Over the course of my life, I’ve heard countless hearsay “funny intuition” stories from both people I’m acquainted with and “true scary stories” online from the likes of youtube horror narration channels, subs like r/letsnotmeet and r/creepyencounters, etc.. There is quite a bit of variation in the stories’ scenarios, but they usually hit the same narrative beats. In many of such stories, the narrator is in a situation that gives them some kind of “bad feeling” from, and they’re prompted to leave. Some time later, the narrator learns that from listening to their gut, they narrowly avoided something dangerous (usually some type of accident or a predatory criminal) in that situation. Another common variation is that the narrator feels a sudden inclination to go somewhere or do something they normally wouldn’t think to do. While following that prompting, they inadvertently find another person in some kind of danger (typically a family member, but casual acquaintances and strangers aren’t unheard of as well). The narrator’s last second arrival saves the victim’s life. A role reversal of the narrator finding themselves in trouble and then rescued by someone following an inciliation last second, is also quite prevalent in these sorts of stories. Here are some fictional examples that I’ve written as a demonstration of such stories.: 1.When I was in my first year of college, there was a girl that attended an economics class with me. She was very hot and seemed really nice, and I was naturally quite drawn to her. One day, she asked me on a date next weekend. At first, I was really excited and I happily accepted it. However, I had a strange and bad feeling about her. Couldn't really put my finger on why, but that girl and the whole date thing just felt so off for whatever reason. I tried brushing it aside but that feeling just kept nagging at me. So I canceled our date the day before we scheduled it. She wasn’t happy about it, but the girl didn’t push it further. About a month later, I found out on the news that the same girl drugged, raped, and dismembered some poor dude she lured on a date. If I didn’t follow my instincts that day, that could’ve been me. 2.When I was just hitting my thirties, my friend invited me and our friend group to her birthday. She wanted us to go boating with her on a nearby lake. For some strange reason, I just didn’t feel comfortable with this. My friend and two of my other friends insisted that I go, but my gut kept telling me no. They eventually gave up and went on the boating trip without me. While on the trip, my friends went missing. After about a week of searching, some divers found their bodies in the bottom of the lake. From what I’ve been told, the boat they used was in really bad condition. Apparently, the boat capsized and sank in the middle of the lake, and my friends drowned. If I had ignored my feelings, I probably would’ve joined my friends in the lake’s depths. 3.Several years ago, I took a day off from work. For some odd reason, I felt a very strong prompting to go out on a jog. What was so unusual about this is that I’m typically not interested in athletic activities like that. No matter how much I tried putting it off, a voice in my head still kept telling me to jog over and over again. It was a very nice day outside, so I thought “why not.” I jogged into a forest only a few miles away from my apartment. During my jog, I passed a woman and a boy walking together. When I got about a couple yards ahead of them, I heard some commotion behind me. I turned around to investigate and I saw two masked men carrying and dragging the woman and the boy into the woods. Instinctively, I screamed and charged at them. Upon seeing me, the men dropped their captives and scurried into the forest bushes. The woman profusely thanked me for saving her and her little brother and hugged me. I stayed with the pair and comforted them until the police showed up. I left the scene after the police took my statements and released me. Other than some reporters trying to push me for an interview, that was the last time I’ve heard of the situation. I never saw the two would be victims again and from my understanding, the two men were never caught. It still haunts me to this day on what could have happened to those two if I didn’t have that sudden urge to jog. What are your thoughts and feelings towards such stories, if any? What is likely behind the “bad feeling” intuitions in your opinion?
All I can say is that in real life I've never had anything like that, but it doesn't bother me if a story has that, especially if it's one that leans toward the supernatural. Edit: I originally thought the three stories were actual accounts you experienced.
This is not a demonstration, it happened for real. It was several years ago, I was taking the trash out and walked with the bag out the front door, where my dog Pepper was sitting looking out as she liked to do. She wagged her tail as I walked past her, but she stayed inside. I went down the few steps of the porch onto the sidewalk and turned to walk toward the big trash can, when I saw Pepper lying on the sidewalk against the wall of the house a little ways in front of me. Well this was very strange. Yet there she was, plain as day, lying on the sidewalk right in front of me in one of her favorite positions. I was quite puzzled, so I took a few steps backwards so I could see the front door. And there was Pepper, sitting inside looking out at me just as she had been. Goose bumps raised all over my body and my hackles went up. I got something like an adrenaline rush. I don't believe in the supernatural, and yet I was experiencing it. I turned and looked at the Pepper on the sidewalk, and she was still there, real as can be. It occurred to me it might be a shadow (she's a black dog). In fact there was a tree overhanging the sidewalk and it's entirely possible there was a shadow from the branches that just happened to look exactly like my dog. But even as I thought that I couldn't shake the fact that it was really her, solid as can be, and in exactly her favorite position to lie in. I looked back at the house and there she was inside looking out at me. Goose bumps redoubled. Now I felt like I was literally in the grip of some supernatural event. I took a few steps forward and slid my foot across the sidewalk. It went right through her. What I was seeing was indeed a shadow, but it was truly uncanny how much it resembled her. Even as my foot passed right through her, I was still seeing Pepper there and my mind was utterly convinced it was really her. Two days later (maybe it was three) she died of a heart attack while on her cable in the front yard. She died on the sidewalk overlapping the exact spot where I had seen her doppelgänger. I'm convinced that subconsciously I had noticed signs that she was getting old and unhealthy. Who knows what else might have warned me. I used to consider myself a total rationalist, and I scoffed at ideas I considered superstitious, but a few other things had happened over the course of my life that started to soften that belief. In fact many many years before that I had been driving my car with a friend in the passenger's seat when suddenly some kind of alarm started going off under the dashboard. It was a buzzer of some sort, maybe it was the seatbelt warning or something. It was going off nonstop and we couldn't find any way to shut it off. And it was getting really annoying, so I told him to just yank it out. After I assured him I was serious a couple of times he smiled and did it, and we decided laughingly that it must have been the 10-day warning signal that the car was about to die. A week or so later the car indeed died. And suddenly our jokes took on a new significance, as if subconsciously we knew it was going to happen. I think it happens when something important is about to happen that maybe you're not prepared for emotionally, so some inner helper prepares you. The unconscious remembers everything apparently, and notices everything, but your conscious mind can't process that much information, so it has filters that only allow the most immediately relevant info through. But when some of that unconscious info suddenly becomes important it can emerge in some way that feels supernatural or bizarre. In fact whenever we encounter the unconscious it always feels supernatural—especially in this materialist age when we deny its existence. In the past we acknowledged it and called it religion or ghosts or whatever, but in our modern arrogance we deny it and pretend like our limited conscious awareness is all there is. The more you study brain science or Jungian psychology the more this becomes apparent, and the longer you live the more experiences you have that make you realize it, unless you decide it's all just mumbo-jumbo and dismiss it all.
In my hang gliding career, there were a few times when I was preparing to launch, but something just didn't feel right. I couldn't put my finger on it, but it was enough to pass on launching at that particular time. I came to trust that feeling, though, because it meant that my accumulated experience was telling me that even though there was nothing blatant about the conditions, they were similar enough to situations where I'd learned something previously (for good or ill) that they merited a second glance. This feeling probably caused me to pass up what might have been some wonderful flights, but if it saved me from what might have been a disastrous one, it was worth heeding. As the expression goes, "There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots."* *Obligatory addendum: "Except Chuck Yeager."
