Most disturbing thing you've ever seen in real life?
- Thread starter Froggy Slayer
- Start date
When I was a kid I was caravaning with my parents. It was night and I was asleep in the caravan with my sister and my dad who was sleeping of a beer. My mum was still outside with friends around the campfire. My mum came bursting into the caravan and she was crying. It woke me up and I could tell that that something was really wrong. From the fear in her voice I assumed that she must have been hurt or was ill. But when I asked her what was wrong she told me and my sister to stay in the caravan and dragged my dad outside. I wanted to know what was happening, but did as I was told. I must have fallen back asleep, but I vaguely remember them both coming back into the caravan much later and they were calmer than before. The next day I got up and went outside. The caravan a few rows down was a burnt-out wreck. I asked my dad what had happened and he told me that the previous night, two of his friends and their kids had been in there. They were all dead. I'm kind of glad I didn't see it happening in truth.
The most disturbing thing I've ever witnessed was a man drinking red wine while dining on fish. Red wine with fish. The audacity and absurdity of it all...*shudder*...I was never the same after that.
Really though, I did manage to catch that video of that man who had his head severed while he was still living. Well, it wasn't so much severing as it was sawing. Not really sure if that counts because I didn't actually see it happening in front of me, but I can't think of anything else at the moment.
Really though, I did manage to catch that video of that man who had his head severed while he was still living. Well, it wasn't so much severing as it was sawing. Not really sure if that counts because I didn't actually see it happening in front of me, but I can't think of anything else at the moment.
I found a dog on the side of the road that had been hit by a car and was dying.
I stopped, removed the collar very carefully (it was a german shepard) and called the owner, who was out looking for their dog.
Seeing the guy freaking out while I helped him load his dog into the back of the truck... I have 2 dogs, and thinking about that happening to either one of them is horrible.
I know it's probably nothing compared to some of the stuff that's already been posted but it's all I have.
I stopped, removed the collar very carefully (it was a german shepard) and called the owner, who was out looking for their dog.
Seeing the guy freaking out while I helped him load his dog into the back of the truck... I have 2 dogs, and thinking about that happening to either one of them is horrible.
I know it's probably nothing compared to some of the stuff that's already been posted but it's all I have.
My Mum and Dad having sex.
Walked in their room one day and there they were.
I'd repressed that until now, thanks.
Also, those multiple choice captcha questions always give me a good laugh. I imagined a great white shark eating Belgian waffles.
Walked in their room one day and there they were.
I'd repressed that until now, thanks.
Also, those multiple choice captcha questions always give me a good laugh. I imagined a great white shark eating Belgian waffles.
My answer is pretty skewed considering for most of my childhood I found real-life animal-based gore more fascinating than horrifying due to having spent a lot of time back then watching violent animal documentaries.
People-based violence and death on the other hand affects me a lot. I was glued to the TV during the rolling news of Beslan, New Orleans, The Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2011 tsunami in Japan.
Especially the latter since the full weight of the damage and loss of life was even more drastic.
It'd hard to see how much damage is caused when you're looking at what was previously a bunch of sparse mud huts.
But when it's a modern town where you can even see what it used to look like before by looking at it on streetview, it hits you even harder.
My dad lacks a hell of a lot of tact sometimes. But last Christmas he thought it would be smart to show me a picture of body recovery digging out a mother and baby from the silt afterwards. For the rest of the week I just kept bursting into tears thinking about it. The woman was caught mid-pose trying to dig through to find her baby that was only a foot away.
Having almost drowned a few times myself I remembered just how painful jungs full of water is and every time I think back to that image I feel the desperation and agony that mother must have felt.
When I was 17 I also saw a dead body by the side of the road that was being investigated by police (Glasgow has a high murder rate compared to the rest of the UK but this person might have been run over). It was next to a main road and wrapped in a bloody sheet. Either the body was dumped in that state or covered to avoid causing crashes either by rubbernecking or the fright of it all.
It just so happened that as my bus went past, the police were opening up the sheet to look at the victim underneath. I saw parts of the face and a bony, pale hand in front of it. Both flecked with blood.
It didn't really affect me until I got home and realised what I'd seen.
I also researched a fair share of gore and violence in regards to my webcomics. I wanted realistic gore rather than the typical cartoony depictions in order to match the feeling of terror and uneasiness felt by the characters.
There was a video I saw on Youtube once (they removed it) of a guy with his leg blown off by a mine in Bosnia, another one showing the beheading of a Korean captive in the middle east, another video had a Japanese guy committing suicide by jumping off a building. Each of these videos made me freeze in horror. I couldn't turn away.
This was before I saw the corpse by the side of the road so it explains why I wasn't so disturbed as I could have been. Sure, it was a body, but I didn't see the person die and there wasn't very much I could see in that brief second. It still sticks with me, though. Like the first time I watched "Russian Hammer Time".
People-based violence and death on the other hand affects me a lot. I was glued to the TV during the rolling news of Beslan, New Orleans, The Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2011 tsunami in Japan.
Especially the latter since the full weight of the damage and loss of life was even more drastic.
It'd hard to see how much damage is caused when you're looking at what was previously a bunch of sparse mud huts.
But when it's a modern town where you can even see what it used to look like before by looking at it on streetview, it hits you even harder.
My dad lacks a hell of a lot of tact sometimes. But last Christmas he thought it would be smart to show me a picture of body recovery digging out a mother and baby from the silt afterwards. For the rest of the week I just kept bursting into tears thinking about it. The woman was caught mid-pose trying to dig through to find her baby that was only a foot away.
Having almost drowned a few times myself I remembered just how painful jungs full of water is and every time I think back to that image I feel the desperation and agony that mother must have felt.
When I was 17 I also saw a dead body by the side of the road that was being investigated by police (Glasgow has a high murder rate compared to the rest of the UK but this person might have been run over). It was next to a main road and wrapped in a bloody sheet. Either the body was dumped in that state or covered to avoid causing crashes either by rubbernecking or the fright of it all.
It just so happened that as my bus went past, the police were opening up the sheet to look at the victim underneath. I saw parts of the face and a bony, pale hand in front of it. Both flecked with blood.
It didn't really affect me until I got home and realised what I'd seen.
I also researched a fair share of gore and violence in regards to my webcomics. I wanted realistic gore rather than the typical cartoony depictions in order to match the feeling of terror and uneasiness felt by the characters.
There was a video I saw on Youtube once (they removed it) of a guy with his leg blown off by a mine in Bosnia, another one showing the beheading of a Korean captive in the middle east, another video had a Japanese guy committing suicide by jumping off a building. Each of these videos made me freeze in horror. I couldn't turn away.
This was before I saw the corpse by the side of the road so it explains why I wasn't so disturbed as I could have been. Sure, it was a body, but I didn't see the person die and there wasn't very much I could see in that brief second. It still sticks with me, though. Like the first time I watched "Russian Hammer Time".
I witnessed a suicide about a year ago. The man standing next to me on the platform (distance about 5 ft.) jumped in front of a train. I saw his body getting twisted unnaturally before he disappeared from sight, after which came the sounds of all the bones in his body popping and being crushed (which was much louder than I expected).
It was only a short train, and was still too fast to stop before it cleared the spot where he jumped, so a few seconds later there was enormous amounts of blood and bits being ejected at the end of the train (I'd estimate about a third of his body), the rest must have been caught in the trains undercarriage. Thankfully, no recognizable parts of his head were visible, the only things I could identify were leg and arm parts ( more due to the clothes still hanging to it than any anatomical features).
I often find myself thinking about his facial expressions, he looked right at me a few seconds before he jumped and I remember something odd about the way he looked at me, but I could not and still can't articulate what it was.
There was also the image of a man in the street who had been stabbed to death, this was when I was 6 years old while on family vacation in Kenya. On our way from the airport in Mombasa to our hotel (in armored cars and with armed escort), we passed through a street where a man was slumped against a wall in a large pool of blood, I don't remember much more than the vivid colour because I was so young.
It was only a short train, and was still too fast to stop before it cleared the spot where he jumped, so a few seconds later there was enormous amounts of blood and bits being ejected at the end of the train (I'd estimate about a third of his body), the rest must have been caught in the trains undercarriage. Thankfully, no recognizable parts of his head were visible, the only things I could identify were leg and arm parts ( more due to the clothes still hanging to it than any anatomical features).
I often find myself thinking about his facial expressions, he looked right at me a few seconds before he jumped and I remember something odd about the way he looked at me, but I could not and still can't articulate what it was.
There was also the image of a man in the street who had been stabbed to death, this was when I was 6 years old while on family vacation in Kenya. On our way from the airport in Mombasa to our hotel (in armored cars and with armed escort), we passed through a street where a man was slumped against a wall in a large pool of blood, I don't remember much more than the vivid colour because I was so young.
About covers it.kman123 said:
OT: I've got two, but they are not as good some of these(!)
I helped gut a moose my grandfather had just shot. I got up close and personal with several hundred pounds - although you might just as accurately say several dozen gallons -- of steaming, stinking, bloody, gelatinous viscera, all of which we scooped out to form a heap/pool bigger than any of us (I mean larger by mass, not taller). We could see a sloshing mess of pine needle puree because its stomach wasn't fully opaque. For the first several minutes, the animal was still twitching.
Saw a deer get hit once. The guy in front of me caught its hind end pretty good, knocked it into the ditch. I stopped to make sure the driver was okay. He was fine but the deer obviously wasn't. Its back end had been hit, which meant its head and front legs were alive and functioning. It was bleating like crazy, trying to stand up, failing over and over, because it didn't understand its pelvis was crushed. That's the sorriest I ever felt for any living thing except one.
Observed a hospital autopsy up close one time. You never really forget all the sights and smells. Watching the pathologist's assistant open up the top half of an old woman's skull with a circular saw was particularily memorable. Disturbing but very interesting at the same time.
I watched the church I was baptised in as a child burn down. I felt the heat on my skin, and I saw the spire fall.
In middle school, on the way to school, a kid got hit by a car on his bike (he was maybe 12). Our bus drove by it and we all saw him laying on the side of the road in a pool of his own blood.
I sat at the very front of a bus - the seat next to the driver, just by the front door - on the way to school when a kid got hit. Straight on by the thirty-ton bus coming around the corner - trees blocked the line of sight so there wasn't a moment for the driver to see the kid trying to run across the road.
I just saw a brown blur, then the impact on the windshield - I thought "Woah, who the fuck put a garbage can in the middle of the road?" because it looked like a brown plastic garbage can, and the hollow, thumping sound he made when he hit the side of the bus over and over again as it passed him made me absolutely sure that it was a plastic garbage can.
We stopped, there was a massive crack on the windshield right in front of the driver - I wondered, what the fuck now? Did we hit a THING? Some guy came in the back door covered in blood, and I realized that yeah, we hit a "thing" that was a boy, about 2 or 3 years older than me. Guy who came on probably asked someone to call an ambulance or something, but at the time I wasn't listening, I was just... Startled, confused and irritated.
I'd been in a really good mood that morning 'cause we were going to go ice-skating with my class and I love that shit. I was irritated that I would be missing out on it because this stupid kid went and got himself killed by the bus.
Did take a day or two for it to sink in, really. It didn't help that we still went past that spot every day to and from school, and indeed some days I rode the same bus, cracked windshield and all. I don't know if they replaced the windshield before they replaced all of the local busses with newer ones.
Driver was gone for a while, but damned if, not a year later, I saw him in that driver's seat again, doing the same run in the mornings. I've immense respect for that driver, because I don't know many people who'd go back to work after such an accident, even with a break.
I just saw a brown blur, then the impact on the windshield - I thought "Woah, who the fuck put a garbage can in the middle of the road?" because it looked like a brown plastic garbage can, and the hollow, thumping sound he made when he hit the side of the bus over and over again as it passed him made me absolutely sure that it was a plastic garbage can.
We stopped, there was a massive crack on the windshield right in front of the driver - I wondered, what the fuck now? Did we hit a THING? Some guy came in the back door covered in blood, and I realized that yeah, we hit a "thing" that was a boy, about 2 or 3 years older than me. Guy who came on probably asked someone to call an ambulance or something, but at the time I wasn't listening, I was just... Startled, confused and irritated.
I'd been in a really good mood that morning 'cause we were going to go ice-skating with my class and I love that shit. I was irritated that I would be missing out on it because this stupid kid went and got himself killed by the bus.
Did take a day or two for it to sink in, really. It didn't help that we still went past that spot every day to and from school, and indeed some days I rode the same bus, cracked windshield and all. I don't know if they replaced the windshield before they replaced all of the local busses with newer ones.
Driver was gone for a while, but damned if, not a year later, I saw him in that driver's seat again, doing the same run in the mornings. I've immense respect for that driver, because I don't know many people who'd go back to work after such an accident, even with a break.
I'd say seeing my big brother in the hospital with second (and maybe third, I'm not sure) degree burns over his torso and parts of his face. The disturbing part was the morphine thing. The doctors pumped him with too much, so my dad (also a doctor) took him home and weaned him off of it. I remember seeing/hearing my brother scream in pain from the withdrawal.
Other than that; growing up from age six to sixteen with a severely alcoholic/depressed/mentally absent mother was, at times, very disturbing. She's fine now, though (and I've had enough of mourning my childhood) so I try not to dwell on it.
Other than that; growing up from age six to sixteen with a severely alcoholic/depressed/mentally absent mother was, at times, very disturbing. She's fine now, though (and I've had enough of mourning my childhood) so I try not to dwell on it.
