October 9, 2025 ā¢ 22 mins
**š©ø True Horror Stories: Terrifying Encounters with Wild Animals & Dogs šŗ** In tonightās chilling narration, we dive into real-life horror stories involving the creatures we often fearāand sometimes trust. From campers stalked by predators in the dead of night to hikers who came face-to-face with something *not quite natural*, these true accounts will make you think twice before stepping into the woods again. But itās not just the wild you need to fearā¦ Sometimes, the animals we live with turn deadly. Sometimesā¦ they protect something they shouldnāt. š§ Settle in, turn off the lights, and prepare yourself for disturbing tales of survival, primal fear, and the unknown. šÆļø **Do you have a scary encounter with an animal or dog?** Share your story in the comments or email me for a chance to be featured in an upcoming video. š Donāt forget to **like, subscribe, and hit the bell** so you never miss a midnight scare. --- #TrueHorrorStories #AnimalEncounters #DogHorror #ScaryStories #Narration #WildernessHorror #RealScaryStories You can also listen in podcast form "Scary Stories from Bad Vibes" Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6WCjzGChSiOtskaZjonvqz Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/scary-stories-from-bad-vibes/id1614005565 iHeartRadio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/53-bad-vibes-nightmares-94022380/ Deezer: https://www.deezer.com/show/3497187 Podcast Addict: https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/3868720 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/bad-vibes-nightmares-4264713 JiloSaavn: https://www.jiosaavn.com/shows/Scary-Stories-from-Bad-Vibes/1/A7Unzn6te1Y_ Become a CHANNEL MEMBER for early access for as little as 99 cents a month: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7N-0n6MRuhtRVfCpj_oArQ/join Perhaps buy some MERCH: https://teespring.com/stores/bad-vibes-storytelling Follow me on Social Media: TWITTER: https://twitter.com/BadVibesYOUTUBE INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/badvibesstorytelling/ Send your TRUE story in: badvibes760@gmail.com Music by: C.O.A.G https://www.youtube.com/@co.agmusic Timestamps: Story 1: (00:00) Story 2: (03:08) Story 3: (05:30) Story 4: (08:28) Story 5: (12:54) Story 6: (16:45) Story 7: (19:48)
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
When I was young, I went fishing with my dad
and my best friend. We waded through some deeper water
to reach a shallow sand bar where the fish were biting.
It was quiet and peaceful. We stayed out there for
quite a while, casting lines into the hot sun, surrounded
by nothing but water, sky, and occasional splash of a mullet.
(00:27):
But the tide began to shift. Slowly. The water that
had been just above my ankles crept higher and higher
until I was waist deep and it was still rising. Then,
in an instant, the entire world snapped into focus. A
huge shark seven maybe eight feet long exploded through the
(00:48):
school of moullet, thrashing to the surface just feet from
where I was. The water was panicked as a fish scattered.
I froze, We all did, my dad, my best friend,
just standing there in the sudden silence, mouths sanging it open,
staring at the space where the predator had just torn
(01:08):
through the water. No one screamed, no one ran. My
dad calm but daily serious, said, walk back, slowly, slowly,
don't splash. So we did, but the tide it came
in more than we realized. My dad and friend were taller,
(01:29):
they could still manage the deeper water. For me, though,
it was another story. The stretch between the sand bar
and the shore was now over my head. I couldn't
walk anymore. I could barely bounce off the bottom. The
water reached their chest, but I was gasping just to
keep my head above the surface, one hand gripping my
(01:50):
fishing rod awkwardly overhead, while the rest of me flled
beneath the water line. I was completely helpless. We all
knew that the shark was it's ill circling somewhere in
the murky water behind us. It could have been six
feet away, it could have been inches. I couldn't see,
couldn't move fast, could barely breathe. It felt like a nightmare,
(02:13):
like one of those dreams where you're trying to escape
something in the dark but your legs won't work. Except
this was real. There was something in the dark, and
it had teeth. Even then, I knew the odds. I
knew it was unlikely that the shark would come after me.
It was hunting mullet, not people. But if there was
(02:33):
ever a moment I had been attacked, that was it.
As a kid alone in the deep water, barely able
to stay afloat, splashing just enough to draw attention, surrounded
by bait, fish and blood scent. A few years later,
just a few miles away, a man was killed after
jumping off his deck right into the path of a
(02:54):
bull shark chasing mallet. So yeah, I knew the odds,
but I also knew the water. A few years ago,
I went with my then girlfriend to the beach. We
were boogie boarding from the first sandbar back to shore.
(03:16):
It was during the week and the place was deserted.
No lifeguards, no other swimmers, just us. We were alone
in the surf for what felt like a quarter of
a mile in every direction. She was riding a wave
back to the shore, laughing, her board cutting through the foam.
I stayed back, facing the open water, watching the horizon.
(03:38):
I was trying to read the waves, looking for the
next good one to ride back. That's when I saw it.
Fins more than one, a shark, maybe twenty yards from me.
It cut through the surface of water like knives, gliding
in and out of sight between the swells. No splashing,
(03:59):
no threat, just quiet predatory movement. My stomach turned to ice.
I waited for the next wave heard hammering, try not
to move fast. When it came, I didn't hesitate. I
rode straight back to the shore, every second, expecting a
surge of water behind me or a flash of gray below.
(04:21):
I didn't want to scare her, so when I reached
the sand, I just said, hey, let's go hang out
under the tent for the rest of the day. My
voice came out steadier than I felt. But she saw
right through me. She knew without me saying the word.
She guessed exactly what I had seen. I didn't get
a good enough look at it to know what kind
(04:42):
of shark it was, sand shark, bull, tiger, maybe even
the hammer head. It didn't matter. When you see a
living missile of teeth and muscle pointed in your general direction,
you don't stick around to identify it. You get out.
The ocean is a shar territory. I've always been taught
(05:02):
to respect that, But seeing that fin, seeing it glide
so close in silence, made me really something else. How
many times have sharks been there and I didn't see them?
How many shadows had passed beneath me, just out of sight,
And all the years I've been swimming, that thought still
freaks me out more than the fin that I did see.
(05:31):
Growing up, my grandma used to babysit me. She lived
with my uncle and he had a rot wiler. Big, powerful,
but always friendly. She was kind of the dog you
didn't have to worry about until you had a reason to.
One afternoon, when I was nine or ten, I got
into my head that I was gonna pretend to be
a pro wrestler. I wrapped my arms and hands in
(05:54):
white masking tape like I'd seen on TV. I spent
the next hour slamming stone animals into an imaginary ring.
When I got tired, I got a few action figures
and was wandering outside the carport, there where the deer
stands are stored and where the wether usually slept. She
(06:14):
was there, curled up, fast asleep. I sat down a
few feet away and started playing. Everything was quiet, peaceful.
Then I heard it subtle at first, just the sound
of a dog stirring. I didn't even look up, but
then came a growl, low, deep, not playful. That was
(06:35):
when I turned around and froze the rot While they
was staring at me, her eyes logged onto me like
I was pray lips curled, teeth bared. The girl got louder.
She wasn't wagging her tail, she wasn't coming over to
stiff me. She was tense, watching hunting. I tried to
(06:57):
talk to her. It's me. I barely was able to
get the words out. I stepped back, slowly, hoping she
recognized my voice. But she didn't, or maybe she did
and something in her didn't care. Then she lunged. It
happened fast, muscle and teeth lunging forward, eyes wide with
something I didn't understand but now recognized as pure instinct,
(07:21):
and I swear, and a split second I realized what
she was aiming for, my arms, the tape. I ripped
off the masking tape as fast as I could and
threw it at her like it was something cursed. The
moment it hit the ground, she stopped, just stopped, and
I ran full sprint back into the house, heart pounding
(07:43):
so hard I could hear it in my ears. I
didn't go and do that dog for days. I barely
breathed in the same direction as that car port. Then
out of nowhere, I got asked to feed her. I
opened the door, heart in my throat, and she was
wagging her tail like nothing that ever happened, just like that,
back to friendly by that day never left me because,
(08:06):
for a moment, a terrible moment, I wasn't a kid
playing for tend I was prey, and I saw up
close what it looks like when something you trust suddenly
doesn't recognize you anymore, or worse, it does and still
chooses to go in for the kill. I was stationed
(08:29):
in Japan three out of the six years I was
in the Navy. During that time, I least a traditional
Japanese home. The shower was in its own separate walk in,
with a deep sink, tub, wooden bench, the whole deal.
It was honestly one of my favorite parts of the
place until this morning. I stumbled into the shower, half asleep,
(08:52):
barely conscious. As I shut the door behind me and
stepped towards the tub, something black flashes past my perfume vision,
followed by an immediate thud. I look down into the tub.
There it is a Huntsman spider the size of my
goddamn hand, legs spread wide, motionless, just staring up at
(09:15):
me like it's been waiting watching I freeze. Best guess
is that it had been on the wall behind me.
I must have startled it, but now it's between me
and the rest of the room, coiled like a nightmare.
Instincts take over. I grab my shower head from its
mouth it's on a hose and aim it directly at
(09:37):
the thing. Flush it down the drain whatever it takes.
As soon as the water hits it, it leaps, not crawls,
leaps straight out of the tub onto the wall, and
bolt it for the window. It moves like it's glitching
through reality, faster than it should have been possible for
something that size to move. I try to throw the
(10:00):
window open, but before I can't even touch the glass,
it jumps again and runs under the shower into the
powder room. Now I'm naked, concerned, soaked and breathing hard
while this demon spider waits for me on the cabinet
door outside. It just sits there like it knows it's
(10:20):
baiting me. I make a run for the front door,
grab a foot flop, creep back into the powder room
and wing the sandal at it with everything I've got.
Direct hit lets go flying, but it's still alive. It
limps out of the bathroom. It disappears under the stairs slower.
(10:40):
Now wounded, I'm done playing games. I grab a can
of bug spray, push down the nozzle, and start moving
in for the kill. That's when I see it curled
around the back edge of one of the stair treads.
There's this black, twitching tail. I think it's a spied
(11:01):
I aim spray, but what drops isn't the spider. It's
something else. A mukad centerpede longer than my forearm, black
and red, shiny armored, and it charges me, not screwing away, charging.
The front half is raised off the floor like a cobra,
(11:23):
mandibles clicking, biting the air. I don't scream, I'm just
about to pass out. I stumble backwards, unloading the can
of spray, trying to stay on my feet as this
thing comes at me like it has blood in its eyes.
I hit it again, still moving, I turned the flip
flop on its edge and use it like a saw,
(11:44):
cutting the thing in half while it thrashes under the pressure.
The second it stops moving, I remember the spider. It's
still alive, still under the stairs. I blow air into
the gap and it runs out, but stumbling. I raised
my flip flop saw and smash it hard until it
(12:06):
stops twitching. Then I just stood there, soaking, wet, naked, trembling,
heart pounding in my throat, surrounded by venom and legs
and parts of things that should not exist in the
same place as a shower. And then I screamed at
the top of my lungs for about thirty seconds straight.
(12:26):
The whole battle lasted maybe three minutes, but it felt
like I spent a year in the house. By the
time I got to work, I was so visibly shaken
that my coworkers stopped what they were doing just to
ask me what the hell happened to me. Honestly, I
still can't tell if it was the worst morning of
my life or the most badass thing I've ever done.
(12:54):
I did field work back and forth between the US
and UK and East and South Africa for about ten years.
In that time, I spent a good portion of my
life living in remote base camps, hours or even days
from the nearest town out there. You're in the wild domain.
You stop being on top of the food chain, and
(13:15):
every so often you get reminded of that in a
way you'll never forget. These are some of my oh shit, moments.
The first was an elephant, a female with a calf.
You don't really understand how big an elephant is until
it's charging you. The ground doesn't shake, it thunders, dust screams,
(13:41):
the sound of breaking branches, all of it rolls over
you at once. Knowing she had a calf made it worse,
because there's no bluffing in a charge like that. She
wasn't posturing, she meant it. Then there were the big cats.
I know for a fact that I was stalked at
least twice, once by a leopard, easy to identify because
(14:04):
it's the only large predator at that site. The other time,
most likely a rogue male lion. That lion was known
to hang around the area. You don't see them, of course,
not at first. You just feel it, a prickle along
the back of your neck, the sense of eyes in
(14:24):
the dark. Sometimes you catch a flash of movement in
the brush, a low rustle of grass behind you where
there shouldn't be any, and then you remember you're not
tracking it, it's tracking you. The next was in Alaska.
It was a day off and everyone else had gone
into town. I was sitting in the main tent reading
(14:47):
when something made me turn around a moose cow with
a calf five meters away. If you never see a
moose up close, you don't understand how massive and unpredictable
they are, especially her mother with her young They aren't
big dumb deer either. They're unpredictable, and they're faster than
(15:08):
they look. But the one that still wakes me up
at night happened in South Africa. We had a party
of the night before some one forgot to close the
kitchen door. I woke up, hung over, stumbled into the
sink to make coffee. The rubbish bag was right beneath me.
(15:30):
I heard something moving aside. I'd bent over and sulk shifting.
A mozambique spitting cobra, its head low, slightly flared, one
wrung move, one startled breath, and I'd be blind or dead.
Then there were the hyaenas. Two spotted hyaenas broke into
(15:53):
the camp one night, killed a few dogs, and started
nosing around the tents. Mine included you don't forget the
sound of a hyenas womp when it's right outside your tent.
It's deafening, it makes your bones feel hollow. And then
a noise I didn't even know existed, the low graw
that follows when it's that close. That sound doesn't come
(16:17):
from outside, it comes from inside you. I've got dozens
of other stories from the years, but none of those
have ever made me feel the same raw, primal certainty
that I'm not in control here. I could die right
now and nature wouldn't even blink. When I was a kid,
(16:45):
I spent a lot of time at my babysitter's house
with their kids. They had a smallish, hurting type dog,
supposedly gentle and sweet, supposedly, but their sun he was
a nightmare. He chased dog around with a NERF gun,
tackle it, pin it, scream in its face, basically tormenting
(17:06):
it every chance. He got that kind of relentless, cruel
chaos only kids can generate, and the adults did nothing,
not even a word, just let it happen, like noise
in the background. I was seven, I couldn't do much,
And honestly, what made it worse was this wasn't even
the worst abuse that happened in the house. The dog
(17:28):
was just the most visible victim, So I stayed quiet.
Then one day I was just sitting there, a fly
was buzzing overhead, nothing dramatic, just a fly. The dog
was nearby, and of course I didn't think anything of it.
Then I heard this growl, low, tense and focused not
(17:50):
at me but through me. The next thing I know,
there was a blur of violence, suffocating, blur of fur
and teeth and heat of breath. The dog latched at
my face, face snapping, snarling, and second it was on me,
not barking, not nipping, mauling. It won for the fly,
(18:15):
but it got me instead, and it took part of
my upper lip. I don't even remember pain, just confusion, terror,
blood and its face in mind, hot, wet, angry. We
never found the missing chunk, just gone vanished. I've always
(18:37):
told people the dog bit me, because that's the simplest
way to explain what happened, but honestly, I think it
hit a piece of my face. The worst part is
I've been afraid of these dogs ever since, which is embarrassing, right,
being afraid of a tiny herding dog. But the fear
(18:58):
doesn't care how something looks. Fear remembers the feeling of
the breath, the fur, the snapping teeth inches away from
your eye. The second worst part is I kept hanging
out with a babysitter's kid after they gave the dog away.
Then a year later they told me they actually gave
them to their cousins. They told me this by taking
(19:20):
me to their cousin's house without any warning, without asking,
just casually walked into the home where the same dog was,
saying it was retrained. I don't remember how I reacted.
I just remember staring at the dog across the room
and wondering if he remembered me too, if you recognized
(19:40):
my face or what was left of it. I'm from Florida,
and I was volunteering at a local nature conservancy after
a big storm had torn through the area. One of
(20:00):
our jobs was to remove fallen logs that had jammed
up in the creek. The creek was about chest deep,
fifteen feet wide, and completely opaque, a thick tanny stained
brown that swoiled all the light. You couldn't see an
inch beneath the surface. Typical Florida fresh water, but still
(20:20):
deeply unsettling when you're standing in it. I was moving logs,
shouldered deep in water when I suddenly noticed the shape
on the embankment, A massive, motionless, twelve foot alligator it
had been there the whole time, and I hadn't seen it.
Then it moved without a sound. It slid down the
(20:42):
muddy bank and disappeared into the creek, into the same
water I was standing in. Gone, no splash, no bubbles,
just silent. It was like the swamp swolled it whole.
I turned to the land manager, who was still hauling
beside me, and I asked, what do I do? They
(21:05):
barely looked up. Well, those logs aren't cutting, move themselves.
One of them said that gator probably just trying to
get away from us. Probably, so I stayed for thirty
minutes more. I stood in that water, blindly, feeling around
with my legs and hands, moving logs that were the
same size, shape, and color of that fucking alligator, knowing
(21:27):
full well that an actual alligator was somewhere beneath that surface,
inches from my legs, maybe watching, maybe waiting, maybe gone.
Every bump against my boot, every sudden tug of the
current felt like it was about to become something else,
something with teeth. It was one of the most nerve racking,
(21:49):
skin crawling things I've ever done, And the worst part
you never hear them coming
When I was young, I went fishing with my dad
and my best friend. We waded through some deeper water
to reach a shallow sand bar where the fish were biting.
It was quiet and peaceful. We stayed out there for
quite a while, casting lines into the hot sun, surrounded
by nothing but water, sky, and occasional splash of a mullet.
(00:27):
But the tide began to shift. Slowly. The water that
had been just above my ankles crept higher and higher
until I was waist deep and it was still rising. Then,
in an instant, the entire world snapped into focus. A
huge shark seven maybe eight feet long exploded through the
(00:48):
school of moullet, thrashing to the surface just feet from
where I was. The water was panicked as a fish scattered.
I froze, We all did, my dad, my best friend,
just standing there in the sudden silence, mouths sanging it open,
staring at the space where the predator had just torn
(01:08):
through the water. No one screamed, no one ran. My
dad calm but daily serious, said, walk back, slowly, slowly,
don't splash. So we did, but the tide it came
in more than we realized. My dad and friend were taller,
(01:29):
they could still manage the deeper water. For me, though,
it was another story. The stretch between the sand bar
and the shore was now over my head. I couldn't
walk anymore. I could barely bounce off the bottom. The
water reached their chest, but I was gasping just to
keep my head above the surface, one hand gripping my
(01:50):
fishing rod awkwardly overhead, while the rest of me flled
beneath the water line. I was completely helpless. We all
knew that the shark was it's ill circling somewhere in
the murky water behind us. It could have been six
feet away, it could have been inches. I couldn't see,
couldn't move fast, could barely breathe. It felt like a nightmare,
(02:13):
like one of those dreams where you're trying to escape
something in the dark but your legs won't work. Except
this was real. There was something in the dark, and
it had teeth. Even then, I knew the odds. I
knew it was unlikely that the shark would come after me.
It was hunting mullet, not people. But if there was
(02:33):
ever a moment I had been attacked, that was it.
As a kid alone in the deep water, barely able
to stay afloat, splashing just enough to draw attention, surrounded
by bait, fish and blood scent. A few years later,
just a few miles away, a man was killed after
jumping off his deck right into the path of a
(02:54):
bull shark chasing mallet. So yeah, I knew the odds,
but I also knew the water. A few years ago,
I went with my then girlfriend to the beach. We
were boogie boarding from the first sandbar back to shore.
(03:16):
It was during the week and the place was deserted.
No lifeguards, no other swimmers, just us. We were alone
in the surf for what felt like a quarter of
a mile in every direction. She was riding a wave
back to the shore, laughing, her board cutting through the foam.
I stayed back, facing the open water, watching the horizon.
(03:38):
I was trying to read the waves, looking for the
next good one to ride back. That's when I saw it.
Fins more than one, a shark, maybe twenty yards from me.
It cut through the surface of water like knives, gliding
in and out of sight between the swells. No splashing,
(03:59):
no threat, just quiet predatory movement. My stomach turned to ice.
I waited for the next wave heard hammering, try not
to move fast. When it came, I didn't hesitate. I
rode straight back to the shore, every second, expecting a
surge of water behind me or a flash of gray below.
(04:21):
I didn't want to scare her, so when I reached
the sand, I just said, hey, let's go hang out
under the tent for the rest of the day. My
voice came out steadier than I felt. But she saw
right through me. She knew without me saying the word.
She guessed exactly what I had seen. I didn't get
a good enough look at it to know what kind
(04:42):
of shark it was, sand shark, bull, tiger, maybe even
the hammer head. It didn't matter. When you see a
living missile of teeth and muscle pointed in your general direction,
you don't stick around to identify it. You get out.
The ocean is a shar territory. I've always been taught
(05:02):
to respect that, But seeing that fin, seeing it glide
so close in silence, made me really something else. How
many times have sharks been there and I didn't see them?
How many shadows had passed beneath me, just out of sight,
And all the years I've been swimming, that thought still
freaks me out more than the fin that I did see.
(05:31):
Growing up, my grandma used to babysit me. She lived
with my uncle and he had a rot wiler. Big, powerful,
but always friendly. She was kind of the dog you
didn't have to worry about until you had a reason to.
One afternoon, when I was nine or ten, I got
into my head that I was gonna pretend to be
a pro wrestler. I wrapped my arms and hands in
(05:54):
white masking tape like I'd seen on TV. I spent
the next hour slamming stone animals into an imaginary ring.
When I got tired, I got a few action figures
and was wandering outside the carport, there where the deer
stands are stored and where the wether usually slept. She
(06:14):
was there, curled up, fast asleep. I sat down a
few feet away and started playing. Everything was quiet, peaceful.
Then I heard it subtle at first, just the sound
of a dog stirring. I didn't even look up, but
then came a growl, low, deep, not playful. That was
(06:35):
when I turned around and froze the rot While they
was staring at me, her eyes logged onto me like
I was pray lips curled, teeth bared. The girl got louder.
She wasn't wagging her tail, she wasn't coming over to
stiff me. She was tense, watching hunting. I tried to
(06:57):
talk to her. It's me. I barely was able to
get the words out. I stepped back, slowly, hoping she
recognized my voice. But she didn't, or maybe she did
and something in her didn't care. Then she lunged. It
happened fast, muscle and teeth lunging forward, eyes wide with
something I didn't understand but now recognized as pure instinct,
(07:21):
and I swear, and a split second I realized what
she was aiming for, my arms, the tape. I ripped
off the masking tape as fast as I could and
threw it at her like it was something cursed. The
moment it hit the ground, she stopped, just stopped, and
I ran full sprint back into the house, heart pounding
(07:43):
so hard I could hear it in my ears. I
didn't go and do that dog for days. I barely
breathed in the same direction as that car port. Then
out of nowhere, I got asked to feed her. I
opened the door, heart in my throat, and she was
wagging her tail like nothing that ever happened, just like that,
back to friendly by that day never left me because,
(08:06):
for a moment, a terrible moment, I wasn't a kid
playing for tend I was prey, and I saw up
close what it looks like when something you trust suddenly
doesn't recognize you anymore, or worse, it does and still
chooses to go in for the kill. I was stationed
(08:29):
in Japan three out of the six years I was
in the Navy. During that time, I least a traditional
Japanese home. The shower was in its own separate walk in,
with a deep sink, tub, wooden bench, the whole deal.
It was honestly one of my favorite parts of the
place until this morning. I stumbled into the shower, half asleep,
(08:52):
barely conscious. As I shut the door behind me and
stepped towards the tub, something black flashes past my perfume vision,
followed by an immediate thud. I look down into the tub.
There it is a Huntsman spider the size of my
goddamn hand, legs spread wide, motionless, just staring up at
(09:15):
me like it's been waiting watching I freeze. Best guess
is that it had been on the wall behind me.
I must have startled it, but now it's between me
and the rest of the room, coiled like a nightmare.
Instincts take over. I grab my shower head from its
mouth it's on a hose and aim it directly at
(09:37):
the thing. Flush it down the drain whatever it takes.
As soon as the water hits it, it leaps, not crawls,
leaps straight out of the tub onto the wall, and
bolt it for the window. It moves like it's glitching
through reality, faster than it should have been possible for
something that size to move. I try to throw the
(10:00):
window open, but before I can't even touch the glass,
it jumps again and runs under the shower into the
powder room. Now I'm naked, concerned, soaked and breathing hard
while this demon spider waits for me on the cabinet
door outside. It just sits there like it knows it's
(10:20):
baiting me. I make a run for the front door,
grab a foot flop, creep back into the powder room
and wing the sandal at it with everything I've got.
Direct hit lets go flying, but it's still alive. It
limps out of the bathroom. It disappears under the stairs slower.
(10:40):
Now wounded, I'm done playing games. I grab a can
of bug spray, push down the nozzle, and start moving
in for the kill. That's when I see it curled
around the back edge of one of the stair treads.
There's this black, twitching tail. I think it's a spied
(11:01):
I aim spray, but what drops isn't the spider. It's
something else. A mukad centerpede longer than my forearm, black
and red, shiny armored, and it charges me, not screwing away, charging.
The front half is raised off the floor like a cobra,
(11:23):
mandibles clicking, biting the air. I don't scream, I'm just
about to pass out. I stumble backwards, unloading the can
of spray, trying to stay on my feet as this
thing comes at me like it has blood in its eyes.
I hit it again, still moving, I turned the flip
flop on its edge and use it like a saw,
(11:44):
cutting the thing in half while it thrashes under the pressure.
The second it stops moving, I remember the spider. It's
still alive, still under the stairs. I blow air into
the gap and it runs out, but stumbling. I raised
my flip flop saw and smash it hard until it
(12:06):
stops twitching. Then I just stood there, soaking, wet, naked, trembling,
heart pounding in my throat, surrounded by venom and legs
and parts of things that should not exist in the
same place as a shower. And then I screamed at
the top of my lungs for about thirty seconds straight.
(12:26):
The whole battle lasted maybe three minutes, but it felt
like I spent a year in the house. By the
time I got to work, I was so visibly shaken
that my coworkers stopped what they were doing just to
ask me what the hell happened to me. Honestly, I
still can't tell if it was the worst morning of
my life or the most badass thing I've ever done.
(12:54):
I did field work back and forth between the US
and UK and East and South Africa for about ten years.
In that time, I spent a good portion of my
life living in remote base camps, hours or even days
from the nearest town out there. You're in the wild domain.
You stop being on top of the food chain, and
(13:15):
every so often you get reminded of that in a
way you'll never forget. These are some of my oh shit, moments.
The first was an elephant, a female with a calf.
You don't really understand how big an elephant is until
it's charging you. The ground doesn't shake, it thunders, dust screams,
(13:41):
the sound of breaking branches, all of it rolls over
you at once. Knowing she had a calf made it worse,
because there's no bluffing in a charge like that. She
wasn't posturing, she meant it. Then there were the big cats.
I know for a fact that I was stalked at
least twice, once by a leopard, easy to identify because
(14:04):
it's the only large predator at that site. The other time,
most likely a rogue male lion. That lion was known
to hang around the area. You don't see them, of course,
not at first. You just feel it, a prickle along
the back of your neck, the sense of eyes in
(14:24):
the dark. Sometimes you catch a flash of movement in
the brush, a low rustle of grass behind you where
there shouldn't be any, and then you remember you're not
tracking it, it's tracking you. The next was in Alaska.
It was a day off and everyone else had gone
into town. I was sitting in the main tent reading
(14:47):
when something made me turn around a moose cow with
a calf five meters away. If you never see a
moose up close, you don't understand how massive and unpredictable
they are, especially her mother with her young They aren't
big dumb deer either. They're unpredictable, and they're faster than
(15:08):
they look. But the one that still wakes me up
at night happened in South Africa. We had a party
of the night before some one forgot to close the
kitchen door. I woke up, hung over, stumbled into the
sink to make coffee. The rubbish bag was right beneath me.
(15:30):
I heard something moving aside. I'd bent over and sulk shifting.
A mozambique spitting cobra, its head low, slightly flared, one
wrung move, one startled breath, and I'd be blind or dead.
Then there were the hyaenas. Two spotted hyaenas broke into
(15:53):
the camp one night, killed a few dogs, and started
nosing around the tents. Mine included you don't forget the
sound of a hyenas womp when it's right outside your tent.
It's deafening, it makes your bones feel hollow. And then
a noise I didn't even know existed, the low graw
that follows when it's that close. That sound doesn't come
(16:17):
from outside, it comes from inside you. I've got dozens
of other stories from the years, but none of those
have ever made me feel the same raw, primal certainty
that I'm not in control here. I could die right
now and nature wouldn't even blink. When I was a kid,
(16:45):
I spent a lot of time at my babysitter's house
with their kids. They had a smallish, hurting type dog,
supposedly gentle and sweet, supposedly, but their sun he was
a nightmare. He chased dog around with a NERF gun,
tackle it, pin it, scream in its face, basically tormenting
(17:06):
it every chance. He got that kind of relentless, cruel
chaos only kids can generate, and the adults did nothing,
not even a word, just let it happen, like noise
in the background. I was seven, I couldn't do much,
And honestly, what made it worse was this wasn't even
the worst abuse that happened in the house. The dog
(17:28):
was just the most visible victim, So I stayed quiet.
Then one day I was just sitting there, a fly
was buzzing overhead, nothing dramatic, just a fly. The dog
was nearby, and of course I didn't think anything of it.
Then I heard this growl, low, tense and focused not
(17:50):
at me but through me. The next thing I know,
there was a blur of violence, suffocating, blur of fur
and teeth and heat of breath. The dog latched at
my face, face snapping, snarling, and second it was on me,
not barking, not nipping, mauling. It won for the fly,
(18:15):
but it got me instead, and it took part of
my upper lip. I don't even remember pain, just confusion, terror,
blood and its face in mind, hot, wet, angry. We
never found the missing chunk, just gone vanished. I've always
(18:37):
told people the dog bit me, because that's the simplest
way to explain what happened, but honestly, I think it
hit a piece of my face. The worst part is
I've been afraid of these dogs ever since, which is embarrassing, right,
being afraid of a tiny herding dog. But the fear
(18:58):
doesn't care how something looks. Fear remembers the feeling of
the breath, the fur, the snapping teeth inches away from
your eye. The second worst part is I kept hanging
out with a babysitter's kid after they gave the dog away.
Then a year later they told me they actually gave
them to their cousins. They told me this by taking
(19:20):
me to their cousin's house without any warning, without asking,
just casually walked into the home where the same dog was,
saying it was retrained. I don't remember how I reacted.
I just remember staring at the dog across the room
and wondering if he remembered me too, if you recognized
(19:40):
my face or what was left of it. I'm from Florida,
and I was volunteering at a local nature conservancy after
a big storm had torn through the area. One of
(20:00):
our jobs was to remove fallen logs that had jammed
up in the creek. The creek was about chest deep,
fifteen feet wide, and completely opaque, a thick tanny stained
brown that swoiled all the light. You couldn't see an
inch beneath the surface. Typical Florida fresh water, but still
(20:20):
deeply unsettling when you're standing in it. I was moving logs,
shouldered deep in water when I suddenly noticed the shape
on the embankment, A massive, motionless, twelve foot alligator it
had been there the whole time, and I hadn't seen it.
Then it moved without a sound. It slid down the
(20:42):
muddy bank and disappeared into the creek, into the same
water I was standing in. Gone, no splash, no bubbles,
just silent. It was like the swamp swolled it whole.
I turned to the land manager, who was still hauling
beside me, and I asked, what do I do? They
(21:05):
barely looked up. Well, those logs aren't cutting, move themselves.
One of them said that gator probably just trying to
get away from us. Probably, so I stayed for thirty
minutes more. I stood in that water, blindly, feeling around
with my legs and hands, moving logs that were the
same size, shape, and color of that fucking alligator, knowing
(21:27):
full well that an actual alligator was somewhere beneath that surface,
inches from my legs, maybe watching, maybe waiting, maybe gone.
Every bump against my boot, every sudden tug of the
current felt like it was about to become something else,
something with teeth. It was one of the most nerve racking,
(21:49):
skin crawling things I've ever done, And the worst part
you never hear them coming
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