What was your last brush with danger?

Katie Bange
Barista, Coffee Cartel
"My house is haunted. Every time we come home, furniture's been moved. We've had doors slamming and spoons flying across the room. There's a preacher who lives upstairs, and he came and prayed on it, and the next day the Mormons came by, and they prayed on it, too. But I still get a really bad feeling, like somebody watching. It's definitely a different presence, and it's very, very bad."

Justin Atsidis
Pig-Latin Instructor, Lipschitz Language Academy
"I was a passenger in a car, and we were going 25 mph, and I bailed out. I hit the ground and rolled. That got looked down on as this crazy act, and it followed me around for weeks. Then, as I was crossing a road, I got bumped by a car. That was painful. Woke up the next day, looked at my injuries and asked: "What the hell happened? You got such a short stay on this planet -- why would you do that to yourself?"

Beth Haney
Curator/Site Manager, Campbell House Museum
"Well, my last job I did a lot of filing, and there was always the looming threat of paper cuts -- probably the worst pain under the sun. And paper cuts are very dangerous. What if they get infected?"

James Fitzgerald
Sales, Rivertowne Studios
"I nearly hit a deer on I-64 while driving back from Louisville last night. It was kind of late, I was a little tired and I'm going along about 75, and suddenly there's a deer in the road. I had to swerve. It made me think about cars, how stupid they are, and it's too bad we have to hurry so that we risk killing ourselves and other creatures for our convenience."

Jane Lesser
Bartender, St. Louis Brewery Tap Room
"My cat, Onion, is a brush with danger every day. She'll come up and growl and hiss and puff up. I don't know what her problem is, but she's mean and nasty and evil -- and she has her claws."

Lee Brooks
Handyman/Hauler
"In '96, I got shot six times. I've still got the one bullet in my hip. I think it was my coat -- that was the color they wore in that neighborhood. I think another gang came in from somewhere else and shot me, thinking I was one of them. And what really hurt, the girl I was with, she refused to testify, so the shooter got off scot-free when I could've been killed. It's always something, isn't it?"