Warning: Long post, but I recommend you to read it all.

Ok, so this happened when I was around 9 years old (25 now) and It’s something I will never forget. It gives me goosebumps to this day.

I live in a terraced house (four houses combined) and my neighbors and I each have our own little patio. There’s a small road 10 meters from my yard where people do their Sunday walks and so on. Only a small fence separates my small yard and patio from that road. I live in a pretty crowded area, with several of these terraced houses spread around in my neighborhood, so seeing people walking on that road is pretty normal for me. Seeing random people standing on my patio is not.

When I was 9 I usually got home from school about an hour before my mom got home from work. I live maybe 50 meters away from school so my mom figured I was mature enough to be home alone for around an hour before she got home. This one day I got home from school. I did the usual thing which was to make sure I locked the front door, and double checked that the back door leading to the patio was also locked. (I was 9, being alone was a little scary even though it was in the middle of the day and only for one hour) I then rushed to my room upstairs to play as much PlayStation as possible before my mom came home and made me do homework.

While playing, I heard this noise coming from outside my window. (My room was located one floor over the patio, with a view to the road I told you about before) It was kinda like the sound of a cat. But my cat had been missing for over three months. Hope sparked and I thought “OMG, did he finally come back?!” I ran downstairs to check if it was my cat, but the sight that met me gives me goosebumps just writing this.

There was a guy standing on my patio. A tall guy with black hair covering half of his eyes, making him look like a male version of the ring women or something. I could hear him making high pitched sounds, almost like a cat meowing. A brown liquid was running down from his mouth, and I could see him spitting out my dads stomped cigarettes. He was actually eating from the ashtray. I was frozen observing this, eventually snapped out of it and screamed so loud that the man must have heard it. He didn’t react, he kept on eating from the ashtray.

I ran upstairs to my room, locked the door and called my mom who then called the cops. I’ve never been more terrified in my life. Laying in bed under my sheets, shivering with fear, as I hear these creepy high pitched noises from the guy eating cigarette stomps from the ashtray on my patio.

I kinda blacked out for a moment, because the next thing I remember is the police arriving on the road by my yard. I hear them talking to the guy saying stuff like “what are you doing?” “Get over here or we will come down and arrest you” and so on. He didn’t respond, but the high pitched sounds was more frequent and louder. I decided to look through the window, feeling safe now that the cops were there.

I could see two police officers standing by my fence, one man and a woman. I did not see the creepy man however, because he was standing directly one story under me and my field of view. The police jumped the fence, and I remember hearing the creepy guy screaming louder than anything I’ve ever heard before. He charged the female police officer with full force, and he fucking knocked her out cold. The male officer then immediately tazed the guy, leaving him shaking on the ground, screaming still. The police man struggled to keep him on the ground while putting handcuffs on him, but eventually made it.

After a while he managed to wake up the female police officer, who seemed to be badly hurt. He called for backup and an ambulance, and then he sees me standing in the window above him. The expression on my face must have been something else, because he just looked at me and said “I sure as hell hope you didn’t see all that” I started to cry. By this time neighbors started to arrive wondering what the hell was going on. One of my neighbors, an elderly woman, made me come down and she took care of me until my mom came back home. The police took the creepy guy with them in the car and left. Before they left they promised to come back and talk to us about what had happened.

This is where the story takes an unexpected turn. The male police officer came back later that night and sat down with me and my mom to talk. He explained that the guy on my patio was actually diagnosed with severe autism. He had escaped a facility where mentally challenged people lived, located around 5 km from where I live. He explained that the guy had actually been living in my house 5 years ago but he had been forced to move when his mom, his only caretaker, died. The poor guy probably thought he would find his mom in my house. He missed the routines and he missed living there with his mom. The police had to move him from the house that time 5 years ago, because he was extremely strong (From what I heard he had extreme tensions in the body because of the autism, making his muscles grow stronger and stronger throughout the years) This was the reason he reacted the way he did when the police came this day. Still frightened I told the police officer that he needed to make sure this would never happen again. He promised it wouldn’t.

After a few sleepless nights my life got back to normal. The years went by and the guy didn’t come back. Until one year ago. At this time my mom and dad had moved out, I bought the house from them and I’m still living there today. I was enjoying my morning coffee on the patio when I see this random guy stopping on the road by my fence. He just stands there, looking at me. I look at him and give him a nod. And then I hear the high pitched noises. “Holy shit it’s him” his hair had turned grey but the high pitched sounds made me realize. My heart started racing and I instantly remembered the reason why he was back. I realized that he must have managed to escape again. Because I kept my cool a bit longer then when was 9, I started to realize how sorry I felt for the guy. 16 years later and he was back to look for his mom. I decided to carefully ask him if he wanted to come down to the patio. He instantly jumped the fence. I started to think he would knock me out like he did to that police officer. He didn’t. He smiled. He looked at me and smiled.

I offered him to sit down. He didn’t respond. I offered him to come inside. He started laughing. We went inside. His face lit up, pure joy. He was home. It reminded him of the life he had with his mom. It almost made me tear up. All of a sudden he sat down in my couch, turned on my tv and switched directly to the cartoons. I observed him for a while, he was just completely focused on the cartoons. I just wanted him to enjoy the moment so I didn’t say anything to him. I realized I had to call the facility to let them know. The caretakers arrived 10 minutes later. After a lot of convincing he got back up, crying, and they went back to the facility. I called the facility two days later. We made a deal.

His name is Tom, and I now consider Tom my friend. Every Sunday from the day he returned, Tom and his caretakers visit me to watch cartoons. They say it’s the highlight of his week. It makes my heart warm. Now, for several years my thoughts were “Let’s NOT meet, guy on my patio eating from the ashtray” now my thoughts are “Let’s meet every Sunday to watch cartoons, my friend Tom”

I was about 7 years old; my brother about 10. It was well past our bedtime when our mom woke up off the couch to put us to bed. Our dad worked construction out of town back then, so it was often just us three at the house for weeks at a time. Up the stairs and to the immediate right was our parents' bedroom. Going left put you in the middle of a hallway. Taking another left down that hallway led to my brother's room. The opposite end was my room which was also across the hall from our upstairs bathroom. At either end of the hallway are windowed doors we always kept locked and rarely used. The door on my end led to a balcony overlooking our front yard, and the door on my brother's end opened to our back porch (the house kinda leans into a small hill).

My brother and mom both had a habit of waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. I only knew this because I was always a light sleeper and they just couldn't help flushing with the door wide open. This night, however, my brother stopped on his way to his room and came back towards the bathroom, "I'm gonna try to pee before I go to bed. The past few nights I've been too afraid to walk to the bathroom. I keep seeing a man wearing stripes at the end of the hallway.". I don't know if my mom wrote it off as my brother telling ghost stories to try to scare me or if she was already half asleep and didn't catch it, but she didn't react at all to my brother's confession. I, on the other hand, was terrified by it. The fear of seeing a ghost like that at the end of the hallway or through the windows is the reason I started running from the stairs to my bedroom at night.

Years later, when I was about 18, my mom and I were having a conversation in her car about a dog we had for a very short time when I was little. We were sharing stories about Max's tendency towards destroying my shoes and other unruly behaviors when my mom blurted out, "Do you remember that time I opened the front door for the cops and Max ran inside to the kitchen and started tearing open that big bag of dog food we had?". This really caught me by surprise, because in all the years I lived in that house we never once called the cops (gun owner family in a quiet, rural WV neighborhood, etc.).

I asked her what she was talking about and she looked equally surprised as if she had just revealed something by accident. "Oh, that's right! I never told you because you were too young at the time. One night, I woke up hearing noises outside my window and when I looked I saw a man staring into my bedroom.". She went on to describe how turning on the lights caused him to take off running and how she grabbed my dad's pistol before calling the cops. "I can't remember all the details I gave them when they showed up... tall white male, wearing a striped shirt and jeans, short dark hair... something like that. They said it matched the description of a man they were looking for in the area. It turns out he had escaped from jail on a murder charge."

Now, I know it sounds so obvious hearing those two stories back to back, but it wasn't until a few years ago, in my mid-twenties, that I pieced together that my brother had unknowingly warned us about a murderer who spent multiple nights casing our home.

This happened to me four years ago. It’s by far the most extreme and life threatening situation I’ve been in. The eyewitness account you are about to read is 100% true, and is mine.

For some understanding, this happened in the United States. It was the summer of 2012. My longtime boyfriend and I had recently gotten married. Even though we were dirt poor college students and lived in a dinky apartment, we were having a blast. That particular summer we gathered with our friends at the local movie theater almost every weekend. There was one just down the street from our apartment that had really cheap movie tickets. A night out that was under $10 was certainly within our budget! Anyway, one Thursday night I received a call from this group of friends inviting us to watch the midnight premiere of the newest Batman movie. I had just finished working a 12 hour shift and was pretty tired. I almost refused the invitation and thought of crashing in my apartment instead. However, I didn’t want to miss out on the fun, and it was a movie I'd wanted to see for a while anyway. Certainly it wouldn’t do any harm to stay up later than usual and miss a few hours of sleep, right?

At 10:30 PM we met at the theater. We passed large cardboard cut-outs of Catwoman and Batman as we walked inside, greeted by the smell of buttery popcorn and the chatter of excited movie goers. The ticket booth was to the right of the entrance, and just above that was an electronic list of movies being played. The 12:00 AM showing of the Dark Knight Rises was displayed up there in bright red letters. Being paranoid that the tickets would sell out quickly, one of my friends swung by earlier that day and purchased tickets for all of us. We bypassed the ticket line and went straight to the ticket taker. She smiled at us and kindly directed us to Theater 9, which was on the right side of the lobby.

If only I had known what I do now. That among the crowds a killer was lurking. That as I walked across that tacky red and purple carpet towards Theater 9, I could have been walking to my death. I think about it often now, what I would have done had I known. Pulled the fire alarm, called the police, screamed for people to run away....But, of course, I had no way of knowing what was about to happen. Oblivious to the peril I was putting myself in; I pushed open the doors for Theater 9 without giving it a second thought.

The hallway in this theater was shaped like a U and you could go either right or left. Theater 9 was the largest screening room in the building, perfect for accommodating the crowds that midnight premieres brought in. The screen was motionless and gray; not even the previews had started yet because there was still a good hour and a half to go until the movie actually started. We entered on the right side, so all of the seats were to our left. I remember being surprised at just how packed the theater already was. Just about every seat was filled, much to our dismay. At first it seemed like we wouldn't find a spot to sit together. Now, the way this theater was set up, there was a section of seats right in front of the screen. This area was flat, and there were about five rows of seating in this section. A lot of seats in that section were empty, but sitting right in front of the movie screen sucks and none of us wanted to sit there. One of my friends then spotted a row with five empty seats all next to each other, perfect for the amount of people we had. These seats were about 3-4 rows up from where the seating rows start to elevate. We ran up the stairs before someone could take the seats and filed in. My husband, Brock, sat in the 5th seat. I sat next to him, and my friend Samantha sat next to me on my right side. Her boyfriend, Tommy, sat next to her, and another friend named Leo sat in the aisle seat.

We spent the next several minutes casually chatting, joking around, and laughing. After a while my three friends went to the lobby to buy drinks and that addicting movie theater popcorn. While they were gone, Brock and I passed the time by people watching. The theater was bright since the lights weren’t dimmed yet, and I could see everyone clearly. There were a lot of people dressed in Batman T-shirts and hoodies. One person even had a mask and one of those shirts with an attached cape. There were a lot of kids in attendance as well, which wasn’t surprising because, even though it was a Thursday night, it was summer vacation so that meant no school the next day. Of all the people I saw, the person I will never forget was the little girl sitting in our same row a few chairs away. She was really cute, blond with blue eyes, and passed us several times on her way to the lobby, each time coming back with various snacks and popcorn. Overall, people seemed very excited to see the movie, and the room was filled with energy and laughter.

After what seemed like an eternity of waiting, the lights started to dim and the previews began. Just like every movie I've seen before, a quick animation flashed across the screen reminding us to get refreshments from the lobby (we were already devouring that popcorn like ravenous animals), to silence our cell phones, and to make sure we know where the emergency exits are. The animation had this ugly CGI cat in a tuxedo that was sitting in a movie theater. I casually glanced at the bright green emergency exit signs that were on the left and right sides of the movie screen. I didn't think much of the reminder, like usual. After that, I only remember one preview for the Man of Steel, the others I’m not sure what they were about. When the movie started the theater erupted into cheering and clapping. The title of the movie, The Dark Knight Rises, exploded onto the screen. This was followed by the scene where Bane is hijacking a plane. I thought this scene was pretty cool and it caught my interest right away. Only when the movie started to get a little less interesting did I remember just how tired I was. I decided I would close my eyes at the more boring parts to get a little bit of rest. I had been awake for 20 hours at that point, so I was rightfully sleepy. My eyes were closed for most of the duration of Batman and Catwoman’s encounter. I don’t really remember what was going on in that part of the movie (perhaps some of you have seen it and know what I’m talking about.) Anyway, when I opened my eyes again Bruce Wayne was on his computer digging up information on Catwoman. This is the last scene I saw. I never got to watch the rest of the movie.

All of a sudden, a loud BANG erupted from the left side of the theater. I sort of screamed a little because it startled me. A strange smell started to fill the auditorium. It was like the smell of a firework, so I thought it was a cherry bomb or something similar. Had someone thrown fireworks into the crowd as a prank? Then, down near the right sight of the movie screen, the dark silhouette of a person caught my attention. They were just a black frame against the bright movie screen. A series of flashing lights was coming from this person. It was a weird moment where time literally slowed down and everything went strangely quiet. I was completely frozen, unable to move and really unable to think at all. It was like my brain had stopped working entirely.

Brock caught on immediately to what was happening and he grabbed me. He pulled me to the ground and lay on top of me, shielding me with his own body. At this point time and sound returned to me. I could hear the gunshots ringing out across the theater. People were screaming. The movie was still playing on top of it all, creating a chaotic explosion of sound. I realized the flashing lights I had seen were bullets flying out of a gun barrel. An instant sensation of adrenaline flooded my body. There was absolutely nothing I could do except lay there and hope to God that the bullets I heard ripping through seats and walls wouldn’t go through me, too. At one point shrapnel hit my head, cutting off a good chunk of my hair, and as I reached for the spot to make sure it wasn’t bleeding hot pieces of metal fell into my hand.

I was lying face up, so I could see everything that was happening. The lights from a still-playing movie danced across the ceiling and walls. My friends were on the floor with me. Our unfinished bucket of popcorn was spilled all across the floor. Leo had his legs sticking out into the aisle because there wasn’t enough room for him to hide completely behind the seats. At some point Samantha's water bottle, which had been in the cup holder between our seats, exploded. Water splashed all over my face. The smell of gun smoke was overwhelming. Riot grade tear gas made me cry and caused me to cough uncontrollably. There was another smell, too; the horrible metallic smell of blood that I’ll never forget. I remember my lower body feeling wet all of a sudden. For some reason I thought this came from the leaking water bottle, but I soon realized this wasn’t the case.

All of a sudden things went strangely quiet. The bullets had stopped for some reason. Tommy shouted “LET’S GET OUT OF HERE!” We took advantage of the opportunity and made a run for it. We ran down the stairs, across the front of the screen towards a bright green EXIT sign. We crammed into a small, closet-like space where the door was. It was so dark we had a hard time finding it. We were screaming and slamming on the walls to find the door, blinded by the tear gas and dumbfounded by shock. Then, finally, my hands felt the metal door handle and I pushed against it with all my strength. The door flew open and the light of a nearby streetlight flooded our eyes. We pushed against the door so hard that we all fell over onto the concrete. Samantha lost her pink flip flops just outside this doorway.

As I scrambled to my feet and literally ran for my life, I realized my legs were red; absolutely soaked with blood. It was like I dipped my legs into a bath tub full of it. I checked my body all over and realized I wasn’t injured at all. Where had this blood come from? I looked behind me and realized that the blood was my husband’s. He had been shot in the leg. A massive, gaping hole had ripped through the lower half of Brock's right leg. His foot was barely hanging on and dangled lifelessly. Leo and a young man I didn’t recognize were carrying Brock because, after falling outside the door, he lost all his strength and he couldn’t walk. I was completely shocked. I had no idea he had been injured, especially since he was right behind me the whole time and managed to escape the theater all by himself. How he did it on one foot, I’ll never know.

At this point I screamed. My scream was so loud that it alerted nearby construction workers. At the back of the theater there was a narrow parking lot, followed by a grassy lawn and then the street beyond that. The construction workers were doing road repair on this street, but as soon as they heard my scream and saw us running they stopped working and watched what was going on. I’m not sure why this is such a vivid part of my memory. Anyway, they carried Brock along the back sidewalk all the way to the end, where the corner of the building is. This was quite a distance, several dozen feet. My husband then collapsed from exhaustion and pain, saying he couldn’t move anymore. He lay down and a puddle of blood started to form beneath him. I looked back, and realized we had left a trail of blood leading from the door all the way to our current position.

I was trembling. I knelt beside Brock and glanced around to see who else was injured. Tommy had been shot in the knee and the hip, and was further away in the parking lot. The teenager who helped my husband was also injured. His dad and mom were with him; his mom was sitting against the wall and looked like she was going to pass out. She was bleeding from several places. That family escaped at the same time we did. I guess they heard the bullets stop and decided to make a run for it, too. We were all lucky, because the shooting was still going on inside.

I had to take off my shirt and use it to stop the bleeding. I’ll never forget how lifeless and limp his leg felt, and I imagined that’s what a dead body must feel like. I got blood all over my hands and arms. The police showed up really, really fast. I’d say we were only outside for a minute or two before the red and blue sirens filled the night and rushed to our location (we were literally a block away from the police station). A female officer stood by us the whole time until paramedics arrived, which took a very long time.

Brock was one of the last to be taken to a hospital. He was bleeding out for almost twenty minutes before an ambulance pulled up on the same street with the road work. At this point he had become almost unresponsive and was on the verge of unconsciousness. Several massive guys rushed across the grass with a stretcher, loaded him onto it, and then ran with him back to the waiting ambulance. I wasn’t able to go with him because there was another injured person in the ambulance, and it was too crowded. I wandered around to the front of the theater alone, unsure of where my friends had went. My blood stained shirt and a pool of blood were left behind on the corner of that sidewalk.

Walking through the crowds felt like a dream. I couldn’t believe what just happened. People were in hysterics and crying. A lot of people such as me were covered in blood. And, like me, I’m pretty sure the blood staining their skin and clothes wasn’t their own. A lot of people seemed to notice how lonely and dazed I looked, so they kept me company and even offered me a ride to different hospitals to find Brock, because I hadn’t been told what hospital he was taken to. I hung around these people for a while as police swarmed the area and asked us what we saw inside the theater. The whole parking lot was on lockdown, and we weren’t going to be allowed to leave any time soon. It was around 2:00 AM, so it was very dark outside still (and I was pretty cold, wearing only an undershirt and shorts). The flashing red and blue lights of what seemed like 100 police cars were blinding. I remember seeing a big police vehicle pull up that said something like “Crime Scene Investigation Unit” on it. I think that’s when it really sank in and hit me. I started to get sick to my stomach and wanted to vomit, but somehow I was able to hold it back.

Eventually, police started letting people leave. I jumped into my truck and booked it out of there. I was in such a panic that I didn't even think to go back to my apartment, grab my cell phone (which I had forgotten) and call my parents or someone else to help me! I was angry, upset, scared, and most of all still in a state of shock. Was I really going to lose Brock only a month shy of our first wedding anniversary because of some psychopath with a gun? Thankfully, by the time dawn rolled around I found the hospital he was treated in. This was in the next city over, maybe 45 minutes from the theater if you're going the speed limit. I was so happy to be there, and the hospital staff were all so welcoming and understanding. After making sure I wasn't injured as well, they let me wait in the ICU room that Brock would be placed in when he was done recovering from surgery. I was so glad he was alive. Brock and Tommy both had survived, though many others weren’t so lucky.

I found out the following day (after some much needed sleep on a hospital couch) that 12 people were killed in this shooting and over 70 were injured (I remember they first thought 15 people were killed, but the real number was 12). The little blond girl sitting in my row did not survive. She died in the theater no more than a few feet from us. She had been shot multiple times. A heart broken police officer, who cried during his court testimony, tried unsuccessfully to save her by carrying her out of the theater and having her sent to a hospital. Tommy was rushed to a different hospital in the back of a police car. He underwent surgery and made a full recovery. The bullet missed his hip bone and narrowly missed his urinary tract and bladder. According to the surgeons, my husband lost almost half his blood. Brock made it to the hospital just in time; any later and he would have died. He underwent several blood transfusions and was in the hospital for 21 days. The wound to his leg was severe enough that they had to amputate it after trying unsuccessfully to save it.

It’s been so long since the shooting happened that my husband, friends, and I have been able to recover from it somewhat. The event was pretty horrifying and has left us scarred for sure. I wouldn’t consider that part of the story to be creepy, though. No, the creepy part is the shooter himself. I later learned much about him from the murder trial that would follow in the coming years. Though my encounter with this man was very brief, he has affected my life greatly. Just to know that people like this exist…is disturbing. He is certainly one twisted individual that I never want to see again.

I learned everything from watching the televised trial that took place in early 2015. This guy was going to school for neuroscience or something in California. I guess he was a pretty smart guy. However, for some reason he had an obsession with killing people and had a stalker mentality. After dropping out of his university, he moved to my state and chose my local theater to commit a mass shooting. Before that, he was planning on hiding along remote hiking trails up in the mountains, jumping people, pulling them into the woods and killing them there, though he never went through with that idea. He stalked my theater for months and had this shooting all planned out for the night of July 20th. Though I never saw him before this, its unnerving to think this guy could have been watching us every time we went to the theater, and we would have never known it. We were completely unaware of what he had planned against us. This completely ruined my sense of security, because who knows what the stranger next to you is planning on doing to you.

I came very close to the shooter, but I never actually saw his face in person until I was forced to testify in court. Of course I saw his mug shots on television, but while in the theater I only saw him as a dark silhouette in the shadows, like a demonic figure rendered from the darkest and most sinister nightmare. He was even in the hallway that we passed upon running for the emergency exit. The only thing stopping him from killing us there and then was his jammed assault rifle. To commit this crime, he ordered a few thousand rounds of ammunition, riot gear and armor, tear gas, an assault rifle, and a shotgun. He took pictures of himself, which were shown in court, wearing all of this gear like some sick trophy and holding up these weapons with a menacing smile. He dyed his hair orange and put in these creepy black contacts while making devilish faces into his camera, something that made me sick just looking at. Before driving to the theater with all of this gear in his car, he booby trapped his entire apartment and set it to explode if anyone opened the door. Then, once at the theater, he posed as a movie goer and even bought a ticket for the movie. I think his ticket had Theater 8 on it, which was next door, but Theater 9 had more people in it so he went into number 9 instead. He was in the few front rows. I must have passed him several times in the lobby while he was there. Maybe he had seen me, too. At some point during the movie, he got up and went through the side exit (which didn’t have an alarm for some reason), kept it propped open with something, then went to his car to put on all his armor and grabbed his weapons. Then, he came back inside and started shooting. When we escaped the theater, we ran past his white car which was parked right at the exit. We didn’t even notice it. At some point he came outside, and he would have seen us there on the concrete. I don’t know what stopped him from shooting people that were outside, too, but he could have easily ended us there and then if he wanted to.

I think the hardest part for me was facing this twisted individual in court. I’ll never forget rising as they called my name, walking down the center row past my family, other survivors, and crowds of news hungry media personnel. I sat right across from him, maybe only 10 feet away. While his orange hair was gone and he wasn’t wearing black contacts, being so close to him was a creepy and uncomfortable experience. My encounters with this man are certainly ones I will never forget. I can now say that I've come face to face with a true, deranged psychopath. He just had this blank stare in his eyes the whole time. If eyes truly are the windows to the soul, then his soul was filled with nothing but a cold indifference for those he had murdered and harmed. He wouldn’t even look at me. Sitting across from him in court was the second time I had knowingly been in the same room with this man. A man who had tried to take my life, but thankfully failed, a man who would end up spending forever behind bars when, at the end of it all, he was sentenced to 3,318 years in prison for his crimes.

This is to the man who tried to kill me. The man who has caused countless nightmares and fueled the fires of my paranoia. The man who hurt my friends and family, causing years of untold grief for my husband because he will never walk the same again. The man who stole the innocence and joy from a 6 year old child who went into that theater alive and came out dead. To the man who carried out the worst mass shooting in Colorado history, let’s not meet again. Ever. I hope you rot in prison.

(Edits: grammar and stuff. Also, I forgot to mention that Leo, Samantha, and I escaped without injury. A lot of people have asked, so I thought I'd mention that.

Thanks for all the support! I never expected so many people to read my story! Also, thanks to all you anonymous gold-givers :)

No, I will not be giving anymore information about my identity for obvious reason. I have provided proof to the moderators, and I don't think it's necessary to share that info with everyone else. I do have photos of my husband's injury, though I will not likely post them here for his privacy and for the graphic nature of the photo...)

I deliver pizza and I’d been having a really busy night, non-stop back and forth, without any time to even pause and take a leak.

I’d been so busy that I wasn’t really thinking about bathroom breaks. But we’re also going through a bit of a heat wave in our area, so I’ve been drinking copious amounts of water.

All of a sudden as I was driving to this particular delivery, the urge to go hit me. Like, things went from 0 to 60 in an instant. Thankfully I was close to the customer so could get this one over with quickly. Or so I thought.

I pulled up to the house, and it was an area I’d delivered in before, so I could immediately see that something wasn’t right. All the lights were off in the house, not even the glow of a television or anything. It was extra apparent because the streetlight closest to the door happened to be out of order. And on top of it all, the block was dead quiet.

This is a big university area, and obviously there aren’t many student renters in July, but there had to be at least one person, because someone ordered this pizza.

Maybe they just liked sitting in the dark or they were out back in the yard, whatever, I just didn’t want to get out of my car and knock on a quiet house in the middle of the night (around 9:30pm) without first checking that I had the correct address and the customer was inside.

It was scorching that night, even after sundown. My car’s A/C is a joke, and the piping hot pizzas don’t help things much, so I have to try and open the car door as infrequently as possible to keep any cool air in.

I called the number the customer provided and the voice on the other end said, kind of brusquely and out of breath, “Yah?” I just tried to keep it clear and concise, “Hey, it’s your pizza out front but there doesn’t appear to be anybody home?” And the customer replied, still gasping for air, “Yah, I’m not home.”

I had to pee so badly by that point that I was much less patient than I’d otherwise be with a customer right out of the gate, “Well, then we’re going to have to terminate the order, because I’ve arrived in the stated delivery window and you were supposed to pay in cash, so, I don’t know what to tell you. Plan ahead next time.”

I instantly regretted letting my bladder do the talking for me as the voice on the other end came through more clearly as a young, bubbly, and very distraught girl who couldn’t have been older than 20 or 25.

“Oh my gosh I’m so sorry I was running down the street so I could barely hear you!” She cried, “I just switched you out of my AirPods. Is that better? Sorry, I completely lost track of time at work, but I knew you were coming, that’s why I’m literally running home right now. Please don’t leave, I’m starving and I don’t have a car. Seriously, please don’t leave. Five minutes tops, ok?”

I know what it’s like to be hungry, and running late, and have no car but not live near any restaurants. Plus when I heard her voice I began to remember more specifically having delivered to this place a couple times before, and she’d always been perfectly nice. Now I felt bad for snapping at her. I tried to walk it back, while simultaneously looking out my window for potential spots to pee.

“No, no, my bad, I’m letting the heat get to me and it’s not your fault. No need to rush. See you when you get here.” I hung up and, while surveilling the street, was starting to think I was really out of luck.

All the other houses had people in them, and were close together, so there were no clumps of trees or out of the way patches of land or anything. Of course I had just tossed my empty water bottle at the last delivery, because I’m an idiot.

Finally, I decided it was escalating to the point of an emergency, and the safest bet was to use a bush in front of the woman’s house. She wasn’t home. The street light was out so no one would see me. The people who were home were inside. My car was parked across the street and we’re a small shop who don’t wear uniforms, so if someone did spot me, they’d have no way to connect me to my employer. Animals pee outside all the time, humans are animals... this is fine.

I scurried over to the tallest bush in her front yard. She didn’t really have much of a yard, more just a walkway lined with bushes and flowers that ran adjacent to her front door. The biggest cluster of bushes, the only one where I could be sure there would be no visible splatter on the side of the house, was about four feet from her door.

I looked both ways, unzipped, and let fly. After the initial millisecond of relief, I noticed the sound was way off, more like pissing on something solid than something leafy.

I started panicking, thinking I’d aimed wrong. But once I start, I can’t stop mid-stream, so I kept squinting into the darkness to see if maybe I was hitting a key rock or something and could just move a few inches over. Instead, all of a sudden, I heard a way more concerning noise. A deep voice exclaiming, “What the fuck?”

And before I could turn around, assuming I’d been caught by a neighbor, a man came leaping out of the bushes.

He blew by me, brushing my golden shower off him as did. He spit pretty emphatically on the ground, so I think I might’ve beaned him right in the face. I didn’t see where he went after a few paces but, though this next part is kind of a blur, I do think I remember hearing a car screech out from a bit further away after a minute.

I’d gotten some night vision by that point so I was able to make out his height, build, and outfit, but only the most general details of each.

I was in such shock that I didn’t even put my dick away. I just stood there trying to figure out what had happened. The reality was so terrifying that my mind refused to accept it, and impulsively searched for a reasonable explanation that could make everything ok.

I thought, “Could these bushes lead to some backyard area and just looked like they were against the house? Could they have been obscuring an open window?”

My inner voice was desperately screaming “Bruh that man was wearing a hoodie in 90 degree weather. That was a bad man. You’re in a bad situation.”

But the very idea that I was within inches of a guy who would be hiding in bushes at all, let alone in front of a young woman’s house at night, just wasn’t something I was ready to grapple with yet. I was coping by not coping.

My fight or flight response totally failed me at that point, because my dumb ass did the absolute last thing I should have done, and approached the bushes to try and validate this “There must have been a good reason for a man in a hoodie to be behind these bushes in the middle of the night.” theory.

So I walked over to the side, turned on my phone flashlight, and tried to peer around the line of shrubbery.

Pro tip, as scary as things may look in the dark, seeing them with a single beam of your flashlight can sometimes make it even worse. That’s when I saw the bag.

There was a tattered drawstring bag sitting behind the bushes. Slightly splashed with pee. But I was in such a moronic daze from shock that I groped around for it thinking “See? This is it, this will explain why he was back here.”

It explained it. Once I maneuvered it over and pulled it open I saw a sharp knife, a roll of duct tape, and a bottle of pills. The delusions officially broke at that point and all the adrenaline, endorphins, and self preservation instincts that had been suppressed kicked in ten times over.

I became whatever the opposite of dazed is. More laser focused than I have ever been in my life, with one singular goal: “Get back to my car.”

I dropped the bag, booked it across the street, got in my car, and slammed the pedal to the floor before the door was even all the way closed. I went as far as I could as fast as I could until I hit a red signal, then I pulled off to the side and realized I shouldn’t be driving anymore than necessary in the condition I was in.

I pulled into the parking lot of a 24 hour drug store and took a breath. I was finally calm and coherent enough to zip up and formulate a plan of action.

My first lucid thought was “Who do I call first, the police or the girl whose house that was?” I thought about it for what couldn’t have really been more than ten seconds, but felt like an hour, and decided “Ok. I am in my locked car with the engine running. If trouble starts, I can drive away. I know somethings up, she might not, she needs to know not to keep walking in that direction.” But as I was dialing her number, it occurred to me, “What if there was no girl?”

I thought I remembered delivering to that house before, but what if I was wrong? What if the girl on the phone was just a decoy to get me there to rob me, or worse?

Every pizza guy on the planet has seen the Evil Genius documentary by now, so I thought “She called me all out of breath. She wasn’t home. The whole thing was off, can’t risk it, I’ll start with the cops.”

I called 911, the operator was very helpful in keeping me calm, because I was a complete wreck by this point. He kept assuring me that someone would be there soon.

I kept telling them they had to get there before the girl did, but I was trying to express three thoughts at once, and really damaging my own credibility. It came out more as:

“You’ve got to save this girl because he wasn’t after me I was just delivering a pizza. Unless they were after me, in which case there might not be a girl, but I talked to one on the phone, so then you should find that girl because they used her to lure me there. But if she’s real she doesn’t know about the guy, who was also real, and there could be more guys if there’s actually a girl, and you know what? Even if there isn’t a girl there might actually be more guys. I only checked one part of the bushes so I don’t actually know. But we’ll know which guy is the one I saw because I pissed all over him, you know. I didn’t mean to, this was back when I thought the girl was real but not home, but she might be real so you really need to find her if she is because the guy was real—“

Finally they basically just asked me to stop talking and stay on the line. But that was when I saw an incoming call from the customer. I couldn’t answer it without disrupting my 911 call, so I just ignored it.

But then she sent me this text like, “Hey I’m here, don’t see you?” I told 911 she was there and they said officers were only minutes away. But who knows how long that meant? Especially after I’d given such a scattered account of the events in my panic.

I just felt overwhelmed with guilt. Because my rational mind said the odds of her being a decoy girl for some large scam targeting pizza guys were low and the odds of her being the intended victim of a predator were high.

So I put my 911 call on mute (where I can hear them but they can’t hear me) and turned back, heart absolutely pounding out of my chest, compulsively muttering “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” the entire way.

Then I took 911 off mute and told them I had returned to look for the girl. They weren’t happy about that, but I saw her meandering past the parked cars in the street looking to see if one was mine, and I waved her down, flashing my brights.

She bounced on over to the window of my car, happy-go-lucky. I figured that was a good sign that she wasn’t in on whatever this was. But I was just so scared to be back in the general area and to not know what had just happened or what was going to happen. I kept whispering “Get in. Get in!” And she was like, “Get it? Huh? Oh! You want me to get the pizza from the back?”

I didn’t want to make the same mistake with her that I had made with 911, so instead of trying to tell the whole story, I stuck to the bare basic facts. “There was a man in your bushes. I’m on the phone with the police. I don’t know where he is right now. Please get in the car so we can lock the doors.”

I was barely able to get even those sentences out, and I was shaking like I’d had 10 cups of black coffee. I held up my phone with 911 on the call screen to verify it for her. I thought that was why she got in the car with no further explanation, but it turns out that wasn’t entirely it.

“You still there? Is she with you? Are you safe? Is anyone else there?” 911 kept checking in, not knowing who the third party I was talking to was. I reassured them, and we drove, more cautiously this time, to a location 911 instructed us to wait at to speak with police after they cleared the area.

I didn’t actually have to do much after that. The police came pretty soon after, a police car met us, I gave a statement telling them everything I observed, and she went to go speak to more officers in more detail than they needed me for.

It turns out the reason she got right into a strange pizza guy’s car without probing any deeper into my story is because she knew who the man was right away from my description.

She had an abusive ex-boyfriend who was apparently psychotic enough that he immediately came to mind from hearing “There’s a guy in your bushes.”

She later called us to thank me and insist on leaving a huge tip. I wasn’t there when the call came in so the kid who answered didn’t know to refuse to accept the money. But the manager already promised the next time we see her we can load her up with enough “one free pie” cards to last a lifetime.

Easily the scariest thing that has ever happened to me, on the job or off. I don’t get the chance to tell the story much, because I try to avoid sharing it with anyone who could possibly know the girl or know of the event.

But I’m still not the same since. Even though I know he didn’t even have anything to do with me directly, this truly shook me to my core. So, man in the bushes, let’s not meet.

This happened to me about a month ago but it still boggles me.

Two points of background to make this story make sense:

1)I live in Tokyo and commute via those famously crazy crowded trains daily. There exists on them this kind of unspoken agreement that everyone works together to make this suck as little as possible. People for the most part hold their backpacks in front of them, men don't manspread etc. But thats when the trains are full. About two stops before mine, the train goes from SARDINE CAN to everyone on this train could lay on the seats and have room left over. So usually I can sit down at this point.

2) I'm not a Japanese woman. Very obviously so, even when I'm in my white dress shirt and pencil skirt like all the other office drones. I'm often the only obviously non-Japanese woman on my train in the morning. But despite my appearance, I'm fluent in Japanese.

So one day I sit down when the train empties out, headphones in, mobile game going, ready to enjoy the 10 minutes of sitting I get on my hour commute. I'm sitting with my legs crossed, but there's maybe 10 people in the whole car so I'm not in anyones way.

I'm tuned out when all of a sudden a hand reaches out and grabs my bare knee (I'm in a skirt). I of course jolt straight out of my skin, rip out my headphones and look up at the hand's owner. It's some skinny old japanese dude (60s???). He points at my legs, then at other people on the train (again, a max of ten in a car that can hold 50+ easily and probably held about 80 ten minutes ago). In slightly broken English he says

"You must not cross legs"

I'm so bewildered by this I start to tell him in Japanese "The train isn't crowded right now, I'm not in anyones way-" But he doesn't like this answer. He starts to reach for my legs again, presumedly to uncross my legs himself. I, liking even less of this, summon up my loudest non-scream "DON'T TOUCH ME", and thankfully this is enough to get him to stop that, as another thing you don't do on trains here is make a fuss.

Sadly though, yet another thing you don't do here is get involved. So despite a woman all but screaming "Don't touch me", its some foreign woman causing trouble, best not to get involved etc etc so no one comes over. So while I've made it clear that I will not stand for physical confrontation, this old dude still feels comfortable enough to stand directly in front of me, nearly knee to knee, looming over me while he repeats endlessly

"You. Must."

He did this for at least five minutes. I didn't move. I didn't blink or break eye contact. I started plans B through P of how to get off this train at the next stop. Thankfully he gave up before the next stop, shaking his head and calling me a "rude bitch" in Japanese before wandering off.

Still take the same train but haven't seen him since.

Lets not meet again leg police fucker, lest you find out what happens when you loom over a girl at dick punting height.

Edit: removed double negative

So last night, I was at a classmates house working on a group project we have due tomorrow. I live in an apartment in the town where our university is located and my classmate lives at his parents house which is in the foothills just outside of town. In order to get to the house, you have to drive along a relatively secluded and narrow two-lane road for about 5-6 miles. We started working on the project at about 6 pm and I ended up hanging around for a while after we had finished our working. So I left his house pretty late at about 11 and started down the road back towards town. I didn't realize how tough it would be to navigate the road at night; there were no streetlights and the road was unkept and riddled with potholes. On top of this, I had no cell service so I had to drive very slowly to make sure I didn't blow out one of my tires since I had used my spare a couple of weeks back.

I figure I was about 3 miles from the house when I rounded a tight corner and saw a pickup truck with a camper shell parked diagonally across the road. The manner in which it was parked completely impeded my path and I couldn't drive around it because there was a gully on both sides of the road. The only way for me to go at this point was backward, where there was a pulloff that I could use to turn my car around. At first I couldn't see inside the cab, but when I turned on my high beams I saw that there was a man slouched over in the drivers seat, his head resting against the steering wheel as if he had been knocked out after a bad accident. I immediately sensed something was wrong, the way his car had just "coincidentally" come to rest in a position that totally blocked the road was a big red flag for me. I had heard stories of people playing dead in the road as a way to lure unsuspecting people out of their cars so they could rob them.

I decided "fuck this shit" and elected to go back to my classmates house and explain what was going on. I threw the car into reverse and kept my eyes darting back and forth between my rearview and the truck. I looked and saw that I was almost to the pulloff where I could turn around. When I looked back, my heart skipped about five beats. The man who had been slouched over in the drivers seat was now walking at my car at a hurried pace while a few other men jumped out of the camper shell and started moving towards me as well. I panicked and accelerated backwards into the pulloff, which messed up the undercarriage of my car pretty bad. As I put it into drive the guy was already at my passenger side door tugging on the handle which, thank the lord, was locked. I only caught a brief glimpse of him but his face appeared to be scabbed and leathery, definitely a meth head or some sort of drug abuser. I sped away and didn't slow down at all until I reached the house, constantly checking my rearview to see if they were following. Thankfully they didn't tail me, and when I reached the house I explained what had happened to my classmate and we called the cops. I was grateful that my buddies parents were kind enough to let me stay the night.

They didn't find anyone on the road matching the description but I filed an incident report and they told me they would be on the lookout for similar vehicles and suspicious activity. But holy shit, I'm still so shook up over it. I keep getting the same adrenaline rush I got when I saw the guy charging me whenever I think about it. Please share similar experiences you've had, as I would appreciate a good read or a good discussion to help clear my headspace!

One time I went to the bar with one of my friends. I had just turned 21 so I havent been to much bars up to that point. My friend was drinking on the way to the bar so he was already pretty drunk when we got there. When I sat at the bar a cute girl came and talked to me and my friend. She said her name was Candice and I noticed she had really really bright red hair. I assumed she dyed it. It was pretty, but unnatural. Anyways.

This girl was flirting with me and my friend. She could tell my friend was already very drunk. To be honest I played along like I was drunk already too since it seemed to be working for my friend. I didnt know if she was just trying to get free drinks so I told her we didnt have much money. She offered to buy us drinks. She kept buying us drinks and I started to get confused as to who she liked between me and my friend.

My friend went to the bathroom. Before he came back he was kicked out by the bouncers. He was too drunk. Candice and I went outside with him. She kept telling him to go home with her. He was so out of it he could barely answer her. I told her he was too drunk and that I couldnt let him go anywhere. I didnt want him to wake up hungover in some random house with no car and no idea what happened.

Candice kept pushing it, saying that she would take care of him but I told her no because I had to stay with him, I was more sober than him he was my responsability. I told her the only way he was going anywhere was if I tagged along. I assumed she thought that I was jealous or cock blocking but my friend could barely stand and lost interest in Candice already at that point. She immediately started flirting with me and offered to get my friend a taxi to drive him home and said we could go to her place alone.

At this point I had a few drinks and I was pretty buzzed so I agreed. We took my friend to the taxi and walked to her car. I slightly stumbled on the way to her car. "Wow youre pretty drunk huh?" She said smiling as she held held onto my arm "yea" i said. I dont know why but I just felt slightly shy and anxious. Everything was just happening too easy for me so I felt uneasy. We got in her car we drove down the street. "Wanna stop at the liquor store and get some more to drink? I'll buy it so dont worry about paying" she offered.

I didnt want to drink anymore than I already did. I was already buzzed and wanted to be able to carry myself throughout the rest of the night. Sometimes I made myself look stupid when I'm drunk so I didnt wanna ruin anything with Candice more than I already did earlier with telling her my friend was too drunk. I told her I was already drunk enough but she insisted. I didnt wanna seem lame so I told her to get me a pint of liquor with some apple juice to chase it.

She went in the store and came out with a lot more than just a pint. I assumed she wanted to drink more also and thats why she got a fifth instead of a pint. On the car ride we passed the bottle back and forth but she took tiny sips. I tried to take tiny sips but she kept passing me the bottle and telling me to drink. I somehow managed to drink all of my apple juice, and pretend to drink the bottle by spitting the liquor in the apple juice bottle. I tossed the apple juice bottle full of liquor out the window before she saw it.

I didnt want her to know i was acting drunker than I was she actually believed I was sloppy drunk when I was simply buzzed. I took a couple more sips of liquor and finished the bottle. Throughout the car ride I called her the wrong name a couple of times to get a reaction out of her. She didnt react to it. She just kept letting me call her Carla without correcting me. For some reason I thought she lied to me about her name initially. We drove up to her house. I pretended to trip and stumble into her front door.

She helped me walk inside by holding me up. She opened her front door, which was unlocked, we walked in her house, she closed her front door and then locked it. I thought that was strange but assumed she didnt want anyone walking in on us. I told her that I had to use the bathroom. I walked into her bathroom, locked the door and looked in the mirror. I just felt strange, i felt like something was off. I felt myself becoming more drunk from finishing the bottle ealier. I turned on the sink to make noise and made myself puke up the liquor I drank. I flushed and went to the sink and started drinking the tap water out of my hands to sober up. I just didnt want to be drunk but I still wanted to hook up with Candice so I wanted to pretend to be drunk.

I turned the sink off and I could hear her talking to someone "he's drunk as hell. He can barely stand up. You do it." Who was she talking to? And do what? I walked out of the bathroom and into the livingroom. The moment i stepped into the livingroom i saw her walking into another room. All i could see was the back of her head, that strange very bright red hair go into another room. I didnt see her face or anything. I just saw her kind of walk fast into the room. The livingroom was pretty dark. "Hey where you goin?" I slurred like I was drunk. She walked back into the dark livingroom and up to me "let's go in my room" she said.

I looked at her bright red hair and then into her eyes. They were different. Her face was different. It was another girl with the same hair. Thats when i realized. It was another girl with the same wig on. It was a wig the whole time. She had changed it with the girl from earlier for whatever reason. My heart felt like it stopped. But i tried to look like I had no idea it was a different girl. I kind of smiled at her and told her I just needed to use the bathroom one more time and told her sorry I was so drunk. She said "its fine just hurry up in there" i went into the bathroom and locked the door. I heard her whisper something to someone again this time I think I heard a male voice whisper back.

I honestly didnt concentrate on listening to exactly what she said, something sketchy was going on and I had to get out of that house. I opened the bathroom window and jumped straight out of it and ran faster than I have ever ran in my life. I didnt look behind myself or anything. I just ran through the back yard, jumped the fence, ran through someone elses back yard, hit a road, and ran toward the main road. I kept running down the main road until i saw a 24 hour convenient store I ran into the store and stood straight at the front of the store in front of the camera. I called a taxi and went home.

I try to think what happened that night. What was she, or they, planning that night? Why did she tell me a fake name? Why was she trying to get my friend and I so drunk? I thought maybe a robbery but she kept spending money on us. She kept buying us drinks and even paid for my friends taxi cab. And mostly, why did she wear a wig that she gave to another girl to wear? Who was she talking to? What did it mean? And what was in that room they tried to lure me into?

Edit: The next day after this incident I went back to the house with a couple of friends to see just what was going on. Nobody was there. No cars, no people, nothing. Just an empty house. I ended up finding out that the house was a summer rental and whoever those people were, they broke into that house and used it for only that night and never came back.

A few years ago, I was renting a house in Northern California. The neighborhood was just outside the suburbs. It seemed like the perfect balance of having space and having nice neighbors close enough not to feel isolated. The area had no street lights, so it was very dark at night especially if there were clouds blocking the moonlight. It didn’t bother me though. It made my little house feel even more quaint on dark nights.

I got home from work one day in mid winter. It was a cloudy night, so pulling up to my house, I saw only what my headlights and front porch light illuminated. When I got out of my car, I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke. That was odd as I had never smelled that before around that house. I didn’t see anyone nearby, so I ignored it and went inside. I had just got off a shift with a few hours of overtime, so I felt pretty tired. Even though it wasn’t even 7 yet, I decided to take a shower and call it a night.

I woke up sometime later sure that I had heard a noise inside my house. I wasn’t worried right away because my friend would sometimes stop by to use my shower after work on his way to his night classes. I even gave him a spare key so he could stop by even if I wasn’t home. He would always text me to let me know beforehand though, and I hadn’t heard my phone go off.

I reached over to my bedside table and picked up my cell phone to see if my friend had sent me a text. The bright light from my phone’s screen and number pad blinded me. These were the days before phones had a light sensor that would dim the screen in the dark, and this particular phone was so bright I could use it as a flashlight. Through squinted eyes, I could make out that it was 9 something, but I couldn’t tell if I had an unread text or not.

I set my phone aside and called out my friend’s name. There were a couple of seconds of silence before I heard loud foot falls as someone started running through the bottom floor of my house. I leapt out of bed and ran to the closet. They were already up the stairs by the time I had opened the door and stepped inside.

That house had three rooms upstairs: two bedrooms on either side of the hallway, the one I was in and a spare, and a bathroom at the end. The bedroom doors were both closed, but the bathroom door was cracked open. I heard whoever was in my house thunder down the hallway past my door and into the bathroom. Thank god he did. That gave me enough time to open the attic access in the ceiling of my closet and hoist myself up.

I had just started to lift myself up when the person ran back out of the bathroom. My feet were barely inside of the attic when my bedroom door burst open. I heard footsteps run into my room and stop. When they didn’t see me in that room, they ran back to the hallway and into the other room which just had boxes stacked in a corner, some weights, and a table where I painted my miniature models. I guess they decided that if someone were hiding, it would be in the bedroom because they charged back into my room and turned on the light. A moment later the closet door was ripped open.

I was crouched in my attic just a foot or so away from the access, so I could try to stop them if they started to climb up. From my vantage point all I could see was from about their knee down. They were wearing dirty blue jeans with frayed cuffs and worn work boots. After a few seconds of looking in the closet, they stepped away and I heard a loud crash come from my room followed by a scream of frustration and anger. That scream was the most unnerving part of the incident for me. It reminded me far too much of my stepfather who would scream in a similar way when he lost his temper. He would eventually be put in a mental hospital for several mental disorders that resulted in erratic and violent tendencies.

The man in my house ran back down the stairs. I heard crashes and clatters as things were thrown around and furniture was knocked over. I stayed crouched in the attic. I had left my cell phone when I ran for the closet, and I wasn’t certain I could climb down without him hearing. After some time, the noises stopped. I started counting slowly. When I reached 1,000, I decided it was safe enough to climb down and call the police.

The first thing I noticed when I exited the closet was the intruder had flipped my bed over. I assume in an attempt to find me. That was the loud noise I had heard after he stepped away from the closet. I couldn’t find my cell phone, so I went to the land line by the bed and called the police. I waited in my room until I heard them call out from downstairs.

The first floor was a mess, but I had expected that. Chairs had been knocked over, the sofa had been flipped. All the books, pictures and knick knacks I had on my shelves were strewn across the floor. The cupboards in the kitchen had been opened and all the boxed and canned foods had been thrown to the ground. As far as I could tell though, the only thing missing was a single knife out of the wooden block in my kitchen.

The police checked the house from top to bottom. They found that the side door had been forced open by something like a crowbar. They also found a few cigarette butts along my fence line along with some foil and an empty pen tube which the police said people often use to smoke meth, so they think he had been watching my house for a while. I realized that he must have been out there smoking a cigarette when I got home. They collected up the ‘evidence’ and told me I should stay with family or friends that night and get that door fixed as soon as possible.

I opted to just not sleep. I moved a shelf over to block the broken door and spent the next couple hours cleaning things up. I would often go to the window with a flashlight and shine it along the fence line where the police found the cigarette butts and foil, but I didn’t see anything.

The next day I called to have the door fixed and motion lights installed at the back and sides of my house. I ran a phone cable up into the attic and added a landline. I never wanted to be stuck up there without a phone again. Nothing else happened at that house though. I lived there another three years without incident.

One more precaution I took was practicing getting out of my bed, going to my closet and climbing into the attic as quickly and quietly as possible. I even kept at it when I moved, except now I go to a crawl space at the back of the closet instead of the attic. I try not to think about what would have happened if I had been a bit slower getting to the attic or if he hadn’t gone into the bathroom at the end of the hall first.

This past Monday my coworkers and I returned to our hotel from a day of work out in the field. Rebecca and I walked to our rooms and as we stood outside of our rooms, I opened mine and I saw someone in the bathroom. I said, “hello…” Nobody answered. My first instinct was that it was a cleaning lady in there for some reason - and then I saw MY bag with MY clothes in her hands.

I said to my coworker, “There’s a woman in my room.” Then I asked the woman, “What are you doing with my stuff?” It gets a little fuzzy here because I can’t remember everything I said and what she said, but she kept mumbling about how her key still worked... how it still worked and that’s how she got in.

I was in shock and she was obviously very flustered having been caught mid robbery. She dropped my bags and fumbled around with her purse and a white plastic bag. By this time my coworker was behind me watching all the insanity unfold. This woman was scrambling and walking towards the door and I said, “What’s in the bag?” thinking it is probably my stuff and so she said, “No, no, it’s just my things, it’s just my things, I’ll show you,” and so she did. I looked and I didn’t see anything of mine and so since I’m obviously in shock at this time, I let her leave.

I went into my room and it’s been ransacked. I did a quick look around to see if anything had been taken. All of my electronics were still there. Then I went into the bathroom and I saw my underwear, my bikini, and my clothes shoved into my own bags randomly. Even my passport was shoved in there!! Then I looked on the counter and I saw that she got into my medication. I’m not sure what was going through my head at the moment other than I wanted it back, so I ran out the door to go find her. I ran to the laundry room downstairs and out to the sides of the hotel and I didn’t see her. I realized I was never going to find her, so my coworker and I went down to the lobby to tell them what happened and then we called the police.

We went back up to my room to wait and I noticed that there is a metal bat on my bed a little larger than one of those novelty wooden bats you can get at a baseball game but there’s also a flashlight on the end. She must’ve left it behind in her hurry. She also left behind a necklace that must’ve fallen out of her bag when she was scrambling with mine.

I was mostly freaking out at this point because I thought that she’d gotten away with my medication that I need. The police got there and took our statements and looked around the room as well. One thing that I noticed was that there were bits of drywall in the sink and I pointed that out to the cops but none of us really knew where it came from. We started looking at the door and the windows to see if she pried her way in somehow but there was nothing. So we kind of just went with the idea that she had a spare key or something, even though the hotel front desk was adamant that there’s no way that could be.

The officer that came brought two more officers as back up because they thought the woman might still be in the vicinity. But after our statements were taken, there was nothing else they could really do so they left. I sat down to finally make some calls to tell people, and as I’m on the phone, I’m thinking about the drywall in the sink and it still didn’t make sense to me. So I’m on the phone and looking at the drywall and the mirror on the wall right above it….. and then it hit me...

I got my coworker and asked her to help me pull at this mirror on the wall. And we took the mirror down and there’s a hole there just big enough for a desperate junkie to squeeze through. I asked Brian and Rebecca if I should call the cops again to let them know that I found this and my boss said, “There’s still two cop cars in the parking lot.”

So I went down to tell them and the female cop kinda rolled her eyes, but the young guy said, “I’ll come check it out.”

They both came back up, looked in the hole, and found… A pillow, blankets, cigarettes, clothes, toothbrushes……….

This woman had been LIVING IN THE WALL BEHIND MY MIRROR for God knows how long!! She had access to me and my room at all times!! (I know it might be hard to picture - there was a crawlspace about 2 feet wide in between the two rows of rooms.) One of the officers called the original officer to come back and take pictures of this. She explained to him what’s going on and all I hear over the radio is “No fucking way!!”

He comes back, takes pictures, and is just as mind blown as the rest of us.

Obviously we packed up and left immediately.

What’s even crazier is she has probably been there a long time. The last time we stayed at this hotel I would randomly smell cigarette smoke and I assumed someone was smoking in their bathroom and it was traveling through the vents. But nope a junkie was smoking just on the other side of my mirror!

She had access to other rooms too. The holes in the walls were from a renovation and the hotel hadn’t properly patched and just covered up with mirrors. She could have been hanging out in people’s rooms when they were gone.

Anyway this was insane and I’m taking a little time off.

Posting from mobile so sorry if the formatting is off.

photo of the hole

This happened maybe 10 years ago when I was in my early 30's. I was standing in line at the local pharmacy to get my prescriptions. This is a small town and I am a regular there, so they know me on sight. I was behind a couple of other people in line, and there were a couple of people behind me.

I kept feeling a tickle in my hair in the back of my head, but every time I looked behind me, the guy there was a few steps back and looking at the floor. This happened several times by the time I was at the front of the line. The pharmacist told me she wanted to talk to me about my medication in the consultation room they had at the time (since converted to a bathroom). I thought this was weird because we both knew I had been on this medication for years and would be for life. Nothing new.

I get back to the room and close the door, and she comes in from the door at the other side that leads from the pharmacy. She told me that the man behind me had been stepping forward, sticking his nose in my hair, and smelling, before stepping back and looking at the floor. This shook me pretty badly as this is such weird behavior, especially in my little town.

The pharmacy staff insisted on having me wait there until the guy was distracted (by another pharmacy employee), and they had a security guard walk me to my car and watch me drive off, to make sure I was gone before Hair Sniffer came out and saw what I was driving and what direction I was going.

I still use this pharmacy and some of the same people still work there. I will always be grateful that they took the initiative to make sure I was safe that day.

This is a story I have wanted to tell for a long time. Yes, it is very long. It is as long as it needs to be to say what I need to say. I included a tldr at the bottom. This took place between 1995 and 2002.

Everyone has had a bad friend or two; I had an epically bad friend. If it hadn’t happened to me I would never have known that this strange mental disorder was real or that people could behave this way outside of Lifetime Channel movies.

I grew up in Northern Indiana. I went to a large high school in the mid 90’s and my senior year I met another student named Hannah who had recently transferred from the main local Catholic high school in the area. That was unusual to transition so late from private to public school. Hannah said she had been expelled because of a fight with another student over some drama about a boy.

She said the other girl had made allegations against her and accused her of attacking her. Whatever had happened, the police had been contacted and she had restraining order placed on her by the other girl. It had forced her expulsion and that was how I came to meet her. Hannah said none of it was true. She said she never tried to hurt her.

Later I went to college in Indiana; she went to college in Florida. One day, a friend of mine from the dorms ran into a guy she had known from Catholic school back in my hometown. Once he left she told me about this incident that had happened to him where these two girls were fighting over him about which one was his girlfriend. Neither one of them was dating him and yet both of these girls thought that they were in a secret relationship with him. The whole thing had been very strange. Then she said one of them was a girl named Hannah.

The next summer I was back in my hometown and Hannah was also. I hung out with her casually. I told her what I had heard about her. She said she would tell me what really happened.

She had a crush on this boy but she had seen him talk to another student named Julie and she became jealous. She said she was convinced that this boy Mike wanted to be her boyfriend. She was sure Julie must have said something bad about her. Hannah said Julie was popular and pretty and a cheerleader and she hated everything about her so she decided she would try to see if she could push her to commit suicide.

Hannah said it hadn’t worked but that she had a nervous breakdown. I asked her what she had done.

We went back to Hannah’s house. Up in her bedroom she pulled something out from the back of her closet. It was a set of books. One was a book on how to use dirty tricks to get revenge on people and one was a book with a cartoon character on the front pulling their hair out and it said in big letters GASLIGHTING!

I know it’s common phrase now, but back in 1995 I had never heard of it. I asked Hannah what the book was about and she said it was about how to drive someone crazy. She said it was simple, you just make them believe things aren’t really true or that things they think are real never happened. She told me what she really did to Julie a couple years back in high school.

She had pretended to be friends with her. She got her phone number and then she had started making these anonymous phone calls to her. This would have been way before cell phones were common. She had a friend from her church who had a crush on her and she would trade sexual favors with him in exchange for him pretending to be Mike on the phone. He would get a blow job for every time he did this for Hannah. Fake Mike would tell Julie not to talk in school so that they could keep things private. Hannah would put notes in her locker and sign Mike’s name to them. Fake Mike would make plans to meet Julie at the mall or the movies and then never show up. It sounds very stupid but they would have been 14 or 15 year old girls when this happened.

Hannah said she had done something really embarrassing but that it had worked. She had a mix tape and she would whisper nasty little phrases like “you want to die” or “you should kill yourself” between songs and had played it in her bedroom when Julie was over. Obviously she commented on it and Hannah sat there with a straight face and said she didn’t hear anything and had no idea what she was talking about. She had set it up with her brother earlier and had asked him to help her play a prank on her friend. He came into her bedroom and said he couldn’t hear anything and turned around and told Julie that she must be crazy and hearing things.

Julie’s parents decided to confront this boy and his family about his behavior towards their daughter. He had no idea what was going on. Because her parents had confronted this boy about something he was never doing Julie had been publically humiliated at her high school and everyone was talking about how she was crazy. Hanna loved every bit of it. Until Julie’s parents got their phone bill and decided to give it a good look.

Mike had not been calling their house, but somebody had been. They had numerous anonymous phone calls. They checked it out and found out they were all coming from Hannah’s home phone number. Julie confronted Hannah about it at school and that was when something violent happened between the two of them in the stairwell. Julie said Hannah had started screaming at her that Mike was her secret boyfriend.

Hannah was very angry about that. She said Julie made that part up to try to get back at her and embarrass her for what she had done. She said Julie was exaggerating about what happened in the stairwell and it had been an accident. She said she never tried to push her over the railing, she had merely bumped into her.

Hannah wasn’t embarrassed about it. She was proud of it. The only thing that upset her was that she had been caught, but she said that most of the people at her Catholic school still thought that Julie was crazy so she considered it something of a victory.

Hannah didn’t have anything to say in her defense, just that when she liked a boy she would do anything to be with them.

That summer Hannah started dating a guy named Derek. Every time I saw her she told me tales about their wild and crazy sex life and how much he was in love with her. Hannah said it was a secret affair and they were sneaking around behind his girlfriend’s back. We saw him once at a party and he screamed at Hannah to stay away from him and leave him and his girl alone. Someone had been making strange anonymous phone calls to him and his girlfriend. He paid to have the number traced back and found out it was Hannah. Hannah admitted that she had been trying to break them up because he was taking too long to do it himself but that she had overplayed it and now he was angry and had broken things off with her.

She was depressed after Derek so I took her out to a bar. Hannah started flirting with this much older guy in his 40’s who was sitting by himself. She had recently purchased a cell phone, this would have been in 96 or 97 when they were still kind of new and novel. The next thing I knew she has this phone out and I thought she was giving this old guy her phone number. Instead he asked her what she wanted him to say? She typed a phone number in, handed the guy her phone and he made disgusting comments to whoever answered about how he was having sex with this guy’s girlfriend and commenting on what a whore she was. He hung up and started laughing and handed the phone back to Hannah. Hannah gave him a 20 dollar bill and said the girl was a bitch and deserved it for stealing her boyfriend. She was paying complete strangers to anonymously call people she hated on her cell phone and recite some pre-arranged script to spread rumors about them.

I ran into a mutual friend later in the summer and mentioned that Derek had broken things off with Hannah. She gave me a very funny look and said that maybe there had never been any relationship to break off.

A year later we were both temporarily living back with our parents and sort of adrift. Hannah had been kicked out of her dorm over an accusation made by another student and never completed her degree. She had started hanging out with some old friends from high school. One of those former high school friends was a young woman named Kelley who Hannah had been pretty good friends with. Something had happened between the two of them because Hannah went on and on about how much she hated her. It had something to do with Kelley’s new boyfriend Dan. Hannah insisted she was using him in some bizarre plot to make another man jealous and was worried that she would hurt him because she had found out about an STD that she had.

I drove by her house one night and there were two police cars out front. I went home and called her and she said she couldn’t talk. I went over and saw her the next day. I thought that their house had been robbed or something. No, the police had been there to talk to her about an incident that had been reported.

Hannah was upset. She said that she had to tell the police that she had smoked weed and had gotten high because Kelley had made an accusation against her. Hannah said it was an accident and a misunderstanding. Hannah swore she hadn’t been trying to hurt her.

The day after Hannah told me about how much she hated Kelley apparently she had called her up and said she wanted to talk to her about something. She and another friend had shown up and the three of them had gone out to some local overlook to smoke a joint. The other girl waited down below for the two of them to talk privately. Hannah had asked Kelley to look at something and when she turned her back Kelley said Hannah grabbed her and tried to push her off the ledge. They were about 100 feet up in the air and she would most likely have been killed by the fall. Kelley said they fought back and forth, she regained her balance and had took off screaming about what Hannah had tried to do.

Hannah said it was all a misunderstanding. It was an accident. She had been trying to show her something but then she had lost her balance because she was high from the marijuana and had grabbed Kelley to stabilize herself not push her off the edge. She said Kelley had almost fallen off because she had hysterically overreacted. Kelley had been very upset and insisted that Hannah had done it on purpose and she said that it was because she was jealous over her relationship with Dan. She said it was obvious to everyone that Hannah was obsessed with him. What Kelley had not done however, was tell the police that they had smoked a joint right before this happened and when Hannah did, the police said that didn’t have enough evidence for any kind of case. They weren’t happy with Kelley for omitting that part of the account.

That was it for Hannah and most of her high school friends, or at least for a couple of years. Kelley stuck to her version of what happened and her friends sided with her. People began talking about the strange rumors that had followed Hannah around since high school. I thought it was suspicious but I couldn’t bring myself to believe that she tried to kill another woman. I thought that sort of thing only happened in the movies, not small towns in Indiana.

I did not, however, want to be friends with her. She was an embarrassment to be around.

She had almost no friends left in town at that point. She called me up to tell me she had decided she needed a change and she was going to pursue a different career and move to Minneapolis to make that happen. She moved in 1998 and I honestly thought I would never see her again. I wish I hadn’t

She called me about a year and a half later. She said she was doing really well and that the move had been good for. She said she had made friends and she had met a boy and was completely in love. She said this was the guy she was going to marry. His name was Dan and she told me that he was the guy that had gotten her interested in punk rock and heroin.

I kind of paused when she said that. I wasn’t any kind of angel in my 20’s but I never even dabbled in hard stuff like that and it didn’t sound very good. Hannah insisted it wasn’t a habit. She said it was amazing and easy to control as long as you were careful. This was a complete change in lifestyle and scene. Before this she had been something of a hippie chic but that was all gone now. At that point her life revolved around; hair, punk rock, heroin, and Dan.

She wanted to come back for a visit. We went to the mall and she stopped at a kiosk and said she wanted to buy a cell phone. She lived 8 hours away in a completely different state with a completely different area code. We got into a small argument about it. Back in 2000, cell phones were purchased and billed from your local area code and you paid through the nose if you were roaming. Hannah said to just drop it because she had done her research and it would be fine.

She bought the phone and listed her boyfriend Dan as the main user on the registration. She left and I noticed she had left her curling iron behind and I thought I would surprise her by calling her new cell phone. She had set it up at my house and I got the number from the caller ID. No one picked up, instead it went to an answering machine for Dan. The same Dan that had been dating Kelley years earlier and the same Dan that Hannah had been accused of being obsessed with. There was no doubt about who it was.

I hung up and I wondered why she had lied to me about who her boyfriend really was.

A couple of minutes later Hannah called me back on her original cell phone. She played it off as a coincidence that I had just called that other number. She said she had run into hometown Dan and his friends and he had lost his phone so Hannah had done him a favor and given him the one she had just purchased. I said how strange it was that she would buy a phone for her boyfriend Dan, only to run into someone else with the same name and give it away instead. Dan’s real name is very common. Probably one of the most common names for men of my generation and Hannah joked about how many different people she knew with that same exact name.

A couple of months later she called. She wanted to visit again in the summer. No matter what she said about being in control of the heroin use, it was very obvious that it had become a full-fledged habit. Things had taken a turn in her life. Her boyfriend Dan had moved to Chicago. Hannah said that he was still in love with her and they were still together but that something had happened with his ex-girlfriend and they were taking a break and only seeing one another privately. Hannah said he was trying to protect her. According to Hannah his ex-girlfriend had refused to accept their break up and had been stalking Dan for months. It was one of the reasons he had moved. She had taken an overdose of heroin and had tried to commit suicide when she found out that Hannah and Dan were together. That was the reason that they had decided that they had to keep their relationship secret. That was why Hannah was really in town. He was going to be coming later to join her and they had set up a get together.

I wanted to meet him but Hannah said he wouldn't act like her boyfriend when other people were around. I started to question her. She got angry and said she wouldn’t let me meet him because I wouldn’t understand their relationship. We got into a fight. I ordered her out of my house and made it clear that I wanted nothing to do with her.

Her mother called me about a year later. She said that Hannah was living with them in Atlanta because something very bad had happened in Minneapolis. Hannah didn’t have any friends left. Her mother straight up begged me to please forgive so she could have someone to talk to. She said Hannah had spent 3 months in rehab and was off the heroin, but emotionally not doing well. She said she had to make a trip back to Minneapolis to take care of some things and pick up some of her stuff. Her mother was worried that being back there and around her old friends would trigger her to want to use again. She said it was very important that Hannah not relapse. If she did the consequences would be severe. She wanted me to go with her. I said I would.

Hannah wouldn’t tell me what happened. She just said that someone had almost died and it had been an accident but it had still been her fault. She drove into town to pick me up for our trip up to Minneapolis but said we had to stop somewhere first. We went to the old bar downtown that we used to hang out in when she had lived in town. She said she had to meet someone. Some young woman walked in and Hannah walked over to her and hugged her and started crying. She was apologizing all over the place and kept telling her she needed her to realize that it had been an accident. The woman said she forgave her but that her life had been difficult since what happened and she could not have anything to do with Hannah anymore and could no longer be friends with her. Hannah asked if she had ever spoken to her ex-boyfriend and had a chance to work things out with him. She said no, he was mad at her and he refused to talk to her. Hannah said he had a new cell phone and she gave her the number just in case she changed her mind and wanted to get a hold of him.

She left. I was sitting there totally confused by what I had just witnessed. I was really uncomfortable with what I had heard. I asked Hannah if the ex-boyfriend she was talking about was hometown Dan. She said no, someone else that I had never met. Hannah said she and her Dan had broken up because he was still using heroin and she said it was too painful to talk about him. She said it was so painful that when we got to Minneapolis to please not bring him up. She said her friends knew not to mention him around her and she asked me not to also.

We got to Minneapolis and the young woman we were staying with turned out to be one of Hannah’s former roommates. That is when I found out what had really happened and what Hannah had been refusing to talk about. It turned out that girl from the bar had been the other roommate. The one that had almost died because of something that Hannah did.

We settled in and Hannah said that she could explain what happened a year ago. A year ago!? That was the first time I realized that this had happened much longer in the past than I thought. The former roommate said that she was happy that Hannah was clean but she needed her to explain why she had tried to kill the other girl. Those were her words. She wasn’t calling it an accident. She said she was there, she saw it and Hannah had done that to her on purpose and she wanted to know why.

This is what she described.

Hannah had a friend from Indiana that had broken up with her boyfriend Dan after Hannah had told her that she found out he was cheating on her and had gotten another woman pregnant. Hannah invited her to live with her up in Minneapolis to get away from him and start over. She had no idea that Hannah was a heroin user.

She did not like Minneapolis. She had experienced a run of bad luck the couple of weeks she had been there and even though Hannah kept trying to convince her to stick it out to see if she would like it she had decided she was going to leave and go back home. She regretted her break up with Dan. She wanted to talk to him and see if they could work through it. They had been together for almost two years. She was worried because she had lost touch with him. Hannah had been able to track down his phone number for her through some mutual friends but no matter how many times she called or how much she begged, he refused to answer her calls or call her back when she left messages. She was upset and told Hannah that she was going to stop by his apartment to see him on her way back to Indiana.

She was supposed to be leaving within a day. Hannah kept insisting that she would like heroin if she would just try a little bit and had been pressuring her very hard to join in with everyone else. The roommate was angry about that. She said Hannah knew she was scared and didn’t even want to try it. Hannah had promised her that she would be safe, and promised her that it would be a small dose. Hannah said she knew what she was doing. She gave in.

Hannah bought the heroin and she bought a lot more than normal which she said was for a party later. She prepared the needles and said she had just used a small amount. Instead, she had used all that she had bought which turned out to be way more than was necessary to kill all of them. Hannah had given the girl the injection and she slumped over immediately and stopped breathing. Hannah had then moved on to the other roommate and told her everything was fine in the other room and that she was enjoying herself. She tried to convince her to take her dose, but she wanted to check on the other girl first. Hannah walked over and had an imaginary conversation with the young woman who was completely unconscious and tried to convince the other roommate that she was fine. She went to check on her herself and immediately saw she wasn’t even breathing, panicked, and started screaming at Hannah about why she was lying. She ran for the phone. Hannah ran after her. She dialed 911. Hannah grabbed the phone and hung it up. They called back and she said it had been a mistake and they were fine. Hannah wouldn’t let her near the phone and kept trying to tell her that she was being hysterical and that everything was okay. Hannah tried to pin her down and force the needle on her and she fought back and ran out of the apartment and down the hall to a neighbors. They called 911.

When the paramedics got there the girl was clinically dead. They worked on her and got a heartbeat and transferred her to a local hospital in a comatose state. She lived, but for a while it wasn’t clear if she would pull through. Hannah told the police she didn’t know why she had done it. After talking with a lawyer she said it was because of heroin psychosis and that she had been temporarily insane at the time. She agreed to a long term rehab stay and a year of drug testing and probation. After that the charges against her were dropped. That had been the reason that it was so important Hannah did not relapse. She would have been looking at prison time.

Hannah said it had been a strange temporary hallucination that had caused her behavior and that she had never meant to hurt her and the whole thing had been an accident and a misunderstanding. The same excuse she always used.

I am going to spell this out, since the morons who work for the Minneapolis police department were too stupid to realize this 20 years ago.

Hannah was obsessed with this girl’s boyfriend Dan. She had been obsessed with him for years. She had developed a detailed and deranged fantasy that the two of them were in a secret relationship together because she has a peculiar and somewhat rare psychiatric condition called erotomania or De Clermabault’s syndrome. She believed that this young woman was standing in the way of their romance and so she ingratiated herself to her and pretended to be her friend so that she could find a way to get close enough to her to get her out of the way.

She successfully managed to spread rumors and interfere in their relationship enough that the two of them broke up and then Hannah invited this young woman to Minneapolis to isolate her from her other friends and control what information she had access to.This was the year 2000, we didn't have text message or Facebook back then for keeping in touch with people She lulled her into a false sense of friendship and security so she could manipulate her and get close enough to her to hurt her. When she realized she was still in love with Dan and wanted to talk to him Hannah realized that she would eventually find out that the rumors she had been told were not true and that Hannah was the source. She purchased a cell phone in Indiana and made a recording of Dan’s answering machine message so that she could impersonate him on the phone and so the young woman would believe she was in contact with him. She never knew that Dan never received the messages. Hannah was using that to spy on her. When she said she was going to go back home and show up and see if Dan would talk to her in person Hannah knew that meant she would find out she had given her a fake phone number and that she had gone to extreme lengths to prevent her from speaking to him and it would have been obvious why.

She tried to talk her into trying heroin because she planned on killing her and her other roommate because that would be a good way to make it appear to be an accident. Hannah was about to have her obsessions with Dan, her delusional beliefs about him, and her bizarre mental disorder exposed and she knew that. She knew for at least a day or more before the incident which is why it is clear that her actions were premeditated, because her motive was. All of this would have been remarkably easy to figure out if the police had contacted Dan, and if they had taken a look at Hannah’s phone records. Phone harassment has always been her favorite hobby.

Instead they treated it just like the other 999 overdoses they have to respond to every month and gave Hannah the old rehab or prison option. Since her family could afford a lawyer and a 3 month rehab stay that was the option she took. The police never investigated her for anything. Never contacted the man “Dan” at the center of this, and never took any serious look into her background. It wasn’t an accident. It was an attempted murder and a pretty easy one to prove at that. Instead, the police totally dropped the ball and because of their incompetence she was allowed to completely get away with it. By the way, just in case any idiots who work for the Minneapolis Police Department ever read this; there is no statute of limitations on first degree attempted murder.

At the time, I didn’t know any of this. I was trying to act as a support system for a former friend who was suicidal on the cusp of a heroin relapse. I was suspicious, but any time I asked Hannah questions, she just said it was too painful to talk about or would guilt trip me about not respecting her boundaries. She had sworn to me that this young woman had never been in any relationship with the Dan from our hometown that she had known years earlier.

I returned to Indiana and Hannah returned to her parents in Atlanta and I didn’t talk to her for a while. She called later and wanted to visit her old hometown again. Once again I let her stay with me.

We ran into Dan. He had moved to Chicago, but just happened to be back in town that weekend. I hadn’t seen him in years. Hannah had contacted him to get together. She spent the whole afternoon trying to pull him aside to talk to him, but instead he made it clear that he had only shown up because he wanted to see me. He had broken up with Kelley years earlier but I thought he had a long term girlfriend since then. Dan said she had left him a year ago and just disappeared. He had called her repeatedly but she had completely cut him off. He was nice to me, he was handsome, he was a lot of fun to be around and he asked me out.

We made plans to meet up the next day. I saw him at a bar and he turned around and walked out the door and wouldn’t even look at me. I was upset and confused. Hannah was super sympathetic. She apologized for not telling me what he was like and said he had this weird thing with lying to girls and playing with their emotions by pretending to like them. It wasn’t like I had never been lied to by a boy before but this felt strange.

A week later my student loan came through and I decided to go back to college and finish my degree. I moved a couple hours away. The first person that called me was Hannah. Once again, she wanted to come visit me. She insisted that she had gone out and got me a “surprise” and she needed to give it to me in person. She said she had something really important to talk to me about and she said that it would sound weird but she asked me to promise her that I wouldn’t tell anyone she was coming to see me. I humored her.

She showed up at my apartment and when she walked in the first thing she asked me was if I had told anyone she would be there. At first I said no. She said that she had something for me and reached into her purse. She paused and said that she just wanted to make sure that no one knew she was there. I was frustrated and I kind of off-hand said that no one besides my mom and best friend. Hannah got furious. She was angry that I had told anyone she would be there and refused to show me what she had brought as a surprise for me. She went and locked it in her glove compartment because she said she didn’t want me to snoop in her stuff and find it. She kept saying she wanted to talk about something but the time wasn’t right. She decided to go home a day early.

Then, one day a couple of weeks later, out of the blue, she just showed up on my doorstep one evening. I was on the phone with my best friend, who by the way, went to the same Catholic high school as Hannah and while not close friends with her, knew who she was. I was talking to her when I saw Hannah walk up to my front door. It was an 8 hour drive from Atlanta to Indiana. I got up and opened the door and I still had the phone up to my ear. When I opened it, Hannah had her head down and she had one hand inside her purse. I said her name and she looked up at me and pulled something purple from her purse.

She saw I was on the phone and swiveled around and put whatever she had been holding in her hand back in her bag. She was acting very strange and she was shaking and I was worried. I asked her to come inside. At that point I was convinced that she was back on heroin and that had been the secret she had been trying to talk to me about for months.

She said that she was upset about a boy and needed to talk to me. She said she had something that she wanted to show me and she reached into her purse and pulled out a handgun. It was a purple and black revolver and I realized from the color that it was what she had pulled from her purse when I had first answered the door. She said that she had been checking to make sure the safety was on and I was lucky that she hadn’t accidentally shot me because I had startled her. She said the gun was because she was back on heroin and scared of the part of town she had to go to in order to buy it.

I didn’t know it back then, but revolvers don’t have safeties.

She told me about a musician in Atlanta that she had met and she was frustrated because he had a girlfriend and she hadn’t been able to find a way to get him to pay attention to her. She wanted me to tell her what I had done to Dan so she could use it on this guy. She told me he was still talking about me months later and she wanted to know why he was still interested even though we hadn’t talked since the previous summer. From my point of view, he wasn’t. He had ghosted me months earlier. Hannah kept insisting that I must have done something to him. It was like she was implying that I had hypnotized him or something ludicrous and she wanted me to tell her. I clearly explained that I hadn’t done anything and he had ignored me and then never returned my phone calls after I tried calling him. She cried and drank for a couple of hours and then turned around and drove 8 hours back to Atlanta in the middle of the night. Just for the record, Hannah was the one who gave me Dan’s phone number.

After this, something very strange seemed to get set into motion. I got a phone call from an anonymous number and when I answered it was Hannah who said someone wanted to talk to me and she flipped me over to a three way call with someone else. It was Dan’s roommate and best friend in Chicago and he started screaming at me asking me why I was playing games with Dan and messing with him. He said he was going out of his mind and I needed to call him back and stop whatever it was that I had been doing to him. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, Dan had never called me and I had tried to call him and…....Then we were disconnected. Then another anonymous call that was really Hannah with another three way call and another group of boys who started yelling at me and telling me they would kill me for what I had done to Dan. Then another disconnected line before I could ask them what they were talking about.

Then I called Hannah to find out what the hell was going. It was the craziest and most disturbing conversation I have ever had with another person. At first, she just kept saying that I had hurt Dan and I could not ever talk to him again or have any contact with him. None of it made any sense since this was about a guy that had refused to return my phone calls and had ignored me for months. Hannah started getting very upset and kept saying that I knew what I had done, I just wouldn’t admit it. She said that Dan hated me and had never wanted anything to do with me but that I was doing things to him to make him say that and pretend that he liked me instead of her. I had no idea what the hell was going on.

She said that Dan was her secret boyfriend and that he was in love with her and had been in love with her for years. She said that the two of them had been together since they were teenagers and that I knew it but was pretending not to. I asked her how she could have been his girlfriend when I knew of others girls he had dated. She started screeching that those weren’t real relationships. He was only pretending to like them, when he talked about them he was really talking about her but other people kept doing things to him so that he couldn’t tell her directly how he felt, but she knew. She insisted that he found ways to let her know that he was really thinking about her. She said that all of his friends respected their privacy which was why they would play along when he pretended he was dating other people. She kept insisting he was in love with her and no one else.

She said she was sick of people pretending to be her friend and then stabbing her in the back by going after her boyfriend and she said she would not put up with anyone coming between them and she would not let anyone hurt him. She said I was forcing him to forget how he really felt and that it had hurt him not to be with her and she wouldn’t let me hurt him. I realized that she wasn’t making any sense and that she was totally psychotic. I told her to NEVER contact me again and I hung up.

All I could think about was how she had pulled a gun out of her purse the last time she had shown up at my apartment by surprise. She had given a fatal overdose of heroin to another woman, and had been accused by another of luring them to a ledge and trying to push her off. The one thing we all had in common was Dan. I called the number I had for Dan. It was disconnected. I thought about that weird situation with the cell phone she had purchased a couple of years earlier. I found that old number in my address book and called it except this time it wasn’t Dan’s voice on the answering machine it was mine. The psycho bitch had made a recording of my voicemail and had put it on a cell phone that she owned and once I discovered that pretty much everything fell very clearly into place. That was what had happened to that girl in Minneapolis, and that was why Dan had spent the last several months thinking he was contacting me. There was no relationship with Dan, it was all in Hannah’s head and she was frantically trying to keep other women away from him to protect her fantasy from imploding.

Hannah is psychotic. It is a mental disorder called erotomania and it is the fixed delusional belief that another person is secretly in love with you. Not everyone who has it will be violent, but some people are. In some cases other people are used in strange psychotic dramas and vicious smear campaigns that are aimed at trying to rearrange reality so that it conforms with the delusions inside of their head. The people that are perceived as standing in their way can be the victims of extreme violence.

Hannah showed up the next day at my apartment screaming at me to let her in. I would not and I was getting ready to call the police when she started crying and saying that Dan had killed himself and then she walked away and that was the last time I ever saw her. I spoke to my parents who told me that I had received several phone calls to their house from people letting me know the same thing.

I changed my phone number to keep her from contacting me. I contacted the police in Indiana who said if she showed up again that they could arrest her for felony intimidation but not for anything she had done months earlier. I contacted the police in Minneapolis but I knew very little information, only Hannah’s name, not where or when it had happened. I asked repeatedly to please be allowed to speak to someone but the woman on the phone said they weren’t interested in talking to me. I moved so she wouldn’t know where I lived. I cut myself off from anyone from my hometown who I thought might know her so nothing could ever get back to her about where I lived. The last I heard from her she was stalking some new guy down in Atlanta.

I would have been more than happy to meet the bitch in a courtroom but unfortunately the law is nothing like you see on TV. So unless I ever have the privilege of sitting in on her sentencing hearing, Hannah from Indiana, let’s not meet again.

Tldr; former friend turned out to be a psychotic stalker with a strange mental disorder who spent years engaged in bizarre and secretive behavior to attack or kill any woman who went near her imaginary boyfriend.

I've told this story in other places, on other accounts before, but it bears repeating.

One day, when I was an elementary schooler (I think probably 3rd or 4th grade), I was awoken by my mom in a rush. She had overslept, and since she always woke me up in the morning, this meant that I too overslept and now there was just no way I was gonna be ready for school early enough to get on the school bus.

IIRC, school started at 8 AM, and my bus pickup time was 7 AM, but it was already like 6:40 or something, and I was still in my pajamas and hadn't even had breakfast yet. So mom decided that today, we would just tell the bus driver to go on ahead and she would take me to school, which would give me plenty of time to get ready.

So I'm sitting there at the dining room table eating breakfast, still in my pajamas, and it's now about 6:50. We hear the bus pull up, about 10 minutes earlier than usual. My mom peeks her head out of the door, into the foggy morning and waves the bus on. She closes the door and comes back inside, but the bus doesn't pull away.

There's a knock at the door, and mom opens it to find a man in a bus driver uniform. He explains that he's a substitute driver, because the regular driver called in sick. He says he knows he's a few minutes early, since he wanted to get an early start on the route since he didn't know it well. Mom explains to him that she was gonna take me to school since we woke up late. He gets visibly upset, and says that he can wait a few minutes since he's already running ahead of schedule. My mom insists that no, I won't be ready to go in a few minutes, and tells him to go on ahead. He seemed angry about this, but turned around and got back in the bus and left.

I return to eating my breakfast, and still don't have my school clothes on at this point. But at 7:00 AM sharp, another bus pulls up to my house. Mom thinks this is weird and goes outside to talk to them. She comes back inside looking terrified, but doesn't really say anything about it and tells me to finish getting ready for school. At the time, I didn't know what happened, but mom would end up telling me a few years later.

When she went to this second bus, she found that it was being driven by my regular bus driver, and it was full of all the other kids that are usually on the route (the other bus was empty, by the way). Mom asks the driver about the substitute driver and about him calling in sick. "I never called in sick. There is no substitute driver on my route." he says.

The driver immediately called dispatch in a panic, and told my mom to go inside and call the police (which she did, without me knowing) and report this incident. There was absolutely no one doing my driver's route that day. Whoever this was, was most likely a kidnapper who had targeted me.

I never heard anything about it again. Not even if someone else had ended up being picked up by this mysterious fake bus driver. But chances are, had I gotten on that bus, I would have never made it to school, or back home. And if mom hadn't overslept on that specific day, I would have been on that bus.

EDIT: yes you can narrate it on YouTube, no need to ask me:)

Quick backstory: I've had a stalker for about 4 years, he was never aggressive or sent me proper threats, so, stubborn as I am, I did my best to ignore him and not give him the satisfaction of showing him any fear (to be honest, after a while I also wasn't scared anymore since he almost never came close to me, I know being stalked can effect people severely even in a case like mine and that's toally valid, but I guess I just got lucky and was never really psychologially affected by it). His stalking behaviour mostly just consisted of sending me letters and "gifts" such as photos of my own apartment building from the outside, things he dug out of my trashcan and so on. I called the police many times but they weren't able to (or really tried tbh) catch or identify him.

About 3 weeks ago I discovered the German version of r/IAmA and thought that people might want to know about what its like to have a stalker. Since I barely use any social media aside from reddit and have no personally identifying information here I didn't think he'd ever see it. One person even asked "Does he know you're putting him on blast on reddit" and I answered "Maybe. Maybe it would make him angry, maybe he'd be turned on. Don't know, don't care" Well, I know the real answer now, He did see it, and he did not like it.

Like I said, he was never aggressive and never came close to me. The closest I know of was when he sent me a picture of myself, unlocking my apartment door, taken from the corner of the steps above (sorry if that makes no sense, idk how else to explain it) but I consider myself a pretty vigilant person and I'm thinking that he might have hid a camera there instead of being there to take the photo himself, I think I would have noticed him if he did.

I don't how he got wind of the AmA but he did. The next week was quiet, no letters and I didn't see him anywhere. Then he left me letters with printed out questions and my answers from the AmA. He also left me a long hateful letter towards my boyfriend, about an issue I had posted on the German version of AITA. His letters were never hateful like that before, though he never seemed happy with my boyfriend. He wrote about how I should "share the spotlight with him since I got so much attention thanks to him"

A few days later I got a gift, but this time he didn't leave it in my mail box or at my car like he usually did, no, this time he left it inside the apartment building right in front of my door. I didn't take it inside my apartment but opened it outside. It was a pretty big box, which was also unusual, and it was taped shut. As I'm typing it out I realize that wasn't a good idea at all and could have ended badly for me, but luckly he didn't send me a bomb or anything.

He did, however, send me:

several zip ties

a roll of tape (the kind you use to tape off walls when painting, nothing you could use to restrain someone)

a tv remote with most buttons picked off

a pack of bandaids with a few used ones (not actually, just made to look that way according to the police)

and a framed picture of me. I could tell the picture was taken a few days ago and my boyfriend was next to me but cut out of the photo. The frame was shattered and the package was full of glass shards, clearly more than just what could have fallen out of the frame and they were also intentionally put inside the crumbled newspaper that was stuffed in there to keep it all in place.

I called the police right away and gave it to them. They were more concerned this time (finally, thanks) and told me they'd send patrol cars more frequently. He didn't show up or leave me any letters/gifts for about another week and a half. But 8 days ago it started again. I found letters in my mailbox where he wrote about how he wasted his time on me, how I haven't been appreciating his effort, how he was wrong about me being special.

5 days ago I left my apartment in the morning and heard a crunch sound as I stepped on my doormat. He put broken glass under it in the night. I went off to work because I was in a hurry and was just going to make my boyfriend call the police but then I found my car had also been vandalized. The sides were scratched, lights smashed and the windshield had a phrase panted on. "It's time soon, miss my last name" ("Es wird langsam Zeit, Fräulein Nachname"). I went back inside and called the cops myself. They found the same phrase on a note under the doormat. This time they really, really, really took me seriously, which might have been because I was just pissed at this point, which I made very clear. If, for some reason, you're like me and just too stubborn to be afraid of a stalker like mine, then all of this - the letters, gifts, photos, even the damn glass under my doormat - are just really annoying and inconvinient. But my car was useless to me now and the threat scared even me.

I did, however have a dashcam in my car. And it caught everything. The police said took the footage as evidence (even though the dashcam footage wasn't of high quality, and I had given them photos of him that were just as good before but they said it's not enough) and they told me they'll look into it further and promised to send more patrol cars again. Then it was quiet for 2 more days.

Until 2 days ago. Someone rang the doorbell at just after 4am. My bf and I got up but we were both hesitant but I saw blue lights outside and just as I got up I heard them shouting "This is the police, please open the door" They told us they were called by one of our downstairs neighbors, who came home from his night shift about an hours earlier, and heard someone else enter the building after them before they door fell shut (my neighbors know of my situation and I've asked them to make sure they don't let strangers into the building) This neighbor then went into his own apartment and looked through the peephole. We have motion activated lights in the stairway so he waited to see if they turned back on. They did. Then he saw a middle aged man walk upstairs. Above this neighbor are only me and my boyfriend, and a single mom with 3 kids who probably won't be getting any visitors at 3am. So he called the police.

They came and found my stalker one half floor above me on the stairs. He should have been able to see the cop cars since theres a little window up there and they had their lights on but he either missed them or wanted to get caught. They found a pocket knife on him and he confessed to being my stalker right away.

He's finally caught. They got him, it took 4 years, a provocative reddit post, and one very vigilant & caring neighbor, but he's finally done. For now at least. He's facing several charges and I've collected every single piece of evidence over the past 4 years. I don't know what kind of outcome I can expect but for now I've finally got some peace.

Edit: just changed some of the wording to make it easier to read

Edit 2: I already wrote this in a comment but I genuinely cannot stop thinking about it: Today, at 9:30 pm, for the first time in over a year, I took out the trash by myself in the dark. My boyfriend always did it just to be safe. But today I had nothing to worry about.

After high school many years ago, I was in a bad place. My guardian had kicked me out after graduation. She didn’t help me find a place to stay, so I lived in my car for a couple months. I met some heavy metal dudes at work one day. I had seen them around town, and all my other friends knew who they were. Everyone loved them. We became friends over a couple months, and they offered for me to move in with them. I agreed. Looking back now, I wish I had just stayed in my car.

My two main roommates were brothers, named ‘Andrew’ and ‘Seth’. They were in a band. They also believed in the occult and anything of that sort. I never really believed in that stuff, but I’m not one to tell someone what they should believe. They had let me live with them rent free for several months, so who was I to complain? Being the only female in a house full of young men, I was always looking over my shoulder. You never know who you can trust. Turns out I was right to worry.

Over time, their friends started to stay with us for longer periods of time, sometimes weeks. Their friends were another group of brothers that they had gone to school with. There were 5 brothers in total, but only two stayed with us consistently. The younger brother, ‘Mark’, was very polite. He cleaned up after himself and always helped with the household chores. The other brother, ‘Adam’, had a laundry list of mental problems. He had apparently done some bad drugs back in the day, and it had developed into what seemed like psychosis of the religious sort. He had done time in prison for assaulting a woman with a bible. He would often look you in the eyes and tell you he could see how you would die. Once, he told me that I was possessed by a demon and I needed my soul cleansed.

Everyone in the house knew he had these problems, but he was their friend. They helped him through the hard times and gave him a place to stay. Otherwise, he would be on the streets. I was always on guard around him after the things he told me. No one else seemed to be as concerned as I was. They should have been.

One day, I was sleeping and my phone rang. It was my boss. He asked if I could come into work an hour early. It was only 12pm, I was broke and had nothing better to do, so I said yes. I got up and began getting ready to leave. I walked out into the living room to see Mark and Andrew sitting on the couch, while Adam sat on the floor by the TV. He was watching scripture videos on youtube. Some real end of days shit. That was fairly common, so I went about my business. I said goodbye and left for work.

My shift at work was almost complete, when the phone rang. My boss answered, handed the phone to me, and said,

“For you.”

I was just a cashier, so I assumed it was a friend that couldn’t reach me on my phone. I answered the phone and heard a man’s voice that I didn’t recognize.

“Hi, this is Detective Williams, something happened at your apartment today and we need you to come to the station to talk about it.”

I left work immediately. I had assumed one of the brothers had been arrested for drug dealing or something. I was very wrong. I got to the station and was buzzed in. An officer escorted me to a small, cold room with a camera. He gave me a bottle of water, and left me by myself for about 30 minutes. My mind was racing thinking about what could have happened.

He came back in and informed me that Adam had stabbed and killed Andrew at around 1pm. I was shocked. I had just left the house an hour before it happened, and everything seemed fine. I asked if there had been a fight. The detective informed me that there hadn’t been a fight, and it seemed to have happened out of nowhere. I gave my statement to the police, and left with nowhere to go, still in shock and confused out of my mind. Our apartment was a crime scene, so I went to another friend's house to watch the news report, since the police wouldn’t give me any information on the case.

Over the next couple of days the information began to be released. Adam hadn’t just stabbed Andrew once, not twice, but he had stabbed him over and over and nearly decapitated him. After the murder, he ran down the road, still holding the murder weapon. He called 911 and informed them what he had done. I watched the news report in horror. We had known he was unstable, but this? He had fully confessed to the brutal murder, and provided police with his notebooks. He had apparently been planning to murder all of his brothers, my roommates, and me. He thought we were possessed by demons, and this was the only way to free us. Luckily none of his other intended victims were there that day. Mark unfortunately witnessed the murder, but he luckily escaped. If I hadn't gotten that call from my boss, I wouldn’t be alive today.

So, to the man who brutally murdered my friend, and wanted to murder me, let’s never meet again.

I was 13 years old at the time (now 22) and on vacation with my parents in Turkey.  We were in an all-inclusive hotel and enjoying the holiday.

The hotel was full of tourists from different countries. There was this one guy, around 20 who was staring at me for some time. I felt uncomfortable  and asked him how he was doing. Wrong choice. The next few days everywhere where I was he also suddenly appeared. Not flirting, just lurking for hours and watching me. He had a really strange vibe around him and I felt I shouldn't be alone with him.

Now, I was still young so my parents didn't want to leave me alone in a foreign country. So he could not bother me. But one night there was entertainment in the hotel, which became boring to me after some time. I told my parents I wanted to go to my own hotel room and I would see them in the morning. I left and walked to the elevator. What I didn't know was that the guy who was watching me for days saw me leaving and he had followed me. When I saw him also coming in I was in great fear. He looked at me silently with a sinister smile. "This is it." I thought. Rape, assault or maybe even worse.

And just before the doors of the elevator were closing someone stuck his boot between it in order to prevent the doors from closing (I am not kidding) All I could see was a boot. The doors opened and it was my dad. He saw that the creepy guy was leaving at the exact time I had left and didn't trust it. He looked the guy in the eye and said hello. My dad took me to my hotel room. To this day I am so glad for the rescue because I don't want to know what would've happened if he didn't.

This was years ago but I still tell this story to friends any time I get the chance. I was the baddie in someone's Let's Not Meet.

When I was in high school, I entered a relationship with a very close friend named Ivory. After Ivory and I broke up, we stayed good friends. When Ivory's birthday came around, she asked me to come to the birthday party she was having.

The first leg of the evening was at a restaurant I'd never been to a few towns over. Afterward, we would all return to a mutual friend's house for beverages and relaxation. One of Ivory's friends had volunteered to drive us all to the restaurant, but I'd heard plenty of stories about her terrible driving. As a result, I opted to cheuffur myself in my luxurious minivan. Yes, I drove a minivan in highschool. Ivory's friend told me 7pm, so at 7pm my black ass rolled into the parking lot. I called Ivory to let her know I had arrived, but they were just leaving. I overheard Ivory tell her friend "If you tell Sip_of_Sunshine 7, he's there at 7." This all meant I had about a half hour of boredom before I'd have company.

Being the introvert I am, I decided not to go inside and wait like a normal person. Instead, I decided to listen to whatever angsty music I was into at the time--probaly Heartbeat by Childish Gambino. Moreover, I also didn't park right near the restaurant. The restaurant was located in a plaza, a strip with several other stores along either side. For some reason, I thought it'd be weird for patrons to see me just sitting there like some waiting weirdo. Instead, I parked at the far end of the plaza by a supermarket. I could still see the restaurant, and there were fewer cars on this side of the parking lot.

Five minutes goes by, I'm rapidly switching through songs. Ten minutes goes by, I'm bored like a piece of pine in a woodshop class. Out of the abyssal silence of boredom, I felt the hum of a text come through. Ivory had texted me, thank God, a brief reprieve from this boredom.

As I'm composing a response, I get this weird feeling. You know that feeling like someone is watching you, like you can almost hear their eyes? I felt something unnerving, so I looked up from the glow of my phone into the darkness before me.

What I saw was a family of 4. There was a woman, her husband, and their two children. All four were looking at me intensely. The woman was standing in front of her two children with her hands outstretched as though to shield them from a proleptic and palpable existential danger. The look in her eyes was of sheer horror, like a waiter had asked her "is Pepsi ok?" I have never seen such utter panic so visible on someone's face, and I once had to physically intervene to prevent an armed assailant from attacking someone.

The woman slowly creeped forward, family inching behind her. She began moving toward the driver side, closer to me with each step, and with each step, her terror rising. At this point, I'm beginning to panic because I have no clue why this woman and her family are snarling at me so aggressively--did they mistake me for Ajit Pai?

Without warning, the husband says something I could not hear through the glass. He extends his arm and points to my left. His wife, children, and I all simultaneously follow his hand. He was pointing five spots to the left of my car where an almost identical one sat. The mother threw her head back in a single burst of laughter as she unlocked her car.

This family left the grocery store to find a black teen dressed in all black sitting in their car. He then proceeded to maintain eye contact for what felt like an eternity. My perplexed expression likely appeared as a more sinister one, especially in the crepuscular light. I'm just glad they realized where their car was before anyone got hurt or police got called.

So, family who thought I was in their car at night, I promise we totally can meet! I'm actually a really nice guy who doesn't steal cars.

Tldr; Family thought I was stealing their car because I was sitting in my car to pass the time. Pretty sure the panic literally shaved years off that poor woman's life.

Edit: I just want to thank everyone for being so encouraging about my writing. You all inspired me to take it seriously as a hobby. I'm sure you'll see me around on some writing subreddits. You lot are truly wonderful.

(UPDATED)

I'm a girl. My mom was a horrible addict. She barely took care of me as a kid. At the time of this incident I was around 6 or 7 so my awareness and understanding of things happening may not totally make much sense. This happened in the 90s.

One night my mother and I were on a car ride, I wasn't sure why we were driving but it was late at night, I'm not sure what time it was but I assume it was really late because there weren't many cars on the street and I was sleeping in the back seat. I don't even remember getting in the car. My mom drove up to some sketchy house and left me in the car for what felt like forever. Suddenly the car door swung open and someone violently grabbed me by my arm and yanked me out of the car. I started screaming and crying until the man that grabbed me looked in my eyes and said "be quiet and don't try to run or I'll kill you" he had a scruffy beard and looked like a mad man. I was scared to death so I listened. He held me tight by my arm, shut the car door, and walked with me down the street. I looked back at the house my mom was in hoping that my mom would come out the last second and save me. I looked at the house as long as I could as the man dragged me further and further away. As we walked down the street I wanted to cry but I was in shock and in fear. I didn't know what to do. If I sniffled or cried the man would tighten his grip and yell at me. I can't even explain how scared and confused I was. We walked for a little while and ended up in the projects. The projects were a bunch of buildings crammed together in a shitty neighborhood. We walked into one of the buildings and walked up a flight of stairs. My legs and feet hurt like hell but I was too scared to stop moving or complain. We walked up another flight of stairs when I saw some random guy smoking a cigarette in the stairway.

Then without warning the guy that kidnapped me fell to the ground. It happened so fast. I didn't know how the kidnapper fell to the ground so fast but the next thing I remember is the Cigarette guy was ounching and kicking the kidnapper in his head and face. The kidnapper was out cold. Cigarette guy picked up the kidnapper by the back of his jacket and threw him down the stairs. You have no idea how scary and violent it is to see an unconscious man fall down the stairs. To this day I still have a fear of falling down stairs. He bled everywhere.

I still have no idea how Cigarette guy knew to help me but I'm glad he did. Maybe he could see tears in my eyes, maybe he just picked up on something and had a bad vibe, but he acted instantly. The first second he could, he attacked my would-be kidnapper. Cigarette guy starts pacing back and forth swearing at himself, gritting his teeth and clenching his fists. I thought he was mad at me so I started to cry. He looked at me and said. "Okay okay okay okay shut up shut up" he had an attitude so I listened to him out of fear. I wasn't as scared of Cigarette guy as much as the bearded guy but I was still in fear of him. He started to ask me questions with an attitude "why are you out this late? Where are your parents? Why would you talk to strangers?" I was in so much shock and confusion I couldn't answer the man's questions correctly. He asked if I knew my way home and I told him I didn't. I told him a broken story about what happened and somehow with the information I gave him he knew where my mom's car was. The only thing I remember about the road is passing a house with Christmas lights on it despite Christmas already being over. I think he knew the area well enough and figured out where I needed to go from that information but I honestly don't even remember telling him about the Christmas lights. Anyways he told me he would take me back if I promised over and over that I wouldn't tell the police that I saw him or anyone that looked like him and made me promise that I wouldn't even tell the police anything. He had an attitude I didn't care what he asked me I just wanted to go back to my mom so I agreed.

I followed him down the stairs. The bearded guy was still laying on the ground bleeding at the bottom of the stairs that Cigarette guy threw him down. He wasn't moving at all, for all I know he was dead and I hope now that he was. Cigarette guy stepped over the bearded guy and I followed. We walked outside and Cigarette guy looked around panicky. I remember him telling me "the police don't like me". We walked out of the projects and my feet still hurt. Cigarette guy was walking fast in a panic and I had to basically jog to keep up with him. I started crying and he asked what was wrong I told him my feet hurt and I remember him sucking his teeth and picking me up with an attitude. He awkwardly cradled me in both arms. He walked down the road for a moment. Then I remember him swearing and running behind a house or a building. A cop car was driving down the road, he put me down and told me to run to the police car. I tried to run but my legs could barely move and I was scared. The cop car kept driving and rode away without seeing me before I could even get remotely close to it. He kept swearing to himself as he picked me up again and ran down the street. He took me behind a lot of houses and hid from every cop car that drove by, I assume now that the police were looking for me. He carried me in both arms running fast down the road when I saw my mom at her car in the distance. She was surrounded by police. Cigarette guy put me down and told me to run to the police. I got so excited the pain in my legs disappeared. He put me down and ran away.

I ran towards the police and my mom, my mom picked me up and hugged me tight. The police started to ask me and my mom questions. I dont remember too much about their questions but I remember my mom telling the police some convoluted story that just didn't make any sense. She basically told me to not say anything and I didn't say much but cried a whole bunch. We went home. Days later my dad picked me up and knew something was wrong. I told him everything. I never lived with my mom again.

When I grew up and had time to think about that day I never forgave my mother. Not too long ago I asked my dad what he remembers about the situation and he told me what he thinks happened from what I explained to him from years ago. He said my mom was on a drug binge, I got kidnapped, someone saved me but the person that saved me had warrants and wasn't mad at me he was just frustrated with the situation that he had to deal with. Imagine being a criminal on the run and now you have a kidnapped girl with you and you just beat a guy up half to death. If he would have gotten caught with me he could be in jail for my kidnapping. With my mom lying and me being in shock and confused I wouldn't be able to tell them that the man helped me because while it was all happening I didn't even notice he was helping me. To the man that saved me thanks. To the man that tried to kidnap me, let's not meet.

UPDATE I think I found "Cigarette Guy" someone on reddit knows a man with a similar story. I hope both people are the same. So far it looks like it's the same man that saved me. I'll keep everyone posted.

Update 2- I need help. My update post was removed by the mods. I don't want to break any of the rules on here so how do I keep everyone updated without getting my posts removed?

Update 3- I finally received confirmation. I found Cigarette guy! Die to the rules of this subreddit I can't keep posting updates, so I'll update people on my reddit profile.

It was the summer of 2016 and I had just married my long time girlfriend. Over the course of our 12 year relationship we had travelled to the mountains several times in both summer and winter for camping but also to stay in nice mountain hotels and snowboard the slopes. Naturally, we both agreed this was how we wanted to spend the first few weeks of our marriage. We booked a 20 day stay at a mountainside campground on the other side of the country. We also decided to bring our dogs with us as they too love being outdoors and we generally bring them camping anyway. After two days of road tripping we had arrived, quickly set-up and settled in for a good long stay on the mountain. It was beautiful.

A couple of days into our trip and we had already met a bunch of fellow campers. We are very experienced campers so we generally attract a lot of attention from novice campers asking for tools or supplies as they see we are well set up. We are usually more than happy to help people get situated if they need matches, cream or sugar, or help setting up their equipment.

It was day four or five when “she” first made her presence known to us. I will refer to this person as “she” or “her” as we never learned her name. We were sitting down under the shade of the large pine tree at the edge of our site, drinking beers and playing cards when she seemingly appeared out of no where. She was just suddenly right there! “Can I pet your dog?,” she said. Even my dogs didn’t see her approach as the very sound of her voice triggered them into a startled frenzy. As the dogs were worked up already, I politely told her no. Then she just stood there, at the edge of our site. Didn’t say a word. Just stood there sort of existing but not really doing anything. She wasn’t exactly staring at us or looking at anything in particular. I asked her if she needed anything and she said no. After a few minutes she walked off.

I work with people with brain injuries so I’ve had my fair share of experiences with unusual behaviours including people with poor social skills so I wasn’t about to write this person off as creepy just yet, but she had my attention. I casually watched her walk off and enter a campsite across the path and a few sites down from ours. There was already a small tent setup in the site, but she proceeded to pull an even smaller single person tent from her backpack and began setting it up. The day prior we saw two young girls set up the other tent and were clearly the occupants of the site. There was no further interaction with “her” that day although we did notice that the owners of the other tent on the site were not around at all that day and we didn’t see them return that night.

Well, the next morning I am walking to the camp showers to clean up for the day. As I walk past her site, I see she is sitting in her little tent reading a book. The door to the tent is open. I pay no attention and keep on my way to take my shower. When I’m done my shower and walking back I notice her tent is now closed but it’s jiggling about so I know someone is in there. Then she made her presence known in a big way. Just as I am approaching her site on the way to mine, she unzips her tent and I immediately see that she is completely nude. She then positions herself just inside the tent at the door and lets out this over the top full body stretch and held her arms way up the sky while pushing her chest forward like it was some kind of mating ritual designed just for me. While she does this she lets out what I only describe as an exotic moan. It was pretty obvious she was putting on a show for me. I continue on my way to my site and tell my wife about the display I had just been witness too. We both laughed it off and moved on with our plans to day hike a good trail to a waterfall.

The trailhead for this hike was accessible from the campgrounds so we didn’t have to drive to get there. We just walked the additional two kilometres to the trail. We walked at a good pace so when we got to the trail we decided to stop for a few minutes and take some photos of the surrounding mountains before heading into the thicker bush. After sitting there for maybe five minutes while my wife is taking pictures, “she” emerges from the trail that leads towards the campground. At first I thought, ok coincidence, she’s staying here and this is a pretty common trail. But then she sees that I see her and she stops dead in her tracks and just stands there. Same demeanour as our first encounter. Just standing, not doing anything in particular but also sending creep vibes our way. This was the first time I said to my wife, “I think we have a stalker!” Confused, my wife then looks to where I’m looking and is immediately a little creeped out. Once again I think, whatever maybe she’s just hiking the trail no big deal.

So we continue on the trail at a good pace and she maintains a consistent distance behind us. Our dogs at this point are a little distracted by her and our youngest dog keeps turning around to watch her. I got a little fed up with the dog constantly stopping to look back so I decided we will stop for some water and let this woman pass. Well what does she do, but fucking stop walking when we stop and once again just stands there.

Ok so now we are genuinely concerned because this is approaching horror / suspense movie creep level and I start to wonder what this girls intentions are. Standing motionless at that distance and refusing to pass us just ramped up the oh shit factor to about nine. So my wife and I agree to just giver and cut the hike short by taking the shorter loop which was only another half kilometre ahead, and head back to our camp. We managed to get some distance between us by jogging every time we would make a turn and she was out of sight. We didn’t see her again until later that night.

That night my wife decided to take an evening shower at the camp showers. When she returned to our camp she tells me our stalker was in the bathrooms also taking a shower. This time however she was with two other girls and appeared to be getting ready for a night at the club. There is a nearby ski town that has a few night clubs and bars so it was reasonable to see the girls getting ready for a night out. The two girls she was with were the two we saw previously set up at her site. My wife explains that she quickly picked up on the fact that the two girls and our stalker friend were not well known to each other. It was clear that the two girls were close friends with plans to go out partying, and our stalker was making an attempt to be friends and sort of invited herself to join them in their night out.

Now we know the ski town well, and the girls kept reinforcing that they were meeting at a specific restaurant before going to the bar. It was currently 10:30pm and we know the restaurant they were telling her to go to was closed at 10:00pm. They were lying to her about their plans. The stalker kept asking them too, “are you sure this place, are you sure?” They convinced her, and she then left to her tent to finish getting ready while the two friends stayed in the bathroom to finish their makeup.

My wife went on to explain how after “she” left the two friends were mocking and making fun of our stalker. They were young 20 something’s acting like little girls in elementary school. My wife has no time for that, creepy stalker or not she had to say something to the girls for their behaviour. My wife calls them out on their behaviour. Well, putting all the caddy bitch bullying aside, the girls explained to my wife that the stalker girl had set up her tent on their site when they were staying with a friend in the ski town. When they returned they found her living at their site without invitation. She had just taken it upon herself to take a little corner of their site without knowing them at all. The girls said they were upset with her and trying to make her feel uncomfortable so she would leave, but she wouldn’t leave. Of course my wife asked them why they didn’t just report her to the park warden. The excuse they gave was they were leaving the next day and didn’t want to make a huge deal out it.

So whatever happened between them and the fake late dinner plans and clubbing is unknown to us. About 3:00am that same night we are all awoken to a blood curdling scream right outside our camper. At first I was like “holy shit that must be a wild animal.” My wife is trembling, dogs barking, and I am startled but curious. I peel back the window cover to see “her,” standing motionless on the path outside our trailer. I had the window cover down maybe 8-10 centimetres when she appears to make direct eye contact with me. My heart rate is jacked. What the actual fuck. After gazing in my general direction for what seemed like an eternity, she calmly turns around and walks to her tent. I go make sure our trailer is locked. After a good hour, and a stiff whiskey we manage to get back to sleep.

So the next day is a Friday we have friends from a nearby major city coming up the mountains to spend the weekend with us. We haven’t seen them in a while so we are excited for a couple days together. Well they are not at our site for 15 minutes, and as they are setting up their tent, “she” mysteriously appears out of nowhere yet again. Like bam there she is, but now this time she is actually in our site. I hadn’t had a chance to tell our friends about her before she arrived so they were a little more friendly then I was. She asks me once again if she can pet my dog, who during all of this is barking at her. I think I said something like “she isn’t being very friendly towards you right now so I would prefer if you didn’t.” She didn’t pet my dog but she also just stood there starting at me like she was considering how she would dismember my limbs.

“She” then notices our friends tent brand as he is still setting it up and comments on how it’s the same model as hers although a larger sleeping capacity. My buddy has picked up on the creep vibes and my general displeasure with her presence so just gives her the, “oh ya cool,” and keeps setting it up. Well she starts grabbing at the tent pegs and picks up the hammer and says she will help him set it up cause she has experience with it. My buddy declines and asks for his tools back. Cue the fucking psychopath stare down but this time she has a hammer in hand, adding to the oh shit factor. She literally just drops everything right there and runs off. I go on to explain the last few days to our friends and they agree we need to keep an eye on her.

So by this time the two girl friends who’s site she had hijacked were packed up and gone. It’s now Friday night and we’ve been drinking all day so we’re feeling pretty good. It’s maybe about 11:00pm when “she” walks over to our site again. She says, “Hey, you guys seem to have a lot of extra room with the tent and the camper, do you think I could stay with you guys tonight? We could have a lot of fun in there together.” My buddy is feeling pretty good from all the day beers so he’s pretty forward when he reply’s, “ Did you just propose a gang bang to us?” Now this whole time I’m just sitting in my camp chair with my whiskey taking this all in. She wasn’t really taking notice to me at all so far. Then, she smiles, turns her head and looks directly down at me and says, “I like your friend!” She then turns around and walks away into the darkness of the night towards the forest. What! The! Fuck!

We are all now terrified she is going to return. I decided right then and there if we see her again in a creepy fashion I am calling the park warden. This is getting silly.

Well the night is winding down so we all decide to walk together to the bathrooms to clean up for bed. My wife pulls on my hoodie and says, “babe...look!” I look over to see that the site she was setup on is completely destroyed. Shit everywhere. Just stuff, garbage, clothing, food. Everywhere. I thought ok this is weird, could this have been a bear. No we would have heard it. I then notice that the tent is gone. She is gone and left the site a complete mess. As luck would have it the park patrol was completing their fire rounds and were at the messed up site when we were returning from the bathrooms. We told them there was a girl staying on her who was acting erratic and we suspected she was squatting on the site based on our conversation with the two girls from earlier in the week.

We didn’t see her again for the rest of our trip until the last full day. There is a great little lookout point not far from our site which has amazing views of the river and valley below and it was a perfect evening to see the sunset behind the mountains! It was a lovely final send off to an otherwise beautiful honeymoon. Just when we thought we were done with “her” she emerged once again from seemingly nowhere. We were sitting on a couple chairs that are bolted in place at the viewpoint, taking pictures of the valley below. As my wife is looking throw the camera viewfinder she picks up on the woman in the distance. She is standing the in woods a little ways down mountain towards the valley. Watching us!

As her final act, she walked up the mountainside, and sat right beside us on a boulder that was beside the chairs. She says nothing. Just sits there. My wife has the brilliant idea of asking me to take one last picture of the scenery and she gives me a little wink. I pick up on her idea right away and I position myself so this woman is going to be in the picture. My wife wanted this lady’s photo in the event something bad happens with her before we can leave the area. We took our final looks out at the beautiful scenery and headed to our camp for the night. We didn’t see or hear from “her” again.

Upon reflection we agreed this woman had some serious mental health issues obviously. She had zero social skills, and we did witness her attempt to make friends with those two girls that shafted her in a terrible way. That being said, she did things way beyond the realm of acceptable social awkwardness. There were moments I though she would pull out a knife and kill us all where we stood. More than that, the stalking, the midnight screaming and running off into the woods at night was terrifying to us and I feel a story worthy of this sub. I do have the photo on a thumb drive somewhere and will see about uploading a pixelated photo if it’s appropriate. To anyone else the picture just looks like a person is sitting in the shot. But to us, it’s a reminder of our wild adventure and start of our amazing marriage.

To our honeymoon stalker....Lets Not Meet ever again!

Edit:

After much consideration I have decided to add the link to the photo! I didn’t anticipate this post getting this amazing response. The discussions have been polarizing and I really appreciate the comments from both sides. Those that down right find this story unnerving and creepy, and those who feel I mishandled this by misinterpreting her intentions.

I was apprehensive to post a photo as I don’t like the idea of posting pictures online of a person I agree has some form of mental health issues. I don’t want to exploit her afflictions, and it’s not my intention to shame her. That being said, a few factors influenced my decision to post the photo link. Namely, you cannot see her face or otherwise identify this individual by this photo. I also referenced the photo in the story and don’t want to back-peddle on that after receiving so many requests for the photo.

As I said, the photo is unremarkable and she looks like a typical mid 20s something. I have found it interesting that people will associate her behaviour with her appearance. If you were hoping for The Grudge meets The Ring, you will be disappointed. To us however, the normalcy of her appearance made her behaviour throughout the trip seem even more creepy.

In a bold attempt not to disappoint, but also likely to offend some, I present to you....”Her!” ⬇️

https://imgur.com/gallery/yClotQr

Wendell was a panhandler near my college. I always gave him my change when I had extra.

Usually I keep a hard rule not to give money to individuals because I give it to known local charities instead, where I can be sure the money is going to a specific cause.

This one panhandler though, he always sang opera music. Quite beautifully, all things considered.

Even though it was clear he was begging for money due to poverty and homelessness, not busking for tips, I always thought it was admirable that he was trying to perform a service in exchange for the money, and I don’t like carrying coins, so gave what I could (it wasn’t much. Barely a dollar each time.)

I would occasionally strike up conversations with Wendell even if I didn’t have any money for him. He liked to make students laugh with funny impressions or jokes. He was a bit older (I’m an undergrad, he was probably 40s-50s) so we’d mostly have quick chats about the news or the weather or whatever. Nothing deep.

Sometimes he’d randomly share something so intimate that I’d feel obligated to reciprocate with something at least superficially personal. (e.g., he’d blurt out that he almost went to college on a baseball scholarship but drugs ruined everything.) I’d be like... “Oh, wow. Sorry to hear that... I play volleyball. Not for a scholarship though. See you around, ok?”

Once Wendell called me over while I was walking with a professor/my advisor, and I didn’t want to be rude, so I went over just to say a quick hello and introduced my advisor.

When we walked away my advisor was pretty clearly horrified and asked why Wendell knew me by name. I explained our little friendship. He said the homeless in this city weren’t like the homeless in my smaller town back home.

I figured he was being elitist and I think he could tell I hadn’t taken him seriously because after we’d dropped the subject, just before I left, he reiterated that I shouldn’t forge friendships with the homeless population in this city or even give them money because the chronically homeless, (the ones on the streets enough that you could get to know them), tended to have criminal or addictive histories.

I was surprised because my advisor is usually pretty progressive and compassionate so I appealed to him with “Wendell is a victim of a post-capitalist society,” and all the other things I’d learned in his very own classes, but he wasn’t having any of it, basically saying however Wendell became chronically homeless, now he was and I should act accordingly. So my professor strongly implored me not to continue even talking to Wendell at all.

I kind of shook my head thinking “Ok boomer,” and if anything, felt fortified by the warning. Like it was a confirmation that I was a radical doing the right thing, leading a new path, breaking down barriers, bettering society. I got closer to Wendell and shared more about my life with him.

But the very next time I talked to Wendell he was really irritable and distant and I wasn’t sure why. Until he said, “So your boyfriend, you two live together or what?” And I had no idea what he was talking about. I said, “What boyfriend?” And he said “The guy I met from yesterday you were walking down the street with.” And I laughed, explaining it wasn’t my boyfriend, it was just my academic advisor.

Then all of a sudden he wasn’t irritable anymore. He was as chatty as he’d ever been. I probably should’ve taken that as a red flag, but I didn’t think about Wendell much at all then. I only saw him once or twice a week, and only for a few minutes.

It was around then that Wendell started bringing me gifts. I’d pass him and he’d have a flower for me or a metal machine piece. I never refused, because I figured it was a means of preserving his dignity when accepting money, like with his opera singing.

One of my roommates did remark on the flower once, and when I explained she said it was weird. I thought she was also just being elitist and that I was enlightened, bridging the class divide, and superior to her neoliberal paranoia. I mean, come on, it was just a flower.

My advisor clocked all this so brought it up with me again a while later, saying he was worried I was being manipulated. I tried to tell him about Wendell’s opera singing and impressions and how he even almost went to college but then I remembered the reason he lost his baseball scholarship and I stopped short. Looking at it through that lens kind of made me reconsider the whole thing.

I thought about what my professor had said (sparing the details, we did talk for like half an hour, and I finally connected the dots that Wendell did have a history of drug use, and he did sometimes mention how a previous girlfriend “overreacting” to something he’d done had derailed his life besides the drugs) so I decided maybe I should think about distancing myself a little.

But very shortly after, the pandemic hit and classes went virtual, so to save on rent I went home to my parents’ house. Still in the state, but not near campus at all.

About three weeks into being home I was watching a friend’s insta story when I heard Wendell singing opera in the background and I thought “Aww, I forgot all about him. Hope he’s doing alright.” And that was that, I kept watching different stories.

Later that night, something about the story kind of stuck in my gut. It had popped into my mind a few times subconsciously and I’d ignored it, but it kept coming back, so I decided to go and watch it again.

That’s when I realized my friend’s video wasn’t from our college town. It was from my much smaller home town, which is nowhere near my college.

That freaked me out a little. But I figured, everyone moved around when the pandemic hit. My town isn’t that small. It isn’t that far from the college. It was probably a coincidence.

I really wanted to mention it to my parents, but they had always warned me against talking to homeless people (besides, like, “can I buy you a meal,”) so I felt too embarrassed to explain the situation to them. Especially since it was probably a coincidence and I would sound so conceited if I were like “He definitely followed me because aren’t I just so great that he’s probably obsessed with me?”

We have a type one diabetic in the family, so we took quarantining very seriously. I figured “I’ll never see him, anyways. I‘m not going out anytime soon. It doesn’t matter where he is.”

And nothing happened. Well, one thing. A girl from my high school who also ended up at my college called me and, in summary, said “This is going to sound really weird, but I feel like I should say something. I was downtown and a beggar asked me about you. Like, specifically, you. He knew you were on club volleyball. He knew your major. I didn’t tell him anything. But I thought you should know.”

I was pretty alarmed at first, because, how would he know I know this girl? But once we talked I learned she’d been wearing a sweatshirt from our college. So I thought about it and decided he probably saw that sweatshirt, figured she might know me from college since we were both from this town, and was just trying to find out how I was doing.

I thought it was sweet. Also a little weird. But he was a little weird, that was part of his charm.

I thanked her but told her not to worry about it. Besides, I wasn’t in town much longer anyways. I had decided to go live back near campus. It was impossible to get my coursework done with my whole family around all day.

So I went back to campus a while later. Didn’t think about Wendell at all. Until I saw him back on the same corner just a week after I returned to campus.

Ok, even I knew at that time that something was wrong. I stopped giving him money, stopped talking to him, but I was so humiliated by how high and mighty I had been insisting that nothing was wrong and everyone else was being paranoid and elitist, that I decided not to tell anyone what I had noticed.

I was already barely leaving my apartment, never going on campus, and his usual spot was right by campus. I felt bad about potentially hurting his feelings or reading too far into the situation, but I figured he’d get the message, and better safe than sorry.

After finals I decided to visit my brother. In a different state. His roommate had moved home, leaving an extra bed, so I drove up to his place to celebrate the end of the year and get away from it all.

About the ninth day in, I was woken up way earlier than usual (when my brother isn’t working or in school he sleeps until noon) to the sound of my brother talking at the door.

I got up to see what was going on, because we weren’t seeing anyone, we stayed totally quarantined, his state was being hit hard.

My brother was talking nicely to someone outside through a crack in the door, but when he turned he looked royally pissed at me. He turned back outside and said, “Hold on here.” Closed the door, despite the other guy protesting, but I couldn’t hear what he said exactly.

My brother immediately got in my face and, whisper-yelling, said, “Mom and Dad are gonna kill you!”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but my first thought was the cops had come to arrest me for something. It was the only logical thought I could generate first thing in the morning. The only thing I could imagine being arrested for was my fake ID (which I only even use to get into concerts, and obviously none lately) so I was really in shock.

But my brother was still going, as best I can remember because I was panicked at this point, he was saying, “And I’m gonna kill you! This is so not cool. You didn’t even ask? I wouldn’t have said yes anyways. But you didn’t even think to ask?” I realized that didn’t align with being arrested so finally I was like, “What are you talking about!?”

And he said, “You’re dating a 40 year old guy? Older? 45 maybe? Of all the people out there, I mean, Jesus. Dad’s gonna kill you and then have a heart attack and die. Which will kill mom. And you invited him to my house while we’re supposed to be social distanced?? You two can go to a hotel, because he isn’t coming in here. I wasn’t a dick to him, out of respect for you. But if he doesn’t leave now, that’s gonna change.”

So, I had no idea what he was talking about. None. I hadn’t connected any of the pieces yet. Because, you’ve got to remember, Wendell was such a small part of my life until this point. I almost never saw him or thought about him. My whole world had been turned upside down by a pandemic in the preceding few months. He was background noise. Faint background noise. Compared to all the other stuff I had going on.

So I just said the first thing that came to mind. “Dude, I don’t know why you’re getting so mad at me. I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Someone’s got the wrong house.”

My brother looked like he was ready to rip my face off. He said “We’re adults, come on, don’t fucking lie to me. I’m not Mom and Dad. We can’t deal with this if you’re going to lie to my face.” And I said I wasn’t lying, and I think he could tell from my expression and tone that I genuinely was serious.

So now he was as confused and irritated as I was and he was like, “He didn’t just vaguely say he was here for his girlfriend. He used your name, he rattled off a ton of very exact info... I think he said you... uh... Yah. He said you guys had a fight and he was here to work things out?”

Now, I’ve been looking for a boyfriend for a long time, so I was half thinking, “Huh. Maybe dreams do come true. Might as well see who it is.” But I was also starting to feel a bit sick, in the pit of my stomach, because it would be one thing if this happened on campus or back home. But I had changed states. My brother moved to this state for school and I don’t know anyone here but him and his friends.

So I finally did the obvious thing and looked through the peephole. I almost didn’t recognize him at first because he had showered, shaved, and changed into clean clothes, for the first time since I’d known him. But sure as shit, it was Wendell standing on my brother’s doorstep, hundreds of miles from his original corner.

I was so scared I couldn’t speak. My heart was pounding like I was slipping under deep water with my legs tied. I just backed away from the door and sat down on the couch and tried to collect myself.

My brother thought this was my affirming that there really was some secret older boyfriend who had just made himself known, so it took a minute for him to cut off his ranting and his dramatic “What will grandma think?” Stuff.

Finally he realized I was tearing up and he sat down, calmed down, and apologized and said we’d figure it out, and I whispered, still out of breath, “No, you don’t understand. He followed me here.” My brother still didn’t get it. “What? You didn’t want him to come here? What was your fight about?” He asked, still thinking the guy was my boyfriend.

I managed to repress my panic enough to explain the broad strokes to him. But I don’t think he fully grasped how creepy it was in the moment, because he was like, “You’re shitting me. That’s hilarious. I’ll take care of this.”

He went to the door and called from behind it, “Yo, just checked, she’s not here. Must’ve packed out this morning. You should do the same. I’m taking this social distancing real serious.” And winked at me.

That’s when, as my brother says when he tells this story, it got real. Wendell said “You’re lying. I heard her in there. Tell her I’m sorry. I don’t know why she’s been avoiding me but I got cleaned up for her and I’ll take her anywhere she wants to go. Tell her that. Tell her. And don’t lie. I’ll know if you lie.”

That rubbed my brother the wrong way, and he said back, “Bro, you’re not taking her anywhere, now get off my deck before we have a problem.” And Wendell sounded like he was walking away, but instead, he was going over to the window.

When I saw him staring, he looked different than I’d ever seen him. Even than a few seconds earlier when I’d glanced through the peephole. His clothes were clean, but they didn’t fit or match. Eyes bugged out of his head, white stuff caked on the corners of his mouth I hadn’t noticed at first, shaking, just kind of disconnected from reality.

He started banging on the window shouting things like “That’s my girlfriend, you can’t keep her in there. You little bitch ass! Let her out you bitch ass! Let her out! Let her out! I’m coming baby! I’m coming!” I couldn’t tell if it was meant as a threat or a reassurance. I was so scared, I was too scared to run, or even move.

I think my brother was almost as surprised by the sudden outburst. He was rolling up his sleeves like he was preparing to go out there, and I was trying to make my voice work to beg him not too.

But I was so anxious, scared, embarrassed, and sad that I had missed all the signs leading up to this, all the opportunities to prevent it, that our friendship was never the wholesome thing I thought it was (though of course that’s something I had already begun to grapple with before this day), and had so many thoughts swirling in my head, fear being chief among them. All I could do was scream. Not words, just, “Aaaaaahhhhh!” And cover my ears to drown the whole situation out.

Before my brother could charge out the door (he’s an athletic guy, but I don’t think he’s ever actually been in a physical fight) Wendell punched through the window. Nothing actually happened when he punched through, and there was an eerie moment of silence where nobody moved, I think even I stopped screaming.

But when he pulled his hand back, all hell broke loose. A fair amount of blood started spurting out when he pulled his hand back through the glass. The things he was shouting started to make even less sense—along the lines of “Look what you did to me! This is a test! I told you I couldn’t be stopped, bitch ass!” And the look in his eyes got even more distant.

I think the sight of the blood, which has always made my brother really squeamish, made him realize this was real, and he finally yelled “Damn it Sis, call 911!” While he leaned against the door which Wendell was now repeatedly running into (even though he was nowhere close to breaking it down.)

I don’t even remember making the call, but apparently I did, because within ten minutes the police arrested Wendell without resistance. He kept trying to tell them his girlfriend was trapped in the house and he’d come all this way to save her. My poor brother was even momentarily handcuffed and had to explain he hadn’t taken me hostage.

Probably one of the most haunting memories of the whole event is, as they carted Wendell away for arrest, he started singing opera music.

I’ve learned a lot of important common sense and life lessons from this saga. But most of all, Wendell, let’s not meet.

Last night my friends, my crush and I agreed to meet at my favorite bar after work. I was a bit early since I got to leave work 30 minutes early so I went inside and ordered a beer for myself.

There was a huge, muscular guy with a long ass ponytail sitting at the bar and the seat next to him was empty. He offered me to sit down so I did. We had some smalltalk and he seemed nice enough. Just asked me why I'm all alone and he kept talking about how I looked so uneasy and nervous and that I should relax. It was weird but he had an almost empty bottle of vodka in front of him so I really didn't think anything of it.

My friends finally arrived just as I finished my first beer and we went to sit at a table. I had 3 more bottles of beer and we were having a great time. Whenever I went to the toilet, that guy from the bar was there, asking me if I was ok. That was pretty strange but at the time I felt just a little tipsy and everything was alright.

At some point I started to feel sick so I went outside to have a cigarette and get some cold air. The guy followed me outside and asked if I was alright. I was starting to get weirded out at that point. The bar was super full but he really seemed to watch me all night...

I went back inside, ordered a glass of water and told my friends that I wasn't feeling well and would be going home. They all offered to bring me home which I am so darn grateful for looking back.

I took a sip of water and then it all just hit me. I ran outside and threw up. I could barely stand up all of a sudden so I sat down on a staircase and kept throwing up. My friends found me a few minutes later and kept arguing about whether they should take me to a taxi or carry me home. Then the guy from the bar showed up. He kept saying that he lives just down the street and that I could sleep on his couch. My coworker who is basically like an older brother to me, got really pissed and told that guy to fuck off.

They forced me to stand up which was almost impossible at that point and somehow dragged me to my friend's place where I went to sleep hugging a bucket and feeling like I was gonna die any second.

This morning I wasn't able to stand up for hours. When I did, it resulted in instant vomiting. It was 1pm when I finally managed to go to the train station, get something to eat and drink and head home. I'm still shaking and sweating and everything looks blurry.

So weird guy from the bar, I hope we never ever meet again and I hope you won't be doing this to other girls.

So, this happened about 5 years ago while I was 9 months pregnant.

I was Christmas shopping at the mall with my then 7 and 15 year old daughters one Saturday night in a very safe city with very low crime rate.

There was an Applebees connected to the mall, and we ended our shopping pretty late, and the mall stores were starting to close. So, I took my kids to the connected Applebees for a late dinner.

We finish up eating at about 10pm, and leave out the Applebees entrance into the practically deserted parking lot with shopping bags in tow. As we got to the car, I was in the middle of monuvering the shopping bags on my arms to find my keys, when a 50ish year old crusty looking guy starts walking up from somewhere in the parking lot with shaggy gray/white hair and a faded flannel shirt and old jeans.

I noticed him briskly approaching when he was about 40 feet away and he said "This is a stick up, give me all your money". My blood ran cold and I stared at him owlishly and shakingly said "..w...what..?"

He then said he was just kidding and came up and stood RIGHT NEXT to my daughters who were standing on the OTHER side of the car waiting for me to unlock the car to let them in.

He then starts making small talk with me and my girls. He's asking things like if they were being good girls for santa, how old they were, if we got all our Christmas shopping done, what kind of things did we get etc. He didn't seem drunk, high, slow, or mentally challenged at all. He was very coherent and seemed of sound mind.

Mind you, I was a heavily pregnant woman, alone with my two daughters in a mostly deserted parking lot at 10 o'clock at night, who was being approached by a stranger who came and stood RIGHT next to my kids on the other side of the car just shooting the breeze, talking to me AND my kids with his hands in his pockets and occasionally looking over his shoulder.

I didn't want to aggravate him, so I was politely conversing with him and trying to look calm and nonchalant while trying to disguise my frantic hands digging inside my giant purse for my car keys.

This exchange went on for a couple minutes while he periodically kept looking over his shoulder. I was silently panicking and trying to politely keep the situation from escalating by calmly and nonchalantly talking to him while also trying in vain to find my damned car keys to get us out of there. They were in there hiding good.

I felt that at any moment he was going to pull a knife or gun, or rob me, and my kids were RIGHT next to him, AWAY from their mother on the OTHER side of the car and I couldn't find my FUCKING car keys to get my kids into the safety of the car.

He kept trying to engage them in conversation, and I could see that my oldest daughter was a little weirded out, and she kept glancing at me to guage my assessment/reaction to this situation. (Kids often tend to not recognize potential danger when they are with their parents, since they see us as their protectors) and being that he was only talking and acting friendly, and I was doing my best to stay calm, they were oblivious to the alarming situation we ALL were in, and being 9 months pregnant and that I was no match for this full grown man, ESPECIALLY if he was hiding a weapon on him.

While still desperately digging for my keys, I tried to politely give him hints that the conversation was over by saying things like "It was nice chatting with you, but I gotta get these kids to bed" and "It was nice meeting you", and telling my girls to say that it was nice meeting him too.

My polite attempts to get this guy to leave wasn't working because he kept sidestepping my attempts, and asking them what their favorite school subjects are and how nice young ladies they were etc while I was struggling with the shopping bags and digging in my giant cluttered purse for my car keys.

My outgoing 7 year old was completely oblivious to how NOT okay this situation was, because he was being "friendly" and because of the whole "I'm with mommy, so I'm safe" child mentality.

So, she started to talk about what she picked out for Daddy for Christmas, and started enthusiastically talking about kid stuff and asking him if he knew what Minecraft was etc and keeping this creep from leaving us alone by keeping him engaged in conversation. They didn't realize that I was becoming desperate to get them the hell out of there.

Then I suddenly felt this sinking feeling of dread when I realized that I may have lost my keys in the mall, and that we were stuck outside with this stange man who kept looking over his shoulders and was showing no signs of walking away , and I was thinking that he was waiting for the perfect moment to pounce. All he had to do was grab one of my girls and threaten their life, knowing it would make me do whatever he wanted as long as he wouldn't hurt them.

I started to feel my adrenaline start to spike, and my heart and stomach started doing flip flops and I felt like at any moment shit was going to go down as the gravity of realizing that there were no other people or witnesses around and that we were totally alone with him and at that moment, the odds were stacked against us and that he has his chance!

Then, he all of a sudden was all like "Ok, it was nice talking with ya, see ya later!" And walked off in the same direction as to which he came.

It wasn't until THEN I found my car keys and unlocked the car and told my kids to get in fast and I got in too and locked the doors and started the car and drove the hell out of there.

My 15 year old lightheartedly and jokingly said "Ok, THAT was weird" and laughed. I was overwhelmed with relief and then I was confused over what just happened.

I thought to my self "Why the HELL would a guy of seemingly sound mind think it totally acceptable to go out of his way just to approach a woman and her kids in a deserted parking lot late at night JUST to chitchat???" But being that nothing bad happened, I brushed it off and joked about it too.

When we got home, my husband greeted us and asked us how shopping went, and I said it went well, and my 15 year old told him what happened in the parking lot and how weird it was and was kinda joking about it. I started joking too saying how I was mentally having a panic attack while trying to look calm and I started making fun of myself by telling my husband how I was attempting to inconspicuously rummage through my purse to find my car keys.

My husband went completely white and I acknowledged his horrified look of alarm and I assured him that albeit creepy, the guy was just talking and eventually left on his own.

Now, my father in law is a retired sheriff deputy, and my husband went through police academy training after graduating highschool (he decided to go to business school instead of becoming a cop) and being that the knowledge he gained from that, PLUS growing up with a cop for a Dad, I found out why my husband looked absolutely horrified when I told him the details.

What my husband told me completely rattled me to the bone.

My husband told me that he was 100% sure that the reason why that guy was hanging around us and "chit chatting" was because he was WAITING for me to unlock my car.

And the reason why he was standing next to our kids was because once I unlocked the car, and the kids started to get inside, he was most likely going to force himself into the car WITH the kids and hold a knife or gun to them to gain leverage on me to force me to cooperate knowing that I wouldn't abandon my kids, which would force me to get into the car with them and do what ever he wanted me to do, which most likely would be to drive to a remote location to do God knows what. And being that he wasn't wearing a mask, suggests that his intentions were to ALSO leave no witnesses to identify him.

I then remembered that he WAS positioned by the back seat passenger door where my 7 year old was standing by waiting to get in.

My husband then told me that the most likely reason why the guy ended up leaving was because it took soooo long for me to find my keys, and the longer it took, the more anxious and spooked it made him.

And that WHOLE time, I was desperate to find my car keys which through some sort of divine intervention, stayed hidden in my purse, thus saving us from potentially being abducted.

My daughter reminded me about this today, and I thought y'all would enjoy the laugh.

When my oldest daughter was a freshman in college, she and her friends decided to get into bones. Specifically, they would pick up decaying roadkill, clean the skulls, and make art from them (or sell them). Eventually, they decided to get some fresh cow skulls to clean. They went to a local slaughterhouse, and bought three cow heads, wrapping them in plastic garbage bags and putting them in the back of their car.

On the way to the cleaning site, they stopped at a home improvement store in the middle of nowhere to pick up some supplies; two people went inside, two stayed with the car. After a few minutes, my daughter said, "I think the heads shifted; I'm going to check the them and make sure the bags didn't come open." She got out, opened the hatchback, and the bags toppled out, spilling blood and decapitated cow heads onto the pavement.

As she jumped back, she happened to see a lone Store Employee, pushing carts back to the store. And he saw the heads. And the blood. He dropped the carts and power-walked as fast as possible to the storefront, just as my daughter's friends came out. "We need to GO," she said. And they went, with all haste.

This was...oh, five years ago? I'm sure that poor traumatized employee is hoping to never meet them again.

This happened a little bit ago, about a month, and it was a bizarre experience to say the least.

I'm 15, and I was playing some video games before passing out. It was about, say, 11PM, when I hear the doorbell ring. Out of instinct, I begin walking downstairs, but about halfway there rationality came to mind.

"Who the fuck rings a doorbell at 11PM?"

I silently strode back upstairs and stood in the hall, kinda expecting something bad to happen. An exact minute later, it rings twice. My parents begin to leave their room, and give my a quizzical look, and all I had to respond was a shrug.

Then he starts banging on the door. My mother jumps at the first bang, and my father's eyes widened, but more in confusion than fear. He decided to go downstairs and peep through the view hole.

It was our neighbor.

My dad hesitantly opened the door, and I could hear my fathers voice tremble slightly. "Hey, what do you need?" Next thing I hear is an entire full blown scream argument from our neighbor, claiming that this household was his, and we stole it from him. My fathers uneasiness was quickly replaced with annoyance, and he simply shut the door without giving our neighbor the time of day.

My dad stepped on the first step going up the stairwell when our neighbor first hit the door. I'm not talking banging with a fist, this man was full body slamming it. My father was stunned for a second, and my neighbor charged the door again. This time, we began to hear the splintering of wood. Everyone reacted at once. My father went to brace the door with his body, my mother went to go get the other two kids, and I went for 911.

The body slamming ensued for another 5 minutes, and while I was on the phone with 911, it stopped. I thought it was over, and I was relieved. But I still stuck on the phone.

I go peak out the front window of my house, and boy, was it only getting started.

Our neighbor took his Jeep Wrangler and simply directed it straight at our house. We had zero clue what he was doing, until he hit the gas and we heard the squealing of tires, then he immediately hit the breaks. He was trying to scare us out of the house.

I was still on the phone with 911, and I stepped away from the window to comfort my siblings, crack jokes and such. Eventually, police arrived and arrested him.

The next morning, I left for school, still shaken from the night before. I stepped onto our front steps, and saw tire marks leading up to our front door. The lunatic actually nearly rammed our door down with his car.

I really never want to see this cunt ever again, but he lives directly to my right. Fuck my life.

EDIT: Alright, I dont know if he has a mental illness or not, I'm sorry. And no, I'm not going to physically harm him via blade nor bullet. Stop suggesting that.

EDIT 2: No, I do not care if he had threatened us; the situation was resolved with no one harmed. Stop saying I/my father should've hurt anyone. There was no need, rationality over emotion. And no, not even I trust my guardians with a firearm. I would probably be the best candidate for it, but I doubt my father will buy a gun and rely on his 15 year old son to use it. Best that I wait until I'm of age.

I posted this on r/BackwoodsCreepy awhile back on this throwaway account. My wife suggested this sub might find it interesting as well. Here goes:

I grew up in Ohio in the 70s and me and my childhood friend Joe were outside all the time we could manage it. Joe lived on a farm that bordered a pretty big forest and my parents would drop me off in the morning and we’d stay in the woods all weekend. We’d only come out for school. We loved pretending we were frontiersmen; we’d build shelters, traps, practice making fire with sticks, the whole nine yards.

When we got to be in high school, we got this notion to pull a “Stand By Me”. This was based on the movie of the same name that had just come out. The idea was that we’d walk the railroad tracks out in the country. But instead of looking for a dead body, we’d find cool bridges to fish from, and camp a little ways off the tracks. Of course we knew this was dangerous and we’d likely be trespassing, but we were kids.

We had a lot of fun. We did find beautiful rivers, we discovered bridges no one went to, we fished, we hid from trains. At night we camped in woods just near the tracks and made small hidden fires. Nothing bad ever happened. It was idyllic. In fact, it was so fun we did it multiple times. Never had a problem.

After high school me and Joe went our own ways. We both left home, but always stayed in touch and always tried to coordinate visits so we’d see each other occasionally. Well one summer in the mid 90s it worked out that we were both in town for about a week. We’d do stuff with family in the day, and at night we’d either catch drinks at a bar or sit outside Joe’s house around a fire and talk about the old days.

One night, me and Joe got to talking about our “Stand By Me” trips. Well, nostalgia and beer are a hell of a mix. Soon we decided to take a day, walk the rails, camp one night and walk home. The day came, we started out early morning. We had my wife drop us off in our old spot where we used to start - right outside our hometown. She thought this was absolutely crazy and made sure to mention it.

When she pulled away, Joe suggested that instead of walking the usual route, we’d take the opposite direction - just to be adventurous. We knew the land well, we had a map, so I gave a “What the hell” and off we set.

The day went fine. It was fun, and a little sad - but in a good way. We found a bridge and sat on the edge, smoked a joint and moved on. We had no fishing gear, but we brought some canned food and other stuff. Before night started to set in, we picked a spot to camp. It was a thick forested area, trees on every side of the train tracks so you felt like you were in a tunnel. We had brought small hammocks to sleep on, but before we set them up we decided to do a little scouting of the perimeter.

Now, this is what we used to do in the old days too. We’d walk the area around a little bit to make sure some dude’s house wasn’t just over a hill and we were actually camping in their yard. We walked maybe a hundred or so feet into the woods and up a small incline. We figured if we didn’t see anything from on top of this short hill, we’d be fine. But when we got to the top, we saw an old building down at the bottom, about a hundred yards into the woods. It was barely visible.

We pondered over what to do. We both assumed it was a sugar shack or something, because there didn’t appear to be a clear road into it. From where we were, there didn’t look to be anyone in it either. All was quiet, no movement could be seen. No lights. We decided to walk a little closer just to make sure. We came down the hill very slowly and as we neared the building we saw it wasn’t a sugar shack at all, it was an old church.

It looked like it had been abandoned for years. It was a squat, sagging building whose wooden planks were almost black from years of moss and rot. A cross still stood on top of the place, also weathered black. None of the windows had glass and there were no doors, just open doorways. We got close enough to see inside, there were rows of pews and a built up section in front for a preacher to stand. We didn’t go all the way in, we didn’t want to. Beyond all that, there was no sign of anyone else. No footprints, no paths, no roads. It was an abandoned church.

We left immediately and went back up the hill to our spot we had picked to camp. Having a hill between us and the church made us feel better, but we were still a little uneasy. We chalked it up to the natural creepiness seeing a church in the middle of the woods would elicit. Besides, at this point it was dusk and we just decided to rig up our hammocks and go to sleep and move on at early morning.

Night set in, and as we lay in our hammocks and shot the shit, we began to hear something in the direction of the church. Our conversation about it went a little like this;

“Do you hear that?”

“What the fuck is that?”

“It sounds like...people singing.”

And it did sound just like singing. We both slid right out of our hammocks and hunkered down, straining to hear more. We listened for a minute or two, and the singing continued but it wasn’t getting louder. Finally we decided to creep back up the hill and see if we could spy where the sound was coming from. We could still move very quietly in the woods from the old days, it was second nature to us. The moon was barely out but it provided enough light so you wouldn’t walk right into a tree, but it was near pitch black. We didn’t use flashlights as we crept slowly up the hill and we didn’t talk. When we got to the top we saw light in the distance.

It was coming from the church. And the singing was coming from inside. Joe and I put our heads close together and had a hushed conversation that boiled down to “Can you believe this shit?” The light looked to be candlelight from the way it flickered, and though we tried, we couldn’t make out what was being sung. It sounded like church music, but in another language. We sat and watched for awhile, trying to see who was in there, but we only saw occasional shadows. We had no intention of getting closer either, we had about a football field length between us and we aimed to keep it that way.

The singing continued for a bit, and then it stopped. After that, a booming male voice began to chant. I was already freaked out, but this voice thoroughly scared the shit out of me. It sounded like some old testament preacher you see in movies, but again it was like he was speaking in a different language because we couldn’t understand a single word. Eventually it got to where the single male voice would say something and then a bunch of voices would answer in song. This lasted for awhile and then they all broke into this long, sustained wail that just kept getting louder. It got so loud and so...disturbing that I covered my ears. Then it stopped.

At this point I was just getting ready to say “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” when Joe put a hand on my shoulder and hissed “They’re coming out!” We were far enough away that we couldn’t make them out really well, but what we could see was a line of figures walk out the open doorway, all holding hands in single file. We could see some of them had flashlights. They began to sing again, and the light from the flashlights began to move toward us and the hill.

We booked it back down to our camp site, grabbed our shit and ran to the tracks. Once there, we ran down the tracks in the direction we had come from. After a few minutes, we stopped and looked back. We saw lights coming down the hill. They were moving erratically like whoever was holding them was shaking them.

We continued to run in spurts and walk as fast as we could. We eventually stopped seeing the lights and came to a road. By our map we knew a small town was about fifteen minutes down it, and we walked there, got to a 24 hour gas station and called my wife to come get us.

My wife and other friends all just thought it was kids messing around, but I heard those voices and they sure as hell didn’t sound like kids to me. Not sure who those people were, but it was definitely the creepiest thing that happened to me out in the woods.

So this happened in 2013 and I was 17. My family was looking at this house and the owner showed up and talked with my parents. Seemed like a nice older man, built the house himself. It's a pretty nice two story house overlooking a river. Anyway, I was standing back watching everyone talk and as the owner is talking and laughing there's a break in the conversation where he turns away from my parents and his expression completely and instantly changes from happy to the most sinister and hateful scowl I've ever seen. I don't think he noticed me watching, it probably appeared to be on my phone as my head was down. As soon as he turned back he instantly went back to smiling. It was so creepy and honestly made me feel sick. I told my mom who said it was weird but maybe he's just awkward.

So we got the house. We moved in and the next weekend my family is going to church but I don't feel like going. So they all leave me at home. So it's Sunday morning about 11am when I hear really loud banging outside. Its rhythmatic and coming from the side of the house. I was on the other side of the house on the second floor. Honestly my dumb ass thought it was maybe the wind (it was stormy that day) and I didn't think much of it. it stopped after about 5 minutes. 10 minutes later I hear walking around downstairs. Chairs moving. Kitchen cabinets opening and the fridge opening.

I immediately quietly go lock my door, grab my baseball bat, and call 911. While I tell them my address I text my mom and tell her that someone is in the house and that I've called 911. At that point the 911 operator said that someone was 10 minutes out. I tell her sh cause I heard steps walking towards the stairs. Basically the house is so thin I could track where he was in the house. At this time my mom responded that she's on her way. Shes 30 minutes away. So here is a 17 year old, 5'2, 100lb girl hunkered in her room full well knowing that if he came in he'd over power me and take the bat. I was fucking terrified.

I heard him walk down the hallway towards my door. I saw the handle turn and stop. It was locked. And I heard him stand there. He didn't move. I could hear his breathing. It felt like forever but really I think it was about 10 seconds. I heard him turn and go back down. I heard the back door open and shut. And about three minutes later the police pulled up. The 911 operator asked me if I could let them in or if they needed to force it. I knew he had left so I let them in. No one was there, no sign of forced entry, nothing. When my mom got there she looked at my stepdad and asked if he had changed the locks. He hadn't.

I think the creepiest part, and what really validated my story, was that my mom had just vacuumed the hallway. And there were shoe prints that were larger than anyone in our house. And the police hadn't been up there. And they stopped just outside my room.

He died about a year after that.

Please don't forget to change your locks!