main beam, like a lever, I then continued pushing and pushing until roughly ten feel was sticking out over the edge. One final push later and the foot long spike finally let go. I didn't think that the rail would rocket spike first straight towards me afterward, and promptly leaned back as ten inches of sharpened steel raced passed my temple at around a hundred miles an hour.

At the time I was completely calm, barely realizing that I'd been literally millimeters away from having a nice, neat hole through my brain. Ignoring the fact I actually felt the metal of the spike graze my forehead.

It wasn't until a few minutes later that I performed a proverbial 'Double Take' and nearly shit myself.

SO! What are your near death experiences? I'm curious to see how many other people have the same Blind Fucking Crazy One-In-A-Quadrillion-Chance Luck that I seem to have been graced with.

 

[Instant K4rma]

I fell into a local pool when I was 6. I couldn't swim, so I just sank to the bottom. I instinctively began kicking my feet ferociously, which merited a small amount of success. I was slowly rising up but not nearly enough to make it to the surface before I would pass out and eventually drown (I fell in the deeper end). After what felt like at least a minute under water, a man was able to swim down and get me out before the worst happened. Being as young as I was, I didn't fully realize what this man had done for me. Looking back on the incident today, I know for a fact that that man saved my life.

 

[Slowpool]

Tornado in Arkansas. I was there for my grandfather's funeral, and the funnel cloud passed us by about 30 yards away. We didn't have a basement so we were in the middle of the house when a tree trunk crashed into the roof, right overhead. Part of it cracked into the ceiling above us so we could see the torn bark, but we managed to move out of the way before it actually collapsed. I've been a-feared of tornadoes ever since.

I tell you now, it was almost kinda cool.

 

[Klitch]

Well I was in a car accident that I caused when I was 15 (learner's permit), but that was me nearly killing another person. I wasn't in much danger myself.

As for the closest I've ever been to getting myself killed, that's probably be two years ago when me and a friend accidentally went off the marked trail on a seldom-used ski trail that went through the trees. The edge of the trail was marked by small wooden stakes every 20 feet or so, so it wasn't that hard to miss the markers. Anyways we kept going for a bit before we starting thinking we might have gone off course until I reached a clearing in the trees and to see a lot of blank space in front of me. After a desperate, panicked stop I realized that I was standing at the top of a very tall and rocky cliff. I yelled up to my friend to stop so he wasn't in any real danger. Had I continued skiing and gone off, I might have survived, but I would certainly have hurt myself very badly and who knows how long it would have taken the Ski Patrol to find me?

 

[ColeusRattus]

Nice thread.

My "near misses".

Having had a bad infection and temporarily no ablitiy to hear on my left ear, I once almost walked in front of a tramway train.

On my first climbing trip, we started learning by rapelling down a cliff first. I didn't know that there was a ledge about halfway to the ground that ahd trees and undergrowth on it, so I didn't notice it wasn't the bottom. I started to undo the climbing harness, which my instructor gladly noticed even though I was out of direct site, and he yelled that I had still 30 meters to go. Would've been a nasty plunge...

On my first driving lesson, I was halted at a crossroads, with two lanes in my direction. There was a car in the other lane too. I heard a tyre squeal, and then the car rocked: some dude in a pontiac firebird had approached the crossroads at a very high speed, didn't manage to break in time and passed through right between the two cars standing there to continiue speeding down the road.

But all those things happened years ago, wasn't really in mortal danger ever since...

 

[Reaper195]

Ha! Like...three hours ago. Still buzzing over it. Was in town (three hours ago, right?) walking towards a cafe. Saw a mate I used to go to school with not far down from where I was just before I stepped off the curb. I was totally in my own little world and would have kept walking had I not spied this dude. Anyway, I stop to tun fully to see if that was really him when VRRRRROOOOOOMMMMMMMMM (Or some kind of bus noise)! This bus just went charging past way faster than it should have been gone. Took me a few seconds to realise that had I not seen that guy, that bus driver would have had no time to go for the breaks before the bus would have hit me.

ironically, we then went to his place and spent until thirty minutes ago playing GTA4 online. Good times.

 

[Cowabungaa]

When I got stuck under a fat man's ass in a wild water slide. Sounds silly, but good gods it was scary. Got pulled out in time though.

I also had a knife pressed against my belly by my primary school bullies when I was 8 or something. The fear of having your gut slit open as an 8 year old child is...something alright.

 

[norwegian-guy]

Hmm, at the a young age (don't remember how old I were) I fell into a pool without knowing how to swim.
Also at one point I was almost sucked into a rivertorrent in the mountains.

 

[Nikolaz72]

Ehm, jumping onto an air-fort. . When it wasnt actually full of air. That thing closed around oneself so you got the feeling of getting strangled, wasnt really close to death but more interresting than the time I was almost hit by a car.

 

[Lenvoran]

Was 15 and walking over to a friends house after school, began crossing the street. Was almost across when one of the school buses came around the corner at high speed. I noticed and dove out of the way in time not to get hit. Didn't even scrape my knee, but I was thoroughly shaken and subsequently pissed off.

 

[Mrrrgggrlllrrrg]

My brother rolled a compact car when I with him, went right in a deep ditch and couldnt get out for a while. Not really a near death moment though, I was shot at a few times does that count?

 

[Falconsgyre]

My dog got away from me once and ran into a paddock full of a herd of horses. Apparently, he thought it was a lot of fun to chase them; they didn't share that opinion. I eventually had to go in there and get him, because he wouldn't come out. After climbing over a fence and walking through two foot thick snow, I had to sneak around twenty 1000 pound animals, each of which could easily kill me and were now very nervous. My dog still wouldn't respond to me, as he was still running around in circles and apparently herding the the horses in a surprisingly effective manner. Then he got his leash caught in one of their hooves and got dragged right in the middle of them, and the whole herd ran behind a barn.

Since being dragged into a large herd of animals usually means bad things for health, I was pretty sure my dog was severely injured or dead. Then about two seconds later, he came running around the other side of the barn, completely uninjured despite being dragged 30 feet through sets of trampling hooves, and finally, finally decided to actually come when I called him, apparently now deciding this game wasn't fun anymore. It turns out being dragged pulled his collar off (which I'm quite thankful for, because otherwise he'd probably be dead), and I wasn't going to risk him running off again, so I had to physically pick him up and get him out of the pen.

This wouldn't be a problem, except for three things: 1) It was winter, and there was really, really thick snow. 2) He weighs about half as much as I do, and I'm not very athletic. 3) There was a herd of horses behind me who were starting to become less nervous and more angry, and they were surrounding me. A couple of the more aggressive horses started to approach me from both sides, looming in a pretty threatening manner. I moved slowly backwards. They moved slowly forwards. Eventually, I was within twenty feet of the fence, with about five horses forming a semi-circle around me, and pretty worn out from carrying my dog (who was now getting tired of being carried and was trying to get away), made a break for it, and got chased up to the gate. I can't read horse aggression signals and they're not predators, so I'm not sure how likely they were to actually attack, but it was pretty damn scary. Horses are a hell of lot bigger in person than in pictures.

 

[Lurklen]

Me and my buddy almost got hit by a car crossing a busy street at about 11:30 at night. For some reason this street is always busy and there's this one crosswalk that people just don't stop for. So it's late and quite dark and we're on our way back from the video store and nobody is stopping to let us cross. Finally my friend thinks it's clear and darts out across the road and I stumble after him, he's always been faster than me. But it seems he'd misjudged the traffic because just as he reaches the other side of the street he has to jump out of the way of this big old white lincoln. I remember thinking in that moment he had to jump and I'm behind him so I'm dead. I swear it was like time slowed down as I threw my self across the last half of the street, I could feel the hood of the car in motion under me and hear the driver honking the horn and then bam I'm on the sidewalk on my face. And that car went racing down the street like nothing had happened.

This other time me and that same buddy decided to take our makeshift raft out on Christina lake during a thunder storm, cause we're idiots. The thing flipped over and hit me on the head after this huge wave rocked us and my friend had to try and float me back on top of it without paddles because those were gone, so he's pushing this thing and I'm hanging off it seeing double and the storms still raging. We made it to another cabins dock but it was really dangerous and dumb.

Then there was the time we made a flame thrower out of a hibachi camp stove while staying at a horse ranch. I guess I was kind of a stupid kid, lucky though.

 

[BehattedWanderer]

I used to work in a lab where lots of chemicals were around. Not everyone was aware of some of the finer safety procedures, and someone used a glass container as a waste container. Bad, but not in itself all that bad. But, this time, the waste was something that was decomposing, and was producing several gases. And whoever it was had tightened the cap on the bottle, which meant the gases could only expand, without any means of relief--very bad, as you can imagine. I was unaware of this. I walked into the room with the fume hood, turned on the light, walked out and into my lab-side office, half-closing the door behind me. It was at that moment that the buildup was too much and the bomb-like glass bottle exploded, destroying the fume hood, the safety glass, and the glass in the window on the door. I had just walked into the office adjacent, and had I been there several seconds later, I would have been covered in caustic chemicals and shattered glass. Scary day.

 

[Darius Brogan]

It's good to know that I'm not the only one with a golden staff of pure luck rammed down my throat.

Another of my near death moments was about a year and a half ago, and kinda went by in a flash...

I was working for a friend, who owns about to dozen Clydesdale horses (roughly two thousand pounds and twice the size of a normal horse, for those who're not sure) and at the time, I was feeding them. One of the new horses in the barn, Luke, who I happen to own now... wasn't used to being in a barn and I scared the crap out of him somehow or other.
He decided that the best way to become 'un-scared' as it were... was to turn completely sideways in his stall in an attempt to crush me against the steel manger.
I'm not flat right now only because I freaked out and hopped up onto the manger before he could turn me into a human shaped pop-tart.
I also punched him in the steel block he calls a head to get him standing straight again, and it actually worked.

 

[dj_8612]

I've been in a boat and car crash without being injured (for the record I was driving neither) and both vehicles were total right offs.

 

[RanD00M]

I don't think I've ever had a near death experience. Well there was this one thing where I was driving with my sister to Reykjavík and we almost slid off the road and into a bulldozer. I was in a state of shock for a while after that.