Megan, that sounds REALLY scary and a mite unsurvivable outside the sim. Look at some videos of tail fails in a hover and see how fast those things spin - and very rapidly some nose down pitch comes in, or the aircraft rolls, and the aircraft is no longer level, it is rotating tail low/tail high/tail low and very disorientating. Tail then hits the ground. In the Huey in the 70s, we used to practice slamming the right pedal forward to demo how fast it could spin - the feeling of being thrown forward against the seat belt is strange and upsetting.
In the sim, it would be interesting to see the coupling that happens after a high-powered spinning climb to 1000' and then trying to poke the nose over. Splat follows soon after.
In the 76B sim at WPB, they just taught me to grab the throttles back and make some sort of controlled LEVEL crash.