21 people share their close calls with kidnappers, murderers, or near-death experiences.

For every tragic kidnapping or murder victim, there are those who barely got away. Similarly, for every fatal car crash or freak accident, there's a parallel situation where all parties miraculously survived. When you're a survivor of an extremely close call, it's wild to consider how differently it all could have ended.In a popular Reddit thread, the OP shared their experience with almost being kidnapped and asked others to share the times they barely escaped catastrophe.1. OP kicked it off with their near kidnapping experience. So I was I'd say around 10 years old, and my family decides to take the dog for a walk. I decide I want to rollerblade, and make big circles around my family as they walk. At one point I end up a block ahead of my family, and a rusty beat up truck pulls up and stops, and a dude jumps out. I remember him having a super short beard. He says "hey kid, check this out!" and he pulls out a skateboard, and rides it on the street and says "pretty cool skateboard huh kid? You want it?" I, being completely happy with my roller blades, say "no thank you!" He says "come on! It's free! Just come over here and take it!" I say "No, I like my rollerblades!" At this point, he looks down the street and sees my family walking up the street. Without saying anything to me, he throws his skateboard in the back, jumps in his truck and drives away. I never thought it was weird, didn't tell my parents, in my head it was "some dude tried to give me a skateboard I didn't want!" 10 years later I'm like HOLY F*CK. THANK GOD I DIDN'T F*CKING LIKE SKATEBOARDS. tl:dr Didn't get kidnapped because I thought skateboards suck. 2. sookybabi is so relieved they weren't raised by their aunt. Finding out from an Aunty from my dad's side that my parents were going to let my Mum's sister and husband adopt me as a baby because they were childless for a long time. If the transaction happened it would have been kept a secret. Thank goodness it never happened, the woman is a nutcase and the husband ended up divorcing her after they had a son. Their kid grew up whacked and feral, and my parents became his guardian, the poor kid didn't even know how to wipe his a*s and had to be spoon fed at age 10. 3. callmedabau5 saved two kids from being kidnapped. This isn't something catastrophic that happened to me, but still interesting. I'm 16 years old, and last year when I was walking home from school, I saw two little kids that couldn't be older than 9 were walking home a little bit in front of me. I assumed they were brother and sister. Anyway, me being so much bigger with longer legs, I eventually started to catch up to them, and right when I was about to turn off into my street, I noticed a car pulled up next to them and asked them to get in. My heart stopped when I heard the older one say 'but mister, we don't know you'. After that I kept walking towards them and screamed out 'LUCY, MARK' (because I didn't know their actual names), and they both looked at me. I ran up and said, 'guys don't run off on me like that. Stay close.' I pretended like I didn't see the car pulled up next to them and walked with them until the car drove off. They asked me who I was but I just kept telling them to be quiet until the man goes away. When the guy left I told them not to talk to strangers and walked them home. I explained to their parents what happened and I don't think I've ever seen more grateful parents. 4. SmoSays was saved by a gang member. Oh, remembered the one I wanted to say. First, let it be known that I have a gift/curse where people feel like they can tell me their life story. Strangers, especially. I rode the city bus from a ghetto part of town to Homelessville (where I had to transfer) to home. There were a few regulars but every now and then there'd be someone new and inevitably they'd sit next to me. I was at the transfer bus stop with three other people. An old man who spoke no English so I'd never spoken to, this twitchy gang-banger who had gotten on the first bus a few stops after I did. Then there was a man in a suit. He looked like the lovechild of Successful Black Guy and The Rock. He sat next to me and started a conversation. I don't remember what exactly it was but something about his line of questioning creeped me out. On the surface it wasn't anything like 'what color are your panties little girl?' and aside from sitting waaaaaaaay too close he didn't try to touch me. Maybe I was just too wary of strangers but I just didn't want to talk to him and I hoped he got onto another bus. However I was raised to be polite and couldn't think of a way to tell this guy to please stop talking to me. Then Twitchy Gang-banger plops down next to me on my other side. Also too close. Now I'm sandwiched between two guys and Twitch was almost leaning over me. He starts talking loud and fast, rambling and mumbling to where I can't understand a word. Creepy guy eventually gets up to go stand next to NoEnglish but I still have Twitch. Twitch then proceeds to tell me his life story. He claimed to be in the Crips and I thought he was saying this to appear tough though he was flying the right colors. He then talked about his role in the gang and how his dealer ripped him off earlier that day. He was pointing to scars on his arm and face and explaining how he got them. My bus came and we all climbed onto it. Creeper had basically given up talking to me and sat somewhere near the front of the bus while Twitch followed me to the back. He wasn't close as he had before so I'd calmed down ever so slightly. It also helped that I was sitting next to a regular who was blind so if push came to shove I could whip Twitch with the cane. He kept up the constant monologue and didn't stop until Creeper got off the bus. Twitch then says (I'm quoting so excuse the language) 'I thought that fag was never gonna leave' and runs off. Before he does I hear him asking the driver the quickest route to get back to where we'd been picked up. I went home and, using the location and many hours, found that Creeper was a convicted sex offender. A month later I saw a very familiar mugshot in the paper. Twitch was arrested for murder. TLDR: Had a nice talk with a gang member who, it turns out, killed a lot of people. Also he got on the wrong bus to protect a sixteen year old girl from a rapist. 5. Corporal_Cavernosa barely avoided decapitation. Mine was a few months after I'd turned 21. I'm from India, and frequently make trips from my house in Bombay, to one in another state around 1000km away. Its a 20 hour journey because I prefer buses over trains. I've been doing it for over 15 years, and ALWAYS booked the exact same seat, 4 seats down from the driver on his side. This particular time though, I booked my ticket late and instead got a seat on the opposite side of the bus. We'd just stopped for dinner, and once done, I got back to my seat and settled down with a book. As soon as we turned back onto the highway, there was a big thud and a lot of dust and glass flying around. Turns out a truck rammed into the side of the bus. No one was hurt more than a few scratches. However, in my usual seat, there was a lady, about 5 feet tall, and there was a huge block of wood that was stuck over her head. If I'd gotten that seat, I'd have been decapitated. Was quite a WTF moment, and gave me some perspective on life. TL;DR : Didn't get my usual seat on the bus, spared a decapitation. 6. Kool-Callie was rescued from a pedophile. When I was about seven years old, my twin, an older brother and I had gone with a 'family friend' to go to his mothers house. This was nothing out of the ordinary as we had gone with this man on several such occasions prior. We were living somewhere in Nevada at the time, near(ish) the California border. He had asked my parents if it was okay for him to take the three of us for a visit, and my parents said yes. I'm not really sure at what time we left, but we never made it to his mothers house. (I was looking forward to seeing her cat again) We drove for hours, my brother, sister and I in the back seat. This man didn't stop to let us out for a bathroom break, and he didn't have anything other than beer for us to drink, and he was drinking as well. After another hour or so of driving, he got pulled over. He told us not to say anything to the officers. They approached his vehicle and could smell the beer coming off of him in waves. They noticed us in the back seat and asked if we were his. He of course said yes. The officers didn't believe him. Thank God. They asked him to step out of the car and placed him under arrest. He fought them the entire time until they had clubbed him into submission just to get him into the back of the cruiser. Another CHP showed up and took us with him to a foster home where we stayed until our parents could come to pick us up later. It wasn't until fifteen years later that I had learned that the man had pedophillic intentions with the three of us. I never thought anything of the fact that he didn't bring another of my brothers with us. When the officers asked him why that was, he simply replied that the other brother would have talked. TLDR; kidnapped at 7, forced to drink beer when thirsty, nearly raped by drunk man before he was arrested. 7. sarahbobara was rocked to sleep by an attempted robber. I was born in Boyton Beach, FL and spent my first few years in a home that skirted some really rough neighborhoods. Though the houses on my street were mostly low-income and minority families who were just trying to raise their kids, occasionally we'd have some break-ins or gang fights overflow into our community. For a span of a few years we had a crack-addicted homeless man who would hit our neighborhood for easily pawn-able goods to support his habit; the cops always knew it was him, would lock him up for a few months and then when released he'd be at it again. I was really young, just under three years old the night he broke into our house for the second time. He woke me up as he was shining a flashlight into my bedroom window looking for an easy way in, and moi, being the headstrong toddler that I was, got up to investigate "the policeman's flashlight" as I later told my mom. Apparently I must have scared the shit out of him when I sleepily greeted him as he came in through our kitchen window because he abandoned all intention of robbing our home and instead picked me up to rock and soothe me back to sleep, laid me down on our living room couch, and high-tailed it through our rear door. I had forgotten the whole incident completely by the time my mom retold me the story later in life, and initially was freaked out by my 3- year-old description of the "scary man with the long fingernails." However, I look back at it now with a level of humility; it could have been someone else much meaner and a far more tragic situation. This man who was bottom of the totem-pole by most societal standards, addict, homeless, petty-theft, was still a human being who chose to be gentle with a child. In some ways it restored my faith in humanity. 8. npott438 barely avoided killing a man. I was driving down a country road at night, I saw a "Deer Xing" sign, and decided to slow down significantly for the upcoming blind corner. Came around the corner going about 20km/h as opposed to the 80km/h posted limit. In the middle of the f*cking road is some idiot walking and wheeling his bicycle. I stopped about 3 inches shy of hitting him. If I had been doing 80 I would have had to dig a grave. 9. mumpson walked home with a mysterious man. Sort of similar situation. When I was in kindergarten, a man I didn't recognize came to walk me home. Being as stupid as I was, I grabbed my bags and went with him. I'm not sure how but he even knew my name (I think). We chatted and he walked me home, and as I walked through the doors my parents ran to me. Turns out they were looking for me everywhere, thinking I had been kidnapped. My teacher had told them that I left with a man claiming to be a relative. To this day, nobody knows who the man was that walked me home. EDIT: Just to clarify, he did not actually know the location of my house, I think, as I clearly remember leading the way. Also he was quite an older man, as his beard was completely white. 10. MissLadyReddit was almost murdered by serial killer Dennis Raider. Kind of happened to me, but it mostly affected my mother. My parents had just divorced, and my father (being an inconsiderate bastard, as he is,) filed bankruptcy against the house that was in both his and my mother's name, RIGHT before the divorce was final. Because of this, we ended up losing the house and moving to a low-income apartment complex in Park City, KS. Doesn't sound too bad, a small town in Kansas. We lived here for a very short few months. I was the only white kid on my bus in a very racist neighborhood (racist from the opposite perspective) so after getting beaten up a couple of times, my mother agreed to walk with me to and from school. It was about a mile and a half walk, so we would have to leave while it was still a little dark outside sometimes. There was a friendly, stout gentleman who would often wave and say hello to my mother and I as we walked by. It began in the mornings, as he was leaving for his shift as some member of the county. However, it slowly became more frequent. Eventually, he "happened" to be checking the mail or getting out of his car or looking out the window nearly every day, twice a day (as I was going to and coming home from school.) My mother mentioned seeing him at the grocery store a few times, which was easily brushed off as small-town coincidence. By the end of the year, news reports of a serial killer known as BTK- Bind, Torture, Kill- came about, stating that he had been arrested for ten murders spanning from 1974 to 1991. Dennis Rader waved at my mother and I on a daily basis and had been stalking her. He plead guilty and is currently serving 10 consecutive life sentences in a prison in Eldorado, KS. In his confession, he admitted stalking and planning to murder another victim. He had set a date for October of 2004. A date shortly after my mother and I had moved to a better household in the Wichita area because of the bullying issues at my school. TL;DR My mother and I (possibly) almost became victims of an infamous serial killer. In case you all were interested, here's a link to his trutv special 11. EPluribusUnumIdiota outran a mysterious captor. I was chased by an adult male when I was seven. My mom asked me to deliver some eggs and sugar to a neighbor, typical upper-class N. East Neighborhood, no crime. After I delivered the goods I started back home, about 1/4 mile. There were no street lights and it was very dark that night, dark enough that I really could barely see anything when I got to a long bend with bushes on both sides. I had just passed a driveway when I heard a loud rustling behind me so I jumped and looked back at the same time and saw a large, dark figure emerge from the bushes towards me. I was a fast kid, fastest in my class, fastest in my soccer club, and all I could think of was how dark it was and how if I tripped on something I was a goner. I could hear a man's grunt and inhales/exhales close behind me, couldn't hear his feet though, just his breath, and it sounded like he was no more than 5 feet behind me. I kept thinking all I had to do was get to within sight of my front yard and with all those lights he would turn back, quit, but when we got that close and we were running in the light I could really feel him pressing harder and felt he was getting closer. I decided to take a shortcut through a hole in a row of tall bushes that bordered our land. My siblings and I had used this shortcut pretty much every time we've walked in that direction, so I knew there was a two foot drop to the driveway. I ran/ducked through the hole and onto my driveway and I could hear him crash through the bushes, didn't hear him fall, and he was still after me. When I got to about 20 feet from my front door I no longer heard him, which was good because I fumbled with the screen door, and in doing so I got my pinky finger caught and cut off the last knuckle. I opened the heavy front door, jumped inside, slammed it shut and locked, screamed out for my dad and didn't notice my finger was missing a knuckle until after my mom let me go from a long hug. My dad ran out after the guy with a gun but he was gone. My dad came back, fished out the end of my finger and put it in a bag of ice to take to the hospital, but they said it was pointless (no pun intended) to try and reattach it, forget why exactly. The police took my story, looked around, but aside from the bushes being jacked up and some grass pressed down in an obvious pathway across my yard, there was nothing. A few months later in a neighboring town there was a boy about my age who went missing while walking home from a friend's house late at night, then another a few months after that. I never head anything about the fate of those kids, and for all I know it's not at all related to my being chased. But, it erased the idea I tried to believe that maybe some guy was just messing around, a scenario that let me forget the fear of going outside at night. The boys' disappearances also made me very appreciative for life.. and fast feet. Sorry for the long story, I haven't really thought about it in a very long time, so retelling it has reminded me I need to talk to my two kids about being safe around people... and maybe I should have them come with me to the track to run a few laps. 12. dem_cakes didn't get hit by a car, but their friends did. When I was around 9 I went roller skating with my older friends who were around 12 years old. We had just skated out of our neighborhood area when I realized that I forgot something. So I skated home which was literally 2 minutes away, got whatever and headed back. I find out that my two friends had crossed this small road while I was gone and had gotten hit by a driver who ran the red light. It was a hit and run. It was especially sad because one was a long time ballet dancer and she was never able to recover from it. 13. mynamewasf*ck's hand grazed a car that could have killed them. Years ago I was walking on the sidewalk during one of those Silent Hill days that San Francisco has sometimes: the entire world filled with fog, every sound muffled. Still on the sidewalk, I turned to cross the street and paused for absolutely no reason with my hand up in front of me and felt something tingle on my fingertips. Something flat and yellow appeared and then disappeared in front of me in a flash at hip level without making a sound. It took me about ten seconds to realize that what I had just seen was a taxi cab, streaming by at about fifty miles per hour, that had been unable to see the road and had driven onto the sidewalk. The tingle I felt in my fingertips was my hand touching the side of the passenger's side window. tl;dr I am the luckiest motherf*cker on the planet. 14. throwaway8564326's mom booked it fast. Mom and I were coming home from the mall when I was 10. My mom says that she thinks the car behind us is following us. She makes a series of random turns, and the guy is still behind us. She sees a cop car sitting in the parking lot of a grocery store, so she pulls into the parking lot and drives up to the cop. The man then high tails it around us and out of the parking lot, flipping us off as he passes us. I'm still curious as to why he was following us. 15. fireindeedhot still won't forgive Cory. I was four wheeling with some friends up in the rocky mountains last summer. I'm not from the US and this was my first time so I was just a passenger. Everything was going normal, at least as normal as I think (yelling yeeehaw while listening to the team america soundtrack). when we took a turn a little too sharp and high centered on the edge of a cliff. It was like slow motion as we slowly crept toward the edge and I decided to put on my seatbelt. The car got stuck on a mound but wouldn't move backwards. I think the mound was the only thing that slowed us down enough not to go off the cliff. We were literally an inch away from plummeting to our doom, while "AMERICA! F*CK YEAH" was blasting through the speakers. We don't let cory drive anymore. I hope you see this cory, you are an awful driver. 16. The-other-jon was lucky to not be chosen. In middle school I volunteered to work one period for the school library rather than have study hall. I got along really well with the head librarian, I would say he was the first adult that I thought of as a friend. He was really friendly towards me. A few years later I come home from college on break and my mom starts asking me questions about him. Turns out he had been molesting boys at the school. tl:dr Didn't get molested by a librarian, now I have self esteem issues. 17. iwantobeatree's mom has escaped a few times. Didn't happen to me, but my mom. She was a college student in the 70's in Oregon walking out to her car late one night. A handsome brunette brown-haired man comes up and starts talking to her while she's walking out. At first he was very polite, then he began to seem more aggressive/creepy and making her more and more nervous. She starts yelling, a car comes into the parking lot, so she takes the opportunity and runs to her car. A couple years later she sees Ted Bundy on the news and swears it was him that night. Edit: Didn't know men weren't brunette. Also have another story where my mom had a close call, thought you guys might enjoy. About a year after this incident, she moved to Albuquerque, NM. She was at a church gathering on a sunday night. The young adults group usually went to go eat after. She got into her car and noticed two hippie men following her. One had long blonde hair, and one had brown big afro. They kept flashing their penors, mooning her, and shouting out nasty things. About about thirty minutes of her driving around trying to loose them, she finally pulled into a police station and they sped off. About a month later, she learned that they had taken a young girl up in the mountain and raped her repeatedly in their car. While they were raping her, the girl had taken the car lighter and lit the man with afro hair on fire then got away. TL;DR: the 70's were scary for my mom. 18. Bejezus saved the whole school from dying. Not to try and piggy back on the top comment, but when I was in junior high school I had a very tight group of friends. It was about 5 of us. One of the guys' name was, lets says George. George wasn't always the most "normal" of people, but we knew the guy since we were in elementary school and he was a great friend. But he was a little off. He was always doing something "out there". Always being George we said. He never socialized with anyone outside of our group of friends. All through out junior high, we never saw anything suspicious in him. Come our freshman year of high school, when everyone starts figuring out their identify, you could slowly see the changes in his personality. He was becoming distant and even more incredibly "out there". But we always supported him as our friend because we understood most of his problems, even if we weren't capable of doing anything about it. Then one day, I was with my friend Steven and George, and out of no where he announces that he was going to murder everyone in the school. It freaked us out. He showed us his plans (and yes, he had detailed guidelines to how he was going to do this. School blueprints, paths to taken, classes to take out first.) But he told us not to worry..he was going to kill us first. Because we had been such good friends to him and defending him when others would try and tell him he was weird or some other BS, we were always there to defend his name. He didn't want us to suffer from watching him do this, so he thought he was doing us a favor. We immediately left his house with some excuse, told authorities and he was taken away. He disappeared for about a year, he was put into a mental institution. Apparently 6 months through, he made "great progress", and was released. He then tried to kill his sister, and was reinstated. He ended up being released and is now joining the Army. I'm not exactly sure if this the best path, but we haven't spoken in a long time. But I still defend him to this day, he was a great friend. I just wish I could help him. 19. valkyrieleison screamed themselves to safety. Same as you, OP. I wandered away from my mother briefly at an outdoor market and this middle-aged, heavyset guy grabbed me with no warning and tried to drag me into his van ~10 feet away. I was a scrawny kid, so it almost worked, too. Screamed my head off for help, he took off running. For years I thought that this was just something that happened to most kids. F*cked me up a bit when I realized just how close I came to being kidnapped. Edit: it did not help that my mother thought I was making shit up and still seems to have no regret about that. 20. everything_is_pandas almost froze to death. When I was little (somewhere between 8 and 11), my dad forced me to join Girl Scouts. We had to wear uniforms to meetings, and I got stuck with the dress version that didn't reach much past my knees. Usually, this wasn't a problem. Then one day we out for some kind of hike or nature walk, in winter. In Ontario. I don't remember how long the walk was supposed to be, but I was getting really cold and very upset (I had a coat, but no snow-pants). My mom was there as a volunteer, and I kept telling her it was too cold and I wanted to go home. Mom agreed and told the group leaders we were leaving early. Now my mom didn't have a car, but we lived relatively close by, so we started walking home. To cut a lot of time off our walk, we tried taking a shortcut across a golf course. The snow turned out to be a hell of a lot deeper than we expected; I could barely walk through it despite being very tall for my age, and it was almost up to my mom's waist. My mom's health had never been great, and when we were out in the middle of it, she realized she couldn't keep walking. We were stuck out there, alone, with no cell phone, and no one waiting at home expecting us back (my parents were divorced and my dad was living in Quebec at the time). It was getting dark and still freezing cold. Luckily, there were some houses within sight of the golf course. Mom stood in the snow and prayed while I waded across the golf course and into the nearest neighborhood. I ran up to the first house I saw and rang the doorbell. Then the scary part happened: no one answered. I tried another house, ringing the bell and pounding on the door. No answer. The street was completely empty, but there were houses on both sides. I turned around and screamed, as loud as I could, "Somebody HELP ME!" No one heard me scream. So I went to the third house and rang the bell, and finally, FINALLY, someone answered. I started babbling to a random stranger about how my mom was out on the golf course and needed help. He ran out to get her, while I sat on the staircase inside. His daughter was nice and gave me a pair of her socks (black with red toes and red dogs around the ankles) since mine were soaked through with melted snow at this point. The man found my mom and drove us both home. I never heard the guy's name and I've never seen him or his family since. But I still have the socks his daughter gave me, and I'm never going to throw them out. TL;DR: Me and my mom almost froze to death within sight of a dozen houses. 21. Yboc was saved by a broken wrist. In August of 2009 I was riding at my local motocross track one evening. I was doing laps with a friend and right on straight into a 90 foot jump. Right as hit the beginning of the jump my bike bogged and lost a lot of power. I give it some panic throttle but I leave the lip without enough momentum and I had to bail off the bike mid air. I slam to the ground after about a 20' fall and still moving forward pretty fast. I ended up breaking both wrists and one required surgery. A couple weeks later I go in for a pre-op blood test and I end up getting a call shortly after and they told me my blood sugar was really high and I needed to get to the doctor. So, it turns out my blood sugar was way high and I had been ignoring the only sign of my newly acquired Type 2 Diabetes (I was peeing a lot). If I wouldn't have broke my wrists I don't know how much longer I would have gone on without knowing. And I don't know how much higher it would have gotten and what it would end up doing to me. So that's how breaking my wrists may have really saved me. Edit: As I read over that, I realized that it starts out pretty cool with a motocross story, but then ends with lame diabetes. Sorry for that.