35 Times People Felt “Something’s Not Right Here” And Acted On Gut Feelings That Saved Their Lives

In 2004, on Boxing Day. Not me but my mother. Family trip including all cousins and extended family on my dad's side to visit the coastal South of Sri Lanka on vacation, about 20 people in all.

Well planned trip, last moment my mother didn't want to go. No reason at all. None of us could get her to explain why but she refused to go. So we went inland on a different trip to see some other relatives.

Around midday, the entire extended family now on both sides were sitting shocked in front of the television watching the very same hotel we booked being washed away live by the tsunami.

To date, she still can't explain what she felt.

This will probably get buried here like the last time I tried to post this story, but here goes.

When I was a kid, probably 4 or 5, I was sitting in the front passenger seat of my mom’s car. We were at a red light, and all of a sudden, I had this huge urge to jump to the back seat. My mom flipped out. Started yelling at me about how I shouldn’t ever do that in a car or I could get seriously hurt.

Light turns green, my mom starts to turn left, and the passenger side of our car gets hit by another car so hard, that it knocks our car out off the road and into a tree.

We were later told that had I been in the front seat, I would have probably been k*lled.

My aunt told me a story about my dad, who greatly dislikes his sister and is an all around a*****e 98% of the time, calling her out of the blue one night while she was in college. She answered, he said he didn't know why but he had this urge to call her, to make sure she was okay. She told him she was fine and thanked him for calling to check on her.

She never told anyone else except me, and hopefully a therapist or two, but she was holding the bottle of pills she was planning to commit s**cide with right when he called her. Twenty some years later and she's very happy with her decision to live.

I went to hospital with shortness of breath and my heart racing. They did a chest x-ray, blood test for blood clots, ecg, and a few other tests but all came back normal. After observing me overnight everything still looked good, oxygen saturation was perfect, my heart rate was still a bit elevated but nothing too crazy, and it seemed that it was likely leftover symptoms from a bad virus that I'd had a week or so earlier.

The ER doctor asks me how I would feel if they sent me home and I just had a bad feeling about it all. I told him as such and that I had no real basis for it except that I just felt off about it. He said fair enough, let's try one more test and if that comes back negative then we'll send you up to General Medicine and see if they can track something down.

That test was a VQ scan that found despite all other tests showing no results for blood clots, I actually had a whole bunch of them in both lungs. I ended up with a diagnosis of unprovoked bilateral pulmonary embolisms and am on blood thinners for life.

Super grateful both for the bad feeling and the ER doctor who was willing to listen to it!

About 10 years ago, working security at a site about 50 miles from home, got off shift at midnight, and didn't bother to change out of uniform because I was only going to stop for gas. Two stations in the town I was working in were open after midnight, but it slipped my mind as I drove past the first one. Pulled into the other, (same brand, same gas price, same sort of dump entirely) and just didn't like something about it. Nobody else around but he clerk that I could see, but I decided to go back to the other one.

Topped off and headed back out of town, I get close to that station again. Three city cop cars, two deputies and a state trooper are outside blocking the road with guns drawn. Turns out a city cop walked in on a robbery. Dude put a bullet in his vest, and the store owner knocked the robber out cold with a bat before the cop could recover enough to get his gun out.

That would have been me, in a uniform with a nice shiny badge, but no body armor.

I woke up from a deep sleep at like 2AM during a winter storm, something wasn't right... I immediately went looking for my senior dog and couldn't find her anywhere in the house. My roommates had a tendency to let her out for a walk and forget about her, closing the door.

I ran to the front of the house and found her laying on the welcome mat, she was hardly breathing and covered in snow... She had been outside alone for at the very least 5 hours. I moved out shortly after.

My mom dropped my 3 year old brother off at daycare before she had to work in the morning. When she got to work she had this terrible feeling something was wrong with him. She ended up leaving work and drove to the daycare. She found the daycare lady inside sleeping while the daycare kids (including my brother) were running around the pool. My brother never went back to that daycare again.

It wasn't mine but my boss' actually. It was any old day at work, it was about to be dinner rush and I was tired. As usual I was going to go to the dollar store to get some RedBull. I asked my manager if he wanted to split it bc they were 2 for $5, he said no but as soon as I reached the door he said wait. I asked him what was wrong and he said I should go later, he didn't give me a reason and we're pretty relaxed so I told him to p**s off and as soon as I pushed the door outwards I hear a sound I can't even describe aside from just BREAKING. Whatever it was it was broken, that's all I knew. Turns out an SUV drove straight into that dollar store's front door [and their red bull fridge]. My manager has annoyed me like that a million times, but I'll never forget the time he saved my life with his BS.

When I was in Afghanistan I was sitting in some walled farm compound we'd commandeered, and I was looking up at some hills. For some reason I cant put my finger on to this day, I decided we would be attacked soon, and ordered my men to move to cover out of sight of the hill on the opposite side of the compound sheltered by a large wall. An absurdly long 15 minutes later, my squad is kinda shooting me sideways glares like they think I stood them to for nothing. Getting paranoid, jumping at shadows maybe.

Riiiiight about when the next most senior ranking guy aside from myself was looking like he was gonna say something a barrage of gunfire hit the spot we'd all been sitting, then an RPG round blew a hole in the wall at exactly the spot i'd been leaned up against.

Moving to the other side of the compound where the enemy couldnt angle thier fire directly on top of us from the overlooking hills probably saved atleast my life for sure, and probably several others.

There was not one single reason to suspect an attack was coming. We had not recieved incoming fire in 3 weeks, there had never been enemy activity in that sector for almost a year according to intel reports.

I was learning violin when I was about 10 from an instructor at my local music shop. I got the weirdest feeling from him even though he didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. I wanted to vomit every time I looked at him, especially his hands. After 4 lessons I told my parents that I had a terrible feeling about him and I never wanted to go back. Luckily, they listened and didn’t make me ever go to him again. A few years later he was arrested for molesting multiple of his students. I have no idea how I knew something was off. He never did or said anything but I just felt it.

(it didn't save me but i saved someone else) when i was 6 my brother (8 at the time) and i would go to my grandmas house while our mom worked late some nights. anyway one day i was just randomly thinking about fire alarms. i don't know what caused me to think about it but after i started i couldn't stop. i have adhd and this super focus thing so whenever i'm thinking about something as simple as fire alarms it consumes my mind. i asked my grandma and she said she hadn't tested hers in a while. just for kicks she did and sure enough the batters were dead. she replaced the batters and made sure they worked. the VERY next morning her house caught on fire while she was asleep. if she didn't hear the fire alarms she would've been trapped in her room on the second story without a phone or anyway to contact help. she most likely would've died. i always make sure fire detectors/alarms work in my house now.

Few years back I went to uni in Brussels. I would always take the train to get there. One morning I just woke up and didnt feel great at all. Keep in mind I have had a horrible flair up of Crohns for the last weeks. But this felt different. Guess it was my gut.
So instead of pushing through it like I did with ly Crohns, I decided to stay home for once. This was the only day out of 2 that I ever stayed home from uni.
That day the terror attack happened on the train that I usually ride to get to uni.

My boyfriend and I were visiting friends for a week in Phoenix. We girls were lounging at the pool while the guys were flexing their grilling skills. My boyfriend paused a moment, stood very still then told me to go get dressed, we had to go. Right now. I wanted to fuss but something told me not to. We drove straight through to San Antonio right to his parents very rural house. (before cell phones and they didn’t have a land line within a half mile) Seconds before we arrived his little sister had jumped off of a rain barrel and landed on a metal spike that went straight up through her foot and into her leg. His dad was at work so there was no car available there. She was bleeding like crazy and his mother had just walked out and found her. I don’t know what spoke to him in Phoenix, but it would have been all bad if we had not arrived exactly when we did.

I was on a road trip with my dad through mountainous terrain and it started raining. We were stuck in our car because of a traffic jam on a very narrow mountain road. I got a feeling that we should not be here and I told my dad that we should get out of the car just in case. My dad gave me a puzzled look but agreed after I insisted. It probably was only a minute that passed after we took shelter in a nearby tea stall that a thunderous sound startled the bejeezus out of us. Lo and behold our car was nowhere to be found. In its place was a boulder. A boulder the size of a house. From that moment onwards final destination has been my least favourite movie.

When I was 18 in my first year of college, I was walking into a convenience store and two girls popped out of a car to ask me to buy them cigarettes because they said they were 17 (needed to be 18). I said sure, took their money and order, and as I was walking in, a bald 40-something guy wearing a button down shirt walked out.

I immediately was thinking that guy's a cop. I bought for me and the girls, and asked the clerk straight up if that guy was a cop. Clerk confirmed it for me.

So I walked out, told the girls to meet me across the street, and walked back to my dorm.

Across the street I saw the cop creeping behind a building in his unmarked Crown Victoria, and so I walked right back into my dorm without waiting for trap.

The whole thing was a sting set up outside a dorm to catch college freshman buying cigs for people a year younger than them. Such a waste of time. The girls were in on it, the clerk knew but had no choice, and because of my hunch and his confirmation, I walked right out of it with two free packs of smokes.

I had gone to this bar back home with a few friends and afterwards everyone was supposed to go to this house party. I was game to go from the moment I was invited. Halfway through the night I had this gut feeling to not go. I told my best friend that she shouldn’t go but she insisted that she wanted to go because there were a few cute guys there. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we shouldn’t go, but she talked me into it. When we got in my car to head to the party the gut feeling was worse. I grew up around cars and drive a manual (my best friend is completely clueless when it comes to cars) so I deliberately grinded the gears and jerked the car and made it stall, acting like something was wrong. I pretended to try to fix what wasn’t broken and after about 15-20 minutes of “fixing” my car, cops and fire trucks followed by EMS flew by us. I “fixed” my car but told my best friend that I just wasn’t feeling well and she agreed and said my car breaking down ruined her mood, so we went back to my place to watch movies. About an hour after getting home we got a call from a friend of ours saying that the girl who owned the house and who was throwing the party was cheating on her husband who was deployed and came back in leave to surprise her and caught her in bed with his buddy. Dude pulled a gun and started shooting at this girl and his friend while everyone else fled the house.

I was with a co-worker. He had lied to me about going to a family party of his. But when I showed up, it was just him and I and we went to a bar. I rolled my eyes and just thought I could clench my teeth through it.

He knew the owner of the bar. And got me alcoholic drinks (I was only 20). I started pouring out the drinks when the dude was shooting pool because I didn't want to be tipsy/drunk while dealing with him (that decision honestly saved me).

I told him I wanted to go home, but he talked me into taking him home first. So I followed the directions he gave me and I pulled into a hookah bar parking lot instead. He started getting really aggressive and trying to kiss me. I kept pushing him off. I was still trying to be polite but firm and telling him to stop. That's when I noticed the group of guys around my car, talking to my coworker in my car in another language. He then opened my car door, got out, and proceeded to grab me by the hair to try to pull me out of my car, the other guys gathering around.

I had the mind to lock my door when I noticed the other guys. I also had put my car in reverse. So when he grabbed my hair I let off the brake and my car started rolling back so he let go of me.

It was terrifying. I told our boss the next day and he quit when our boss asked him about it.

Not me, but my mother, saved my grandfathers life when he had a stroke in his chair in their living room.

We had all started to walk around the the development, when my mother, after about 50-75 meters from the house said, "I am going to go back and check on Dad." I went with her, and I nearly witnessed my grandfather die. He was on the chair, conscious, but unable to move or talk... Just looking at my mother with bulging eyes. She called 911 once, then twice when she felt that they were running late. Ambulance came, got him on the stretcher, but it was too wide to fit out the door. We ended up tearing the door frame off to get him out.

Because he was conscious, he actually remembers the ride to the hospital. He told us later that he heard the driver or someone say, there is not a chance that this guy lives. That was when I was around 5-6 years old. He is still alive to this day, more than a decade later.

At my mothers funeral, part of his speech was about how, without my mothers actions, he would not have been able to spend time with her during her final years of life. And for that, he is eternally grateful.

I had a gut feeling I should pull my wallet and phone out of my purse. Not even 20 seconds later, I get mugged. The man dragged me across the sidewalk and stole my purse BUT all he ended up getting was a juice box and my birth control.

My mom and her entire family were saved from dying from Carbon Monoxide poisoning by her dad. He left for work, got a weird feeling and drove back home. Everyone in the house was unconscious, and he had to drag or carry them all outside one by one. They all survived.