People Share Crazy 9/11 Experiences In Chilling Reddit Thread

A Reddit thread is going viral with some truly heartbreaking and chilling 9/11 experiences.

Wednesday was the 23-year anniversary of the horrific terrorist attack that left thousands of innocent Americans dead.

The attack carried out by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda operatives using planes as weapons took down the Twin Towers, hit the Pentagon and one plane went down in Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.

Chilling thread of 9/11 experiences goes viral.

Everyone who was alive on the day remembers exactly where they were when they heard the news. It's one of those moments that sticks with you.

People took to Reddit on the 23-year anniversary to share stories of the worst moments from the attack, and it's a must-read thread.

Check out some of the stories below, and let me know your thoughts at David.Hookstead@outkick.com:

• An acquaintance of mine was a medical resident on the upper west side of Manhattan. The hospitals went into emergency triage mode, prepping for an onslaught of injuried survivors, thinking there would be huge overflow from closer hospitals. And it was just…silent. There were no survivors to send to their way. That’s when she realized the unprecedented devastation of the attack.
• The hours before I knew if my mom was dead or alive. They wouldn’t let us leave the school and I didn’t have a phone. From our school we could look out the window and see the smoke. Some people saw the second hit. Finally they couldn’t hold us any longer and I ran home. Mom was asleep and didn’t even know what had happened, she had taken me to school then decided she was going to take the day off and went home to nap and just slept all day.
• My dad was a bartender in Fairfield Co CT near a train station and said the cars left there in the parking lot was sad. Then some his regulars stopped showing up eventually he found out they were gone
• A phone call from the mother of my lifelong best friend telling me that he had been killed at the Pentagon that day.
• All the footage of people jumping.
• Watching on television as people in the towers looked at their options and chose to jump. Absolutely heartbreaking.
• When the second plane hit, and it became evident that this was not an accident.
• When I found out that my roommates dad died in the second tower. He had gone down to the sky deck after the first plane hit but they gave the all clear so he went back up to his office thinking he would be okay because he was there in 1993 during the car bomb attack in the garage, then the second plane hit trapping him.
• When the first tower fell, the feeling of absolute dread and horror knowing how many lives were ending at that moment. The second one falling just felt like the end of the world and in many ways it was. The world we lived in changed dramatically and immediately.
• For me, the worst was thinking I had just lost both my parents in a 6 months period. My mom died in the spring of 2001. My dad was at the Pentagon. I was a sophomore in HS and spent the day wondering who I was going to be living with, how I was going to keep our house, how I was going to pay for food, etc. All punctuated by new and increasingly horrific images and news updates. I barely remember that day other than sitting with my classmates in each subsequent period staring at the TV and talking in small groups. A lot of people at the school had family that lived or worked in the District so we were all more than a little freaked out. Most of that day is a foggy haze to me my brain was just overwhelmed with the enormity of it all and my own personal shock. My dad was fine in the end, but I didn't know until I got home from school and checked the answering machine and heard his voice. I think I cried a little with relief.
• I was living in Okinawa when it happened and immediately the base shut down and sirens went crazy. They had to prepare as if the attack was from N.Korea and act accordingly. It was in the middle of night and I was like 11 so it was super weird.
• Seeing all of the people jump from the flaming towers. It was sanitized from most replays, but when the event was being shown live, you could see one person after another jump. Some would jump 5, 6 people at a time. You could see holes in the roof of a pavilion where the bodies tore through. And you could see the results on the ground, although identifying them as human was impossible. The thought of what those people must've been facing inside the towers that made jumping to their deaths the better option was horrifying.
• For me, it was that I just got home from Army training late on Sept 9th and was really looking forward to relaxing with my girlfriend for the two days I had before classes started at university. I hadn't even unpacked my gear yet. I turned the TV on, watched the second plane hit, and my heart sank when my phone rang soon afterwards. By the end of the day, I was saying goodbye to my friends and family again.
• "(My dad's name), I can't reach either of them. I can't, I can't." My aunt breaking down sobbing around 9pm because no one could reach my two family members in the NYPD. My uncle called around midnight to say he was ok. My dad's cousin the following afternoon. They had both been assisting with the evacuations around the city.
• Being a few blocks away seeing bodies fall, then being told to run north.
• It was surprising how long it took everyone to realize that the plane that hit the first tower was a jetliner and not a small private prop job.
• When Flight 93 was flying toward Washington, and we were wondering who of our friends were already dead and who were about to die.

That's just a handful of stories from the Reddit thread. It's just simply brutal to read through it. There's no other way to put it.

I was sitting in school when an announcement went out for all teachers to turn on the TVs in the classrooms, and we sat there the entire day just watching the carnage and horror unfold.

I remember many of the female teachers crying, and many of the male teachers being incredibly angry. It was surreal in the moment and it's still a crazy moment to me more than two decades later.

Be grateful we had plenty of brave men ready to respond, and never forget those we lost. Do you have a 9/11 story? Let me know at David.Hookstead@outkick.com.