People Who've Had Near Death Experiences Are Opening Up About The Ways They Survived, And My Heart's Pounding Just Reading Them

Whether it's nearly being involved in a car accident or losing one's balance from a height, we've all had at least one moment of total panic when we think, "This is the end." While many people prefer to keep their brushes with death close to their chest, others find solace in talking about their near-fatal experiences...

So, recently, when a viral Reddit thread asked, "What moment did you think 'I'm dead,' but you survived?" people did not hold back from sharing the nitty-gritty details of their near-death experiences. From alligator attacks to being buried in sand, here are 17 heart-pounding stories from people who managed to cheat death:

1."My husband and I got caught in a snowstorm in the middle of nowhere in the pitch dark. It wasn't on the weather forecast, just one of those freak things that happens."

"The driver had been doing everything possible to avoid hitting us. His pregnant wife, two children, and pet dog were with him. When he got out of his car, he was hyperventilating and nearly puked. Miraculously, though, no one was hurt!"

"I told my husband after the ordeal that I was absolutely certain we were going to die at that moment and that I felt a weird sense of calm come over me because I figured there was really nothing we could do about it, and he told me that he felt the exact same way.

The whole thing happened in seconds, but I remember feeling like time had slowed down despite knowing it was happening quickly."

—u/Miss-Mesmer

2."I was lying prone on my dorm floor. I don’t remember how I got there, but there’s a good chance I had stood up from my desk and fell. The floor was so cold, and I was so tired. My muscles didn’t want to move, and I felt my fingers go slightly numb. I just wanted to fall asleep right there."

"My EMT training kicked in, and I realized I was going into shock. As the thought crossed my mind, I was gripped with terror: If I fell asleep, I would die there on the floor. I had to get up. I had to go get food.

Of course, I didn’t do the sane thing and call 911 or wake my sister — who was sleeping mere feet away — nor did I get food from my dorm fridge. Shock does wild things to your mind. Instead, I walked to the dining hall because I wanted their food. What should have been a five-minute walk felt like it took 20. I don’t know how I didn’t collapse, but it was probably sheer willpower. I made it to the dining hall and got some apple juice because I didn’t have the strength to even lift a plate.

I later discovered that my weight had been unintentionally dropping (not from cancer or an eating disorder, but rather messed-up college eating patterns), and I had developed hypoglycemia from it. More recently, I was diagnosed with POTS. No doubt the combination sucker-punched me that day. I'm so glad I didn’t die."

—u/HumanPretzel14

3."I live in Florida, and my friends and I like camping at the Wacissa River; it’s a freshwater river with lots of natural springs and beautiful wildlife. So, one Friday after work, we left to get to our campsite by sunset. We had all our supplies for the weekend in my and my husband’s canoe for our friends — as they were mostly on paddle boards and kayaks. It was a little later than we expected as we set out, and we were still paddling to the campsite while the sun was setting."

4."In 2010, I was stationed in South Korea and a few of my coworkers and I decided visiting the Seoul Zoo one weekend would be fun."

"However, we did not check the weather. Upon arrival, we decided to ride the ski lift that goes around the park so we could get a lay of the land. So, all eight of us loaded into four lift seats and ventured into the park while suspended 30 feet in the air.

A few minutes into the ride, the wind shifts and becomes suddenly very cold. Then, a light drizzle begins. As we're approaching the lion exhibit, the lift stops, and the rain starts to become a downpour. The wind blows harder and harder and starts turning the lift sideways towards the open lion pit.

Within moments, it's raining so hard we can't breathe, and we have to choose between hanging on the bars of the lift or covering our mouths to catch a breath. All of us are in total silence — absolutely terrified that our lift will jump the cable, causing us to fall to our deaths."

"I don't know how long we were hanging up there before someone eventually cracked and began laughing. None of us are sure who started, but we were all in hysterics once they did. It stopped being scary and just became absurd."

"We're going to drown in midair, suspended over lions. You couldn't write a movie this bad. I later found out we'd been hanging up there for nearly an hour.

As suddenly as the rains came, they dissipated. We sat there in the slowly brightening sky, dripping wet and freezing, for a good ten minutes before the lift finally began to move again."

—u/Indie_Cred

5."When I was 14 or 15, I climbed a tree in our front yard. Some of the tree's branches had recently been trimmed, and there was a 'stump,' nearly ten feet off the ground and five or six inches wide, sticking out from the trunk at an upward angle."

"So I'm climbing this tree, and once I'm a little ways past the 'stump,' the branch in my hand snaps under my weight. I plummet for about two seconds, my hands scrambling, before I touch a branch. Somehow, I managed to snatch onto that branch and cling for dear life. My feet were still touching the tree, and the branch I was hanging onto was bowed under my weight, so I was basically standing against the tree trunk at a 90-degree angle.

I take a moment to catch my breath, then turn around to see how far off the ground I am. That's when I see that branch stump, just underneath me, with the tippy-top directly in the middle of my back. Maybe four inches from my spine. To this day, I'm convinced that I caught myself just in time to not hit that branch square in the spine, which would have paralyzed or killed me."

6."I was eating my lunch at work and choked on bread. My initial reaction was to try to use water to wash it down, but I couldn't swallow...and that's when I started to panic."

7."I had a postpartum hemorrhage immediately after giving birth. I bled for 90 minutes straight and lost two liters of blood."

"Nurses and doctors were frantically working to stop the bleeding, all while my husband and newborn daughter were huddled in a corner — watching helplessly. I was in and out of consciousness due to the blood loss, but at one point, I swam back to consciousness, looked over at my husband’s terrified eyes, and calmly thought, 'It’ll be hard for him to be a single dad. His parents live nearby, though, they’ll help him. They’ll be okay.' And then I lost consciousness again, fully convinced I was about to die.

Surprise, I lived! At last, they found the source of the bleeding and stopped it. I got a massive blood transfusion (donate blood, people; it saves lives!), and we all got to leave the hospital three days later. I'm thankful for getting a happy ending, but that calm acceptance of my own death lives with me to this day. I’ll never forget it."

—u/No-Astronomer-8607

8."A few years ago, I was at a bartending event in Florida. Basically, it's a three-day drinking fest every May. There's a sandbar about a mile or so away where people with boats go to drink, and all kinds of debauchery happens."

"I snagged a ride out to the sandbar and got so plastered I fell off a boat and somehow cut my fingers. After walking around and trying (unsuccessfully) to get a ride back to land, I made the genius decision to swim back to shore. (Yeah, it's not a smart idea). I swam about halfway back before I suddenly felt exhausted. I couldn't move my arms and began swallowing water. I thought, 'OMG, I'm going to die,' and decided to float so I could rest for a bit. I was nervous and out of breath, but while I was resting (and hoping I wouldn't float further away from shore), I was suddenly yanked out of the water. As it turns out, it was the Coast Guard coming to rescue me — I hadn't even heard the boat.

So now I'm on the boat, my hand is bleeding everywhere, and this guy is LOSING HIS SHIT on me. I apologized and told him I thought I could make it but just ran out of energy. Then, I realized the reason why he was actually screaming at me. He explained that May is bull shark breeding season in Florida and told me that the two things sharks love more than anything else are blood and shiny objects. Mind you, I was lying in the ocean with a bleeding hand and an oversized silver chain around my neck. He told me if I were in a helicopter and could see how many bull sharks were swimming around me, I wouldn't have dipped a toe in the water. But because I was floating on my back, I didn't notice them."

—u/TripIeskeet

9."I'm a firefighter, and a few years back, I was dispatched to a confirmed structure fire at a condemned home where 14 unhoused people had been squatting. When we got there, an ambulance that happened to be driving by saw the fire (they were the ones who called it into dispatch). One of the EMTs was carrying a burn victim to the ambulance and began screaming 'There's a bunch of people in there, man!"

"My chief waited until after the scene to discuss what happened. He said, 'Once I saw the exterior conditions a little while after you entered, I was radioing you guys to get out...I didn't get any response and was sending a crew up. Then you guys came out. It flashed on you maybe 10 seconds after you crawled out the door.'"

"Both my radio and my backend guy's radio malfunctioned. They didn't work the entire scene. But we obviously didn't know that until afterward.

A fire 'flashing' or flashover is basically when it gets so hot in space that EVERYTHING, including the smoke, ignites in flames. Even our protective gear can't handle that amount of heat for more than a few seconds. Both of us would've been burned and killed had we not followed our instincts and training. And it all would've been for nothing since it was a condemned house and no other victims were inside.

Again, in the moment, I didn't know it had flashed. But after being told it did once we got out, I had a massive sinking feeling in my gut when I looked at my backend guy. We were seconds away from being burned to death. If we had just been a bit further in that room or simply turned the wrong way and not found the door, we'd be dead."

—u/stcat35

10."I'll preface this by saying that my dad drove a fish truck throughout my childhood, and my sister and I often went with him on Saturdays on his route because, surprisingly enough, it was the best quality time."

"Once, when I was 10, I was doing my dad's route with him, and we parked behind a strip mall at our favorite fish shop. When it was time to leave, we played a game of who could get in the truck and put their seatbelt on first. I went to run around the back of the box truck and saw another delivery truck coming slowly over a speed bump, so I stopped in my tracks.

Unfortunately, we lived on Cape Cod, and it was very sandy. I slipped and fell directly under the front tire of the oncoming truck. The driver didn’t see me, and I was pinned under the tire because they thought I was another speed bump. I screamed bloody murder immediately, and my dad came running over and told the driver to stop. I jumped into my dad's arms, and he carried me into the back of the store and laid me on a table. After he called an ambulance, I was rushed to the hospital. They determined I only had bruising on my pelvis and no major issues at all. I limped for a week or so, but that’s it. I remember lying under that tire and thinking I was about to get crushed.

The kicker is it was April Fools Day, so when my dad called my mom to tell her, she didn’t believe him right away. After that, some of the guys on the route nicknamed me 'Splat,' and every April Fools Day, my dad still texts me, 'Happy almost died day.'"

—u/Expensive-Emphasis56

11."I was working at a construction site. One morning, our excavator operator was three hours late and came in smelling of whiskey. When he arrived, he skipped his paperwork and vehicle safety check. Then, he fired the vehicle up and headed to the trench we had lined for him."

12."I’m a woman and had a heart attack when I was 46. It was a Monday at about 4 a.m. I had just gotten home from work and started to have weird pain. Even though I felt like a hypochondriac, I looked at the list of heart attack symptoms for five hours but didn’t think anything was wrong because I wasn't having symptoms on the left side."

"So, I chalked it up to muscle pain since I only felt it on my right side. Luckily, I have an urgent care five minutes from my house, so I decided to drive there just to get checked out. Once I got there, they told me I was having a heart attack.

I rode to the hospital in an ambulance and immediately had two stents put in. Denial should be the number one sign you’re having a heart attack. For months beforehand, I was exhausted all the time and felt like I was dying, but menopause, a stressful job, and a recent divorce made me think it was depression.

Always trust your gut; mine was screaming at me that something was wrong for a couple of months before anything happened. Thankfully, I got away with no heart damage. Now that it’s been a year, I know that the tiredness, depression, anxiety, muscle pain, and a lot of other weird symptoms were all due to blockage. I really thought I was dead when they had me hooked up to the EKG and told me it was a heart attack."

—u/Difficult-Suit-1906

13."When I was in college — during COVID's peak— I contracted viral meningitis. For those who don’t know, viral meningitis doesn’t kill as fast as bacterial meningitis, but it’s still terrible. At the hospital, the nurses were terrified that I would contract COVID and die."

"I spent two months at home and, at times, in the emergency room. It was the sickest I had ever been. Every day felt like a pounding headache.

One morning, I woke up with double vision — even though my head felt clear. At that moment, I thought I was absolutely going to die. I was alone at home that day because my dad had left to get a minor procedure done. I called a doctor friend and began crying, telling them that I thought I was dying. Once my dad got home, he took me to the emergency room.

I'm recovered now and doing fine. But damn, I’ll never forget the experience."

—u/Odd-Ad1576

14."When I was about 15 years old, I was on a plane bound for Orlando, Florida. I don't know how it happened, but we were too high in the atmosphere — to the point where we could see the earth's curvature. We needed to land, so the pilot dove the plane down to the ground. We became weightless for about two minutes — just floating in the air with nothing but our seat belts to keep us safe."

15."I was at the beach once and decided to dig an eight-foot hole in the sand. After I was finished, I sat down in it, and it collapsed on me..."

"The only reason I had any oxygen supply was because a surfboard was jammed behind my neck to stop more sand from falling on me. I was convinced that I was going to die, and I even told my girlfriend goodbye. When the firefighters showed up, I said, 'Get me out, even if you have to bash my head with shovels while you dig.'

The firefighters propped themselves on a ladder across the hole and began to dig. All in all, I was stuck in the hole for 50 minutes before I was rescued.

Being unable to move made me feel more helpless than ever before."

—u/Remarkable-Shock4892

16."I was mountain biking through a trail that I and some friends had just ridden up. At this point, it was near the end of the day, and we were all exhausted. The downhill path was incredibly steep, so we gained momentum quickly. In one section, we hit a small pile of rocks and discovered there was a sharp bend in the trail. I failed to slow down and went directly towards the edge of a cliff."

"I went flying straight over the handlebars, headfirst, and thought I was going to die. Miraculously, though, because I had tried to turn and brake, I had shifted my body so that when I flew over, I spun. When I hit the ground, I landed on my back. Luckily, I was wearing my backpack — which was filled with a water bag and coat — and a helmet. A tree punctured my bag, not my lungs, and my head was fine. I was scratched up but overall fine.

The biggest concern was that I hit my hip on a rock. Fifteen years later, my left hip still acts up occasionally.

It's an absolute miracle I am alive. My friends in front and behind thought the day was going to turn into a body recovery mission until I climbed back out, tossing my bike and cussing every step of the way."

—u/RamseySmooch

17."It was September 11, 2001. I was three blocks south of the towers when I heard loud engines screaming."

Which one of these stories did you find most nerve-wracking? Have you ever had a near-death experience? Let us know in the comments! (Or if you prefer to stay anonymous, you can use this Google Form).