lifestyle

13 transit horror stories that will haunt your dreams.

There is just something about buses/planes/trains that brings out the very worst of humanity.

24-year-old writer Munyee Lau wrote an open letter to a fellow plane passenger that went super viral this week. Lau was flying from Singapore to Sydney last month when she found- or rather smelt- a couple of unsolicited seat mates during her flight.

“Dear passenger 15A,” she wrote on her blog. “You do not know me but I was seated in front of you during the flight from Singapore to Sydney on April 12th. What I had initially thought to be a routine flight turned out to be a once in a lifetime experience – and it was all because of you.”

The offending feet.

 

She continued, “It was so nice of you to take off your shoes and put your feet between my seat and the plane window. It must have taken considerable effort — it was a small space but you stuck it as close to my face as you possibly could.”

“For immediately, my nose was assaulted by a putrid smell of death and decay.”

“The stench was so strong that I turned to check if the old lady seated next to me was still breathing.”

But if you thought smelly socks was the worst thing to be dealt with during transit, think again. We’ve rounded up some of the most disgusting transit stories from around the office and the interwebs for your reading pleasure horror.

Warning: These stories get pretty foul.

1. “A friend of mine witnessed a hand-job on the train and then the girl wiped the semen on the hand pole in the carriage.”

ADVERTISEMENT

2. “On a bus one time this woman was eating a Kit Kat, and mid-chew she sneezed. I was standing across the aisle from her, and it all happened in slow motion – all the saliva and choccy chunks sailed through the air, illuminated by the afternoon sun, and landed squarely on my face.”

3. “I strongly believe that on domestic flights it is an unspoken rule that you DO NOT recline your seat. On a 1.5hr flight from Sydney to Brisbane I had a guy recline his seat into my long legs and then proceeded to rub his sweaty, smelly, bald head all over his seat cushion which was like five centimetres from my face.”

4. “I was on a train once and a man cut his arm and told everyone he had HIV. Then he tried to put his bleeding arm on people.”

5. “When I was about 14 going to my drama classes in Redfern, a guy came and sat opposite me in an empty carriage, looked at me intently and then started masturbating while staring at me. It was so traumatising.”

6. “I am that person who gets travel sick, and I was really unwell on my flight home from Thailand, and the girl next to me was a total bitch about it. Complained loudly the whole time, kept hitting the call button to bring flight attendants over so she could dob me in (although one was already looking after me) and was just generally awful. It’s hard because when you’re motion sick you can’t do anything about it and I was just trying to get through it. I kinda wished I’d thrown up ON her.”

ADVERTISEMENT

7. “A sweet old lady once sat next to me on the train, I thought, ‘awesome, this should be a pleasant trip in’. Then she started slowly scraping at her skin, then smushing the skin into little balls, then collected the balls of skin on her lap and then flicked them off. IN MY DIRECTION. No amount of filthy looks stopped her.”

 

8. “My friend was on a train and the chick she sat next to was a tad unhinged, she was saying she was on the run because she had killed someone and kept saying all this hectic weird stuff, and my friend sort of just ignored her. And then the lady wet herself. And didn’t have any clothes to change into – because all she was carrying were a small child’s clothes.”

9. “So I was on a bus coming back from a concert and an ACTUAL brawl broke out. A father and son duo lost their minds, then two younger men stepped in to stop them. The four punched on, one of the good guy’s girlfriends tried to help and she got her nose broken. The bad guys jumped on the seats and tried to fight and intimidate people. The cops came. I ended up in court as a witness.”

10. “I was once on an international flight with a baby that would not stop screaming ..  six hours in to a twelve hour flight he had screamed the whole way…  at least twenty people had offered advice about how to soothe him and it culminated when the baby projectile vomited across the laps, faces and laptops of an entire row of three people. ( The baby was mine.. the vomit was now theirs.) Oh the horror.”

ADVERTISEMENT

11. “On the train home from work I sat next to a morbidly obese guy. After he got off, I took the seat he was in, by the window. I found that the seat was very warm but I did not realise that it was also soaking wet, until it was too late. When I got off, I realised that I had a stranger’s piss all over my backside from the seat. IT STANK and had seeped through my clothing onto my skin. I could feel it drying off on me on the walk home. Gross.”

 

12. “I was on the Metro for a school trip in college. My group gets on right as another group leaves. All of a sudden I can’t breathe. The air feels like poison and I’m thinking the train got hit with an anthrax bomb or something. Everyone in the train car is gagging and flipping their shit except for one dude who looked homeless, who calmly looks up at me and says ‘just pepper spray’. So yeah, some fuck unloaded a can of mace in the Metro car and bailed out as a prank.”

13. “Was riding the T in Boston. Saw a shiny quarter on the floor next to one of the hold bars. Since I’m like a damn seagull the shininess attracted me. I got up, walked over to the the quarter. Bent over to pick it up. Was soundly slapped on the ass. The force of the ass slap caused me to go face first into the hold bar. The whole train laughed at me. I got a bruise on my face. Someone else got my quarter.”

 

Want more? Try these:

A group of disgruntled flight attendants on the worst things people do on planes.

“It’s time to stop the spread of men.”

Are people ruder than they used to be?

Tags: