21 Chilling Moments Where People Got The "Gut Feeling" That Something Was Wrong — And They Were Totally Right
Julia Corrigan
·20-min read
Please note: This article contains mention of violence and sexual assault.
The chilling feeling that something is just, well, wrong can come at any time, and as I've come to learn, should never be ignored. Recently, I've been delving into stories of people who had a "gut feeling" that something was totally wrong, and it turned out their instinct was right.
These stories were so compelling (and surprisingly, relatable — thank you, instincts!) that many members of our own BuzzFeed Community chimed in with "gut feeling" stories of their own. Here are some of the most chilling and compelling:
1."I got a new neighbor at the beginning of the pandemic, and trying to be neighborly, I introduced myself over my six-foot privacy fence. Big mistake."
2."My best friend and I were picking blackberries a few summers ago when we started hearing rustling in the bushes and the birds were chirping like crazy. I got a feeling we were in danger and told her we needed to go. She said it was fine and kept picking."
3."In the early '90s I was driving to my evening shift. I observed a guy kind of stumbling into the road towards me. I knew picking up strangers was a dangerous thing to do, but he looked like he needed help."
4."I work at a public library and had a guy who took a liking to me, chatting me up, hanging around, asking for me if he didn't see me. Creeped me the F out. Coworkers started hustling me off the floor as soon as he walked in."
5."When I was 6, my mother took my brothers and me to the lake with her boyfriend. We swam and had hot dogs and roasted marshmallows. When it was time to leave, my mom's boyfriend's car would not start."
6."Not me, but my mom. She woke up from a dream where a car was crashed into and pushed off a cliff. That morning, she told my father about the sinking feeling she had. She begged him not to go to work that day. He still decided to go."
7."Not as dramatic as some of these, but I was once waiting at a red light. The light turned green but for some reason, I didn't pull out right away. A few seconds later, a car came up on my left and blew through the red. If I had pulled out when my light turned green, I would have been T-boned."
8."I was an RA my junior year of college, so I was on campus after most people had left for the summer. It was a small and very safe campus and I frequently walked around alone at night without issue."
"He started to pick up the pace toward me when we rounded the corner of a building and there were two male students around 200 feet away. They turned our direction and he slowed upon seeing them and lowered his voice, saying he wanted to 'show me something' and that he had weed he wanted to sell me."
"I yelled 'not interested' and turned and sprinted back to my dorm, going around to the back door and making sure he hadn’t followed me. I called campus police and reported it, but tried to laugh it off as me being sort of paranoid.
The next morning campus police emailed the school saying the man was a registered violent sex offender and that everyone should report him immediately if he was seen on campus. If I hadn’t changed the way I was walking, I may not have run into anyone else and things could have ended up way worse."
—Anonymous
9."I was working at an amusement park over the summer back in the 1980s. I was done with work and some acquaintances and my roommate were going to a bar. I decided it was too late for me, and I had heard the guy driving was already drinking. I went with my gut feeling and stayed at the park."
10."I'm a criminal defense attorney and a woman. The nature of my job requires me to often meet in closed-door, private rooms so I can talk to my clients about their cases and preserve attorney-client confidentiality."
"When I got back to my office, I went to my boss and asked for the case to be assigned to a different attorney. I couldn't name a single thing the client had done or said that would have made anyone agree that he was frightening. I couldn't articulate my concern other than to say, 'Something in my gut just gave me a bad feeling; I don't want to be alone in conference rooms with him.'"
11."I was going to take a flight to San Francisco from Oxnard. I woke up out of a dead sleep with my heart pounding thinking that the plane was going to crash, so I called up the airline and rescheduled for a later flight. Sure enough, a student pilot flew into the plane over Burbank airport and killed everyone on board."
—Anonymous
12."One beautiful fall evening, my boyfriend and I took my van and drove out to the local mountains to make dinner at a remote overlook. After dinner, we decided to stay the night at the overlook. At dusk, I started to get an unsettled feeling."
13."When I was 17, I was a front desk receptionist at a gym. There were always guys coming in and out, flirting, mostly harmless. But one guy in particular made the hairs on my neck stand up. He was ex-military, very fit, handsome, huge. But something about him rubbed me the wrong way."
"Fast-forward ten years later, and my best friend (the same one who got the creeps) is now a cop and sends me his mugshot."
"Turns out, he was a serial rapist across multiple counties who would drug women he dated and homeless women he would offer a ride to, and then rape them.
They caught him after a poor homeless woman reported him. His DNA has been linked in multiple cases. You never know. 17-year-old me got the creeps and some thought I was stupid. It probably saved my life."
—Anonymous
14."I lived in an apartment complex during COVID and didn't go near people. We had four laundry rooms in our complex. One day I met this man in the laundry room, he was probably in his late 50s, about the same as me."
15."I was feeling anxious, nervous, like something bad was about to happen. I never had that feeling before. We were headed out to a movie and I mentioned the feeling to my girlfriend, who is a healthcare professional. She checked my pulse and said, 'Let's go to the ER.'"
16."My mom used to work in San Francisco when I was little. We lived in Berkeley across the bay, and my grandparents would babysit me while she was at work. One day, she was working, and it was getting close to the end of the day, and she started to feel something was off."
17."I had just moved to the West Coast and had only been there a few months. Due to the move I was buying and returning a lot of things. One morning in December, I was getting ready to leave to make one of these return trips, and I had this heavy weight in my gut the entire time."
18."When I was 18 years old I was in college and decided to take a job as a fast food restaurant closing manager, with shifts from 4 p.m. to midnight. We usually closed the dining room at 11 p.m., but the drive-thru stayed open 'til midnight. This one night, I was doing paperwork in my office about 15 minutes before closing the dining room when I got this overwhelming feeling that I needed to lock the dining room early."
"Rather than go through the drive-thru he decided to go to another fast food restaurant, right next door to us. He went in, ordered his food, ate, and then hid in the bathroom ceiling. After the manager locked the doors he robbed the place, had all the employees lay face down on the floor, and shot all but one of them in the back of the head."
"One employee was able to run out the back door and escape. The killer was on the run with his face all over the news and town for a week or so before he was caught. Needless to say, I quit that job that very night."
—Anonymous
19."When I was 19, I was a telephone installer for GTE and we were putting phones in for new construction. My boss wanted me to wire in some things that were directly below other workers putting in ductwork. I had a feeling, and decided to wait for them to finish with the large piece of ductwork that they were installing."
20."It was on a Friday evening, and I was 13 years old. That day, my group of friends and I decided to hang out in our neighborhood and go skating a bit."
21.And finally: "My Filipino family moved to Cudahy, Wisconsin, just a couple miles outside Milwaukee, in the mid-70s. When I was in my late teens, I started sneaking out to gay bars in the city on the weekends using a fake ID. One night, this cute blonde guy started cruising me."
"I told him I had a curfew and needed to get home, and offered to exchange numbers. He kept trying to convince me and took off my flip-flops so he could massage my 'pretty' feet. I insisted I needed to go, and he got angry."
"I tried to get my flip-flops back on, but he threw them in the back seat and then grabbed me by the wrist with a really strong grip. I panicked, and started to struggle to get his hand off me. I wound up punching him and then fell backwards out of the car. He shouted angrily at me, then sped off in his car. I had to walk all the way home barefoot, and I told my parents I'd been mugged. I never saw the guy again, as my family moved to Chicago shortly after this."
"A few years later, I was watching the news and saw a report about a serial killer who'd been arrested. It was the guy from that bar. It was Jeffrey Dahmer."
If you ever have a gut feeling, listen to it. You never, ever know: It might save a life. If you have your own "gut feeling" story, feel free to tell it down in the comments below, or, if you prefer, you can check out this anonymous Google Form. Who knows — your story may be included in an upcoming BuzzFeed article!
Note: Some submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
Terrifying footage shows an attempted kidnapping of a child in Brooklyn on Saturday, November 9, local media reported, citing police.Footage posted to X by Crown Heights Shomrim Patrol (CH Shomrim), a neighborhood patrol organization, shows a father walking with his two children, a boy and girl, on Kingston Avenue.A masked man grabs the little boy’s hand and tries to walk away. The father holds onto the boy’s hand and pushes the man away.According to the post, the incident occurred on Saturday afternoon. In a later update, the organization said a suspect was arrested over the incident.No injuries were reported and the suspect, a 28-year old man, was charged with second degree kidnapping, reports said. Credit: CH Shomrim via Storyful
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