OK, here's one: This was after I had sold my 2-seater Cessna 150, and while I was renting planes. Arriving at the airport, I find out that all 2-seaters, which I was intimately familiar with, were rented out or in the shop, so I decide to suck it up, pay a little bit more and rent a 4-seater (Skyhawk) instead. I had been checked out in one during the BFR a few months ago, but it wasn't what you call "fits like a glove". So I take off, fly to, whatever, Monterey or something, enjoy the coastal scenery and the toy houses below and finally get back to the home airport and land. Turns out, being not 100% familiar with a Skyhawk, I land going too fast. So what does an airplane do when you land at too fast a speed? It does what it's designed to do, it takes off again. A little. It starts to hop down the runway, doing these little bunny hops. Would be a fun thing to do (the hops don't damage the landing gear or anything), except for the insignificant little fact that while you're hopping down the runway, you cannot brake. So the shopping mall conveniently located at the end of the runway starts to get larger and larger in the windshield, as I'm still hopping down the runway at 70 knots. If you panic now, you're dead. So training and survival instinct take over, I push the throttle forward, retract the flaps and pitch the airplane into best climb angle. The shopping mall is now filling the windshield, but the airplane is light, with but one person inside, and the engine does its job and finally there is a positive climb and the airplane clears the shopping mall. Once again I enter the landing pattern, but this time I land 5 knots slower and it doesn't hop and I can brake and turn off the runway.
My point is, you haven't really lived until you have almost died once.
Last year I was starting my take off and about 1/3 of the way down the runway, a huge, huge coyote (biggest I've ever seen) runs clean out in front of the plane, gets terrified by the prop and starts running straight down the runway in front of the plane. Scared the hell out of me, the coyote probably shat himself and then dashed off to the side as my stall horn was blaring and I'm expecting to drop back to the runway any second with a thud... fortunately I got it leveled off and gained a bit of speed before the end of the runway and cleared the trees and power lines with a few feet to spare.
I guess my scary-est pilot story was flying from connecticut to pa, around the west side of NYC. the cieling was closing in from above and the trees were rising underneath.. the sky looked lighter to the west but with a classC airspace there. I came very close to just going IFR. (not certified)... but the radio was blasting things about convective sigmets, i was loath to go into the clouds..... anyway, I safely made it back to wings field without bending any metal.