“This Doesn’t Feel Right”: 50 Unpleasant Gut Feelings That Were Right On The Money

When my son was 14, he lost 30 lbs within a few months. I wasn’t terribly concerned out of the gate because he started on the heavy side and also because he seemed to be working for the weight loss. However, he went to Mexico for a week with his dad and came back 10 lbs lighter and alarm bells started going off because my brother is a type 1 diabetic.

Kiddo had an awful migraine-like headache, so I decided to take him to his pediatrician to have a blood sugar run. I expressed my concerns and the doc pooh-poohed me, spending a lot of time congratulating my son on his weight loss. She was resistant to running a blood sugar, but I insisted – sure enough, type 1 diabetes with a dangerous blood sugar of nearly 500. Sometimes moms just know. Also, f**k that doc.

I was ordering illegal d***s from a lab in China to treat my cat's FIP in December of 2019. (Now legal in the US and many more cats have been saved!)

People started posting things in the FIP group about how, suddenly, the labs were taking their money, and nothing was being sent, all communication was blocked, etc. Then, in January of 2020, labs began "closing early for Chinese New Year." I knew something huge was happening.

I figured it was SARS, and told my husband he needed to think about ways to teach from home, because the s**t would hit the fan if/when it made it to the US. He never once doubted my prediction, because one of my hobbies is studying past epidemics and pandemics. (SARS, Ebola, Marburg, smallpox, influenza)

I knew it, whatever it was, was going to be bad, but I had no clue as to just how bad COVID-19 would be.

My cat lived, so that's nice

Was gaslit by my ex for six years telling me I was hard of hearing. 

She would mumble things constantly making me ask her to speak up. 

She said I was old and my hearing was going etc. even though I never had to ask people at work in a busy office to speak up or repeat things. 

After six hears she f****d up though. We live in Hawaii and some of her college girlfriends came out to visit and stay with us. 

After two days her and her friends are walking and talking when finally one of her girlfriends snaps and yells “Why are you talking so quietly? What the hell is wrong with you? No one can hear you!!  You never talked under your breath before ever! What the hell?”

She looked at me and knew her a*s was busted. 

So for years and years it was just a petty way to put one over on me I guess. 

This was a thirty year old grown a*s woman. 

Ill never understand it. 

When I was a kid, around '02/'03, on the news there was a video of Saddam Hussein delivering some sort of public address.

I said to my older brother "that's not Saddam Hussein". My brother got real pissy started calling me an idiot, insisting that it is Saddam Hussein because the news said so.

Some time later, a few days a few weeks I don't recall, anyway there was a news update that the man in the video of that public address was not actually Saddam Hussein - it was a decoy.

To me it was obvious. I'm on the autism spectrum and I have a photographic memory of faces pretty much. That's my thing. If you try and tell me Bill is Bob, I WILL figure out that Bill is in fact NOT Bob. Don't try and sell that nonsense to me.

Grew up being told I have asthma and that I needed to use inhalers all my life. Thought something wasn’t right, i never really trusted my parents judgement fully.

As I got older, i realized I didn’t need the inhalers as much. It was just cause they were smoking cigarettes around me while I was a kid!

Years back, I was visiting an ex at college. We went to her church, and I met the youth pastor for the first time. Cookie cutter youth pastor right, upbeat, only good vibes, always smiling, we've all met that guy. But something was off, and I didn't want to be around him. Just a gut feeling, ya know? I refused to go back to that church because of him. My ex and her family thought I was crazy. Even some of our friends said I was wrong. Fast forward a year, we had broken at this point, but I saw that he had been arrested for child solicitation with a kid at the church. Always trust your gut people.

There was someone roughly in my PhD cohort who worked a few labs down the hall from me. They always seemed to get positive results with no protocol troubleshooting and the results were always the sort of thing that journal editors looked fondly upon. Somehow this person was 2X as productive as even the super smart, 60+ hour week working, creative grad students in others lab (seriously, think about the smartest kid in your highschool, it would be that person, but probably even more driven to work extreme hours).

This person won pretty much every graduate, then postdoc award you could get and ended up a professor at a well regarded university with a huge startup grant.

**A year in to them starting their faculty position, their former postdoc lab, upon not being able to repeat any experiments or build on the data, figured out that the person had fabricated or fudged at least 60% of results that had been published in top tier journals.** We're talking outright fabrication, not just a slightly too contrast-enhanced micrograph or blot. They reported this to the funding agencies and there was as full investigation. They lost their grants and the university fired them.

In talking to someone in the person's PhD lab, it turns out a similar thing happened and there were some really questionable western blots that had been overly processed and cropped in ways that were definitely misleading. At least one Masters student burned a year trying to build on that work and got nowhere.

Turns out one of the golden children of my PhD program and someone who was featured by funding agencies as the next big thing had built their scientific career mostly on lies and it took ~10 year for anyone to really catch on.


There are some really great scientists who just happen to land on fruitful projects... but no one is _that_ productive and lucky all the time.

X wife said she was going to the park to relax, I said have fun. But it was out of the blue and felt odd. It might have been an invasion of privacy but I tracked her phone, she was not at the park.

Confronted her and she came up with the most bizarre pulled straight out of her a*s story I have ever heard of in my life, ended up seeing the texts on her phone. She was meeting up with another guy.

Funny thing is she would always gaslight me in fear that I would cheat on her, never happened. Couldn't even watch movies with attractive women in it.

I f*****g knew it.

There are few but I will tell about a recent one. I will keep it short. One Guy I knew suddenly got very Rich. Post COVID He said he left the job and started a new business. Within a year He bought a Mercedes and a luxury apartment.He said he is doing Stock and Equity dealings and Forex investment etc etc . In 2023 He was doing many podcasts and interviews on TV as an emerging entrepreneur. Meanwhile I was telling my friends that no way this guy can earn that much money legally. My friends thought I was jealous of him. But I knew something isn't right about his rise in such a short Time. Then he bought multiple luxury cars and flats and was flexing his wealth. Spent millions in parties.
No one believed me.
This year he was arrested for running a Ponzi scheme.Now he is in Jail and all his assets were seized by authorities and everyone in my Circle was holy f**k, you were right.

I was at my friend's house and we were talking in a hallway while his wife grabbed something from the room we were waiting to get back into. She passed and I was just like "Is she pregnant?" And he was like "Not that I know of." and I looked back down the hall in the direction she went and said "I think she's pregnant, man." He asked why and I don't know. She just gave off pregnant vibes. She wasn't showing or anything but there was something about her that just screamed "with child." A couple weeks later I'm talking to him on the phone and he goes "Oh hey, guess what: she's pregnant." I told him number four was already baking in the oven. Don't know how I knew but I knew.

We had a couple private Facebook groups at work for internal communications. Just asking co-workers for help on tasks, stuff like that.

Came in one morning to find we were locked out of the Facebook groups.

Me: “This doesn’t feel right. Something’s happening.”

Co-worker: “You’re just being paranoid. It’s just a computer glitch.”

The upper management showed up mid-morning to start handing out layoff notices.

Used to see the local big town/small city hockey coach on local tv. Used to do interviews in a corner of the locker room surrounded by tv radio and newspaper reporters. Something about him I always found off to the point of him being creepy. I wrote it off to him being morbidly obese, which even that explanation why I was creeped out didn’t feel correct.

Then a few years later some of his players came forward saying they’d be groomed into sex acts with him and he ended up serving (not enough) time.

When I was a kid, the day after Christmas I would always check out the pawn shops near my grandparents house so I could spend my Christmas money on used video games. There was one where the owner was very chatty but always gave off a creepy vibe. Couldn’t quite pinpoint why but his shop always felt uncomfortable. Eventually, it came out that he had m*rdered his ex girlfriend and incinerated her in the basement of the shop. He got away with it for fifteen years until his sons testified against him.

I f*****g knew it!

Elon Musk getting involved in right-wing politics. I called this years ago.

Recently, I was planning a sabbatical as I had been with the company for 10 years. In the lead-up to the month, I kept procrastinating for one reason or another on making the arrangements. I couldn't shake this sense of dread for some reason. I even mentioned it to my boss about a couple of weeks before in our 1:1. I told her I hadn't ever been away from work for so long.
She reassured me that it would be good. We then talk about how next time we'll discuss my career plans for the upcoming year.
I can't emphasize enough that when we talked about this, it felt like it was not going to happen.

Fast forward a week, and I get an invite from my bosses boss. It was a Zoom meeting with our VP of engineering to lay me off. 100% would not be recommended.

I always thought my dad and I looked so different than the rest of his siblings, my aunts and uncles. Us both being really pale, dark hair, vs his siblings being tan, light hair, no similar features.
My cousin (grandpas side) sent me a DNA test one day bc she bought two, and her husband didn’t use it so she sent it to me as we were both into genealogy. I said “haha how funny would it be if we weren’t related!”

We aren’t, (would’ve only been related on grandpas side, previous marriage) grandma cheated and took the secret to her grave. Turns out my Dads middle name just being the letter “E” was the first letter of her lovers name.

About 15 years ago I was hired to assist on an inventory and appraisal of the wine collection of a guy who lived in the Caribbean and ran a bank there, specializing in selling long-term, high-yield CDs. I went down and spent a week doing that and spending time with him and some of his very few employees, none of whom seemed to do very much work at all.

As soon as I got back I set up Google alerts for the guy's name and Ponzi scheme. A month later it started going off like crazy; he'd been indicted, assets frozen, fled in his private jet and eventually got picked up at a cheap motel in Canada. A year or so after that I got interviewed by the FBI, mostly questions to establish who of his "employees" I met, some about his lifestyle (presumably to try to make a tax fraud case, although they ended up just getting him on Ponzi charges).

My ex suddenly accusing me of cheating for the weirdest reason. I knew something was off. A week later, I caught an unfamiliar name calling on his phone. I snooped around and found out he had been cheating, and was trying to make up a reason so he could break up with me. Lol

A town I lived in had a "Fast Fashion" store take up shop on the far end of the commercial district, too far to get any foot traffic. The displays in the windows never changed and I never saw a single person going in or out. Every time I drove by I said to my partner "That place HAS to be a front for something."

One year later it was busted for being an illegal grow operation.

Always had a certain feeling about a former coworker in the accounting dept. Just a sneaking shady vibe I couldn't shake. One day the head of HR accidentally printed a document that showed the salary and raise/bonus/profit sharing structure of every single employee to a shared printer instead of his office printer, and I found it. Shady coworker was getting paid WAY less than I expected her to be making for all the work she was legitimately doing. Like despite my suspicion about her, she was actually a seemingly good employee and had worked her way up to a role with significant responsibility. The moment I saw her pay structure I knew she was making money off the company in other ways. There was NO WAY she was settling for that salary after being there for so many years and for the work she did. I just....knew. Fast-forward a few years and turns out she'd been embezzling significant amounts of money from the company. Submitted false expense reports to pay for everything from groceries to gas to food delivery to vacations, and no one caught it bc she was the head of the dept. All came to light when a new junior employee saw a suspicious Amazon expense and brought it to the COO. Investigation led to the discovery of 10s of thousands of dollars in embezzled funds. I quit soon after the discovery but I hear they're pressing criminal charges against her. Somehow I just KNEW!