26 People Who Had Overwhelming Gut Instincts They Couldn't Ignore...And Were Right
WARNING: This article contains mentions of rape and death. Though the descriptions are not graphic, please proceed with caution.
Call it a gut feeling, an intuition, or a sixth sense — odds are, you've had an experience or two in your lifetime thus far where you've just so deeply known something you have no business knowing. Regardless of whether it's a feeling of deja vu or simply your body clueing into something moments before it happens, it's a bizarre feeling.
I've read and written about a lot of "unexplainable" stories here on BuzzFeed dot com, so I decided to round up some of the most surreal encounters like these that people have shared. From dreams that saved their lives to a feeling in the pit of their stomach that made them think twice, here are 26 such stories:
Stories have been sourced from the BuzzFeed Community and these three Reddit threads (1, 2, 3).
1."I used to really enjoy driving around at night. Where I live, there are a lot of country roads, and they were fun to zip around. One evening, after I'd been at a friend's house, I decided to drive to my church (about half an hour away from home) and back, just listening to music. The route is one I've done most Sundays for 17 years, so even in the dark, I felt fine to go 60mph (speed limit). I got maybe a quarter of the way there, and my stomach started really twisting. I knew that if I kept going, I'd regret it."
"But I shook it off. It wasn't that late, and the weather was fine. I wasn't going to miss this driving opportunity. But as I got further, the feeling in my stomach got so much worse, and I realized I had to turn around. Just before I reached the hill pass that's about halfway to the church, I pulled a U-turn and went home. I stopped feeling so anxious and forgot about it.
The next day, I woke up and got in my car to go to church, only to find my usual route had been closed. As it turned out, on the hill pass along my route, the road had crumbled away, leaving a sheer drop that would have been around a blind bend for me. The road issue had been called in by a driver going the opposite direction to me about five minutes after I'd pulled a U-ey and driven away. I'd definitely have been, at the very least, badly hurt had I kept going."
2."I was driving in remote Cambridgeshire fens — 40-ish miles of terrible roads. The sun was going down, and we pulled into a flat-roof pub to use the bathroom. We went in and the bar was completely full of blokes silently watching the TV. Not one of them moved, said anything, or acknowledged me in any way, not even the barman. I got to the bathroom, and the light wasn't working, so I had to piss in the pitch black. Blokes were in the same positions when I got out, not having moved an inch."
"I got back in the car, and my girlfriend said she needed to go to the restroom, too. I told her to put her seatbelt back on because we were leaving now, before we were burnt in the wicker man. I know it sounds silly; I just didn't want to be there when the sun went down.
I sped until we reached the motorway, then we pulled over again. Not sure why, but it was one of the creepiest and most unnerving experiences I've ever had. Something just told me to get out of there."
3."I was in a pet store passing the time before an appointment. Suddenly, I was filled with dread. As an anxious person, this isn’t totally usual, so I initially tried to talk myself out of it for a minute or two, which, of course, felt like forever. I was so uncomfortable that I thought, 'Screw it, I don’t need to be here,' and went down the aisle to the side of the store, so I could loop around back to the front door in the center. As soon as I got to the side of the aisle, a BMW SUV came crashing through the glass windows, knocking over the aisles, straight into the cash register. It would have hit me dead on."
"Astoundingly, no one was injured. The driver hit the gas by mistake, and she was horribly upset. I walked in a bit of a daze after that. Still creeps me out as I’m typing this, actually."
4."I was like 8 or 9 when my parents took me and my younger brother to stay the night at my paternal grandparents' house, as my parents were in the middle of divorcing. My grandparents lived in a farmhouse that was connected to a barn with machinery, gasoline tanks, and hay on the ground floor and furnished rooms on the floor above that. The room we were supposed to stay in was in that barn. As soon as we went into the guest room, I was overwhelmed by panic and felt really dizzy. I turned around and just said that we could not sleep in that room."
"We spent the night on the couch in the living room instead. Later that night, a gas leak in the barn ignited, and almost the entire barn — including the guest rooms on its top floor — exploded. Maybe I had that weird feeling because the gas had leaked into the room already, but no one else felt anything,g and I'm sure I would be dead if I hadn't noticed it."
5."I was waiting at the train station to pick up a friend of mine. I was early, so I decided to stand in the sun right outside of the station. A guy with a bicycle walked up to me, asking in broken English if I knew how late the train would arrive. After I answered the question, he stayed around and started talking to me. Now, I know that's not weird at all, but the things he asked and the way he acted and looked just gave me a creepy vibe."
"Eventually, he asked if I would walk with him while he dropped his bicycle off. I didn't want to, because the place to store bicycles at this station was very secluded and — to be honest — I didn't want to be alone with this guy. So, I noped out and walked into the station. He started yelling at me and calling me names. At that moment, the train came in and it got very busy. So, he left.
A few months later, I read this article in the local paper about a girl being raped at the station. They had put a drawing of a guy next to the article, as he had not yet been caught. It was the same guy. To this day, I'm very happy I didn't go with him."
6."I was out on a run, and I noticed this old woman (probably 60-70) sitting on the curb. She waved me down, so I ran over to her. She needed help getting up, but as we were talking, I just got this feeling in my gut that something was off. I felt really horrible abandoning an older woman who claimed to need help, but I couldn’t shake that feeling, so I apologized for not being able to help and ran off. I looked back just a few seconds later, and this dude in a black truck pulled up to her. She got up and got in the car with no problem. I sprinted home."
"Maybe I was just a paranoid teenage girl, but to this day 15 years later, I still get chills thinking about it and feel like it may have been a ploy to try to kidnap me. I was training for a marathon and ran that route a lot, so they could have been expecting me."
7."It was 10 p.m. at night. I was pregnant, driving with my 3-year-old in the backseat, and was coming up to a rural intersection. A light appeared on the side of the road, and a young man came out onto the road from the cemetery, trying to get my attention. Not frantically, but enough for me to slow down and see what was going on. I rolled down my window, and he stood about 6-8 feet away from my car, telling me there was an accident at the next intersection about three miles ahead. He didn't seem aggressive, but something was...off. I know he noticed I was pregnant and that my son was in the back, sleeping."
"I said I had to go that way, but he was adamant that I shouldn't. He didn't say that the road was closed or anything like that. I said I would take whatever detour they had at that intersection. He said it was better to take the road going over the hill, the next right turn. I said I didn't know it that well, and at that point, I thanked him, said I would figure out how to make my way home, and drove off.
I looked in the rearview when I was actively moving, and he was gone. I figured he'd shut his flashlight off and that was why I couldn't see him. But it felt like he just disappeared, and I thought it was odd that he would shut his light off and just stand in the dark. There were no streetlights where this happened.
I ended up driving a different way home that night, not the one he told me to, but a longer, out-of-the-way scenic route. I kept running the scenario through my head. I couldn't shake his insistence that I avoid that intersection at all costs.
The next day, I called the state police and asked if there was an accident at that intersection last night. They said no. I relayed to them what happened, and they were perplexed by it all, especially the young man posing as emergency personnel. I called my mother-in-law, who lives right on that intersection, and she said absolutely nothing happened that night. But to be fair, she's usually in bed by 9 p.m..
My friend summed it up for me: 'So, a strange guy walked out of the cemetery late at night, told you to avoid an intersection because there was an accident, wouldn't tell you what happened at this intersection, wouldn't tell you if the road was closed or how traffic was being diverted, nothing. Just that you can't drive down there. Sounds like a ghost to me. Maybe he saved your life that night."
It's been 20 years, and I still can't forget this interaction. I wonder what would have happened had I just ignored him and just drove through it. Guess I'll never know."
8."I left to go catch my bus and saw it about to pull out from the stop ahead of me. I could have made it if I had run, but something told me not to catch it and just wait for the next one, so I did. I caught the next bus half an hour later. Now, I almost always sit at the back of the bus on the driver's side, so that's where I sat. A little way into the journey, traffic was slowing, and we drove up to the cause of it. A lorry had crashed into the bus I had missed, right into the back on the driver's side. Had I caught that bus on time, I probably wouldn't be here. Still gives me chills after six years."
9."I was on a date with a girl hiking a trail system that I knew like the back of my hand. Something felt weird, but I shook it. We went around sunset and were going to swim in one of the deep pools in the creek. Maybe two miles into the trail, I got the feeling again. She was talking her head off, but I was just listening to everything around me. I told her to stop talking, and she looked at me very concerned. I just put my finger to my lips and listened."
"I heard something familiar, but I couldn't place exactly what it was. We never stopped walking. We came to the Arroyo just before the creek pool, and I heard it again. By this time, I knew.
I told her we were going to walk to the clearing where the Arroyo was and turn around. She told me she heard something weird. As we came to the clearing, we stood there like statues, dead silent. Her nails cut my arm from gripping it so hard. Then around 15 feet from us, the biggest mountain lion I've ever seen crossed the clearing with two of its young. She looked at us, and as our eyes met, my soul left my body. I felt the girl's grip tighten around my arm even more.
The mountain lion stopped, and so did her babies. I'm guessing she sized us up...and then just kept going. The babies kept turning around, looking at us, but ultimately, they just slowly crossed the top of the hill, and that was that. We turned around and told everyone we saw on the way in that there were three mountain lions on the trail. They all turned around and left.
That was the first time I was ever scared out in nature. I didn't have a handgun on me. I had been there a hundred times. She told me the sound she heard was a deep purring, and that was what I kept hearing, also. I just hadn't put it together at first."
10."When we were little, my family used to travel around a lot because of my dad’s job. My grandma would always tell us what fun things we could do in the place we were going to visit next. We were about to move to a very rural country. My grandma excitedly said we were going to love running around with horses and donkeys. A few days after we arrived, we were supposed to go to the countryside with some of my dad’s friends. As we were leaving, my grandma called and I answered the landline. She was a little frantic and made me promise her that we were going to stay by my parents' sides at all times on the trip."
"I promised, and then she talked to my mom. My mom was uneasy, but we went anyway. On the way there, I fell asleep and dreamed about a big field with a small red shack in the middle of the tall grass. A little girl was calling me and my siblings to go play with her. When we finally arrived, it looked just like the place in my dream. I asked my mom if we could go out and play, and she said absolutely not. This was very strange. The friends we were visiting told us that it was better for us to stay near, because a little girl had drowned a few months back. My mom then got very flustered and told them that my grandma had called and told her that she'd had a very vivid dream that my sister and I were going to drown in an open well next to a red shack. When we were leaving, we saw a picture of the dead little girl. She was the girl in my dream."
—Anonymous
11."I flew into a smaller terminal at the Cancun International Airport with two friends. I'm American, and they're European nationals. After passport control, a border patrol agent said they had a taxi waiting if we'd like to take it. I declined, saying I'd rather take the shuttle to the main airport, but my two friends told me I was being paranoid and to get into the car. It was locked from the inside, but 'luckily' the Mexican police showed up before the car started driving."
"They told us it was an illegal taxi and they offered to give us a ride to our hotel instead. Before my friends could answer, I said thanks but no thanks. Finally, we took the shuttle. Then we called a real taxi and made it to our hotel safely. It was one of the few times being a paranoid American really worked out."
12."About a decade ago, I was driving my Miata with a friend to a track about four hours from home. We left after dinner the night before so we could wake up there and get an early start. About an hour from our destination at 11 p.m., a wild summer storm hit. There was heavy rain, high wind gusts, and lots of debris. I told my buddy that our early '90s windshield wipers couldn’t keep up, I couldn’t see shit, and I just felt like I was white-knuckling the steering wheel."
"I decided to hit the exit and that we’d just get some late-night food at a Waffle House and wait out the storm. We sat down, and I had a TV in sight, so I was casually watching. Almost immediately, a weather map came up and showed that a tornado had passed right over where we would’ve been a few minutes later had I not exited."
13."A few years ago, I was at a bar with a couple of friends. All was good, we were drinking and having fun. All of a sudden, we heard this discussion taking place just a couple of tables from us. Two guys were having a shouting match, threatening each other. I stopped everything to pay attention to them. My friends were making fun of me, saying I was gossipy. One of the guys involved in the conflict got up and left. Immediately after he left, I told my friends we had to go. Now. They didn't get why, but I'd been their friend since forever, so they reluctantly agreed."
"We went to a different bar in a different neighborhood, but I couldn't take my mind off of those two guys. The next day, the news was talking about a bar fight. Apparently, the guy who got up went home, grabbed a gun, and came back for a drive-by. Killed four people in the process.
My grandpa taught me never to ignore my gut, and I couldn't be happier to have listened."
14."I found a lump in my right breast at 43 years old. I had a clean mammogram five months earlier. I just knew. Four different doctors told me it was nothing and to come back in a year. I did not and found a fifth. Yeah, I had to argue my way into being diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer."
15."When I was about 7, my family relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina. We were staying at a hotel while my parents looked for a house in the area. Every night we were there, I had very intense dreams about a girl but could never remember the details. I just knew that she was bad news and had something to do with Charlotte. Her face was clear; I can still see it in my head."
"Anyway, I spent the next few weeks trying to dissuade my family from moving to Charlotte in order to avoid the girl. Thankfully, we ended up moving to a small town outside of the city, which was a relief, because that meant that I only had to worry about her if we took a trip into town. A couple of days after we moved in, the lady from across the street came to introduce herself. Her daughter was with her, and she was the girl from the dreams. Her name was Charlotte."
—Anonymous
16."I’ve had a lot of strange experiences growing up. The strangest was when I was in high school and my grandpa was in hospice with cancer. At the time, I didn’t know he was even in hospice because I was in a theater competition, and my parents didn’t want me to worry while we were traveling for state finals. The day we went north for regionals, I was super sad for no explainable reason, and I kept having 'visions' of my family crying all day. I chalked it up to performance anxiety and went on with my day."
"I was planning on going to a movie when we got home with my friends, but on the bus ride back, my mom called and said I had to come home immediately. It turns out that my grandpa was taking his final breaths, and we had to drive down to be with my grandma so we could help plan the funeral. In that moment, I felt like a fortune teller."
17."When I was around 18, I was on a backroad with some friends and a girl I didn't know was driving really fast. Now, I'm a bit of an adrenaline junkie, and I have always enjoyed a calculated risk in the name of a good time, but on this occasion, I told her to either slow the fuck down or let me out. I literally had to start screaming at her before she listened and slowed down. A week later, she crashed on that same stretch of road at 90mph, killing her and the three passengers in her car."
18."I was waiting for an Uber on the outskirts of Atlanta with a couple of friends around 10 p.m. We were just shooting the shit after leaving a nearby restaurant and talking about what bar to go to. A disheveled older man walked up a few feet behind one of my friends and struck a weird pose for 2-3 minutes while looking in our direction. There was no one else around. Then, he walked off without saying a word."
"He came back a few minutes later and sat down on the sidewalk about five feet away from us. At this point, I was just wondering what he wanted from us because there was absolutely no other reason to plop down that close to us on an empty sidewalk. Then, a small sedan pulled into a nearby parking lot, hidden behind some bushes in the spot closest to us and consequently furthest from any of the shops in that lot.
I only noticed because I happened to be facing that direction, but then I saw six guys pile out of the sedan and immediately cross the street directly toward us. I realized there were not any shops or restaurants still open nearby. It suddenly occurred to me that the strange dude might have been sizing us up when he was watching us earlier, and he came back to 'mark' us. We were all dressed nicely with smartphones out and watches visible — basically, in the fanciest stuff we had for a night out.
Right as I started to speak up about heading back towards other people, our Uber pulled up to the curb. As we drove away, I watched those six guys talking in a circle where we had just been standing, and then cross the street again and get back in their car. I'll never have a definitive answer, but I'm pretty sure we were 10 seconds away from some unfortunate shenanigans."
19."I was about 14 or 15 and I was staying after school to study in the library. After a while, I fell asleep at a desk and had a really strange dream. I dreamed that the librarian — who was a scary older woman — was shaking me while screaming, ‘Save me, help me! I don’t want to go, save me!’ over and over. I woke up very confused, only to see the librarian having a heart attack. I rushed over and started doing CPR on her. A teacher passing by noticed and called an ambulance. On the way to the hospital, one of the paramedics told me if I hadn’t saved her, she would've been dead."
"After the incident, the librarian and I stayed good friends. She passed only a week ago, and I recently went to pay my respects at her funeral, thinking how bemused she’d be to know that her legacy was being commemorated in a BuzzFeed post!"
—Anonymous
20."My grandmother was dying of cancer. I couldn’t visit as much as I wanted because my mother, whom she was staying with, told me visits were too strenuous for my grandmother. One night, I dreamed that my grandmother was at the foot of my bed. She was smiling. She told me she came to say goodbye and not to worry about her, because she was better and could dance again. She started twirling around and I abruptly woke up. It was 3 a.m., too early to call anyone. I waited as long as I possibly could, then drove the 45 minutes to my mother's house."
"I knocked on the door at 7 a.m., and my mom answered. She looked bewildered to see me and asked how I got there so fast, since they had just found that my grandmother had passed in her sleep less than an hour ago. I told her Grandma came to see me, but she wouldn’t believe me and swore someone must have called me. Mom barely talked to me through the funeral. Years later, she asked me once again how I got there so fast, but cut off my explanation and never would discuss it again. I was very close to my grandmother, and I truly believe she came to say goodbye."
—Anonymous
21."On Sept. 10, 2001, my father was in the hospital for a chronic illness. Part of the treatment for this illness required pain management, which would periodically, in my opinion, be too much. My dad would sometimes hallucinate or act 'crazy.' So when he called me from the hospital that day, he was frantic, but I wasn’t alarmed. 'TURN ON THE TV,' he said to me."
"My parents' anniversary was the following day, and my mother was out of town on a business trip. Normally my father would call my mother to share an anecdote, but I listened on patiently. After a minute of nothing but boring local news, I said, 'Dad, what am I watching for?' He said, 'Just keep watching.' Again, after another minute, I said, 'Dad, I think I missed what you wanted me to see. What did I miss?' He said very clearly and with a lucid tone, 'President Bush said there were terrorists who hijacked a plane, but we’re all going to be okay.'
I told my dad that I would call him later but I needed to go to class. I shrugged it off as another one of his pain medication–induced hallucinations. The next day was Sept. 11 — my parents' anniversary and the most horrific day in recent American memory. I was so focused on the actual events and shock that I completely forgot what my father had told me the previous day until about a week later. When I realized it, my family believed me, but my dad didn’t remember saying it at all."
—Anonymous
22."I was taking my mom to a follow-up appointment after back surgery the month before. The freeway was closed due to a car accident, and life flight was called to transport the people injured in the accident. The highway patrol was funneling everyone off of the freeway to the right-side exit. I had the strongest feeling we needed to move to the left farthest lane, so I did. No more than a minute after I moved over, a garbage truck came barreling down the freeway and crashed into the car that was in front of us in the other lane so fast that it lifted the front end of the truck and landed on top of the car."
"We were in a tiny sports car that would have crumpled like a tin can under the weight of a garbage truck and definitely would have killed my mom and me in a second."
23."My friend — let's call her Carol — told me this story about 30 years ago, and I’ve never forgotten it. Carol’s husband died unexpectedly several years before, and then a few years later, her 20-year-old niece was killed in a car accident. Carol had a very good, longtime family friend who was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of cancer before Carol's niece was killed. At the time of her niece’s passing, her friend was very ill and didn’t have much time left herself. Because of this, Carol’s family decided not to tell the friend about the niece's passing, as it would have only caused upset and they didn’t see the point."
"A day or two later, Carol went to visit her friend. As sick as she was, she immediately told Carol that she had the strangest dream. She had been walking down the street when a bus stopped in front of her, and she was told to get on. The bus driver was Carol’s deceased husband. But that wasn’t the strangest part. Carol's niece was also on the bus, telling her to get on! She told Carol that she just couldn’t figure out why it was Carol’s husband and niece together, it was just so random! Of course, Carol knew it wasn’t random at all but kept that to herself. Her friend passed away within hours of her relaying her dream."
—Anonymous
24."I used to have a recurring vision of a car crash in which I was in the passenger seat and a boy in my grade was driving. In the vision, we were driving at night and a drunk driver was coming headfirst at us, so the boy swerved the car, not knowing that there was a ditch right there, and the car rolled over. I could envision it vividly, right down to the side road it happened in front of. Fast-forward a couple of years — I'd had this vision a few times already. I dreamed about it sometimes, but other times it just popped into my head. Well, one night I got invited to hang out with a few of my friends, but I didn’t have a ride, so the boy from my vision offered to drive me."
"On our way there, I saw a driver swerving toward us, just like in the vision. Sure enough, the boy swerved, and we rolled over, right in front of the road I had seen. Both of us recovered from our injuries, but the fact that I knew exactly what was going to happen creeped me the fuck out.
After a few weeks in the hospital, I told the boy about my visions. He didn’t believe me at first. That was the case until I told him details about the crash I couldn’t possibly have known because I blacked out right after we rolled over. He had been awake the whole time, so he knew that the details I was saying were true. It was wild."
—Anonymous
25."Felt suspicious about one of many growing skin spots I had. Had six doctor's visits asking them would look at the skin spot. They all said it was nothing to worry about, but my cat continuously sniffing the spot made me worry. Took this evidence to a new doc on a day the dermatologist happened to be visiting. My doctor laughed it off like all the others but said the dermatologist might be interested in the weird shape. The dermatologist took one look, sniffed it, and said to get a biopsy ASAP. The biopsy showed aggressive cancer under the skin — the spot was the ‘iceberg’ tip. Got a big lump of me cut out, but just in time."
26.And finally, "I was driving a friend home late at night when I was around 21. She lived in a pretty rural area outside of St. Louis, MO, and about a quarter mile from her house was an old abandoned farm and farmhouse. I always thought of this place as non-threatening, as she told me she and her two sisters would go there as kids and they found an attic full of cool things, including a trunk of vintage woman’s clothing and old love letters, like something out of a movie."
"Anyway, I was driving her home on a hot summer night. We had the windows open to let in the cool air. We are also singing at the top of our lungs. We passed the abandoned farm, and I dropped her off at her house. I waited long enough to see that she made it inside, and I headed back out the way I came.
I was driving along, and I got to almost where the farm was. I saw two things in the road. My danger meter went off, as I had just driven this road and there was nothing there. I put the windows up and made sure the doors were locked. I got closer, and I realized the items were two car batteries spaced out in the road, which was basically a one-lane road. They were placed in a way that I would have had to get out and move them to drive on the road. I immediately knew I wasn’t getting out of the car, so I picked the side of the road that had the lesser ditch, and I gunned it.
I was driving a little SUV and remember feeling the car run over branches and things in the little ditch, but I just gunned it and got out of there. All the way home, I felt creeped out and kept checking my rearview mirror. I called my friend the next morning and told her what had happened, and we both agreed it was weird. Shortly after that, I moved to another state and didn’t think much of it.
Fast forward to 2-3 years later, when I was back visiting my hometown. I randomly ran into my old friend, and she ran up to me with wide eyes and grabbed my arms. She asked me if I remembered what I told her that night. I said yes, and she proceeded to tell me that not too long after that had happened, her family was awakened in the middle of the night to someone pounding on their sliding glass door. Her dad went to check and saw two naked, injured women let them in and called 911.
They had been abducted from St. Louis City (about 40 minutes away) by two men and brought to the old, abandoned farmhouse where the men tortured and raped them. The women somehow managed to get free and ran to the only light they could see — the light over my friend's garage. They survived, but the men were never caught. There was evidence the men had been going there for a while. My friend was convinced they had put the batteries in the road to lure me out of the car. I’m just really glad my gut told me not to."
Have you ever had an experience like these? In the comments below or via this anonymous form, tell us about the time your gut instinct, premonition, or intuition ended up being 100% right (or, maybe, even saved your life).
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
