We’ve all done it, ignored that nagging feeling or voice in our head, telling us not to do something, or trust someone, or go somewhere. But how many of us actually listen to that feeling instead of shrugging it off as us being silly’? In a world which thrives on rational thinking and scientific evidence, should we be listening to our gut instincts at all, or is it better to work everything out "on paper" with thorough reasoning behind it? After reading these stories, you'll definitely want to err on the side of caution!

My smoke detector was driving me nuts – it kept giving off this intermittent chirping sound every hour or so, and it was driving my dog crazy. In the end, I disconnected the battery, promising myself I’d get a new one the next day. I went to bed, but I was tossing and turning, and I just couldn’t sleep, and all I could think about was that damn smoke alarm. Eventually, I got up, reconnected the battery and went back to bed.

I was awoken a few hours later to the sound of the alarm screaming – I got out of bed and stomped to the door, ready to pull the whole thing off the ceiling but when I put my hand on the door handle it was so hot I had to let go. That’s when I noticed the smoke seeping under the door. I grabbed my dog, who luckily sleeps with me, and managed to get him and me out of the window and safely to the ground. Pretty much the whole house was destroyed, but I was, and am, just thankful that something told me to put the battery back in.

A few years ago, I was working at a bar, and after a few months of working there, a new guy started. All the girls were flirting with him, and admittedly, he was hot. I guess maybe he liked the thrill of the chase because he started flirting with me almost immediately even though I kept my distance - I’m generally pretty shy and hate making the first move. My manager put him on the bar shift with me, and the other girls asked me about working with the "hottie," but honestly, he kinda gave me the creeps. Couldn't figure out why.

I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something about him which sent my alarm bells into overdrive. Anyway, after a few shifts, he asked me on a date – lucky me, right? But something told me to stay the heck away from him, so I made my excuses and turned him down. He kept asking, but when he realized I wasn’t going to change my mind, he started flirting with another girl.

She, of course, said yes, and even said I was stupid to turn him down. Whatever, right? I told her that there was something "off" about him, but she said they were going dancing at a new club that night, so I let it go. Safety in numbers and all that jazz, plus, it's really not my business.

The next evening, neither of them showed up at work. I was a little concerned, but mostly annoyed, as it meant we were two people down. Then the police showed up, asking all of us questions about the guy. They had found her in her car beaten so badly that the couple who called 911 thought she was dead. They had left the club because she wasn't feeling well from the drinks, and he said he'd drive her to her car. He did more than that... She recovered physically, but she never came back to work. They aren't sure where he went afterwards either. I still go cold when I think about it -- who knows where he is now?

I was driving home from dinner at my sister's with my husband and three children when there was the sound of metal scraping on the road. I figured the tailpipe was dragging, so I pulled over so my husband could get under the car and see what was going on. Our youngest was only 5 months at the time and she was asleep, so I left her to sleep in the back seat while myself and my older two children got out and stood next to the car.

It was a really quiet road - no traffic at all - but, for some reason, I felt like I needed the baby with me. I went into the back seat and pulled out my baby girl and wrapped her inside my jacket. As soon as I reached the kids, who were a few feet behind the car, I turned around to check on my husband crouching with the flashlight. Out of nowhere, this truck sped past and hit the back of my car, with my husband still looking underneath it.

I watched the car get shunted along the road, dragging my husband with it. He survived but he almost lost his leg, and he had several fractured ribs. Had my baby girl still been in the car she would have been instantly killed.

This is going back about a decade, but I was in a department store shopping for Christmas presents, and I needed to go up to the top floor to use the restroom because the lower one was under construction. I’m not normally claustrophobic, but as more and more people piled into the elevator, I started to get this horrible feeling, like "if something happens in here I’ll never get out" kind of thing. But the feeling got stronger, and as the doors closed, I yelled at the people in the front to open the doors again.

A few people cussed at me under their breath, but I didn't care. I just knew I needed to get out. I left the store and went to the gross mall restroom. When I got home, I switched on the TV and breaking news came on about the store I’d been in – the elevator had malfunctioned and was stuck between floors for hours. One person was severely injured because of a panicked escape attempt. What had happened was that one of the cables had snapped, and the emergency brakes had caught them. Firefighters thought it could be because the elevator was overloaded.

When I was in my first year of studying to be a nurse, I got invited to go out to a beach party one Friday night. None of us had a car, but as the party was a good hour’s drive away we couldn’t afford the taxi ride, so we started asking around to some of our other classmates. One of the TA’s in our class over-heard us talking about it, so he offered to take us as he had friends close to the place we were going, and he’d come and pick us up on his way home.

My friends were really excited that we got to go, and I was too! A beach party is one of those essential college experiences, and I was really needing a night off. But as Friday got closer and closer, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go anymore. We all knew the guy, he was always nice and polite, so I had no reason to feel uneasy but I did, and I couldn’t shake it. My friends convinced me to go still. On the evening of the party, he picked us up and drove us to the party, gave us his cell number and told us to call him when we were ready.

Just after midnight I called a cab, figuring I could ask my mom for some extra cash if I really needed it, and we all went and spent the night on my floor. The next day we were told that the guy had crashed his car, and was three-times the legal limit for driving. The photos on the news sent shivers down my spine – the car was a total wreck, and anyone sitting in the passenger or back seats would have been killed outright. I was really glad I called a cab that night.

I had just started running a weight loss club with the gym I worked at, and it was my first night. I was nervous but looking forward to it. The place I had booked to hold the session was in a community center. Not knowing how many people were going to turn up, I chose the larger room just in case. Quite a few people came, but as I was welcoming people at the door, I got a sick feeling about these noises from above the room. It just sounded like cleaning, or something normal, but my eyes kept being drawn to the ceiling, so much so that several of the members kept looking up as well.

I told the group I’d be back in a minute and went out to find the building manager, telling him I’d like the smaller room. He shrugged, unlocked the door for me, and I herded everyone into the smaller room. We were about 30-minutes into the class when there was a loud crash from the other room.

We ran out into the hallway to have a look, and the entire ceiling had collapsed in the big room, right on to the chairs where we had all been sitting half an hour before. The majority of the group would have been crushed. I called the building manager a week later, and he said that there was a big water leak that had weakened everything, and the noises I heard were probably the supports beginning to breakdown.

I had been looking for a new house to rent for myself and my three children. I was newly divorced, and it was a fresh start for all of us. We looked at maybe a dozen houses, none of which felt quite right, but the last house was different. It wasn’t pretty, or as modern as the rest of them but as I walked in, I felt safe.

The agent explained that the bars across the windows were kick bars because the last occupant had run away from domestic violence and the police had put them in as a precaution. She offered to have them taken off, but I told her just to leave them, no need to create more work for someone else when it adds a bit more protection. A couple of months later I was asleep when I heard the sound of smashing glass downstairs.

I called 911 and hid with my kids upstairs. When they got to my house the intruder was still there, trying to get in. He’d smashed the windows but because of the kick bars, he’d not been able to get through. The next day the police came to tell me that the man they’d arrested was the husband of the previous tenant, who had no idea his wife had moved, and when they searched him they found a gun and a couple of knives in his pockets. I was asleep when he tried to break in, and my daughter was sleeping with me. We would have been slaughtered in my bed if I hadn’t decided to leave the kick bars on.

This story isn’t about me, but rather my mother. I always call my mom every day, just to say hi and catch up on how things were going. This one day about a year ago I called her as usual, but there was no answer. I tried a couple more times, but still, she didn’t pick up.

This wasn’t unusual – she often went out, or spent time in the garden and wouldn’t hear the phone, but when she would notice a missed call from me, she’d always call back. Still, something was telling me she wasn’t okay. I tried to ignore it, but the nagging feeling in my gut wouldn’t leave me alone, so I jumped in my car and headed over to her house.

I had a key, so I let myself in, calling her name. That’s when I saw her, on the ground in the garden. I performed CPR until the medics arrived, and thankfully she survived. Apparently, she’d suffered a heart attack. We had no idea she had heart problems, so there was nothing to warn me apart from my gut feeling. Definitely pay attention to it now!

I’ve always been intuitive when it comes to my own health, and I know my body, so when I started to feel tired and lethargic, I knew something was wrong. I went to see my doctor, and he agreed to give me a full work up. I had every blood test imaginable, all of which came back normal. I had no pain, no symptoms other than the fatigue, and the doctor told me to stop worrying and that it was probably impending menopause (I was only 38 at the time). I still couldn’t shake the feeling that something was seriously wrong.

After talking to my mom about doctor issues she's had, I ended up paying for a second opinion and had some scans done, which showed a mass on my bowel. A biopsy confirmed it was cancer. I knew something was wrong. Further scans and tests showed that the cancer hadn’t yet spread, but if I hadn’t insisted on a second opinion, I might not be here today.

I’m a security guard, and I had been put on night duty, patrolling this abandoned psychiatric hospital. It was next to a working hospital, so both properties had to be patrolled. Most of the guys on the team hated patrolling it, so I picked up extra shifts for it pretty frequently when I first started. I’m a big guy, I work out, and up until quite recently, I boxed, so there's not much I'm afraid of.

So there I was, walking around the old hospital, feeling bored and wishing the hours away. I came to the bottom of a staircase and was about to go up and check the next floor, but something stopped me. There was no sound or anything, but as soon as I touched the handrail, my gut instinct went crazy. It’s not like me to back out of anything, but I was scared. I stuck around for the rest of my shift, staying mainly outside, and then went home.

My boss called me the next day. A body had been found on the first floor of the building. The dead guy was known to the police as someone who was heavily into drugs. They never caught who did it but they think it was a drug deal gone bad, and the guy had been stabbed to death. Forensics put his time of death at around 2:15 a.m., right around the time I was about to go upstairs. Had I ignored my gut feeling I might have walked in on the whole thing.

When my doorbell rang one morning, I assumed it was a package from Amazon. It was close to Christmas, and I had done a lot of online shopping, so I was super excited to see what I had bought and start wrapping before the kids came home from school. I was halfway down the stairs when the doorbell rang again.

I stopped dead. Something about that second ring sounded ominous – sounds crazy, right? But I knew that whoever was outside my house was dangerous. There are no windows on my front door, so I couldn’t see who it was. I tiptoed to the back door and made sure it was locked, and then stood in the hall, waiting. Eventually, I heard footsteps walking back down my path, so I ran upstairs and peeked out through a crack in the curtains. Two men were getting into a white van and looking back at my house, before driving off.

I managed to get part of their licence plate. Later that day I learned that a woman on the next street had been attacked by two men who had knocked on her door, pretending to be meter readers. When she opened the door, they pushed her inside and tied her up before robbing her home, taking her electronics and cash. I called the police and gave them the plate number and a description of the men. Our neighborhood was just the latest in a series of home invasions by these men, and one of the women had been left with serious head injuries. I've since moved.

Gut feelings usually comes to us with no rhyme or reason, but they're rarely wrong. Pay attention to yours, because it might just save your life!