Freaky Close Calls That People Somehow Avoided

Author image for Eric Lund
Eric Lund
Oct 22, 2021 6:00 PM EDT

At best, life is a series of dodged bullets. With all the falling icicles, natural disasters and blind turns on one lane roads that life has to offer, we can only hope to be fortunate enough to say "damn, that was crazy" at the end of a close call. And it gives us a sense of appreciation for our current circumstances when we can look back with a feeling of bewilderment on the moments that we realize could have gone very differently. 

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  • 01
    Product - Renakunisaki - 1d · edited 23h S 2 The second floor of the house I was renting collapsed a month after I moved out.
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  • 02
    Font - 6K6L · 1d O 9 & 35 More When I was 11 I started losing vision in my left eye, and eventually went completely blind in about 2-3 weeks. After lots of testing we found that I had a brain tumor in my left optic nerve that would likely spread quickly. They gave me a year and a half to live in the best case scenario with treatment. They got the eye surgically removed, started my on radiation and chemo, and luckily I responded well to it. Cancer's long gone, am now a cyclops, and happy to be di
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  • 03
    Smile - BrentHatley - 1d 3 There was an apartment I really wanted but at the last minute I found a slightly better one. The apartment I almost moved into burned to the ground a month later.
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  • 04
    Font - ChaplainSD - 1d · edited 17h 2 8 3 3 6 & 14 More I had some chest pains one night and woke up my wife to tell her. She got a little scared that it might be a heart attack and we agreed that I should go to the ER. The nurses were pretty sure it was a false alarm but would run an EKG as is common practice. In my head I was hoping that the chest pain would come back, not to prove a heart attack, but so that we can find out what the chest pain was. The EKG was done by one veteran nurse and a
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  • 05
    Vertebrate - discostud1515 · 1d ( I used to own a gym with a partner. I sold my half of the company and took a boring but stable government job about 3 months before the pandemic.
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  • 06
    Font - Ageharo · 1d 2 Back in college. Ex cheated and got preggo. Blamed it on me, involved her family and all. I was willing to file a case in court with medicolegal as needed. Ex got too pressured as I was taljing to her dad about medical tests etc. Out of nowhere she admitted that I wasnt the father and it was some classmate she had a fling with.
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  • 07
    Font - vsmack · 1d We went to Thailand in 2003 for Christmas (I spent a number of years there in the early 90s as a kid) and loved it so much that we were gonna do it again the next year. Spend Christmas watching the sun come up on a beach at Phuket again. We had the tickets and everything, but because of some new fallout from an Enron-adjacent scandal, my dad wasn't allowed to leave the country (he wasnt implicated, but was in the c-suite of a credit card company, and all such people were under
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  • 08
    Font - bobear2017 - 23h 4 3 3 2 11 24 years old, had a pesky sore on my tongue that was really bothering me. My boyfriends dad was a dentist so when I was over at his house one night I asked him to take a look. He recommended I go see an oral surgeon the next day for him to check it out. The next day I decided it was feeling better so I tried to cancel my appt but my boyfriend's dad insisted I go. I went, and the oral surgeon pretty much diagnosed it as cancer on the spot. It was aggressive and
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  • 09
    Font - WolfSpartan1 · 23h · edited 20h O Yesterday I was helping my fiance's dad cut some tree limbs from his yard. He was on a lift trying to cut some limbs that were dangling dangerously high over a steel propane tank. The tank itself had $1500 worth of propane. Had. He cut off a limb and it hit the tank with the largest bang I've ever heard. Propane came pouring out the top like smoke from a mortar. He struggled to get the lift down enough to jump out run for his life. We would later find out
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  • 10
    Font - NotMyRealName814 - 1d I was briefly engaged to a man who has since cheated on his gorgeous, intelligent, sweet wife hundreds of times. They are separated but have two children and will likely reconcile. I broke our engagement when he said that he thought it was perfectly ok for a man to cheat on his wife if they'd been married for awhile and "he'd gotten bored". Oddly enough, he didn't believe a woman was entitled to do the same. I feel so badly for his poor wife now. He began cheating on
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  • 11
    Font - fulthrottlejazzhands · 1d I was moving abroad to do a post-grad degree. My flight was to leave out of Newark early morning on 9/11. A family friend who worked in the Towers kept prodding me to move my flight to the afternoon and come visit him in the office so he could show me around (my parents were pressuring me to go as well since it was a good networking opportunity). I was on the fence, but decided not to since I was a poor student and didn't want to pay the cab fair from my hotel in
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  • 12
    Font - Idiot_Savant_Tinker · 23h My wife and I were prepared to buy a nice riverfront property in 2019, but the owners ( her dad and uncle) were dragging their feet. We had our down payment, we were approved for the mortgage, and we had even been living there paying rent. Then the river rose 30ft/10m and we had to evacuate. The water kept rising. The house was destroyed before we bought it. So we didn't buy it.
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  • 13
    Font - LittleBitodd - 1d 3 My manager was trying to have me fired for underperformance, and I was so depressed at the time that I believed I was an awful employee The place I work has a whole song and dance routine just to get someone a verbal warning, let alone fired, so she tried to get me to take a severance payment so that I'd leave and save her the trouble. I had to take sick leave shortly after that conversation, and while I was gone, she initiated the formal process to have me fired. I wa
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  • 14
    Font - MoridinXP - 23h - edited 17h 3 Walking to work in the winter. Half way through a step forward under a skybridge when an icicle taller than me (6') and probably 2' around at the base crashes down right in front of my nose. If my bus had been a half second earlier, if I had walked even a tiny bit faster pace...I would have been impaled from brains to balls. I was frozen in place for a minute, quietly surveying my near-death. There was another pedestrian nearby who witnessed it and the wide-
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  • 15
    Font - Ragnaroq314 - 1d Few years ago I was in a small fender bender. Someone merged into my lane, with me in it, and smashed my driver side door and their passenger door together. I had pulled my arm in from having it hanging out the window about 15 seconds before that happened. Would have most likely had my arm ripped off.
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  • 16
    Font - bonelessbbqbutt. 1d I quit a job after my boss yelled at everybody for faking being sick when one guy came in with the flu and passed it around the office. He claimed that people don't get sick by being near each other. One guy got it so bad he was hospitalized for 2 weeks. I quit with no back up in October 2019. By February 2020, his company went out of business
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  • 17
    Font - tomlapse · 1d S Almost wound up in the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis years ago. My uncle, cousin, and I were on our way to a Twins game. We were originally planning to take the route that crossed the bridge, but last minute decided to take a more "scenic" route. After it happened, we were talking and we figured it probably would have been within a couple minutes of the time the bridge collapsed that we would have been on the bridge.
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  • 18
    Font - willdabeast907 · 1d O 3 3 Was chatting with a woman at the bar, nothing flirtatious just casual banter. I told her I needed to head out and she asked if I could give her a ride. I was headed that way so it wasn't a big deal. We pull into her driveway and I can see a guy at a computer in the living room through the window. I ask who it is and she replied "that's my husband, he's a pansy. I'll bring him outside and you scare him off, then we can have the house all to ourselves for the night
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  • 19
    Rectangle - GallicPontiff - 1d I was asked to have a marriage of convenience to help someone get a greencard. I saw a few friends involved in that community all have horrible issues and tons of stress. I don't need that si.
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