Vol. 244: Disturbing TRUE Stories From Reddit
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That's N-O-O-M dot com. About ten years ago, my ex and I decided to hit the drive-in theater for a Tuesday movie night. It was the perfect midweek escape since I had Wednesdays off, and Tuesday entries at the drive-in were only $5. That particular night, we watched Gone Girl, and by the time the movie ended, it was close to midnight, and we were going to be heading home under a blanket of darkness.

I was driving, and as we left the theater, I hopped onto the freeway. It was late, and the road was mostly empty. Just me, my ex, and a semi truck lumbering along in the right lane. I flipped on my blinker to pass the semi, and moved into the left lane. I didn't see any other cars in sight, so I thought nothing of it. But then seemingly out of nowhere, a white truck appeared behind me, its high beams flashing aggressively. It sped up, tailgating me so closely I could barely see its headlights in my rearview mirror.

My first thought was, "Did I accidentally cut this guy off?" It didn't seem possible. I checked my mirrors, and the freeway had been empty just seconds before. I quickly moved back to the right lane after passing the semi, figuring the truck driver could pass me, flip me off, and be on his way, but that's not what happened at all. As soon as I moved over, the truck filled the gap between me and the semi, sticking to my rear bumper like glue.

My ex was asleep in the passenger seat, and I didn't want to wake him over what could have been nothing. Maybe I had made a mistake, though it didn't feel like it. The truck's driver had three empty lanes to the left where he could pass me, but instead he stayed locked on my bumper, flashing his brights like some sort of maniac. I switched lanes again, hoping to let him pass, but he just followed. Every single time I moved, he swerved behind me. I even stopped using my turn signals, trying to throw him off.

but he mirrored my every move. By this point, my hands were shaking on the wheel. I pushed our car to 90 miles per hour, thinking that maybe I could lose him, but he just sped up to match my pace. Terrified, I nudged my ex awake. "Babe," I whispered, "I think we're being followed." He rubbed his eyes, sat up, and turned to look behind us. Almost immediately, he realized what I meant. Our exit wasn't for another few miles, and the truck showed no signs of letting up.

I begged my ex to call the police, but he didn't. He just kept watching the truck like he was trying to make sense of it. Meanwhile, my fear was spiraling into panic. Then I saw it. An exit to another freeway. One that I hadn't planned on taking. Without thinking, I veered sharply towards it, narrowly missing the concrete pillar of the overpass. My heart was pounding in my ears, but I glanced over at the truck as we made the turn. The driver was staring directly at us. His face was shadowed,

but I could feel the intensity of his gaze. There was something deliberate about it, something cold, something calculating. My stomach dropped, and I started sobbing as I drove down the new freeway. My ex stayed quiet, his expression unreadable, but I knew he had seen the same thing I did. I pulled off at the first exit and found a brightly lit gas station. Shaking uncontrollably, I parked the car and broke down in tears. My ex sat there quietly, letting me cry.

before we switched seats so he could drive the rest of the way home. Once we were home and I had calmed down a bit, we started piecing the night together. I explained everything that had happened while he was asleep: the tailgating, the flashing lights, the driver following me through every lane change. Then we got to the moment when I swerved off the freeway and saw the driver staring at us. My ex hesitated for a moment, then looked at me with a voice low and serious. "Babe, he had a gun pointed at us."

I froze. I had been so focused on his face, on the sheer creepiness of him following us, that I hadn't noticed the weapon, but my ex had. The realization hit me like a ton of bricks. This wasn't just some aggressive driver with road rage. This man had a firearm, and he was following us for a reason. What that reason was, I'll never know. We hadn't talked to anyone at the drive-in, or done anything to provoke someone. The movie was uneventful. The night had started off so normally.

but somewhere on that dark freeway, we cross paths with someone who clearly had dark intentions. I still think about that night. What would have happened if I hadn't swerved onto the exit? What if he had caught up to us? That's a thought that scares me to my core. We were lucky, but the memory of his cold, unrelenting stare will likely stick with me to the end of my days. Hey guys, if you're into the content that we create,

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Nine years ago, I met a person that to this day, I still wish that I never had. I was an isolated, bullied, and depressed 8th grader with the added state of being a plus-size kid in a sport-centric town. So basically, I was teased and ridiculed on a daily basis. I couldn't make any friends with my new classmates. All of my old friends from elementary school had been placed in different classes.

and nobody was in the same after-school groups as me anymore. I was so lonely at the time that if someone talked to me without picking on me, it made me genuinely happy. I had a Google+ account, the only social media that I could access at school, one that I kept hidden from my parents. I'd use it to check out my favorite fandoms, and hopefully use to make some new friends. One day, I was on Google+ in the computer lab, and I had commented under a piece of fan art of a character I liked.

The person who had made the post replied to me not even a minute later. I remember getting excited seeing that notification, my heart swelling up with good feelings. The two of us spent the next 10 minutes of my class talking to each other in the comment section. We ended up replying so much that we flooded a good portion of the comments with our own talk. After I had to change classes, I logged back in on one of the Chromebooks we had stored in the back of the class and saw that she had actually messaged me back. Her name was Haley,

At least, that was what she told me her name was. Years later, I'm not sure that was actually her name. In the message I got, Haley told me she was two years older than me and that we had a lot of things in common. I spent the rest of the school day on my phone, not giving a damn about anything in my classes. We talked for the next week in our DMs until she suggested that we message each other in a private chat room. Later that day, we made a private chat on an online messaging site, and in our first conversation,

We typed out all our replies to each other, but then Haley asked if we could also do a voice call. I told her I wasn't sure, but she told me it would be better to hold a conversation, and eventually she asked me multiple times, so I gave in. After about an hour of us talking, she then suggested that we video chat. I agreed, both to make sure she was actually my age, but also to put a name to a face. Haley turned on her camera, and she did look to be roughly in the same age range as me.

I don't know why, but that fact is kinda what scares me now. The fact that she looks so close to my age, plus that she easily smiled and spoke so friendly to me, made me feel that I had nothing to be afraid of. So that led me to quickly believe that I could trust her. We ended up speaking for hours after, with me practically on cloud nine the entire time. In the beginning of our little friendship, things went alright. We told each other about our schools, what we liked.

and gushed over our favorite anime series. We talked almost every day, and stayed up late talking nearly all night. We even exchanged a couple of silly pictures of ourselves, and memes, back and forth a lot. After we had been talking for about six months, Hayley asked me if I would like to meet her friends. At first, I was ecstatic, and the thought of having more friends made me so excited that I didn't think twice before saying yes. Hayley invites me into a separate chat room,

and I got to meet some of her other friends. I had a completely different feeling about these people compared to what I felt with Haley. Something made me feel unsafe there, even though they all seemed nice, and that Haley reassured me I could trust them. It felt like my instincts were trying to warn me, but I wasn't sure about what, so I just pushed that feeling down and ignored it. Most of them were much older than me. In a chat with her main friends, there were six other people. Most of them were 18 or 19.

But there were two guys that I distinctly remember being in their 20s. I asked how they had all met, and they told me they all met either on other social media sites or in real life, but they wouldn't answer any more of my questions. Obviously, I was a bit naive, so all of the red flags that were popping up went completely over my head, from constant loud talking to frequently overlapping each other. The calls that I was on with them were pure chaos.

The messages were even worse, because they would frequently drop cuss words and topics that shouldn't be brought up with someone who was still a minor. I tried building genuine connections with them, but they all acted dismissive to me, and acted like I was annoying whenever I tried to speak in a conversation. Needless to say, I didn't like them very much. Haley, on the other hand, was all about them. She would pull the exact same habits, jokes, dirty words, and all of that with the others. They could say something super problematic,

but she would be laughing right along with them. I was shocked by this version of Haley, because she never acted like this with me, when it was just the two of us. We still talked a bunch, but slowly, she was talking to her other friends more than she was with me. At first, I thought it was fine, but the more that she ignored my messages or didn't pick up my calls, the more bothered I found myself. When I called to confront Haley about blowing me off, she went absolutely ballistic on me.

saying that I was being selfish and that I didn't want her to talk to her other friends because I was just jealous. I explained that that wasn't true, but she wouldn't listen, and she then hung up on me. Haley then ghosted me for nearly a month, leaving me both worried and upset over what had happened. When she started talking to me again, I was so emotionally distraught that I cried on our first call, and I apologized for the whole thing. She told me it was fine, she just needed some time alone, and that she would talk to me a bit more in a little while.

And indeed she did, although it wasn't about what I thought it would be about. Haley began to tell me that she had depression and that was the reason she wouldn't talk to me for a month. I didn't judge her for it, I just said whatever she needed to talk about, she could come to me with it. This led to her trauma dumping on me nearly every single day, talking about how shitty her home life was, and how bad her relationship was with her mom, how much she hated herself.

I was there to offer an ear and some kind words whenever Haley called or messaged me about it. This quickly became part of our routine, almost daily in fact. In the middle of us having any kind of conversation, she'd begin complaining about anything that had happened during her day. If not that, it would be about how ugly she thought she was, or how much her life sucked, and how much she wanted to end things. The last one freaked me out the most. I was worried about her because we lived in different states, and I couldn't help her in person.

Every time she would become self-deprecating, I would say otherwise, giving her compliments and words of affirmation for so long that my throat ached and felt raw. And then just as fast as she'd bring it up, she'd drop that conversation and we'd talk like we would before. Haley also began calling for long periods of time and messaging me late into the night. Phone calls would stretch for hours and her texts would come in until four or five in the morning. The thing was, it was mainly her talking now,

Every phone call, she'd take over the conversation. If I didn't message her back quickly enough, she'd spam multiple texts back to back faster than I could read them. I would try to end them myself, but every time I would try, Haley would chastise me for wanting to leave our conversation when, not long ago, I wanted to have her attention all to myself. She basically guilt-tripped me back into talking to her, and it worked every time. Even if I had lost interest in our talks or didn't want her to message me during class,

I would still let her talk and reply. At least I still had her attention, and she still wanted to talk to me. This all went on in a cycle for two years, and it left me feeling more anxious and exhausted than anything else ever did. It felt like we had nothing in common anymore, and she either ghosts me for a week or spends the entire weekend texting me non-stop. The topics of her self-worth had gotten worse. They escalated to her messaging me goodbye or "I can't live like this anymore."

without responding to any of my following messages or calls. Alongside that, she would send me pictures of her "marking" herself, telling me about how it felt to do it. The sight of those messages would send me into panic attacks, and every time I would freak and message her after, I would be sent into tears. Not only that, the group chat with her other friends only got worse. Arguments broke out frequently, drama and gossip spread like an oil spill,

And it led to people being blocked or unblocked almost every few days. I hated talking to them. They began ganging up on me in messages, and Haley was often the first one to make rude jokes about me that they would all laugh at. I began to get sick of it, and would stop messaging and calling both Haley and her friends, despite her begging me to. One late night, while the group was in an argument over text, I hit my breaking point. I was tired of all the drama and them treating me like shit all the time.

So I messaged the group chat that I had had enough of them, and then I privately messaged Haley that I needed a break. I then left both chat rooms, blocked everyone involved, deleted my messaging account, and deleted the site from my computer's history. Once it was all over, I felt like I had been freed from some kind of prison, and all I could do was cry in relief over the whole thing being over. I later found out that all the pictures Haley had sent me were stock images and photoshopped.

I also found out from a bit of digging through her background, a lot of the things she said didn't add up. I learned that she was actually a lot older than what she had originally told me, meaning that when we first met, I was 14 and she was somewhere in her 20s. Many things from our interactions still freak me out to this day, especially the picture of her marks and her scathing, self-deprecating messages. For almost three months, I would have nightmares about Haley getting back in contact with me,

and what she would say or do to me. I have many better friends now, and I'm absolutely certain that I will never hear from Haley again. But sometimes, I still wonder who that woman really was. What was it about me that interested her? Although hopefully, I won't ever find out. And to Haley, if you somehow ever find this post, don't reach out. I now know just how much of a weirdo you are, that you obviously got some sort of kick out of gaslighting and abusing a teenager.

and that if you're still clicking away on keyboards from a dark basement, you probably haven't changed one bit.

I was in college when this happened.

Just a regular evening during winter break. I was on my way back to campus, somewhere between 6 and 7pm. I remember that because it was already dark out. I didn't happen to realize that my car was running on E until it was too late. When I heard my car start to sputter, I knew then that I didn't have much of a choice. I just had to coast off the main street and let my car roll as far as it could. It finally came to a stop in front of a random house in the neighborhood. It was quiet and dark.

Sitting in my car, I racked my brain for all my options. Winter break meant most people had gone home, and I couldn't think of anyone I knew with a car still on campus. Resigned, I figured I'd have to hoof it to the nearest gas station, fill up the small gas can in my trunk, and walk back. Grabbing the canister, I leaned against the front of my car and pulled out my phone to check for directions to the nearest gas station. That's when a car pulled into the driveway of the house that I'd stopped in front of.

The driver was a young woman around my age, dressed in a server's uniform, probably from a fast food job. She noticed me immediately, and I couldn't really blame her. I was parked right outside of her house with a gas can in hand. She got out of her car and took a few steps towards me. It was clear that she was cautious, but still curious. She asked me if I needed any help. I explained my situation honestly. Yeah, I ran out of gas, and it looks like the nearest Chevron is kind of far off.

I was just about to start walking when you pulled up. "Hey, I'd hate to inconvenience you, but do you think you could help me out?" Her expression changed almost instantly. Her face paled, her eyes wide like she'd just seen something that didn't belong. At first, I thought it was just because I was some random guy parked outside of her home at night. Her being cautious made all the sense in the world to me, but there was something more, something that seems like it struck her a bit deeper.

I did my best to ease her concern, assuring her, "I've got the gas can, and I don't need to ride with you or anything. I can even pay for the gas." She stood there for a moment, staring at me like she was piecing together a puzzle that she didn't like. Then, with a nod, she took the can, refusing to let me pay her, and headed off to the gas station without saying much else to me. I waited by my car, feeling more than a little bit awkward, but still grateful.

When she returned a short while later, she handed me the filled canister but didn't leave right away. She lingered, clearly debating whether or not to speak, when finally she broke the silence. "Do you want to hear something weird?" she asked, her voice both tentative and serious. "Of course I do," I said. She hesitated for another moment, then continued, "Today at work, I got this prank call, but it wasn't like a normal prank call.

The guy on the other end of the phone just kept asking me the same thing over and over again. "Have you ever run out of gas?" We both froze for a moment, and then, not knowing what else to do, chuckled nervously. It was the kind of laugh that masks unease, the kind that acknowledges something creepy, but refuses to stay on the topic. All I could get out was "Thanks again." She nodded and headed off into her home. I drove away, but the interaction stayed with me.

playing over and over in my mind. Like, what were the odds? A random house, a random night, and a random encounter tied together by this bizarre prank call. Even now, I get goosebumps thinking about it. Was it just an eerie coincidence, or was there something more to it? I'll never know, but it's a moment that remains as unsettling as it is unforgettable to me.