Phew! That Was A Close Call: People Share Their Greatest “Dodged A Bullet” Moments

My dad was a truck driver in an oilfield in Canada. He worked a lot of long hours and every single day. So on weekends, he would bring me and my younger brother to some of his jobs. We were on location and my little brother (3 yrs) and me (10 yrs) were waiting for him playing in the cab of the truck. My little brother opened the passenger door and my little arms closed it.

Jobs done, we start our trek home going about 35 km/hr and the door flies open and I get sucked out of the truck. I remember doing about 10 backflips as I tumbled out. Hitting the ground on my back a few times and rolled my way to a stop. I stood up before the truck was even stopped in absolute shock. Next thing I see my dad looking for me and he burst into tears. First time I have ever seen him cry. I’m 33 now and he still won’t talk to me about it.

Luckily the rig was in a farmer’s field. So when we were leaving I landed on softer dirt. Not a single scratch on me. Dad thought he ran over me with the trailer. Don’t think we ever went to work with dad again. I work for the company now.

Years ago I lived in Vancouver and liked to go for long walks (beautiful city to do so). I was heading to a friend first to drop something off and cut through a neighborhood with a lot of Southeast Asian immigrants ( the ones I got to talk to were mostly from Vietnam). I was aware of a van behind me but it was mid-day and there were people out, so it was only a passing thought.

A lady was working in her garden and as I approached her house she started to look behind me. Then she came out onto the sidewalk and started talking to me in her native language. I understood none of it but her body language was agitated. She kept gesturing to me to come with her up to their walkway. As I looked behind me I see three men getting out of the van, which is now parked just behind me.

By this point, the woman has a good grip on my arm and has me dragged almost to her porch. She kept talking to me and pointing to stuff in her garden and I just listened, nodded, and kept a good eye on the men and van. I don’t remember how long we were there but the men finally left. Both I and the woman let out huge sighs of relief. She then patted me on the arm, said something, and then went back to her gardening. I booted it to my friend’s house.

On the news, the next day was the story of a woman who was kidnapped and gang rape. The victim was grabbed on the next street over from the woman's house, not long after my encounter with her, by 5 men in a van. The men were distinctive and the description of the men and van fit the ones I had to see.

That woman saved me from something horrible and I am forever thankful.

A few years ago I had pneumonia, but my whole family insisted that it was just a postnasal drip, (Which runs in the family) after a week or two I woke up in the middle of the night when I couldn't feel my arm. After I got to the ER the doctor said that it was the worst he'd ever seen and he was surprised I wasn't dead.

I had 3 lbs of mucus cut out of my lungs and another two weeks in the hospital siphoning out the rest.

For three months afterward I could barely walk half a mile without starting to pass out and I still can't run for more than 200-300 yards without collapsing.

As a kid, after running errands in town with my mom, I was climbing into the backseat of our family station wagon. A semi-truck hit a power line pole down the street causing the still-live wire to fall, bounce off the roof of the car and hang across the open door just a foot or two above my legs.

Raised catholic, I wondered for a while after if I had actually died that day and that the rest of what I thought was my life was my purgatory.

Hubs, my sister, and I were hanging out around my parents' house on a very boring 4th of July. We decided to wash my husband's new car sitting in the driveway because it was hot out and an excuse to play in the hose.

We were literally walking out the front door, and I said "eh, we should eat lunch before we get all wet and stuff", and everyone agreed, so we turned around and went back inside. I was warming up something in the microwave (a hot pocket I think), and all of a sudden I hear the loudest BANG I think I've ever heard, from the direction of the front door. Hubs and I look at each other wide-eyed and run outside.

I was greeted by the back-end of a Crown Vic, smoking something fierce, plowed into the tree in the middle of our yard. For a split second I was just stunned, then screamed to my sister inside to call 911. I looked over to the driveway, at the car we had been planning to wash just 5 minutes ago. Totaled. Completely totaled. Brand new 2011 G6, destroyed. Guy hit it so hard it did a complete 90-degree turn across the driveway. He actually hit it so hard, it ended up ricocheting and hitting the other cars in the driveway, mauling 2 other cars. Yard was fd, Crown Vic was fd, tree was fd.

We immediately assumed it was drunk driving, being the 4th and all...I went over to the driver's side and found a very old man, very bewildered, unable to comprehend what I was saying but conscious. I will never forget the look he gave me - confused, helpless, scared. I was on the line with the paramedics as they sent over the ambulances, and tried my best to follow their instructions. (My sister was only 14 at the time, so I handled the call)

Turns out dude was diabetic and had passed out behind the wheel due to low blood sugar, hit the gas pedal with his weight as he passed out, and was plowing down our residential street at about 65mph. He jumped the curb, drove down the sidewalk past another house, then slammed into my husband's car, and subsequently, the tree.

If we had been anywhere near that yard/driveway, I have no doubt one or all of us would have been seriously injured or dead. It was sheer dumb luck and timing that saved us. Huge bullet dodged...or should I say, huge car dodged.

There was a pile of stuff that people would leave at our house when I was at university, coats and stuff. Moving out day and we found a random samurai sword in the pile. We were messing about with it trying to make it go “swoosh”. I was stood facing my brother while he was swooshing it when the blade dislodged from the handle, flew straight past me and stuck horizontally into my headboard. So yeah my brother nearly impaled me while messing around with a random sword we found after a house party. This picture is proof:

My high school sweetheart and fiance was my bullet. He ghosted me out of nowhere, no explanation...just gone. So needless to say, no wedding. I sent the ring back to his mom cos I didn’t want it and was pissed. I go on to live a great life, find a wonderful guy and we have been happily married for 21 years.

25 years later I find out that my old flame had been arrested for underage solicitation and several other charges involving minors. Apparently, Mr Big Man in his Community was arrested in a sting operation after this 12-year-old girl's parents found a whole series of explicit texts and had found that he set up a "romantic" hotel room get-together for them. Police pretended to be her and he was caught in the parking lot of the hotel. Even better, he was married to the same chick he was apparently seeing while we were together and had a couple of kids. All around the same age of his victims.

Yeah...before finding all this out, I regretted for a long time that we didn’t work. After finding out this had been going on for at least 20 years...I was rather glad I got ghosted! Never been so glad to dodge a bullet....

Freshman year of college I had a calc class. It was material I had learned before, but for various reasons they didn't give me transfer credit. So I skipped class quite frequently.

Though I usually slept in, one morning I find myself awake at 8:30 and not really feeling like sleep. Might as well check in on the class and see what's going on.

It was the midterm exam.

My great grandfather was in the merchant navy in the war. He was in the engine room at the bottom of the ship and his friend came down to take over the shift early. Minutes later a torpedo struck and everyone at the bottom of the ship couldn’t escape and died. My great grandfather would’ve been one of them otherwise.

Then, he was in the sea for a while and happened to be picked up by some Portuguese fisherman who saved him. Then, all part of the same tale, he escaped death again. He was meant to be on a flight back to the U.K. but got kicked off last minute to be replaced by VIPs. That plane got shot down and everyone died in it. Miss you great grandpa x.

I was walking down the street in downtown Chicago and I heard a loud bang followed by a woman screaming. Somebody dropped a full 2 liter bottle of soda from the 13 floor and it just missed me. It was essentially a giant bullet at that height and speed. The woman screaming was about 5 feet behind me (she was the 2nd closest to being hit). I'm pretty sure that bottle would have killed me if it hit me.

My ex-husband! He told me he wanted a divorce, but I didn’t. He agreed to work on our relationship and give it a few months. We set a date and went to work, and he acted like things were changing and he wasn’t going to leave. He started encouraging me to take out debt and spend money out of our savings, etc.

Turns out that he was lying to me and had every intention of leaving on the date we set and “crushing” me emotionally so I’d hate him forever, and was encouraging me to take out debt since it was all in my name and he’d get half the savings. I only found out his little scheme because he gave me his Apple Watch (that we’d just purchased) while he was working on something and I read his messages because I had a feeling something wasn’t quite right. For those of you that don’t know, if you delete a message on your phone, it doesn’t automatically delete from your Apple Watch.

I found a few hundred messages to his best friend and mom talking about how much better he could do than me, he had feelings for a coworker and knew she wanted him too (spoiler alert, she didn’t, she’s just a nice lady), he hated me and I was the worst decision he’d ever made, he never really had feelings for me anyway, etc. It was a bunch of savage, cruel shit. Finding it rocked me to my core. I’d never imagined anyone could hate me like that, let alone someone I was married to!

This happened like two weeks after he’d initially sat me down to talk. We were in public and I cried after finding the messages. I went up to him, held up his watch, and quietly told him I knew his plans and to find a different ride home. His smile dropped and the color drained from his face so quick. I went straight home and by the time he arrived, I’d packed him a bag of essentials, left it on the doorstep, and called both his mom and best friend to let them know he’d be needing a place to stay. He was crying and we hashed it out on the steps, which wasn’t my proudest moment. I won’t lie though, to see him cry after what he had said about me was so satisfying.

The next day, I had the locks changed. By the end of the day after that, I had all of his sh packed and waiting neatly in the living room for him to pick up. By the end of that month, I had filed for divorce and we were officially and legally done forever.

He’s a f*g loser and I absolutely dodged a bullet. It’s been a long road to rebuild my trust in people, though. I’m definitely better off having gone through the whole situation, and while looking back it was the best thing that could have happened, it absolutely sucked to go through.

When my great aunt passed away I was helping to clean out her house. I'm just dragging everything out of the basement and suddenly my dad is like, "Whoa! Put that down gently and let's move away from here." So I put the weird metal tube-type thing I'm carrying down and get out of there. Turns out it's a mortar shell from when my aunt worked in a munitions factory during WWII. Bomb squad came and took it away.

Was dating this guy for 4 years (from my 16’s to 20’s). We were looking to buy an apartment and to get married when he broke up with me. He said he was in love with somebody else because she “has a nice body”. He always called me fatty and how much weight I gained and when I told him I was gonna lose weight if he would go grow some muscles at the gym he said that I was the only one who needed to work out. Anyway, I was so devastated, I cried for so long, it was awful.

Fast forward 5 years. Nothing in my life is bad but nothing is good. Just same old same old. I found an exchange program that I could actually afford. I move from Brazil to US. I travel to so many places, I prove myself so brave, I discover so much about myself, and then I meet the love of my life. He was here waiting for me. We are happily married, building our life together, and he treats me with respect, love, like a Queen, and we have a puppy now and we are planning for the future and I’m just so happy. I can’t believe I almost didn’t have this and him.

Not me, but a friend I know had an arranged marriage (not forced, she was happy before the wedding) and literally 2 weeks after getting married she filed for an annulment. Her reasoning was that things felt off, that she wasn’t allowed in a certain room in the house and that the guy was always armed with a large screwdriver. Her family thought she was crazy and she got a lot of stick from supposed ‘friends’.

The guy went on to murder his elderly neighbors with said screwdriver. Needless to say, no one even mentions that part of her life to her now and rightly so. I’m so glad she followed her gut.

I do a road safety show for school kids, and back when the schools started opening up again my manager booked me in for this one school, first one since the outbreak.

The day before I just got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach about it. I’ve got anxiety issues so I didn’t think much of it but the anxiety became overwhelming by lunchtime and I decided to call my manager and cancel. She understood and tried to get one of the other employees in to cover for me but they were all busy, and thank god they were because I heard on the news a few days that a kid at that that school had come to school sick and given COVID to a bunch of his classmates -the class I was scheduled to do the show for.

I’m high risk so getting sick for me would have had a good chance of killing me, so really dodged a bullet there. We decided after that little scare to give it another month or so before we actually resumed again.

I tried to end my life by putting a plastic bag over my head and tying it off. Figured it would be less messy to be found... my cat started going crazy on the other side of the door when I started to get light-headed and feel sort of nauseous. I thought “oh right, you need your dinner and no one else will feed you” and I untied the bag to feed the cat. After the fact, I realized my cat literally saved me from one of my lowest points.

God I miss that cat. Still can’t believe I came that close.

About 10 years ago, I was in a relationship with someone, and she became pregnant. We were only a few months in, and I was terrified. But I did the right thing, stuck with her, did my best to help her through her pregnancy, turned my whole life upside down... sold my house to move to the other end of the city where her daughter went to school (she was divorced, had a kid with her ex-husband).

Everything was going great until she became pregnant. We were having a lot of fun and enjoyed each other's company very much. The instant she became pregnant, it was like a switch had been flipped. She became a straight-up psycho. It wasn't just hormones from pregnancy... this was a whole other level. She was psychologically and verbally abusive. She took being unreasonable and belligerent to a whole new level. I asked what she wanted for dinner one night, and she responded with "You should KNOW what I want for dinner! You're supposed to just MAKE it!" And it turned into an hours-long fight over how the hell I'm supposed to know what SHE wants for dinner. Apparently, I wasn't in tune with her enough to know and that was an unforgivable error. This is one of the hundreds of little things she did to make me feel bad.

he NEVER missed a chance to take a shot at me. Miss my turn while driving somewhere, and have to turn around? I'm the most embarrassing boyfriend she's ever had, and she can't believe she even ALLOWS me to drive anymore. Things like that, all day, every day. It was demoralizing, and I was broken for years because of her abuse.

Anyway, we move into the new house, and within a month, she leaves me. So all this sh I did to turn my life upside down... I sold a house and bought a new one, which costs a lot of money in real estate fees/moving fees, and it was a more expensive home. Worse than that, I now had to deal with this f*g psycho for the next 18 years because she was carrying my baby. On top of all this, she had been cheating on me, and was with her ex bf now. That's who she was moving in with.

ut I was going to be a dad, which was cool I guess. Wished it was under different circumstances, but not having to see her every day was going to be nice. About a week before she gave birth, I ask if it's okay if I'm there when the child is born. She says "I really need other guy to be there."

"I'm okay with that if he is."

"I gotta tell you something. There's a chance it's not your baby."

And after fighting with her for 3 months to get the baby's blood type, it was inconclusive who's baby it was. So we went to the DNA test. Which she fought against me about, finally caving after I laid out in text everything she had done to me, and now she was leaving this question of whether or not I have a child unanswered.

It wasn't my baby. Bullet dodged.

Well, about 15 years ago I dated a guy for less than a year. It was an awful, abusive relationship and I was happy to get out of it when I did.

About... 8-9 years ago, I saw him on the news. He strangled his girlfriend to death. He then dismembered her and lived with her body for a month or so before he was caught. Edit: I've actually written about this before on askreddit under a "have you dated a serial killer?" Question. Here was my answer which gives a bit more detail on it. "Not a SERIAL killer... but I dated a killer.

He was not a killer at the time. We were young, and met on a dating website. He went to my high school but graduated a few years before me. The first... month? Was ok. Then he changed.

We had a huge fight one time because he said something silly. I don't even remember what it was, but I playfully threw a pillow at him. He immediately flipped out, punched a hole in my door and told me he'd make it so I would never have anything to come back to.

Another time, he FINALLY got a job. Didn't have one when I met him and I was paying for everything. After job searching for months, he got one. It's his first few days at his new job, and all of a sudden he doesn't want to go in. No reason, he just doesn't feel like it. I tell him he better get to that damn job or he's going to lose it. After a lot of arguing, he gets ready and we both get in the car so I can drive him to work. As I'm driving, it gets MORE heated and he starts strangling me while I'm at a red light. The red light was right next to a gas station and I pull in there while his hands are around my throat. I manage to get him off me and I get out of the car and scream, "what the f*?!"

"I'm sorry. I blacked out. You just... pissed me off so much! I told you I didn't want to go to work!" The relationship lasted less than a year. He cheated on me with some girl, and for the first and only time in my life, I was GLAD someone was cheating on me. You can go live with her and be someone else's problem now.

Then years later when I saw him on the news, I felt really bad for that thought. He had murdered his then-girlfriend, with whom he had just had a baby. He lived with her body in the apartment for a month. Eventually, the smell tipped some people off along with his gf not being seen by family in a bit. The baby was ok though and was taken in by the girl's family. He went on the run, but was later caught and is currently in prison.

My dad was going through severe depression 10 years ago and my life was equally shty for a whole multitude of reasons, and it was rubbing off on me. I spent what felt like half an hour crying on the floor and working up the nerve to pull the trigger, then when I finally did, the safety was on; I sold my gun the next morning. Wish my dad was able to say the same 3 years later (R.I.P.)

Not my story, but a girl I knew had had a few drinks and decided to hitchhike home, a town about 40 min away from the one she'd been drinking in. Note- it is very common for people to hitchhike in this area. She gets picked up by a car of guys, all seems fine until she points out they can drop her off just up ahead, and they keep driving. She had that 'instant sober' feeling. She plays it off like she's clueless and totally down to keep hanging out with them, acting like she's very drunk meanwhile they're back in more forested area of the highway. Then she fake dry heaves and says she about to puke, really putting on a show so they stop to let her out. She books it into the bushes and just doesn't look back until she's safe.

Had a teacher in high school who was wicked sarcastic and witty, while also being a hard*ss grader. To me, the perfect teacher: class was challenging but we were all laughing and having a good time. He was a great mentor and I continued to visit his class even after I graduated. One time, post graduation, I was sitting in his office and I had just given him some art to decorate his classroom with and he was so excited he blurted,” I could KISS you!”

Something about the intense eye contact unsettled me, but I laughed it off (17 y/o girl, what can I say).

Couple months later, he was arrested for having a sexual relationship with an underage student.

I think I saved a baby's life once. It was in a city center, crossing a main road with a while bunch of other people. The dad was pulling the pram behind him onto the pavement while he texted on his phone, and the dumb f* didn't realize he'd left the pram just... there on the road while he himself was on the pavement. Everyone kinda ignored it while the traffic lights kept that section of road clear but then the lights changed and the idiot still hadn't looked up from his phone while a huge double-decker was bearing down on his offspring.

Out of the whole crowd I was the only one to push forward and pull the pram onto the pavement. The complete imb*le gave a grunt of surprise and dropped his phone as the bus whooshed past and he realised he'd utterly failed in his parenting responsibilities, which was some consolation. I hope it shattered.

I stayed up all night before a daytrip to Hong Kong. You know that daze when you haven't slept, you're just kinda robotic and doing the human stuff, nearly zero awareness of anything?

Well, I went to cross a street and my friend behind me SNATCHED my shoulder and yanked me backwards just in time to feel the WHOOSH of a doubledecker bus breezing past us. I just looked at him like "oh, thanks man" and it took a whole extra minute for my brain to process I would be dead had he not grabbed me.

My newborn needed to be rushed to a super high-level NICU to be put into a state of induced hypothermia because he only had hours before he would suffer permanent brain damage. I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere.

The small town next door just barely upgraded their hospital to have that hypothermia suite, one of only a few in Texas. He’s doing great, no sign of any damage.

Around 30,000 pounds.

I was driving with my wife in town one snowy evening and we had pulled up to a stoplight. I happened to glance up at the rearview mirror and saw a city bus heading towards us... and rotating sideways. I hit the gas and pulled ahead into the intersection and left into the turning lane, and less than a second later, the bus went sliding through right where our car was. It came to a stop on the other side of the intersection and fortunately didn't hit anything, but one second or two feet difference and we would've had some nice spinal injuries.

Many years ago, my flight had just landed at Chicago O'hare and the plane was taxiing when the pilot suddenly slammed on the brakes. People were literally thrown forward against the seat in front of them. A few seconds later, another plane (taking off I think) went screaming by right in front of us.

No explanation was given, though our imaginations provided a lot of gory details.

My GF and I were going to see Cats, the movie. Our Uber pulls up and straight away we notice something about the driver. To this day, we can't articulate what it was, other than to say he just felt "off". We got into the car, already hesitating and a touch anxious. He looks at us in the rearview mirror and makes a comment like "two lovely ladies in my car tonight" or something weird like that.

A few minutes in, he makes another semi-sexual innuendo comment about "riding" with him. My friend notices the handle of a knife just poking out the side of his jacket. She says "hey can we stop at 7-11, we need to grab a Gatorade real quick." So we go in and refuse to come back out. We're considering whether to call the Police or not (it was so creepy, but what would we say? "Ah, some dude was creepy to us?) And while we're hesitating, he winds down his window, brandishes this hunting knife at both of us, screams something about devil-women and then just tears it out the parking lot.

To this day, my GF and I are so thankful that we got out of that Uber. Otherwise we would have made it to the movies in time and we would have seen Cats.

Not me, but I had a field service engineer working on one of my big robotic liquid handlers. He decided to bypass the safety pin that prevents the heads from moving while the cover is open while he had a diagnostic program queued up on the computer. What he didn't know was that the instant he reinserted the safety pin the machine would execute the queued instructions and start moving, and he had a hand inside it right in the danger zone.

I grabbed his shoulder and yanked his hand out an instant before it was crushed. He stopped ignoring me when I told him to stop bypassing safety lockouts to save a few minutes.

In 1992 I was 16. A bunch of us were about to leave a party and I called shotgun. But, my friend Pat kind of wrestled me out of the spot and I wound up jumping in another car since the first car was now full. The other driver and I watched as our friend's car skidded into oncoming traffic. Pat was airlifted to the local trauma hospital where his dad told a huge group of us teenagers that Pat had succumbed to his injuries.

Maybe that's not exactly "bullet dodged", but...

I had a cardiac arrest about four years ago. Dropped dead(ish) in the middle of my shift. Found out after I woke up about a week later that:

A) the manager who saw me fall was a former lifeguard and knew proper CPR

B) an ambulance happened to be passing about two blocks away

C) probably the best cardio unit in my state was a ten-minute ambulance ride from where it all happened.

Walked out of the hospital about two weeks later, full recovery.