Two friends, my brother, and I were all nearly killed in a stampede when we were 10ish years old.
There were about 100 cows or so, and one bull, and the friends' dog was riling them up. When the bull attacked the dog, the dog ran to us for help, and all of the cows followed at a high rate of speed.
We ran as fast as we could, realized we weren't going to make it to the fence and the fence might not matter anyway, and ended up climbing a tree and staying it in for many hours until the bull finally left us alone. Then we were able to run across the field and over the fence to safety.
It didn't actually feel all that serious at the time but, now that I know better, I'm surprised none of us got hurt.
When my brother and I got off the bus one day, sometime in early high school, a random dude was sitting on our porch. When we got close, he leapt at us.
My brother and I are both blackbelts, so it wasn't that tough to knock him away. Once he saw that he couldn't do anything to us, he took off running and never looked back.
Given the area we lived in, and how easily we'd fought him off, we didn't think much of it.
We were wrong, though, as a whole bunch of police showed up to the neighbor's house over the course of that evening.
Turns out that the man we'd seen had slit our neighbor's throat (she lived) and then was attempting to get into our house to hide.
When I was in college, I was shopping at Walmart around 3 A.M. (As you do) and when I was attempting to enter my car, with my arms full of groceries, a dude came up from behind me.
He pushed me against my car, used his forearm to push my head forward, and tried to stick his hand into my pocket (To grab my wallet, I presume).
I dropped everything to the ground and did a spinning-back-elbow into what I thought would be his head, but he turned out to be tall as hell, so I nailed him directly in the throat.
He went down like a sack of potatoes, writhed on the ground for a while, and then I drove away.
Since then, I always keep my keys in my hand, ready to punch, whenever I'm in a shady parking lot. I've also, of course, over-analyzed that scenario a million times.
So the next year, at the same Walmart, at the same time-ish, the same damn thing happened.
A guy came up behind me, pushed me against the car, put his hand into my pocket, and I did a spinning-uppercut on him.
My key went straight through the bottom of his mouth, knocked out his two front teeth which hit me in the face, and ripped the shit out of his lip.
I was just as horrified as he was.
I ripped the key back out of his mouth, gave him a very sincere shove, and then he ran away.
I don't know if the mug-attempts count as near-death, but you never really know nowadays.
Moral of the stories: Living on farms and in poor areas can be dangerous.
There might be more if I think about it for a while, but those are what popped into my head right away.
EDIT: Of course! I almost drowned once, when I was around five or six years old.
What's ironic is that it was a repressed memory for most of my life, and I had no recollection of it at all.
Until one day I read a "How to Recognize Drowning" post on this very forum; at which time the memory came slamming back into my head.