Those aren't horror stories, here's a horror story:
100+ foot oak tree in my line of site, no way around it. So large, you couldn't completely reach around it. What to do? Get out the chainsaw! Put up a steel rope about 40feet up, which is the highest I could get to. That's for insurance to help persuade it to drop the right way. I had asked the neighbor if I could remove a panel of his wooden fence, so as to drop the tree into his woods, the opposite direction from my house. SURE, I'll help he said. Tied the base of the steel rope to the bottom of a tree 100 feet away with a comealong, and torqued it tight. Neighbor decided that I should also connect a hemp rope from the oak tree, to the bumper of his truck 150 feet away. That was a dumb mistake. I started cutting the tree, and it was going fairly well. Almost through, and the dang neighbor decided to take off in his truck! He pulled the bottom of the tree OFF the stump, and caused it to fall BACKWARDS towards my house! I'm going: Oh sh+t, oh sh+t, I'm going to die, and my house is going to get crushed! I'm backing up real fast, and fall down in the path of the tree. I scuttle back out of the way like a 3 year old. The tree comes down slowly because the steel rope is braking it, and is spinning counter clockwise because of the large branch right below where the steel rope is hooked, and that's the heavy side. It crushes my chainlink fence as the branch digs into the ground and halts the top of the tree on enough angle as it grazes lightly down on my roof causing NO DAMAGE TO MY ROOF!
I'm thanking God that he sometimes takes pity, and protects fools from their own stupidness, in trying to save money by not having a professional remove a tree such as this. By the way, the steel rope pulled so tight from the tension of the tree falling, it girdled the other tree I had it tied to and killed it.