(no subject)

[wildflowersoul]

Well, I had an.... unsettling walk home from kung-fu tonight. So I'm walking home down the bike path, and I'm a bit creeped out by some swirly lights in the sky overhead. I have an unreasonable alien fear, and it tweaked me out a little. Walking a bit further, I hear this horrible sound of a man screaming/crying, I'm not sure how to describe it, but it sounded like someone in serious distress. A guy walking near me paused and looked at me and asked if I heard it, too. Another girl near us stopped her phone conversation and joined us when she noticed that we were noticing it, too. So the guy asked me if I had a cell phone, and I grabbed my phone and called 911. While calling, the guy and I went back towards the sound, coming from one of the buildings that borders the path, there's a little street branching off the path to a side street, and we were going to get the name of that street, and noticed that someone else was also calling the police about it. We congregated for a minute or two, not sure what else to do, but since two people had called the police, and the other calling guy was going to stay, I headed out, as the other guy was yelling up to the building that the police were on their way. Very unsettling.

You know, for all the times that I read about the bystander effect in psych classes, I always told myself that in a situation, I'd definitely offer help, but I'm not sure what I would have done if that guy hadn't acknowledged that he thought something weird was going on, too. The screaming guy wasn't yelling for help, but it clearly sounded like something was not right. Or even if there hadn't been a third person on the path near us, would I have dealt with talking to a strange guy at all? There's generally a small amount of foot traffic on the path after kung-fu, but there are some nights when it's dead quiet and there's no one ahead of me or close behind, and the OMG-I-MIGHT-GET-MUGGED instinct kicks in.

So anyway, I hope the guy in need got help and is ok; I'm glad some of us around the situation actually did something about it.

Comments

[tenillypo.livejournal.com]

Creepy!!

[wildflowersoul.livejournal.com]

Totally!

[watchamacallit.livejournal.com]

That's an admirable thing, calling for help. I've made several 911 calls from the highway to report something on teh road or someone with a flat. But I never stop.

[wildflowersoul.livejournal.com]

It was a good group-think situation, I don't know that I would have done anything if we had all done that city thing of pretending that no one else exists around us. Oh man, I would never stop on the highway either. You never know what kind of weirdo might be in that car!

[wildflowersoul.livejournal.com]

The bystander effect is basically that when something is happening and a bunch of people are around to see it, the people witnessing it are less likely to do anything to help because they either think someone else is going to help, or they see other people not doing anything so they think maybe it isn't a big deal (it's kind of based on an incident in New York in the 70s when a woman was murdered outside of an apartment building, and a bunch of people in the building watched it happen but didn't call the police).

I was totally worried that the police would give me a hard time because I had no clue what was going on, but they were pretty decent.

[bushidokelt.livejournal.com]

So i take it the lights were totally unrelated? I'm deathly afeared of aliens myself, so i know the feeling.

[wildflowersoul.livejournal.com]

I'm just going to assume that the lights were spotlights... or something. They didn't seem to be related, but then again if aliens were kidnapping me I'd be screaming bloody murder, too.

[incandes-flower.livejournal.com]

Whenever I see an accident I always think of the bystander effect. Once I made Jeremy pull the car over to get someone at a gas station to call 911 because we saw a car flip over. I feel a lot more responsibility in those situations now that I know how people react. However, if I was alone I think my awareness of my own safety would get in the way of that. Freaky.

[wildflowersoul.livejournal.com]

Wow, I would freak out if I saw a car flip over, good for you for calling. It really makes me glad that so many people have cell phones these days. The whole thing was just very, very weird.