35 True Stalker, Stranger & Let's Not Meet Horror Stories Compilation | 5 HOURS Of Scary Stories
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Hi Raven, Big Fan here. I've been listening to all of your videos for a while now, and I thought that I should share a very scary story that happened to me. What happened to me didn't freak me out as much at the time, but over time the more I thought about it and what almost happened to me, the more terrified I got. I think it's because my brain blocked what happened, and that it was so scary that I felt numb for a while.

My brain has always tended to be good at blocking out traumatic events. This is kind of a long story, so I apologize. This happened back in the fall of 2017. I was almost 22 at the time, and my friends and I were first semester seniors in college. My super close group of friends consisted of five of us. Two guys and three girls. Me being one of the three girls.

I'm going to change all of our names, including my own, for privacy. Our group consisted of: Myself, Girl 1, Daniela, Girl 2, Nicole, Girl 3, Marie, Guy 1, Jack, and Guy 2, Nolan. I'm almost 28 now and I do not drink anymore, but as you know, a solid number of college kids tend to go out and get a bit... drunk sometimes.

Perhaps a bit too often. My friends and I, on the weekends, were some of those back in the day. It was Jack's 22nd birthday, and he was throwing a birthday celebration dinner. And then, after the dinner, the plan was to go to an area of the city that had a strip of bars and nightclubs. It wasn't the first time that we'd been there, and I didn't like to go often because it was at times a questionable area,

But alas, I wanted to be there for my friend's birthday. So, after our delicious dinner, I tagged along and we went to the party strip. We went to about four bars and nightclubs, until I realized I had regrettably gotten a bit too drunk. Nicole had as well. I asked Nicole if she wanted to go Uber with me home, but Nicole was the kind of girl who would keep going, no matter how drunk she got.

I, on the other hand, always chose to stop when I hit a certain point. Even when really drunk, though, I always still remembered everything, and I never drank myself into a blackout. Marie, who is now my ex-best friend for many reasons, wanted to stay and had no thought in how I would get home, and Nicole, who I'm still close with to this day, considered going with me.

but then Jack and Nolan stepped in, asking me if I wanted them to take me home. That's when I said, "No, it's fine. I'm not going to make you stop celebrating your birthday early just because I drink too much and don't feel well." They insisted again, and I said, "No, really, it's fine. Don't worry about it. I'll get home safely."

I really didn't want to be the reason that Jack left his celebration night early, or anyone there for that matter. They offered to walk me out and wait with me for my Uber to arrive, and I at least agreed on that. I told Nicole that she should just stay as well, because she was having fun, and I didn't want to make her go home early with me either.

It was midnight at this point and I was just super tired on top of it, and I kind of just wanted to hop into bed. Looking back, firmly insisting that they should stay was one of the dumbest decisions I've ever made, especially since they were only trying to keep me safe. On the app, it said that my car was a black Toyota Corolla and that my driver's name was Michael.

A few minutes later, the app said the car was on our block arriving, and a black Toyota Corolla pulled up. I said, "Michael, Uber for Daniela?" and he said, "Yes." My friends then hugged me goodbye, and told me to be safe, and to please text them when I got home. I told them, "I will. Have a fun rest of your night." He also looked like the guy in the picture, so I wasn't suspicious of anything.

Back in the day, I would sometimes feel very carsick after drinking, and I would ask the driver if I could sit in the front. So I asked him, and he said, that's totally fine. By the way, I haven't done this in years. I think at such a young age, we all just make decisions that we don't think about too much, quite often, and fail to realize how dumb these decisions were later on.

Sitting shotgun in a passenger's car can be so dangerous, but I was young and dumb, so please don't judge me. After I hopped in, we made a right turn and drove a few blocks. On the route home, there's a darker area of little fields of grass and some houses that you pass before going under a bridge and getting onto the highway.

Just as we were maybe 400 feet from the bridge in the dark area near the houses, he said, Wait, may I have your address? I was slightly confused, but I gave it to him assuming the app messed it up or was having some sort of glitch or something, so I brushed it off. Then, this is when I saw the guy entering my address into Google Maps. This is when I began to get a little suspicious. I looked directly at him and said,

The Uber app should automatically have my address and directions. Why are you using Google Maps? He stayed silent for a few seconds before mumbling, This is easier. This is when full suspicion kicked in. I got louder and more demanding, saying, Pull up the Uber app. He looked at me as if he was taken aback. This is when my Uber driver, Michael, messaged me, asking me where I was standing, so that he could pick me up.

My blood ran cold. I asked, You aren't actually an Uber driver, are you? He looked at me quietly and said, No, with a weird smirk on his face. Now, I knew that I was likely in some serious danger. As someone who is the opposite of passive, and will kick someone's arse if I have to for my safety, I said, No.

If you don't let me out of this car, I will not only punch you in the face, but I will pepper spray you and continue to tase you as your nose bleeds. And I'll call the police as you whimper in pain, feeling real freaking sorry. I also have a pocket knife in case of idiots like you, and I won't be scared to use it on you after I use the rest of my things on you either.

To be honest, all I had on me was my fist ready to punch, but he didn't know this. I had to be intimidating, and make it seem like I had on me some things that could really hurt him. He backed slightly away from me with his back towards his left corner of his seat. I then demanded, Stop this car now, and let me the hell out. He looked really shocked, and he pulled the car to a halt. I then asked,

"Why the hell did you even pick me up?" He stayed silent, looking really shocked. One, as if he didn't expect me to figure out this soon, and two, that I would threaten him this badly, and be more than happy to fight back. He gave a look that kind of said, "This one isn't worth it." I got out of the car, slammed the door, and I ran as fast as I could towards the bar again, even though they were several blocks away.

I made it about two blocks before this guy finally put his car in drive and sped away really fast. I was still mortified, and still being in a super dark area near the houses was a huge insult to injury. Luckily, this guy was nowhere in sight. Why the two cars were the exact same, I guess just horrible luck and a horrible coincidence.

I immediately called the real Michael after I had received his message and told him about what had happened nearly in tears, explaining that that was why I was in a different location now. The real Michael was such a kind and caring godsend. He said, ''Oh, no, I'm so sorry that just happened to you.''

He told me to stay calm, to stay on the phone with him, and to give him the description of my exact location and what I was wearing so that he could more easily spot me, and said that he would be there to pick me up as quick as possible. About three minutes later, as I'm standing in the dark shaking out of adrenaline, I see a black Toyota Corolla speeding towards me as Michael said on the phone, ''I spotted you. I'm here.'' ''I cannot describe.''

the amount of relief that I felt in that moment. I hopped into Michael's car and he said that what just happened was so scary and that I needed to be more careful out there. I told him that the guy in the car fit his exact same description and had the same car and that when I asked him if it was an Uber for Daniela, he said yes and that I was always super careful and expressed that there was no way I could have known.

Michael was really shocked to hear of this coincidence, but was super concerned and caring. He asked me if I needed him to take me to the police station, and said that if I needed him to, that he would turn his app off after getting there, and that I wouldn't have to worry about any charges for the ride home. I said I was super thankful, but that I would just call the non-emergency line and file a police report when I got home, and that I just wanted to get home.

He understood, said that he had two daughters himself, and knowing that I was someone's daughter, it hit an extra protective, worried nerve in him. I immediately knew that he was a safe person to ride home with, even before I got into his car with how he spoke on the phone.

He helped me calm down, and when he got me home, he waited until I entered my apartment building, and once I finally got inside my apartment, I gave him one hell of a tip for saving me from this situation, because between the time the guy sped away and Michael picked me up, it had only been a few minutes. Who's to say that guy wasn't going to turn back around?

After I got home, I called the non-emergency line and filed a police report, but there was only so much they could do, since all I could give was the guy's car model and what he looked like, and where he picked me up. I was in too much of a fight-or-flight mode when it all happened to look at the license plate or take any pictures. I wish that I had, but my only focus was to get out of that car and get away from whoever that man was as fast as possible."

I told my friends what happened the next day, and they said that they were not letting me go home alone ever again, no matter the circumstances. And I appreciated them for that. To this day, I 100% believe that had I not caught on before the other car got onto the highway with me in it, that I would have been kidnapped or trafficked. I do not believe that guy had any intention of actually bringing me home that night,

I believe he was putting my address in to trick me into thinking he was going to drive me home, and that he was going to end up driving me to a different place. And I don't want to ever find out what that place could have been. I believe that he was some part of a ring of men that drove around waiting for young, drunk, vulnerable girls to mistaken them for an Uber and hop into their car. I'm forever thankful for Michael.

because quite a few Uber drivers will cancel the ride after 5-10 minutes of waiting. But Michael, he continued to circle around looking for me until he finally called me. I am forever grateful that I made it out of that situation. There appears to be no shortage of creepy neighbors, and living in some cities high in crime and weirdness, from NYC to LA and beyond,

You would think I would have chosen the Buddhist stalker, the bathrobe man, or even the most distressing peeper who tumbled as a landlord. No joy. But no. In all these decades, and I mean decades, of moves, there is one who stands out above the rest. Timeless. And the memories are imprinted. Flawless. It echoes way back.

way into the deep recesses of a childhood that was already old somehow. We had lived in Seattle. My dad had transferred to LA to a big job, a golden job, dripping with celebrities and parties. I was only four or five, it was the mid-sixties at the time. He was a minister to Andorra on Bewitched, to Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies, the cast of Gunsmoke,

Some of the Munsters, the list really went on. It was a new thought church, sort of a precursor to the New Age movement. There was only one problem. I would wake in the night, not breathing. I have such strong memories of not breathing, and trying to move out of my room to get to my parents. And my mom would always turn on the shower while my dad got dressed, and then we would go to the hospital.

I would always black out and have no memory of anything until after the hospital, while it was still dark. My dad would drive us all west and north along the coast. We would disembark from our car and hear the waves crashing on the rocks, taking in deep breaths of air. I never wanted to leave, because the air was so pleasant and cool and pure. We had to move though.

I had too many near deaths, and he grabbed the first church opening he could find. I recall not even knowing where we were going, but it was beautiful. We had flown there in the night. It was Atlanta, and from the second story cafe at the hotel, all I could see was the green below, the green of the treetops. There were still asthma attacks, but they were less. We had a scare on a trip to the Bahamas.

I recall the Cinderblock Hospital corridor. Atlanta was like moving into the past. It was not hipster LA. It was embroiled in civil rights struggles, and as a minister, my dad knew Martin Luther King, for ministers, priests, and rabbis will often get together as chaplains, except for the more extreme ones who hate all others.

So, when Martin Luther King was shot, and Robert Kennedy, who had come out and we had all met, and that's a long, intense story, was killed as well, my dad needed a break, I guess. Because before I knew it, we were in Wisconsin, where he was again a minister, but only for a moment.

and then he dropped out of the church for a time and went back to college in a small town, and we rented a house in an old neighborhood there. Sorry to give such a long-winded introduction, but I felt it was important to show that we had been around a bit, and we'd seen plenty. We'd cruised down Sunset Boulevard, and we had been there for Martin Luther King's march, the first one, so this new move seemed like a breather.

Small town, quiet homes, some very nice Victorians with smaller 50s homes as well. The eclectic jumble of a downtown living area. There was a hippie couple who owned a head shop living above us in the renovated attic. There was an east coast couple who wore tie-dye and gave me pet gerbils in the biggest, coolest aquarium outfitted with Mr. Zimmerman's hand-carved cedar tunnels and bridges.

In a ginormous house catty-corner behind was a family of ten kids, which was pure heaven for me, an only child. And they were fun kids. We had the best time in the leaves when they fell, and we would build forts and houses, or even pirate ships, singing "X marks the spot" with a dash and a dot. There was an old penny candy store still in business on the corner,

It was dark and the paint had come off of the little building. In the summer when we would come in from the light, it was impossible to see. It was easy to bump into jars of candy on the long counters. It was funny that across the street was a dentist who only gave out balloons on Halloween, next to the degenerate who gave out joints and pennies in his underwear for trick-or-treaters. And then, there was that neighbor on the other side of us directly. It was a family.

But the person who stood out, the one that you saw the most, was the father. And my dad, who never gossiped about neighbors, he was a busy guy, even began to notice him. This was a college town, so casual. Yet, from our many-windowed place on the corner, you could see him. I am sorry that I can't recall his name now,

He walked in a perfect grey suit with a fedora hat, again, all so neat and of another era. There was something... anachromatic about him. He was on the thinner side, pale, sharp features. He would walk alone, but as if on a mission, and he was never without a cigar box that he held on to tightly as he walked. Years later, stories would come out about the men in black,

And he looked so much like those images. An expressionless face with some sort of determination. Men in grey? And what was in that cigar box that accompanied him on each walk? What's in that box? Why is he dressed like an undertaker just to walk around the neighborhood? It's 80 degrees out and he has on a tight tie. It had such an unsettling Cold War vibe.

and our big window, with inadequate coverings, just added to the creepiness. You could be lost in thought, looking at goldfish or waiting for a pie to be baked, and absentmindedly look out the window and there he would be, staring right back in from across the way, as if he had been there, unnoticed, for hours. He would not turn away upon discovery either.

My dad's OCD would kick in over the curiosity about who this man really was. Were the contents of the cigar box drugs, or mini flasks of booze? Or was there a transmission device inside of it, like spyware from Get Smart, the innovative covert operations comedy? Would we ever have a gotcha moment watching him talking into it? He did not appear to have a job.

Or maybe walking around and looking creepy was his profession. Was he a paranoid delusional? Was he a German war criminal? Our interactions with him consisted mainly of what has already been mentioned. A through-the-window affair of him on his solitary strolls that were eternal and insidious. Purposeful and mysterious. He walked around the neighborhood, but he was not of the neighborhood.

Sometimes, my dad would shrug and say that he didn't even look like a Russian or German spy, more like some wax creature from outer space. Our only close encounters with him, and more broadly, his family, would come after a trip. Our house was a rental while my parents went back to school. It was a big place, but not beautiful, just utilitarian.

with a plain grass yard in the front and only scotch thistle grew along the front border of the house, blooming purple. We had gone on a microbus camping trip in Canada, and upon return, saw the thistles had been cut down. Several days later, the neighbor walked by when we were outside and he said that he had done it. It was eerie, because he had waited for us to go on holiday and then trespassed.

He seemed gleeful in his own alien way, and he wanted to get pleasure from getting us upset, it seemed. Just such a weird ambush to get all fired up about. To go after eight thistle plants? He really was proud of himself. He'd sent a message to us. Now, this part I will never fully make sense of. There was a family, I had mentioned, though mostly unseen.

There was a wife who we never saw speak, and only come out the back door without looking so much as up, to the car in the detached garage for grocery runs. And they had a daughter, a few years ahead of me in school. I feel that she was in the fifth grade. She was, of course, more than welcome to play with the rest of the kids who jumped in the leaves out back, but she never came out, and she was pale.

She never showed emotion and seemed more like a little adult, unlike that giant Catholic family with the kids who were always making faces and laughing, especially the little boy who was only about a year younger than me. He would always be sticking out his tongue or making his eyes pop out. This was so odd, but I was invited to spend the night at her house.

at the house of the fedora-hatted cigar box man. I have no idea why my parents said yes. I recall being sort of uncomfortable with the whole thing. Did I really want to be in the clutches of that cringe mystery man? In his lair? On his turf? And why was I invited after he trespassed and beheaded the purple flowering thistles? We moved soon after this to Canada. Their house was smaller.

It was a 50s box, but very much nicer inside with a white carpet, good sunlight, and a perfect area to place Chinese checkers. The girl told me that her parents were older, and they were. Her mother looked like one of my grandmas, with a head of short gray curls. I don't even recall seeing the freaky dad there very much. He must have been out combing the neighborhood the whole time. But the really weird part...

The part that put me on high alert and still makes me wake up sometimes was when she and I went to her bedroom and got undressed into our pajamas. She got really embarrassed. She said, "Oh no," like she had forgotten, and maybe that I would not have even noticed. But then I did. I very much did, and there was no way to unsee what I saw.

Her smooth body, her belly to be exact, was missing a belly button. She had no belly button. She had no belly button. Suddenly she's talking fast and low, saying it's why she avoids swimming, and only has a one-piece suit, and that she never wants to be discovered. She begs me not to tell, not to tell anyone. I recall just staring, taking it in,

knowing that I would never have another chance, and giving myself the space to really see that she did indeed have no belly button. And indeed, she had none. It was so disconcerting. And of course, I told my parents when I came home, and they didn't even question me. It seemed to just make sense somehow. Of course, the progeny of that alien neighborhood cigar box carrying MIB would not have a belly button. It made perfect sense.

They were hatched. They were from a lab or from space, or was she some kind of experiment of his? Soon, the snows would come, and we would be lifted out of the US and into the frozen canals of Ottawa, dripping on pastries and surrounded by ski resorts. I would miss the faces of that dear town. Studious Veeder, or Tony, whose mom had a car that could drive in water.

getting lost in the big family, tearing around their boarding houses like residents or tree-rich yard. We would go on to move again and again and again. New Mexico, Chicago, the Northwest. But never in all of these well-traversed years of absorbing people and places has there been anyone so singularly mysterious as the girl with no belly button and her father.

Last seen standing at night in the rain under a light. Much like a haunting movie poster that would come out exactly a decade later for The Exorcist. Only staring inside our homes. At us. And for how long? There are so many questions about the nature of life and existence itself, and the voyeur next door just added another confounding set of unknowns in motion.

Is there anyone out there who has ever had a similar experience? Thank you so much. This is a long story, so I'll try to make it as concise as I can. I was a member of the Queen fandom, mainly Freddie Mercury. Queen fans are a surprisingly gross, homophobic bunch of people, and so there were many fights over Freddie's sexuality.

I had some theories about him and his psychology, but no one was prepared to listen, and I'd spend far too long in forums arguing with stupid people. And I was sick of it, and was about to leave when a woman, Emily Ramirez, no real names are going to be used here, messaged me saying that she agreed with all of my theories, and asked to friend request me.

We chatted on Facebook Messenger for ages, testing the water, I guess to get to know each other. We became pretty close over the weeks, finding out that we both had the same dark, inappropriate sense of humor. Despite a six hour time zone difference, I'm in London, England and she was in Texas, we were pretty close.

Telling each other all of our personal stuff, fighting trolls together, and most importantly, laughing. Just hysterically laughing. We even spoke on the phone for hours and hours about Freddie Mercury. His personality, theories about his songs and pre-fame life story. There was no one else who shared our views, except another woman called Alyssa, whom she met on YouTube.

Emily invited Alyssa to our group chat for a while, but eventually Alyssa stopped messaging and I sort of forgot about her. At this time, there was no reason to doubt that Emily was real. If she said she was doing something in her life, her Facebook checked out.

For example, she graduated from law school and celebrated by going on a six-week road trip from Houston to Anaheim, stopping at Roswell, New Mexico, El Paso, Sedona, Arizona, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas on her way. I'd always wanted to see the American desert, and she suggested that I should come over and do a road trip with her the next year.

As she went, photos appeared in the locations that she told me she was going to, in the order one might logically travel, and I was fascinated by these places that I'd dreamed of seeing. Emily is a lesbian, and she told me that she had a crazy ex who was out of her league, tall and blonde, and, sure enough, there were photos of the two of them from the previous Halloween.

When she asked me for hair dye advice after her hair went wrong from pool chlorine, there were photos to prove it. She played guitar. And when someone requested a song, she duly posted a video of herself playing it. She was a bit sick of Facebook in the end, so she deleted it entirely, using a new blank profile for the purpose of staying in contact with three friends, including myself.

For a while, we kind of dominated the Queen/Freddie Mercury forums as sort of experts, and we even got to know some of his friends from his 80s gay club years, and I had written some articles on him that I was sharing in groups under pseudonyms. Soon, an Italian woman in the forums began to harass both Emily and myself, discrediting our articles.

I blocked her, and two German women rose in her place. Name-calling. They plagiarized our work that was paywalled and spread it online, saying that we didn't deserve to be paid for lies about Freddie Mercury. So they were giving it away for free. That did die down.

But two years later, one of these people reappeared on a different forum, trying to humiliate me by posting links to old fanfictions that I'd written many years ago on another site that were unrelated to Queen. She'd worked out that it was me from my usernames.

She listed all of my usernames across every social media site that I happened to be on, and accused me of being many more people who, coincidentally, had similar usernames to mine. All of this was because she was possessive over Freddy, and was angry that me and Emily were getting heavily involved with Freddy's friends. I quickly worked out that the Italian and the two Germans were one and the same.

She'd been watching me and Emily for two years. I was made redundant from my job, so my lifeline was to sell Queen fan art. Emily helped me build a webpage, and I had some offers to buy prints of my work, until I received about 30 takedown notices from Universal Music Group, saying that I'd been reported personally for copyright. I warned another victim of the troll who also sold art to be careful.

This girl was a minor, who had actually been doxxed by the troll. After this, the troll began using my non-queen art as her profile photos, and calling herself the names of the people that I had drawn. She had also removed my watermarks, and was threatening to sell them all on her own site. Both Emily and I quit the queen fandom, partly because of the troll, and partly because we hated the biopic.

because Brian May pissed us off, and because we had moved on to other interests. We stayed in contact, but things weren't the same when we had no silly jokes about Freddy to laugh about, and even his friends were bullied off the forums by homophobes and the troll. Emily only kept her Instagram, where she would do live, faceless Q&As about Freddy.

Then, one night at 3am UK time, Emily messaged in a panic and asked to call. She was hysterical, saying that she needed to confess something to me. Her name was not Emily Ramirez. It was Alyssa Sanchez. She had tried to tell me ages ago when she invited Alyssa to our group chat, with the aim of phasing Emily out and then Emily would become Alyssa.

but she dropped the idea in the end because she thought that I'd easily work out that Alyssa had suddenly developed Emily's personality. She said that she had tried many times to tell me her real name, but was embarrassed. Why the sudden confession? Well, the troll had screen-recorded an Instagram Live where Emily was showing followers her Freddy merchandise, she had her laptop on in the foreground, and the troll slowed the video down,

And on Emily's laptop screen, she observed a file named Alyssa Sanchez Tax Documents. The troll called her, threatening to blow her cover online, to tell people that she was never a lawyer and was leading a fake life. So, Emily confessed that she was Alyssa to beat the troll to it, and she apologized about the whole thing. This was not the end.

From here on, Emily will be referred to as Alyssa. The troll, who we found out was a middle-aged woman named Lucy, then phoned Alyssa's mother and cousin, screaming that she knows who they are, that Alyssa still talks to me, and that she will humiliate us and destroy anything creative that we do that invokes Freddy's name. The last I heard was that the troll had pretended to be a rival publisher.

in order to obtain copies of a book that Freddie's friends were releasing for legal reasons, which meant that she saw an advance copy of their book before the authors themselves. I did almost suss Elissa slash Emily out, but I brushed it off. She said her father was a well-known lawyer in the state of Indiana, but no such person exists.

I thought, "Oh well, maybe American stuff is omitted from a UK search engine." Another time she had filmed herself opening a book that she'd bought, and her nails and hands were different to those in selfies that she'd sent me. I put it down to her simply growing her nails out. One time she said that her dad was Mexican and that her mom was Spanish.

but this later got switched around, and she said that her dad believed Spanish people were superior to Mexican people, and regularly told her he was happy he produced quote-unquote white passing kids. Well, people make typing mistakes sometimes, right? Then, she spelled her name differently to normal, and I just brushed it off as bad autocorrect, as her autocorrect fails were a running saga for her.

Eventually, we video called, and I never understood the point of her fakery. She actually looked very similar to the girl whose identity she had stolen. So, I got catfished. And my catfish wasn't even the scary one. A stalker destroyed my friendship with my catfish, which was for the best in the end. Maybe. Alyssa doesn't message me anymore, and I do kind of miss her.

Lucy still has my art as her profile picture, four years on. And on Queen forums, she calls herself Alyssa Ramirez, mashing up the two names. Me? I just keep my love for Queen to myself these days. When I was in my early 20s, around 2010, I lived alone in a ground floor apartment in what I would say was a decent part of my hometown.

It was a bit of a humble but comfortable place. And honestly, I was loving living alone. I didn't dislike living with my parents, I get along well enough with them, but I'm more of a loner, and I like to live within my own confines, not someone else's. For the entire first year, things went really well in my apartment.

I loved the area, I'd furnished it the way I liked it, and I was happy. Then, near immediately after I signed my second year's lease, things started happening that made me reconsider whether or not I was really safe. At first, the things that would happen were incredibly subtle. I would come home from work and would find various things that seemed out of place, but that I couldn't be sure about.

The first thing was one day when I got home and found my front door was unlocked. I kind of freaked out a bit at first, but as I thought about it, that morning I was in a super rush because I was running late, and it was wholly possible that I forgot to lock it. I went in and checked everything, and as far as I could tell, nothing had been taken or moved.

I chalked it up to a "hey dummy, that was stupid" moment and moved on. A couple days later I came home to my door being unlocked again, and again was incredibly mad at myself for having left it unlocked like that. However, when I went inside to make sure nothing was missing, it pretty quickly clicked that it wasn't my doing.

When I walked in, I noticed that the lamp in the corner of my living room was turned on, which to most people wouldn't be a huge deal, but to me, it was a massive issue. I never used that lamp. It was a room lamp from my room at my parents' house that I took so that they didn't have to deal with it, but I hadn't had to use it because the living room has a ceiling light.

I'd put it in a corner behind an extra chair because it kind of looked nice, but I never used it. I checked the rest of the apartment, but again, there was nothing missing. I actually went across the hall and asked one of the neighbors if they saw anyone coming or going from my apartment that day, and they didn't recall anyone being there. I mentioned the whole thing, and they were a bit shocked, but again, they couldn't give me any information.

I ended up calling the main office to let them know, and they mentioned that it could have been maintenance because they were doing pest control on my building at some point that week, but that they should have left a note if it was them. I told them that there was no note on my door, and that my neighbor said that they hadn't seen anyone, which made me think it wasn't the maintenance crew.

They told me that they would ask the crew and see if it was them, and then told me to call them back if it happened again, and that they would figure out a way to get the situation taken care of. And, of course, something did happen. One night, I got home, and when I opened my door, I found an envelope on the floor on the other side of said door, like it had been slid under.

I initially assumed it was a note from the office or the maintenance crew, but normally they just tape those to the front door, not slide them under. I grabbed it, put my stuff down, and opened the letter to see what they had to say, and it made my blood run cold when I read it. It was a typed and unsigned note that said, You look so peaceful when you sleep. I was freaking out in my head. Who the hell had been watching me sleep?

Had someone actually been watching me, or was this some kind of screwed up prank? There was no evidence that anyone had been in my apartment beyond the lamp and my door being unlocked twice, which to me was a mountain of evidence, but to anyone on the outside could just be coincidences. Of course, this letter was a big red flag, screaming, I'm watching you.

but who the hell was the person that typed it? After the letter, I started taking precautions with everything in my apartment. I double-checked all the locks on the windows, I kept all my curtains and blinds closed, I put Christmas bells on every single door so that I could tell that they were opened, and I bought a metal baseball bat that sat right next to my bed just in case.

I had also reported the letter to the office, who made a police report with my information, and they had an officer that would circle the area multiple times a day to see if they could find anyone suspicious. Despite this, things would still end up happening. I would come home to find my fridge open, my bathroom sink running, the books on my bookshelf removed and piled on the floor. I seriously thought I was going insane.

I begged the rental office to change the locks on my door. I told them every single thing that had happened, and they were completely unhelpful. Their solution to figuring it out was telling me to get a camera, because they couldn't do anything else. This was my home. I was supposed to feel safe here, and the company responsible for that safety was basically telling me that I was out of luck.

I was starting to feel depressed and anxious all the time because I was thinking that this person was going to escalate, and eventually they were going to hurt me. Or worse. I hit a wall, mentally. I wasn't sure what to do. I did end up buying a camera, one that I could hang up in the corner that watched the door, but part of me thought that this person was going to be able to beat the camera, and that they would somehow get in and mess with me without being seen.

Of course, that would have been impossible. And the last day of all this was probably the most excited I've ever been. I came home from another day at work to find my door unlocked again. I walked into my apartment, more pissed off than scared, and in the kitchen found another envelope taped to a bottle of wine. I grabbed the letter and opened it, and this time it was a bit more terrifying.

The item in this envelope was a printed photograph of me at work, and on the back it said, "You're always so busy." It was a picture of me serving a table that I had waited on only a day prior. I remembered the customer in the photograph, which meant that this person had been in my restaurant, and that they were now following me in my everyday life. I started to panic, but quickly turned my attention to the camera in the corner of the room.

This guy had the gall not to only walk in, but walk right in front of the camera to get into my kitchen. When I got to my computer and got the footage loaded, I was speechless. I watched as this man opened my front door with ease, walked in with a huge smile on his face, and put the bottle of wine on the counter. I watched as he put the photo on the counter and wrote his note on the back of it, and placed it in the envelope.

The reason that I had that level of excitement that I mentioned earlier was because I knew who this was. It was one of the maintenance guys for the property. I had seen him on the property. I had waved at him. I'd had short, passing conversations with him. I called the office and told them that I had the video of the person breaking into my place, and I asked one of the property managers to come to my apartment so that I could show them.

They did. And I could tell by the look on his face that he wasn't surprised to see what I was showing him. To wrap this up a bit quicker, I called the police and I showed them the evidence. After he was arrested, it came out that this wasn't his first offense. He had been arrested and reported of stalking numerous other women.

The reason that the office manager wasn't surprised was because he knew full well that this guy had done this before. Apparently, he was what they called a "second chance" hire. They knew that he had a record of stalking, and when I told them that I was being stalked, they didn't put two and two together. I have no problem with second chance hires. People do deserve a second chance when they make mistakes.

but he was a textbook case of, we hired a man known for stalking women, we have a woman being stalked, maybe we should consider that. Thankfully, the police took this all very seriously, and since he had a record, they had zero tolerance for his actions, and he went away in cuffs. And, of course, after he was arrested,

All of the craziness stopped. Obviously, I moved out of that property and into a new apartment. The inaction of the property management was enough for me to break my lease. Which I happily did. I have a story that I've been wanting to share with the world for a while. A story that really taught me a lesson about trusting people and made me realize how things can go really bad, really fast.

I am going to add a bit of a trigger warning here, as this story does end in a horrifying way. This happened a while back, when my high school ex-boyfriend, a guy we're going to call Christian, came back into my life after close to a decade of being out of touch. Back in high school, Christian and I were really close.

He was probably the most connected relationship I've ever had, if that makes any sense. He was actually the first guy that I got with, in multiple meanings of the word, and I thought that he and I had this really bright future planned out. In my head, we were going to get married, we were going to have kids, and we were going to grow old together.

In reality, Christian didn't want anything more than a high school fling, and he planned on cutting away from me the minute that he graduated. He ended up telling me as much only a quarter away from graduation. We were talking about the future, and when I asked if we were going to stay in state, he said that after May, there was no we. Needless to say, we broke up that day, and it crushed me.

Fast forward around 8 or 9 years later, I'm single, living my best life and just doing whatever life brings, when, out of the blue, I get a friend request on Facebook from a face that I hadn't thought about in ages. Christian. Being the nostalgic idiot that I am, I immediately went to accept it, but then hesitated when I thought about how our relationship ended.

I sat on it for a couple of hours, but eventually decided that we were both young, we both made mistakes, and it wasn't anything more than a friend request on Facebook. If he had grown up enough to seek me out, and to reconnect, then I could grow up enough to accept it. What I didn't expect was that clicking that button was going to be the opening of my own personal Pandora's Box.

At first, everything was chill. We messaged back and forth, and it seemed like he really had his life together. After high school, he went out of state for college, and he'd actually gotten married and had a son. I congratulated him for all that, saying that it was great to hear that he was doing well, and then he told me that he and his wife had gotten a divorce, and she had done everything she could to keep his son from him.

so he was actually moving back in with his mom for a bit to get back on his feet. I apologized, and I told him that that was awful, and after a bit of talking more, he told me that he was actually in town, and we agreed to meet up for lunch the next day, just to catch up. Now, nowhere in this conversation and nowhere in my mind was there any intention of making this anything beyond just being friends.

I didn't want anything beyond that. I just wanted a friend, and I just wanted to meet up to catch up with him. When we met at the restaurant, I went in for a friendly hug, and when he hugged me, his hand wandered way too far down my back. I immediately pushed away and looked at him like, bro, what the hell? He quickly apologized and said that he just got absorbed in the moment, and he didn't mean anything by it.

I told him that this was his one warning, and that if he tried anything else, this meeting was over, which I think caught him off guard. I think he expected me to be a bit more submissive, mostly because when I was young, I was way more willing to go along with things. In the years since then, I've become a lot more self-sufficient and mentally sound, and I'm not the kind of person to take that crap.

I told him as much, and he nodded, saying alright and continuing to apologize. The rest of the lunch went pretty normal. Nothing else happened, and I figured that he knew his place. Of course, that was the wrong thing to believe. About two days later, I got a message from Christian on Facebook that said, "...thinking of you," with a picture of something that I genuinely did not expect, nor want, to see.

The situation was very disappointing, for multiple reasons, and I told him that that was the end of it. I replied, saying, I told you that if you did anything like this again, that would be the end of it. He immediately said, Oh my god, I am so sorry, that was for someone else, I swear. I messaged back saying that it was nice to see that he was doing well, but that that was the end of our conversations, and immediately blocked him.

I'm not stupid. I knew what he was doing, and I wasn't going to be this rebound fling for him. Plus, he's not exactly the kind of person that I'm into anymore. After that, the situation with Christian went off the rails, and did so pretty quickly. One night, about two weeks later, I was out with some friends at a local bar just trying to have a good time, and lo and behold, Christian showed up.

He walked in and came straight over to us, acting like he was my best friend. The entire feel of the night changed immediately. My three friends all glanced over at me like, who's this guy? And Christian stood over me and smiled like everything was fine. I hit my limit the second he put his hands on my shoulders and said, how you doing babe?

I shoved my seat backwards to make sure that it made contact with him, stood up, turned around and told him that I wasn't his babe and that he needed to leave me the hell alone. He laughed and asked why I was being like this, and I went off on him. I told him that I had given him a chance to be my friend and nothing more, and he decided that he wanted to be a creep instead.

I told him again to shove off and to get the hell back out of my life. After a few moments, he backed off and looked like he was about to cry, and just walked away. I kind of assumed that was going to be the end of it, that he would understand, that I wanted nothing to do with him. Either that, or the next encounter was going to end violently. Unfortunately for me, knowing him, it was more likely to be the latter.

After Christian left, the whole night was ruined, and we all decided to head home. I had driven my friend Michelle out that night, and she'd planned on drinking a bit more, and I don't drink, so I was her driver. When we left, she asked me who Christian was, and when I explained everything to her, she told me that he sounded like a creep, and then asked me if I wanted her to come over to my place and stay just in case.

At first, I didn't think it was necessary, but after a bit of contemplation, I told her that it sounded like a good idea and that I would appreciate the company. I'm going to add a bit of a brief pause right here for the sake of anyone reading or listening to this. The next part of the story is the part that deserves the content warning.

When we got to my apartment, I unlocked and opened the door, and both myself and Michelle were surprised to see Christian sitting on my couch. Now, I know that a lot of these stories end with the ex standing there with a knife and attacking the person, but that's not actually how my story ended. Christian was sitting on my couch. He did have a knife, but he wasn't going to attack anybody.

He pretty clearly ended his own life right there. I was shocked, horrified, I felt like I was about to throw up. Right there on my couch was my high school ex, a guy that I had just sort of reconnected with and had to push back out of my life because he was being a creep, and he had ended his own life in my apartment.

I cannot overstate how traumatizing this was for me at that moment, and every day since. Obviously we called the police, and when they and the medics showed up, they confirmed that he was beyond saving. I couldn't stay there after that. They had to treat it basically as a crime scene with what had happened, and I didn't want to stay there anyways.

This was enough to get me out of my lease, thankfully, and I ended up moving in with Michelle in her apartment. I got rid of pretty much all of my furniture, as I couldn't bring myself to look at it and think about Christian. I've had nightmares about him since, about that moment. Opening my door and to say that this whole thing has haunted me is an understatement. I'm not looking for pity.

and I feel terrible for the fact that Christian felt that ending his own life was the best course of action, I'm just not really sure what else to say about all of it. Through all of this, coming to terms with the situation, and moving my few things out that I did keep, I ended up finding a note from Christian in my bedroom. He'd actually placed it in the drawer of my nightstand,

It was a simple note that just said, "Every mistake in my life has led me to this moment, and all that I can say is that I'm sorry. Not exactly closure, and not exactly something that helped me move on from it. And to be honest, I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to get through it." I think a lot of people would probably say that their freshman year of high school was pretty rough.

And I'm sure a lot of those people are right and had valid reasons as well. I'm definitely not one to say that they were just being dramatic because I too had a pretty bad freshman year. I didn't like to talk about it for the longest time because I had some pretty bad self-esteem issues as is, but I've healed and have become a lot nicer to myself since then.

Also, I've come to understand that I also didn't deserve or warrant any of this. So, I have no reason to blame myself. As my story goes, I was going to be a freshman at our local high school. New school, but it was the same school district, which meant that I would at least have friends there so that we could all be nervous and stressed together. I was a pretty normal kid growing up, or so I thought.

I was the oldest of four, so I was the first to go to high school. I wasn't outgoing, but I wasn't reclusive and shy either. I had a good amount of friends, and I did fine in school too. I always passed my classes with minimal issues. I hated math, but I got through it. And I turned in a minimal amount of homework late. I didn't stand out in class or make myself known either. I was just there.

But then things went a bit different in high school. Most of my classes were fine, except for my chemistry class. Science was one of my favorite subjects, so I typically didn't have any issues. But chemistry, at least in depth as we went into this class, it seemed to be more of a challenge for me. Not to mention, the teacher did not help either.

When I first started attending the class, I immediately got the feeling that Mr. Pendleton was going to be a hard ass. He was very curt in his speaking. He didn't really joke around, and was always on a very specific schedule. He would get upset very easily if someone interrupted him during a lecture, including slamming his hand down on the desk or the whiteboard. He would do this ear-piercing whistle to get people to pay attention.

He was always just very intimidating. I always thought it was weird to the point that if kids bothered you so much, why even be a high school teacher? Anyways, I did my best in that class, but I admittedly struggled with locating the elements on the periodic table and remembering their symbols. I knew some of the common ones, but struggled with the rest. I tried asking him for help.

like if he had any suggestions on making it easier, but with a dead stare he looked at me and said, "Just memorize it. It's not that hard." I walked away from that conversation thinking that I was truly in the wrong, as if I was the only one that ever had issues with it and that's how I took it. Over time, I did not get better in that class.

I continued struggling with some of the topics, and Pendleton did nothing to make me feel better about it. When I got my assignments back, he didn't just mark things as wrong, he would put some mean comments next to them, making me, again, feel like there was something wrong with me. We had a monthly quiz that we took going over all that we learned that month,

and when he was passing out the graded quizzes, he would hand it to some saying things like "Do better, study next time," but never encouraging or optimistic words. Then he got to me. He flipped open my quiz and asked a question out loud, calling out a specific person to answer. He confirmed it was correct, and then pointed out my incorrect answer. He tossed my quiz at me and let the whole class know that I had the worst grade.

singling me out. Everyone was staring at me, and I had never been more embarrassed. I felt incredibly stupid at that point. I put my head down, feeling the eyes burning into me. I remember actually going to the restroom and crying. My parents did ask me about school and weren't dismissive, but they also didn't think the situation was that bad.

I do blame myself for part of that, as I didn't really tell them how bad it was or how much I hated that class. I told them about how I didn't like the class, how the teacher was really unnecessarily mean, and how I seemed to be singled out. I showed them my assignments with his remarks. I told them about being embarrassed in class and how I seemed to be the only one affected by it.

They agreed that he seemed pretty mean, but said that they would talk to the principal about it. I even spoke to my friends and others that were in his class, and they all agreed that he was a complete jerk, but didn't understand why I was being picked on so much. Except one friend that usually excelled in a lot of classes. He basically blamed me saying that I needed to study more, and that he was just trying to push me to do better.

I wasn't friends with that person for much longer either. So, while I waited and hoped that my parents would actually be able to make a difference, I tried to push through the harsh words and embarrassment, and really worked my ass off to at least pass the class. I had friends that helped and devoted a lot of time to get through it, but I didn't.

When we took our quarterly test, I passed it with a low B and I was very proud of myself. Apparently, Pendleton was not impressed by this though. As he slammed my test on the table and he made sure to ask out loud, "Did you copy off of X's test?" X being the person that sat next to me. They looked at me funny too and actually started sitting somewhere else, so yeah. That didn't make me feel better either.

He said because he couldn't believe that I miraculously got better overnight. I was pretty upset and quite frankly fed up with being treated like this, so I defensively told him no, and that I had studied more and he wasn't willing to help us. The room was silent, and the tension was thick, but I felt pretty good for saying it. Pendleton, however, was not amused, and told me that I needed to stay behind after class."

I was not looking forward to that, and in fact, I tried to blend in with everyone and leave at the same time, but he definitely noticed. He called me out with his booming voice halting me in my tracks. I waited by the door, and once everyone left, he told me to go over to his desk. He then asked me why I told the principal that he was bullying me.

I replied that I didn't say anything to the principal, which was true, and he yelled at me again, saying that I was lying. He said some other unpleasant things to me, but for some reason, I was just over all of it, and I yelled back at him that I had told my parents that he was being a jerk and that he shouldn't be a teacher.

He responded back by slamming me against the whiteboard, holding me by my shirt and once again yelling some pretty hurtful things at me. I was honestly expecting him to try to hit or strangle me. His face was beet red. I could see the veins in his temple bulging out. I was terrified. Thankfully, Ms. Stewart in the class attached to the right knocked and opened the door to see us in this position.

I wished that she wouldn't have knocked because the knock was enough time for him to let go of me. But judging by the look on her face, she knew that something was wrong. I was in tears and I walked towards her to leave. She asked me if I was okay and I said no, and Pendleton just sat back down at his desk. I went to the nurse and asked her to call my parents, as I'd gotten sick, so she did. When my mom came to pick me up, I told her what happened.

and she immediately took me back to the school and to the office. She went to talk to someone about it, and I just remember sitting there worried that Mr. Pendleton was going to show up in the office. After that day, my mom would take me to school after the second hour, which was when I had his class, and I just collected my work for those first two classes.

Miss Stewart also reported what she saw, so I guess having a witness was what gave the principal, or whomever, the authority to suspend Mr. Pendleton. I was entirely relieved that he was gone, and I could tell that I wasn't the only one. The first couple of days without him were weird, but the sub definitely helped lighten the mood. By the end of it, though, we were all able to be less formal and actually had a little fun in the class.

I still had a hard time turning in tests and assignments, fearing that I was going to be made fun of or called out, and that anxiety bled over into my other classes as well. My freshman year was very difficult, and I struggled with my self-image, as mentioned. It slowly got better over time, but I think I really had Ms. Stewart to thank for that.

She helped me build my confidence again and really assured me that it wasn't me, but Mr. Pendleton. She actually confided in me, saying that she had heard him shouting on many occasions and even at students from other and past classes, but that she had never seen him put his hands on any other student. I still wonder today if I was the only one, or if there were others that just were never caught or never said anything.

Hell, I still don't understand why I was singled out so hard. I know I wasn't the only one that wasn't doing well in the class, but I was the only one that seemed to be targeted, and I don't know why. He never did return to our school, and I did much better after that. I just hope that he was never able to teach again, if that is how he treated students."

This happened towards the end of my senior year of high school, and, unfortunately, is something that was just as memorable as the rest of the year. I will not be sharing my location or school, and any names I use will be fake, because, technically, I was not the victim here, so I don't want to invade their privacy any more than I already have.

I still feel it's important to share this story as a way of helping others and to stress the importance of "If you see something, say something." I don't know if it's the same for other high schools, but it was quite common for the seniors to pull some kind of massive prank on the school as a whole. They were supposed to be harmless. It was like a universal rule so that no one got kicked out or suspended.

It was also typically done around spring break, giving them time to execute it. So, to keep with tradition, several of us seniors, including myself, started plotting our scheme. The school was going to look like a glitter bomb went off in it. We had tons of glitter and confetti that we had bought from random party stores, and a few bulk bags on eBay for a stupidly cheap, possibly shady price.

One of my friends, called Jesse, was our golden ticket as he was the teacher's aide, which meant he had access to the rooms that had all the spare keys to the classrooms. We started the day before spring break started. There were a lot of teachers and faculty there, as they were probably wrapping things up for the break, so we waited outside in one of our cars while Jesse went in to look like he was working on some last-minute things for a teacher.

After a few hours, people slowly started leaving, so he led us in through the south door and ushered us into different rooms to fulfill our plan. It started out completely smooth. We got through several classrooms, almost ran into one teacher but managed to hide from them. We all even got a good laugh about it too. Then we came across the classroom of Mr. Jackson. Mr. Jackson was the media teacher, and he was actually pretty cool.

I guess when it's an elective we tend to like those more anyways, right? The class was awesome. We made different media related projects, such as our own radio broadcasts, recorded and put together a new session, including local/national news topics, sports, and weather. It was actually a lot of fun, and interesting as Mr. Jackson used a lot of his own equipment.

So, we were working with some very expensive and high-tech cameras, microphones, and even the software was pretty advanced. Mr. Jackson was laid back, and easy to talk to when it came to anything from the assignments to more personal things. He was even a bit of a prankster himself.

When he caught someone sleeping, he would do something harmless, such as having us all leave the room, turn the lights off, and have them wake up confused. Like I said, pretty harmless. So when we came across his room, I didn't want to do anything to the equipment, but I wanted to do something additional or extra to his room, knowing that he would appreciate the prank.

I started looking around the room to get ideas of what to do when I started going through his desk. In the bottom drawer, I found several tapes similar to the ones we used for our projects. In fact, I recognized the names of some of my classmates on them. However, I also found two tapes that only had a label of "Class of '92".

This caught my attention because, at the time of this event, it was not the year of 1992 or 93, or even in the 90s for that matter. My curiosity now peaked. I decided to take one with me, thinking I could use it for the prank or maybe it was a memorable class and could do something special for him as a farewell or a graduation gift.

In regards to the prank, I just covered his desk with glitter and filled one of the tape cabinets with it too. I had two friends with me in that room that saw me with the tape and wanted to know what was on it as well, so I agreed to let them know or watch it with them if they wanted. We left the school that evening, mission successful, and agreed to watch the tape the next day at my place since I had a VCR in my room.

However, I couldn't stop thinking about the tape and what could be on it, or what could be so important to keep that specific year. So, I decided to watch it that night and would just let my friends see it the next day. I know you all have probably already figured out where this is going, but to this day, I still fight myself if taking that tape was the right thing to do.

The tape started during what appears to be a graduation ceremony and then cuts to that same classroom. The room was almost completely empty. A few people walked past the camera and you could hear the door close. What was still on the camera was a girl in the second row from the front. Then, I watched Mr. Jackson walk by the camera, towards the door, and then started talking as he walked towards the girl.

There was some innocent conversation occurring at first. He asked her how she was doing, how her older sister was, and even what her plans were for winter break. Then, the conversation changed to the homework or projects. She shyly asked him about how to do something, and he pulled out another camera, as well as a sheet, and started explaining it. But while this was happening is where my stomach started to drop.

I saw Mr. Jackson place his hand on her knee and then said something quietly to her. I could see their faces and she definitely did not seem interested in this, nor reciprocate in any way. There was some more one-sided conversation while his hand moved from her knee to her thigh. I was frozen with fear and disgust. After about 20 minutes, the tape cut back to the ceremony and there was nothing else after that.

It was pretty obvious what this was, and the ceremony was used as a mask. I was terrified. I knew Mr. Jackson, and in fact, I knew the girl in the video. We had a different class together, but I was only an acquaintance with her really, but I did have a friend that was pretty close to her. I didn't know what to do or who to show this to since we technically shouldn't have been in the school at the time.

I was still a kid, so I didn't know if I would get in trouble if I told them. Instead, I tried to ask my mutual friend to talk to her, but I tried to be vague, not wanting to talk about the situation. My mutual friend, Katie, did not take the media class, so I asked her to ask the girl about the class, ask her if she had troubles and how she felt about the teacher or assignments.

The next day, Katie asked me if I was having troubles in the class because of the girl's reaction. She said she thought the class was okay, but when Katie asked about the teacher, she got quiet and didn't want to talk about it. So she assumed that she wasn't doing well in it. The feeling of something being very wrong only got heavier in my mind. It was still spring break at the time, so I could only dwell on it.

I even admitted to my friends that I tried watching it, but that something was wrong with it and it didn't work. I didn't want them to see it for their, and more importantly, her sake. When we did return to school, I found myself watching him more closely and realized that he was the same as I remembered him, except I saw him glance over at the girl many times throughout the hour that we were in class.

That night, when I got home, I told my parents everything. I told them about how I found the tape and what was on the tape. I gave it to them, but I don't know if they ever watched it. I assume they did because what I was accusing a teacher of was very real and very serious. I can be quite the jokester and always tried to keep the conversation light-hearted. This is not something I would ever bring up in a joking manner.

So, I'm sure my parents trusted me on that front too. They told me that they would take care of it, and that I needed to just go to school as normal. The rest of that week, I tried my best to act normal, but it was hard to not want to go off on Mr. Jackson. It was hard to not want to go to that girl and tell her that I was sorry for what she went through, but I didn't. Thankfully, I only had to go two days like that.

The third day, we had a substitute teacher. Everyone took it at face value that we were just getting a free day, but I think I knew the real reason. The rest of the week continued with that same sub, and then we were told the next week that Mr. Jackson wouldn't be able to finish the school year. I was so relieved, but also concerned as the girl wasn't in the class that next week either. The rumors started to spread pretty fast in the school.

Someone claimed they actually saw the police at Mr. Jackson's home, and then they tried to determine why. Then, many of the students started talking about how Mr. Jackson was pretty creepy, or how something about him was off. Then there were rumors that some student came forward with certain claims, and then the local news and letters sent home to our parents confirmed that this wasn't a rumor, but the truth.

The rest of this was information that I either got from the news, my parents, or people around the school. He was charged with multiple things and went to prison. That I knew. But then I learned that when the girl was confronted, she told her parents and authorities what happened, and several other girls came forward with claims as well.

They also mentioned that there were multiple tapes found with not only similar things to what I saw, but others where he seemed to stalk the girls. I was also friends with a guy whose sister actually came forward, which made me feel like all the other claims were probably true too. I mean, there was physical proof of at least one, and he was brave enough to keep it at school, so I absolutely believed there would be more than just the one.

The first girl that I saw in the video stopped going to our school, and I learned that she was homeschooled. Sometimes I went to stop by her home to see how she was doing, but I didn't want to worry her or her family when a strange guy showed up. Obviously this has been many years ago, and we've all since graduated. I don't know whatever happened to that girl, and I don't think she even knew that I may have been the one that put the whole thing in motion,

But I hope that she's doing okay. So, I know it wasn't exactly me that was affected, but it was still pretty terrifying to see. Not to mention, knowing that I had to have had some impact in changing some people's lives. Who knows how long he may have continued with this horrible act, if I had just kept that to myself.

About 20 years ago, I had some pretty sudden life changes and ended up renting a small house in a small suburban neighborhood. It was nice. It was a major change for me, and I would say that it was a peaceful and fresh start.

The house was charming, not too big. Had a comfortable little yard, and I knew the person that was renting it out, so it wasn't too expensive. As comfortable as it was, I will say that some of the neighbors were a bit out there. The majority of them were kind people, but some of them were nosy.

One neighbor, in particular, Mr. Weller, was a very confusing individual. He lived in the house directly across from mine, and the day that I moved in, I saw him standing outside on his front porch, just sipping on a glass of tea and watching me.

He waved. He seemed friendly enough, but we didn't talk, so... The only knowledge I had of him was that he lived there and was willing to wave at a neighbor that was outside. I didn't see him for a couple of days after that, but about a week or so later, when I'd gotten home from work, I felt eyes stabbing me when I was walking up to my house. I turned around to see who was staring at me,

and I noticed Mr. Weller standing at his front window, and just staring. He wasn't trying to hide the fact that he was staring, he was clearly watching me, with an unreadable expression. I waved, thinking maybe he was just lost in thought, and didn't realize that he was staring, but he didn't wave back, or blink, even. He just held that same deadpan stare.

I felt a bit unnerved about the whole thing. I quickly made my way inside, but the eerie feelings did not stop there. When I would come home from work, or from a jog, he would be there just staring at me. When I would step out to get the mail, he would be there at his window.

If he was outside doing something, like mowing the grass, and I went outside, he would stop doing whatever he was doing, go back inside, and stand at the window until I went back inside. Then, it got worse. Sometimes, whenever I would go inside from doing whatever I would need to do, my landline would ring, but when I would answer it, the person would just hang up.

No breathing, no voice, just me saying, "Hello?" and then a click as they hung the call up. I couldn't prove who it was, and the caller ID would always show blocked, but I had this weird feeling that it was Mr. Weller. I had no idea what I had done wrong, or if I had done something that made him hate me, but clearly, this man had something against me.

I called up the person that owned the house, they were a friend of my mother's, so I had their direct number, and I asked her if she'd ever had any troubles with Mr. Weller. She told me that she hadn't personally, and that I was only the second person to rent the house, but the other tenant hadn't mentioned any issues. So, by this point, I knew that it was just me. After a while, it started to get to me.

The incessant staring, the silent calls, it actually made me feel paranoid. I would actively avoid going outside so that I didn't have to see him standing there and staring at me. I stopped going for my jogs, and when I got home from work, I would just go straight to the house without turning around. I would get the mail every few days to avoid having to walk to the end of the street, and

It hit a point where I would wake up thinking that he was staring in my windows, literally just paranoid. Then I hit my limit. I went outside to get my mail one day and sure enough, he was there at the window, staring daggers at me. My paranoia shifted to rage and I started walking towards Mr. Weller's house. I hate confrontation, but I was done with all of this.

As I was walking to the house, I watched Mr. Weller pull the curtains closed and retreat back into the house, but I wasn't going to just let this go. I stepped on his porch and I banged on the door, probably harder than I should have. After a few seconds of waiting for him to answer the door, part of me was actually more angry at the possibility of him being a coward and not answering. Then, the door unlocks and opens.

and the person that answered was not Mr. Weller. A frail old woman opened the door and looked at me with a big smile, and asked how she could help me. I was a bit confused. I had never seen this woman. I mentioned that I was looking to speak with Mr. Weller, and she looked at me a bit like she was upset at my request. She then hits me with,

"Oh, I'm sorry dear. My brother Kennedy passed away a few months ago. I've been living here for a few months now." I had no idea what to say, but after a few moments she smiled again and said, "Were you too close?" I shyly just kind of shook my head and mentioned that I was a neighbor and that I was sorry for her loss. She thanked me and I awkwardly made my exit out of the conversation.

feeling like a total idiot. I was walking back to my house, just thinking about how creepy it was that he was dead, and apparently had been for a few months. I got chills thinking about how I would see him staring at me from the window, even though he was gone. Then, I stopped, and it hit me that this was all a load of BS, and that I had literally seen him mowing the lawn the day before.

I turned and looked back at their house, and sure enough, he was there at the window staring at me. I actually laughed as I went inside. This jerk was such a coward, and was so unwilling to face me after being a creep for so long, that he had whoever that woman was, his sister or wife or whatever, lie and tell me that he was dead. After that, the staring and calls actually stopped.

He never bothered me again. I would see him outside doing whatever he would do, and I would wave at him any time we made eye contact, mostly to taunt him, and he would just scowl at me and turn away. In the end, I don't know what the hell Mr. Weller's problem was, I don't know what I did to make him dislike me so much, and I don't know why he was such a creep, but I was thankful that it all stopped.

I only lived in that house for another year, and the whole time I never spoke to him or that woman. And I never had any other problems. Back whenever I was around 19, so quite a while ago, I used to sling fries at a place that I don't want to name specifically, so we're just gonna call it McBurger Queen. It was a fast food job, one that had me working around grease and oil for literally six hours a day.

It was gross, slippery, and terrible for both my weight and my skin. For a broke college student that was doing their best, it was a paycheck. Nothing else. I hated every minute of it, but I did it long enough to be promoted once or twice, all the way up to a shift lead. Not a manager per se, but a lead.

It meant that I had to delegate things while the managers sat on their back ends in the office. That said, it did pay for what I needed it to pay for, and as much as I loathed it, I kept it and tried my best to just get through it. Then came who I'll just call Mr. Creepshow. At first, he was just another 50-something overweight guy that liked to come in on Fridays,

A slightly chubby dude with a taste for a double cheeseburger meal. At first, I hardly noticed him, but even when you don't work front, certain orders start to ring a bell. Double cheeseburger, no ketchup, add mayonnaise, extra pickle, and large unsalted fries. Yes, I still remember what he would order, because after a while, it was an order that I would come to hate. But initially, it was just basic stuff.

He'd come in, order, I'd get his food made and out onto the counter. It went from once a week to a few times a week, to literally every single shift that I worked. He went from ordering and sitting down, to ordering and then standing at the counter watching me make his food with this awkward grin on his face. When he sat down, he would sit at the closest table, and would just stare as he ate.

innocent, yet creepy as hell. Then he started trying to talk to me. I would walk an order up, and he would be at the counter, try to get my attention. It would always start with him saying something was wrong with his order and ask that I fix it, but he would then try to squeeze in small talk about anything and everything. The weather, how my schooling was going, I made the mistake of once telling him that I was going to college.

How work was going. Then the conversation started to swing towards things that he had no business asking, not as a customer at a burger joint that I barely knew. One day, he asked me to come up to the counter, and he didn't have his food, so I didn't know what he was going to bother me with. I walked up, asked if I could help him, and he said, ''Yeah, you can. I'd like to take you out for coffee sometime. Would you like that?''

The way he asked it was so weird. Ending the sentence with "Would you like that?" was such an awkward way to ask someone out. I told him that I appreciated the gesture, but that I was taken. He laughed and said something like, "Oh, that's fine. I'm sure you have a bunch of guys after you with, uh, assets like that." I stared at him for a moment,

and he seriously gave me the elevator eyes and smirked at me. At that point, I told him that he was making me feel really uncomfortable. He then responded with, "How about I take you home and make you feel even more uncomfortable?" I stepped back and told him in no uncertain words that what he was saying was not okay, and that I was going back to work, and the conversation was over. After that shift was over, I spilled everything to my night manager.

who gave me the go-ahead to boot Mr. Creepshow if he tried to talk to me about anything inappropriate again. But that was it. She didn't ask any questions, didn't ask for his name or what he looked like, she just said that it was my responsibility to take care of it until or unless he physically did something inappropriate.

After that, I didn't see Mr. Creepshow for a week, so I thought that it was over, and that he had gotten the hint. Maybe he'd moved on to haunt some other poor girl in another fast food establishment. But then, when I walked into work one night, there he was. He was standing in the McBurger Queen manager's office, except he was in uniform.

My stomach dropped as my night manager introduced him to me as David, and said that he was a new crew member, my new coworker. I just gave a plastic smile and asked if I could talk to her alone, and she sent him off to the front to get used to things up there. I then told her that he was the guy, that he was the creep that I had told her about. She gave me this look that screamed that she didn't believe me at all.

and dismissively said, no, you must be mistaken, David seems like an alright guy. I shook my head, and I told her that it was either him or me, that he had to go, or that I was going to go. She promised that she would work something out, and that I needed to just try to work with him. For a few days, I had to work with this guy, and I could just feel him staring at me,

And of course, he worked every shift that I was working. Then, my manager told me that she had actually worked it out with our sister store to transfer him to their team, as they had more openings than we did. But, and of course there was a but, since he had applied and wanted to work at this location, if he wanted to come back here, he could make a call to corporate, and they would likely transfer him back.

Basically, if Mr. Creepshow wanted to come back and ogle me some more, he was within his rights to do so as a McBurger Queen employee. So, I went ahead and gave her my two weeks notice right then and there, and told her that him being away temporarily was not enough for me. She was disappointed, but she said that she understood. I just kept my head down and counted my shifts until it was my last one.

On my second to last day, who would show up working at our store again but Mr. Creepshow? When he clocked in, he walked back to my station and said something like, So, I heard you're leaving. Can I go ahead and get your number now? I want to get to know you better, see what you've got going on. Again, he was giving me those sleazy elevator eyes. I snapped.

I told him that I would rather dip my face in the fryer than ever see his face again. He just kept this big grin and watched me as I walked away from him to turn in my cap and name badge. I dropped them off and I walked straight out that door. I did go back one time just to get my paycheck, and the whole time he was out mopping the lobby and was just staring at me. He gave me this gross little wave and a kissy face when I saw him, and I gave him the finger.

After that, I never went back to that location. I've barely gone back to that specific chain of restaurants. And I hope more than anything that Mr. Creepshow choked on every chicken nugget he ate after that day. I never personally thought that rekindling an old high school flame could lead to such a nightmare. But here I am at the end of a situation that I wish had literally never happened.

If anyone can invent a time machine to help me go back a couple months, please let Raven know so he can send me your address. I'll pay you, I promise. Sorry, I cope with humor. Anyways, I was on Facebook a couple of months ago and it suggested a face that I hadn't seen in about 10 years. A guy named Alex. Alex was my boyfriend in freshman and sophomore years in high school.

but we were both kids and had no idea what the hell we were doing, so we ended up walking away from the relationship, both heartbroken and thinking that it was the end of the world. It wasn't. We both moved on and grew up. I added him on Facebook and he immediately accepted, saying that he was just thinking about me. I mentioned that Facebook recommended him, so they must be reading his mind,

and we just had a really nice conversation reminiscing and talking about life since then. We were both kind of in the same places in our lives: single, not really looking, no kids, focusing on our careers, etc. We even met up for coffee twice just to talk about nothing in particular, and it was kind of nice having him back in my friendship circle, because Alex always was a cool dude.

and he and I were pretty good friends both before and after our two year relationship. Overall, it was nice, and I was happy to have him around again. But then came Alex's most recent fling, Shawna. I randomly got a friend request from her on Facebook, and when I clicked through her profile, I noticed that she had pictures of her and Alex with hearts all over them.

I was a bit confused because Alex was pretty open about the fact that he was single, so I asked him about her. He mentioned that she was an ex of his from about a year prior, and that they hadn't spoken much since then. I thought that was even weirder since she had pictures like they were a recent thing, but shrugged it off and moved on. I decided why not accept it.

Maybe I could get a few secrets about Alex and tease him about them. Jokingly, of course. That was a mistake. She immediately started commenting on all of my posts, liking all of my pictures, even the ones from years ago. It was a bit flattering at first, but then it got really weird. She then sent me a message about Alex, specifically about our relationship in high school.

I told her that we were just kids, and we thought that it was a serious thing, but that we realized that there was a lot more to life than our silly little relationship. Then she came back asking how far we went, which was an incredibly invasive question. I told her that I really didn't feel comfortable talking about it, and she started asking specifics.

Like, had I specifically done this to him, and had he specifically done that to me? I was a bit sickened by this. Again, really personal stuff that was not appropriate to talk about, to someone that you just met on Facebook. I told her that I was done with the conversation, and that if she kept it going, I was going to block her. To which she sent me a picture.

A picture that included her and Alex in a very compromising way. I'm not going to detail it, and I immediately blocked her after that. I made it a point to tell Alex what she had done and said, and he apologized profusely. He said that it was really messed up, and that he had no idea why she would do that. He mentioned that they broke up amicably, that she wanted kids and he didn't,

and it caused a rift that could not be fixed between them, and they really just hadn't spoken since. He also mentioned that he would message her asking her what the hell was wrong with her. I thought that that would be the end of it, but it wasn't, of course. About a week later, I was sitting at a coffee house having a drink with my bestie, and out of nowhere this woman walks up to us and sits in the chair next to me at the table.

I kind of looked at her like, what the hell is this woman's problem? And then it clicked who it was. It was Shauna, but she did look a bit different. Shorter hair, differently colored, but the same face. I could feel myself go pale as she stared at me with this messed up smile and just said, Hi, Emily!

I could tell that my friend was just as uncomfortable as I was, and I just said, "Oh, hi, Shauna?" She laughed, saying that she was scared that I wouldn't recognize her without Alex on top of her, and then said that we needed to talk. I told her that we really didn't need to talk and that she should just leave me alone, but she literally laughed and waved me off.

She started in telling me that I needed to back off from Alex because they were soulmates and that they were going to be together for the rest of their lives and that there was nothing I could do about it. I literally responded with, okay, and she laughed again. No, it's not okay, Emily. You are in my way. Alex left me because of you. He thinks he's still in love with you and he's not. He's in love with me.

and we are going to have a beautiful family. She moved her arm and grabbed my hand that was sitting on the table as she stared at me. If you get in my way, I'm going to kill you. Then she turned to my friend who was sitting at the table and said, I'll kill you too since you're a witness. We both just sat there silently staring at her, probably shocked at how brazen she was about this.

She then sort of nodded and said, "'Okay, I think we understand each other. I'm gonna head out for now. Bye!' In a seriously chipper tone, she got up and just walked out of the coffee shop like it was nothing. I'm not going to lie, I was terrified of this woman. She was clearly insane and she was clearly obsessed with Alex. And she somehow knew where to find me on a random Saturday morning.'

I have no idea how she found me. I had no idea what she was capable of. I messaged Alex right then and there and told him that she was crazy. I told him that she had just shown up and threatened me and my friend, and then mentioned that we should probably keep our distance for everyone's safety. He again apologized, saying that he didn't know why she was doing this, that there was no way he was going to get back with her,

and that he had no idea why she thought he had feelings for me. He did agree, saying that we should probably not talk for a while, until he could clear it up with her, and that he was going to look into getting a restraining order. And that was pretty much it, to be honest. It's only been a couple of months since that happened, and I'm honestly still horrified that Shauna's going to show up at my door with a gun, because Alex turned her down.

I haven't heard from her, and I haven't seen her, but every time I get a Facebook notification, I tense up. This woman was obsessed with this idea of a life that she was never going to get, and I was apparently preventing her from achieving that life by simply existing, I guess. In the end, I took a very important lesson from this. Sometimes, it's best to just leave the past where it belongs.

behind you. My boyfriend, Luke, and I have been together for well over a decade now, and we've lived together for a majority of that time. We'd found a quaint, albeit slightly worn, little duplex that was in a good spot and was easy to get to from anywhere, and they were willing to rent it to us right away, so we took it.

Our neighbors were a bit of an eclectic mix, but none of them stood out more than Dan. Dan was in his early 50s. He was tall and wiry, with scruffy hair that looked like it had seen better days. It was one of those haircuts where you could tell that the person was in denial about going bald, so they did everything they could to make it look like they weren't bald.

Dan was, as I said, in his 50s, but I would frequently see him skateboarding up and down the sidewalks. I mean, good for him. It was neat to see someone his age wheeling it like that, but he would literally be skating around at all hours of the night. I would wake up to go to the restroom in the middle of the night at, like, 3, and I would glance out the window and see him trying to kickflip off the curb at the corner.

A bit weird, but whatever. One Saturday afternoon, Luke and I were out on the porch enjoying the sun when Dan approached us. In a strangely eager tone, he said, "'Hey, do you know who I am?' Luke and I both kind of looked at each other in confusion until Luke said, "'Uh, I mean, you're Dan, right?' Dan responded with, "'No, I mean, who I am.'

What I've been through. We both kind of shook our heads in a way to say, No, sorry, we don't know your history. This, of course, seemed to be an invitation for Dan to tell us literally everything about himself. He began sharing stories about his childhood. About how he was physically abused by his parents. How he'd been kidnapped once when he was ten.

He kept going on telling us all about his teenage years, and how he had even once gotten into a fight with a police officer and was shot because of it. He had a scar on his stomach, and he was sure to show us and tell us that that was where he was shot. This guy went on and on, telling us everything he could think of over that hour and a half at least. Then he paused.

like he was trying to remember anything that he hadn't yet told us and then said oh i'm an artist you want to see a painting i made luke unfortunately is a very compassionate guy and he engaged with him about his art dan then skated down the road went into his place and then immediately ran back out and back to our place with a decent sized canvas in hand

When he got back, Dan's attention completely shifted from us to just Luke. It was like he decided that Luke was the person he wanted to talk to, and that I was just a third wheel to this conversation. Dan showed Luke the painting, and Luke nodded, saying, "'Wow, that's, uh, interesting,' and then motioned towards me, motioning for Dan to show me the painting. "'No lie? This painting?'

It was this really nice landscape, very well painted, really gorgeous, and then overlaid with a group of stick figures having a crudely painted picnic. As I looked at it, it kind of clicked what I was looking at. This beautiful painting, it was a print of a real painting, and Dan had painted the stick figures over it.

I nodded, stifling a bit of a chuckle when I realized and said that it was nice. After a few more minutes of talking about literally nothing, Dan said that he had to go because he needed to help his mom, whom he'd earlier said was actually dead. We said okay, and he skated off down the road again. Luke and I had a bit of a chuckle about the whole thing, and he confirmed my thoughts about the painting, that it was a print that he had painted stick people over.

Definitely weird, albeit mostly harmless. And we had just accepted that maybe Dan was a bit... weird. That weirdness got a bit extra about a week later, when we were in bed and were woken up by the doorbell going off at literally 2 in the morning.

I got out of bed and went down to check the door, and was surprised to see Dan standing there on the front porch, skateboard in hand, canvas in the other. I asked him what it was that he wanted, and he said, "Oh, um, I wanted to show Luke my newest painting." I was a bit rattled by the fact that he'd had the audacity to wake us up to show my boyfriend a quote-unquote "new painting,"

But I stepped back into the house and yelled up to Luke, saying, "'Hey, your friend is here and he wants to show you his newest painting!' As I was stepping back from the door and yelling up, I noticed that Dan had grabbed the door and was holding it open, and kind of starting to step into our home. I just stared at him as he walked through the door, at the same time that Luke had come down the stairs to see him standing in our entryway and holding the painting."

I shrugged and told him that I was going back to bed, and then went back upstairs. I could hear the conversation, and I was a bit upset to not hear Luke tell Dan that he needed to go away. He engaged him and listened to him discuss the painting for a solid 45 minutes, until Luke finally said, Hey, Dan, this is really interesting, but I have to be at work in the morning, so...

"I gotta get back to bed." Dan seemed to be okay with this and told him that he was sorry to have bothered him so late, and that he would just talk to him later. Luke came back up, and I could tell that he was not happy. I asked him about the painting, and he told me that it was more of the same. A really nice print of a landscape, with stick figures painted in random places.

I shook my head and told him that he needed to discuss boundaries with his new friend, and Luke agreed. Then, the worst of the events happened. About two weeks later, once again it was the middle of the night and we were in bed. I was struggling to stay asleep, a common issue with me unfortunately, and as I was laying there half asleep, I thought I heard something coming from downstairs.

But I was half out of it, so I just assumed that it was the cat or some sort of normal house sounds. I went from a bit unnerved by the strange sound to hitting a sense of terrified realization within a few minutes, when I started to hear what I thought was labored breathing. I knew that it wasn't Luke, as I could hear him snoring next to me, so...

This breathing was coming from someone, or something else. I laid there still for just a moment, making sure that it wasn't my brain doing that weird half-asleep thing that it can do, but my eyes shot open when the bedroom light turned on. I jumped up, Luke jumped up, and we both sat there just staring at Dan, now standing in our bedroom and holding a canvas.

This guy had somehow gotten into our house, was in our bedroom in the middle of the night, and was saying that he wanted to show Luke his newest painting. Luke had clearly had enough, as he started yelling asking what the hell Dan's problem was. Dan just kept saying, ''I made a new painting. I wanted to show it to you.'' Luke got up out of bed and kept shouting at this man to get out of our house.''

The whole time, Dan could not understand what he had done wrong. I heard Luke telling him to get out and to not bother us in the middle of the night about his paintings, and then he slammed the door. At that point, I don't think either of us were really able to get back to sleep, and Luke was incredibly upset. The next morning, when we got up,

We saw that Dan had left the painting on our front porch with a note that said, "You can have this one. I'm sorry." We also found that he'd actually broken in through the living room window. He had pulled the screen out, gotten the window open, and crawled in. Interestingly enough, we never saw Dan again. We didn't see him skating down the sidewalk.

He never showed up again to show us a new painting, and after a few months there was a moving truck at his place down the road, and new people were moving in. I have no idea about what happened to him, and I know that Luke feels bad about how he'd reacted, but also, screw that. This man had broken into our house in the middle of the night. I don't care if his intentions were innocent. We actually still have the painting.

It's a print of a man fishing in a boat on a lake, and there's, of course, a stick figure painted next to him, so it's his normal work, and it's actually hanging up in our garage. Now that all is said and done, I do kind of feel bad for Dan, and I'm sure that he had something wrong with him, and he had taken a liking to Luke for whatever reason.

but he had absolutely crossed boundaries that no one should ever cross. I never really believed in the whole "being watched" sensation until it happened to me, until I had to live through an event that made me feel the terror of it all. I'm a college student. I work nights at a convenience store near my campus. It's nothing glorious,

It's a very thankless job in an old and beaten down little store that sells as much alcohol and candy as we do gas. Of course, the store has to add to the creepy ambience, right? The lights flicker, door out back makes this grating creak noise that makes the hair on my arms stand every single time it opens. Other than that, the store is deafeningly silent, minus the soda fountain sometimes making strange noises.

It's a job that pays, and that's about the end of it. You'd think that the scariest thing that you'd have to deal with at these kinds of jobs would be the occasional drunk or irate customer, doubly so if the customer is both drunk and you won't sell him alcohol so he becomes irate. It's the dead of the night, so really you wouldn't think that anything creepy would actually occur. Plus, we're near the school and close to a cop shop.

People know not to do anything stupid since we can get a cruiser there in about three and a half minutes. I would know as I timed it. I once had to call on a drunk guy trying to drive out of my lot. By the time I'm at the middle of my shift, the world is asleep, so really I just get to sit there and wait for the morning to come so that I can go home. There was one night where, as I said earlier, things shifted from normal to creepy.

I was sitting there waiting for my shift to end when an older guy walked into the store. I looked up to greet him, customer service and whatnot, and when I looked out the window past him, I saw this random guy standing outside. He was across the street just behind the streetlight, and with how the light was glowing down, I couldn't see his face under his hoodie. There was something about how he was just standing there that was making me feel genuinely unsettled.

He wasn't just there for the hell of it. He wasn't waiting for the bus. It was like he was deliberately standing there and watching the store. Watching me. He didn't have a dog. He didn't have a phone out or anything. It was just him and the night. Now, I'm a pretty big dude. I'm 6'2", a little over 230, and not easily spooked. But the way this guy was just staring in my direction without moving...

was seriously freaky. After I rang up the old guy, I sat back down on my stool and just watched him as he watched me. Part of me was thinking that he was going to do something, like run at the store, pull out a gun, just something that would justify my terror of him. But he didn't. After about an hour and a half of him just standing there and staring, he took a step forward and then turned left and walked away, down the sidewalk.

No lie, it was a relief to watch him walk away. But, of course, that wasn't the end. The next night that I worked, around 2 in the morning, I looked up and sure enough, he was standing there again. At first, I was mentally certain that it was just another guy standing there, that there was no way in hell this dude was going to spend a couple more hours in the middle of the night just watching the store for fun.

but after I stared at him for a couple of minutes, I could tell that he was wearing the same shorts and same hoodie, and I knew it was him for certain. I tried to shake it off, tried to laugh at myself, and thought, wow, Jason, you're getting paranoid. But this eerie feeling was settling in my gut, and it would not go away. Something was off, way off.

So I did what I think anyone would do if they were in my position, working at 3 in the morning behind the counter of a giant robbery target. I called the police. I explained that there was a man that had been loitering around the store, and that I would appreciate an officer to just maybe check him out, or maybe just come to the store and make sure nothing happened. It was a bit of an exaggeration. He wasn't technically loitering around the store, but...

But it wasn't wholly untrue. They said that they would send a unit to the store to check in. I thanked her and hung up. That's when things went from freaky to "Holy crap, what is happening?" As soon as I hung up from the dispatcher, I looked up and watched as this man reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone and placed it to his ear. Then, right on cue, the phone to the store started ringing. I was still in this weird mentality of denial.

I was thinking that there was absolutely no way that it was this guy. The timing was just a big coincidence. I picked it up and answered saying the name of the store. The voice on the other end immediately cut in and said, "I hope you have a good night, Jason." The voice was low and quiet, and the call ended as they finished their statement, which to me made it feel like a threat.

When the call ended, the man on the other side of the street put his phone away, and immediately started walking away from his post under the streetlight. I stood there watching him walk, holding the phone receiver in my hand, not sure what this was at this point. I didn't answer the phone saying my name, so him referring to me by name was unsettling.

It was entirely possible that he'd been in the store at some point and interacted with me, and I just never noticed it was him. But it was still freaky. After about ten minutes, the officers finally pulled up, which was a disappointing response time, but I guess it was just a loitering call. I explained the whole thing to them, and then told them immediately after calling them that the man called me, and told them what he'd said.

They seemed to want to take it seriously, but I think at the same time this guy hadn't done anything actually illegal, so they had to just say that they would drive around and see if they could find him. And that was it. I finished out my shift, thankful to not see the man out there for the rest of the night. This wasn't the last event, but it was the last one that happened at my work.

What happened after this is the most recent thing to happen, but is also the most terrifying, albeit the least eventful. About two days after the night where I called the cops, I was at home getting ready for work and whatnot, and when I went out to leave, I noticed that there was a slip of paper under my windshield wiper. At first, I thought it was a ticket, or a warning for parking there or something, which was confusing,

But it was the most logical explanation. But when I pulled the page out and looked at it, I was horrified. On the page, right there in black and white, was a written note that said, "'I'll be around, Jason. I'm not scared of the police.'" When I read this, the world felt like it was spinning. What the hell had I done to this person? Why were they latching onto me like this? I really didn't know what to do. Should I call the cops?"

Was this just an empty threat? Was this some kind of stalker that was waiting to escalate the situation? I did contact the police, and when they showed up, I explained the situation that had taken place at work, which thankfully did add a bit of credence to my story. And then I showed them the note that I had just found. They thought it was freaky, and they agreed that this could be a weird stalker situation, but there wasn't much to go on beyond the person just being creepy.

After a bit more talking about things, they basically gave me an open case number and told me that, if I saw this person at all, or if they contacted me, to contact them immediately and this would be an open investigation into potential stalking. Fortunately, this is where the story ends, for now. It's been two months, and I haven't heard from this person nor seen them since then.

I don't know if that's a good thing, or if they're waiting for me to let my guard down, but it's definitely scaring the hell out of me. These past two months, I've been feeling like I'm being watched, being followed, and I swear that I am jumping at literally every shadow. I've kind of started secluding myself, only spending time at work and home, not going out into public just in case.

If anyone has any suggestions, I am open to them, so please do let me know what I should do. I am armed, so if this person tries anything at home, I can do something about it. But I can't open carry, so out in public the only thing I can hope to protect me is the fact that this is out in the open. In the end, I think I'm safe, since it has been so long.

But of course, I am scared of the possibility of them coming back. It's a terrifying feeling. And I may just be being paranoid, but if that paranoia saves me, then so be it. I guess. Hello. I used to be a teacher for many years, and for multiple different grades. It was my career for a good chunk of my life, and I enjoyed it.

I loved children, and I always loved being able to teach them something new, and I hoped I could do at least one thing to spark something in them to challenge themselves, ask questions, and follow their passions. I would like to believe that I made an impression on quite a few, but I know that I wasn't everyone's favorite, and that's okay too.

Of course, even though I looked for the best in all of the kids that walked into my classroom, it wasn't always easy. I did have some challenging ones, but I still showed them as much patience as the next student. My story is about one of those kids. I'll refer to him as John. John was a pretty troubled boy, if it wasn't obvious just from his home life. He had been held back a year, so while he watched his friends graduate, he was still sitting in school.

I knew he just had his dad around, not sure what happened with mom. I don't want to say his dad wasn't good, but maybe more so that he just wasn't around much. There were times that he had been called to the office or had to leave due to fighting, and he would have to wait for someone else to come get him because his dad was always busy. John's words, not mine.

I was used to seeing John in the halls and other classes more, but due to the changes in the curriculum and his free study hour, I now had him in my classroom twice. His demeanor was like some of the other kids. He would lose focus during the lecture or do something else. He would try talking to others or even try to be disruptive, but I didn't humor it. He was treated the same as the other students.

I might tell the class to keep quiet or something similar, or I may even involve him in the discussion. I never did it in a way to try and call him out specifically to embarrass or punish him, but if someone else asked a question, I may tie it into a previous discussion and ask someone else their opinion or take, including him. His answers started as just an I don't know or agreed with the previous person question,

and then he started giving some wise, aleck answers. To those, I would keep going with it. I was an English and a debate major, and I could clap back, if you will. The class found it amusing, and quite frankly, I could tell if I was getting to him. Whether it was a bad thing or a good thing, I'll probably never know. Over time, I felt like I was really breaking down some barriers with him, but he still had his bad days, such as everyone else.

I think we pretty much had some unspoken rules between us and even my classroom that everyone was aware of, which helped in cementing the idea that they were responsible for their own actions, work, and time management. I bring this up because there were a few occasions where John was having a bad day and was obviously in a bad mood because of something that happened.

I've told them that they're allowed to have bad days, but my classroom was to be used as a safe room. Do not start or plan fights in my room, don't take it out on me or other classmates, and to respect the property of the room, i.e. don't punch my bookshelves, kick other people's backpacks, etc.,

In fact, it may sound silly for some high school students, but I had a small desk that sat next to mine in the back of the room so that no one could look at you as a safe place. I had books, exercise sheets to help you keep calm, coloring sheets and blank paper, tissues, all kinds of things for the kids. They were allowed to go over there anytime they needed their own space."

There was even a sign they could use indicating that they wanted to be left alone or wanted someone to talk to. I had a lot of kids, even ones that didn't have me as a teacher that used that desk. I wanted a place that they could go that wasn't just wandering the hall or skipping class and getting into trouble. To my surprise, John had just had an argument with another teacher. It was just words, and as he made his way to my classroom, his fists were clenched.

I watched as he walked in the classroom and he paced like he was about to throw a punch. However, he took a deep breath and actually went and sat at the desk with his arms crossed, tapping his foot. He had the do not disturb sign up, but hey, I thought this was an incredible improvement. He stayed like that for most of the hour, other than writing something, but he then took the paper with him. Anyways, this was how he started behaving in my classrooms.

I found him paying more attention, participating in discussion, and when he wanted to be left alone, he sat at the desk. He even greeted me and would say goodbye for the day. But there was one day that was entirely different. I saw him while he was at lunch, where he looked angry and, again, got into a shouting match with another student. They were pretty close to each other's faces, and I feared that a fight was about to start.

Now, I'm a pretty small woman, so there's no way that I was going to be able to stop anyone, but I did approach and try to deescalate. Another male teacher noticed and he stepped in as well, which broke the two up. I didn't see John again until his class with me. He walked in, very angry, and immediately went to the back desk and sat there tapping the table.

We continued with class as normal, but at some point during the lecture, John abruptly stood up, causing the chair to make that loud screech, and stormed out of the room. I got a bad feeling, so I excused myself and tried to follow him out of the room. I saw him heading towards the front of the building and call out for him, but he didn't even turn around. I went back to my room and called the security desk to let them know, and they told me that they would walk around for him.

I finished that class and the rest of the day actually with no information on where he went, and no one else had seen him either. It wasn't until the next day that I got some information. The day started as normal, but my class with John wouldn't be until after lunch. I didn't see him anywhere in the halls, and no one else that I knew that he associated with had seen him either. Then, right before lunch, I received a call on my desk phone during class.

When I answered, it was the security officer asking me if I was okay. I kind of laughed because obviously I was, and I asked why. He told me that he would explain soon, but then advised me to lock my classroom and to not let the students leave either, even if the bell rang, until he arrived. A bit concerned and curious, I agreed and hung up the phone.

It was about midway through the hour, so the students were just working at their desks at this point, and I was left thinking about this call at my own desk. I had a horrible gut feeling that this had something to do with John. The security officer made it to my room and said the kids would be free to go to their next classes at that point. He then asked to speak to me, since it was my lunch hour, and I agreed."

He told me that they had found someone walking around the back of the school, but they were wearing a hoodie so they couldn't see their face. When they went to stop him, he had tried to run but didn't get very far, as they had already called for the police. It was John. They brought him into the principal's office, called his dad and were questioning him why he was there and not in class.

The more alarming part was that they found an airsoft gun in his backpack, as well as a knife and a folded up piece of paper in his pocket. The paper had a list of names on it. My name was on that list, but it was the only one with a question mark next to it and then was crossed out. They were worried that something had happened, causing my name to be marked off, which is why they called me first.

Everyone else on that list, including the teacher, were people that he did not get along with in some way. I was shocked and heartbroken. He obviously struggled with some inner demons, and I honestly felt that because I challenged him or maybe stood up to him, I was added to that list. But I think he realized that I didn't challenge him in the way that he normally expected.

I challenged him because I saw through the bullying, or maybe I'm completely wrong in that thought, but something changed his mind. I never learned what that could be as he was expelled for the rest of the year. I fought to at least be able to let him finish the year as he was almost done, but the school board wouldn't allow it.

They didn't inform us teachers of this prior, but they said that it was because he had been kicked out of previous schools for similar outbursts, but not like what we experienced. I never heard about John or what happened to him after that, but I also never saw or heard anything in the news, so I guess that's important. All I know is that I'm now a very strong advocate for mental health.

I was before, but this whole event with John really made me see that there are people out there suffering through things that are hard for others to imagine. If you know someone that is struggling, please reach out to them. It could honestly save a life. I wouldn't normally share this story on the internet, but I'm going to go ahead and send it to you with a request to remain anonymous just in case.

Honestly, after what happened, I kind of feel like it's necessary, because it was one of those situations that others should know about. I live in a fairly large apartment complex in a part of town that is questionable. The community/complex is fine overall, but the location is sketchy. We've had a string of car and apartment break-ins over the past year or two.

Because of this increase in crime, the community has installed a gate at the front that is closed after 10pm, and they hired a couple of guards that are stationed in the lot overnight. For the most part, it's actually been kind of nice to have the security guards on the property, as it does make me feel a lot safer. At least, until they hired a guy named Jeb.

I'm not one to judge people based on things like names, but when we got the email from the office saying that they had hired a man named Jeb, I didn't have high hopes, that's all. My initial impression didn't get any better when I finally met him. He was a big guy. Not fat, just really bulky. When I first met him, I tried my best to be polite and to say hi to him,

I work in customer service, so I have that customer service smile. And when I said hi to him, he sort of just grunted. After that, I made it a point to just not talk to him, as that was 1. rude and 2. kind of creepy. Who grunts when someone says hi? Anyways, I avoided him and didn't acknowledge him at all, so he pretty much just left my mind altogether.

My friend Jessica was the one that initially noticed that something was off about him. Jessica doesn't live in the complex, but she'd been staying with me for a couple of weeks because she was having issues in her personal life. I've known her since we were in preschool, so I had no issue offering my couch to her when she asked. She was in the laundry room of the building, doing her laundry as one does, and at one point, Jeb walked into the laundry room.

The laundry room in our building has the washer and dryers, but also has all of the tenant's storage units. It's a small and sort of cramped room, but it has enough space for one to sit if they need to. And that's about it. She was sitting there, waiting for the ten or so minutes to pass by, and just scrolling on her phone when Jeb walked in.

He looks at her, and then walks past her to the other side of the hallway-like area, and leans against the wall. He then pulls out his phone and just starts scrolling, but is very clearly not actually reading anything. After the buzzer goes off on the washer, Jessica gets up to change them over to the dryer, and Jeb pushes off the wall and slowly walks towards her. She notices him, but doesn't want to make an issue.

She's not on the lease here and technically shouldn't be using the facilities until he gets too close. From what she told me, he was uncomfortably close to her and just looking over her shoulder as she was moving her clothes. At one point, she pulls out a pair of underwear and moves it and she hears him say, "'Nice,' under his breath."

She shivered, but just finished moving it all, put the change in for the dryer, and turned around, only to be met with him standing less than arm's length away from her. As soon as she turned around, he smirked and said, "'Hey, can I get your phone number?' She was shocked at how brazen he was, and she told him that she wasn't interested. She said that he chuckled at this response, and then said, "'You live in Unit 203, right?'

which is my unit where she was staying. She asked him why he was bothering her, and he just said, I'm just doing my normal rounds, you know, making sure you're not up to something suspicious. At this point, she said that she'd had enough, so she told him that he was being creepy with his comments, and that it was not appropriate to ask her for her phone number, and then ask which unit she lived in.

She told him that if he kept bothering her and being inappropriate, she was going to report him to the office. He just laughed and shook his head, and told her to have a good night and then left. She made sure that he walked out of the building and then immediately ran over to my unit to tell me about what had happened. I told her that I wanted her to report him anyways, that they needed to know that he was a creep.

She agreed, but was hesitant at first, saying that he didn't really do anything. I mentioned that he may not have done anything this time or to her, but there was a real possibility that could change next time, with the next person. That seemed to make her change her mind, and she said that she would go ahead and report him. The next morning, I went down to the office with her and informed them of the situation.

They were a bit confused since Jessica doesn't live here, but I told them that she was staying with me for a couple of days and that she was helping me with my laundry, and that's why she was there. They seemed to be okay with that and asked for more details. She told them everything and the person that took our complaint seemed to take it seriously. They said that they would talk with him and that they would take action and apologized that it happened.

We thought that would be the end of it, that he would either get fired or that he would get the hint. But he didn't, and he didn't. About two days later, we were in my living room and heard a knock on the door. I get up to answer it, looking through the peephole and see Jeb just standing there. I stop and think about whether or not I should answer the door, but he knocks again and says, ''This is security. I need you to open the door.''

I sighed and did what he mentioned, keeping it chained just in case. As I opened the door, he actually ran into it, like physically bumped into the door. I'm guessing because he didn't expect me to have it chained and he was planning on just walking into the apartment. Once he regained his composure, I asked him if I could help him, and he immediately told me that I needed to open the door all the way.

I told him that I didn't feel comfortable doing so, and he immediately got angry. He said, "You need to open the door. I am with security, and I need to check your apartment." I stared at him blankly for a moment, and asked him why he would need to check my apartment. He responded with, "I have reports there are people living in this unit that aren't supposed to be here, and aren't on the lease, and I want to check just to make sure."

I once again just told him no, that he couldn't just enter my apartment any time that he wanted, and that if they were going to send someone, they needed to call me with 24 hours notice, according to my lease. He immediately raised his tone, saying, ''You're going to open this door right now, or you're going to be kicked out. I am here to check the apartment. It's an emergency.''

I kept up my questioning, asking what the emergency was, whose life or property was at risk according to him. He tried to say something like, ''You may have a murderer in there hiding for all I know, so this is an emergency.''

I just shook my head and laughed at him, telling him that if he really thought that, then the office either needed to call me to talk to me, or he needed to contact the police and have them check out my apartment. I then moved to shut my door, and he reached his arm in and around the door trying to grab at the chain lock.

I immediately shoved the door as hard as I could, and screamed saying that he was trying to break into my apartment. Screaming for help, trying to get the attention of the neighbors. Thankfully it worked, and I could hear several of the doors opening in the hallway, and people asking what was going on. I think he realized the implications and he immediately pulled his arm back and turned to walk away.

As he was walking away, I heard him yell, "Get back in your apartments! There's nothing to see here!" Like, he wasn't just some security guard and had some kind of actual authority. Obviously our neighbors came to my door and asked if we were okay and what was happening. We explained the whole thing to them, and they agreed that everything he was doing was a problem, and that he definitely had something planned with what he was doing.

I actually called the police to make a report, and when the cops came out, all of the neighbors corroborated what I was saying. They said that they would do a drive around to see if they could find him, and that they would be back with a police report for me to give to the office. Thankfully, this was the end of all this. We took the report to the office, and they told us that they had gotten calls from several neighbors in our building about the whole situation.

and that they had let him go that morning, and that he was basically barred from the property. They also said they would assist in any way they could if the police wanted to pursue the investigation. As it is, I haven't seen him since this all happened, and I think he realized that he was treading shallow water, and that if he continued, he was going to end up in jail. In my opinion, he should have been arrested for what he did anyways.

but I don't believe that he was. In the end, it was a terrifying situation, one that caused me to really not feel safe in my own home. The experience left me rattled, and I'm nervous anytime someone from the property has to come to my door, but thankfully nothing has happened since all of this played out. As I've mentioned before, I'm a big guy, 6 foot 5 inches and 300 pounds.

I've worked many physical jobs, so at this time I was in good shape. This allows me the freedom to do stupid stuff that most would be too afraid to do. I don't think about it. Call it my big guy privilege, if you will. I would often take walks late at night, most of the time with friends, but at this time I was living on the streets of Portland out of my car.

I did this by choice. My sister lived across the Columbia, and I could stay there whenever I wished. Just most of the time I didn't feel like going back there. I would have to be back in the morning anyway for work. I would also have bouts of insomnia, times when I just couldn't sleep. See, I was used to physical jobs, and at the time I'd landed a desk job, and I had to burn off a lot of energy.

So, I would choose a direction and walk. That night, I went to Old Town slash Chinatown. That's what it was known as at the time. This is not a place for a young white guy to be in, but I was ignorant of that fact. I loved the area, the very ethnic style of the buildings, at least their facades. The smells and the people, they were always so nice to me.

There was a pizza place that I loved and had been to often, but was closed at this time. So, I was just wandering when I heard something behind me. Looking back, I saw a couple of guys walking the streets like me. No problem. I turn and just keep on walking. After some time of aimless wandering, I hear more noise behind me. Now, there are like six guys walking in a group.

Thinking nothing of it, I just keep going. Now, I have to say that I was walking down alleys, looking at storefronts. I was just stopping at anything that caught my eye. The group of guys probably thought I was looking for some place to break into. At that time, though, I was getting a bit worried. As Ron White once said, "I don't know how many I could take, but I knew how many they were going to use."

I started getting scared as they were getting closer and closer. I saw a phone booth, yes, this was that long ago, and I stepped in. To this day, I have no idea why I did that, but it may have saved me. In that phone booth was a card for a Baptist church. It took me back to the crazy guy at Denny's in my previous story, and I decided to go for crazy and act like a preacher.

Now, I was raised in a very Christian household, almost cult-like, so I knew the Bible backwards and forwards. I started yelling out verses into the receiver, which was not connected to the phone. I was just holding it up in front of me like a microphone, talking about the wages of sin and how only the Lord can save. I turned and walked through the group of men belting out verse after verse.

I probably scared those poor guys, who were most likely just trying to protect their homes. To this day, I do feel kind of bad about it, but I also never walked there again at night. I hope from time to time they think of this story and laugh about it like I do, even though at the time, I was scared stupid. And thanks again Raven for doing such a good job bringing life to these stories. I first met Hannah online.

I think it was on Facebook through a mutual friend that we shared. She commented something on one of my friend's posts, and I responded to her with a joke about something, and she then sent me a friend request, and that was kind of it. For a while, at least. At the time, I was seeing someone, she was seeing someone, so there was no intention beyond we share a mutual friend and have the same sense of humor.

A few years later at a get together for that same friend, and wouldn't you know it, we were both single and we hit it off. She was a dream come true for me. Beautiful, smart, funny. She had a laugh that lit up the room and I fell for her pretty much right away. Before I knew it, we'd been dating for about six months. It honestly felt like that.

We met at the party, and then we were together for half a year. Everything seemed perfect with her until then, when she sprung something on me way out of left field. Out of nowhere, she told me that she had a kid. Which is something that should not have been a surprise, right? Those six months that we were together, she never mentioned having a daughter. There were no pictures of her with her daughter on her Facebook.

In the time we'd been together, her daughter had literally never been mentioned. At all. So, when she came out and said, I have court for custody of my daughter this week, I was kind of like, I'm sorry, you have court for what of who? Worse yet, she kind of played it off like, Oh, my daughter, Courtney, you've met her, I've mentioned her, etc.,

Apparently this whole time Courtney had been living with her ex, Ryan, her father, and I genuinely didn't even know this kid existed. Of course I wanted to be supportive. I wanted to be there for this woman that I was pretty sure I was in love with, but I was taken aback that she was able to hide something like this for so long. I mean, it's not normal to hide a kid from your boyfriend, right? But she was adamant that she had told me about her.

to the point that it actually became an argument, one that got pretty heated and pretty loud. After a while, I relented and basically agreed that I probably just forgot, just to try to calm her down. After that, I asked her about the situation, what was going on with the custody battle and all of that. She started telling me about how abusive Ryan was.

how he was controlling and that he had even gotten physically abusive with her at least once. I asked her how he ended up with custody of her in the first place, and she broke down crying, just completely sobbing about how nothing in her life is fair. I let it go, but I do want to mention that it wasn't lost on me that she avoided the question.

Then came the day of court that she had mentioned, and she asked me to be there as a character witness, which, honestly, I wasn't even sure was a thing for custody battles, but I agreed. I suited up and I went with her to the hearing. I just kind of sat there awkwardly, and at one point I was brought up during a conversation. She motioned towards me, and I had to tell them who I was and what I did for a living.

And that was all they asked me. I was basically told that I could remain seated on the bench, and if they had any questions, they would call on me. They didn't. And I just continued to awkwardly sit there watching this whole thing play out. That was until one word came out of Ryan's mouth, one that was echoed by the judge. Abuse. It was brought up that the reason he had full custody of Courtney was because of Hannah's abusive tendencies.

abusive tendencies that were, apparently, well-documented by the legal system. I don't want to get into all of it, but I think the overall theme of the whole conversation was that she had been abusive to Ryan for a long time, and their relationship fell apart when it was found out that she had been abusive to Courtney, too. This was shocking to me. I hadn't seen that side of her at all.

By the end of the day, it was pretty clear that she wasn't going to get custody of Courtney. At least, not full custody like she had wanted, and it was unclear as to whether or not she would even get partial custody. The whole drive home, she was quiet, just staring out the window and crying. I asked if she wanted to come over to my place to talk things out, and she nodded.

So, we went back to my place, which was a decision that I genuinely regret. We got in, and I sat down on the couch thinking this was just going to be her venting, which I would have totally understood. But she immediately started going off on me. She was screaming that this was my fault, that I was the reason she didn't get her daughter back. I was taken aback, asking her how the hell it was my fault.

and she yelled back that I didn't tell the judge that she was a good person, that I should have told them that she had changed and that she was no longer the person she used to be. I retorted with, "'They didn't ask me to say anything. I would have told them all that if they had asked, Hannah.' And then she hit me. She smacked me across the face and yelled that I should have stood up and argued for her like a man when they were talking about how abusive she was."

The irony in the fact that she had physically assaulted me while yelling about how she wasn't abusive was palpable. I had to hold my breath for a moment because I was about to explode. I simply stood up and pointed towards the door, telling her that she needed to leave. She told me that I would regret it, that she was going to make my life a living hell if I left her. I reiterated that I just wanted her to leave and that she needed to get help.

that I could no longer be involved in her life. And then she said something that haunts me to this day: "Whatever I do, it's going to be your fault for pushing me over the edge." And she left. Now this was clearly a threat, but I didn't know what she meant by it. And there was only so much that I could do because they were only words at that moment. In fact, they were only words for about two days.

Until I got a knock on my front door, and when I opened it, I was met with three police officers asking very aggressively if Hannah was in my apartment. I was confused and honestly a bit scared, and I told them that I hadn't seen her, and even gave them permission to come in to verify. Not something I would normally do, but this seemed incredibly serious.

While two of the officers started looking around the apartment and clearing the rooms, the third one asked me to have a seat because he had some questions for me. I asked him what was going on, and he asked me when the last time I had seen Hannah was. I told him that it had been a couple of days. He pressed me harder, asking me for a specific time, things that were said, etc.,

I told him everything about the argument, how she was upset about the custody case, and I told him that she had left after she got physical with me, and that was it. He asked me if he could see my phone to make sure that she hadn't called or messaged. I showed him that the last call was from her that morning that she had court, and that she hadn't texted me since before that, and I told him that I hadn't had any contact with her since then.

I then, again, asked what the hell was going on. The other two officers came back into the living room, and that's when they started explaining things to me. Apparently, I was the last person to see Hannah before she went over to Ryan's house. They gathered from him that she was distraught, and asked if she could come in, and he told them that she had said something about me assaulting her,

and for some reason he fell for it and let her in. At some point, she had taken a blunt object and knocked him clean out and then kidnapped their daughter, and she'd been on the run ever since. They wanted to make sure that I had nothing to do with it. I told them that I was not a part of that, that we had broken up that day because of the argument, and I told them that I had not touched her at all.

mentioning that she had hit me and that's when I told her to get out. They seemed to believe me, and told me that if I had heard anything from her, I needed to call them immediately. I agreed, and I told them that I would, and after they left, I was lost. How had this woman that I thought I was in love with managed to turn so quickly to someone that would go as far as kidnapping a child?

How had I never seen the signs of who she really was? Was I really that disillusioned? Or was she that good at hiding it? This is pretty much where the story ends for me. After the police asked me the questions, I was no longer involved. The next day, Hannah was caught. She was pretty obviously being looked for and she stayed in town. In fact, she actually went to her mother's house and was hiding out there.

She told her mom that she had won custody of Courtney, but her mom did not believe her, and the police did show up to ask her questions. When they did, Hannah was there, and she was taken into custody. That was that. She's doing time now for her acts, and I can safely say that she will probably never see her daughter again. Is that sad? Absolutely. Courtney doesn't deserve to grow up without her mother,

but at the same time, Hannah doesn't really deserve to be in her life for what she had done. I can end this by saying that I know for a fact that Courtney is actually doing well. I became pretty good friends with Ryan after all this. We ran into each other at a GameStop one day of all places, and were able to finally laugh about the craziness. We've hung out, played COD quite a bit, and I can say that Courtney, who just turned nine,

is a very happy and intelligent young lady with a very bright future. Back when I was in high school, I was friends with this eccentric girl named Lisa. Lisa was one of those strange girls, the kind that wear quirky colors but also tried to dress goth-esque. And I really did like her as a friend, but she could be a bit much at times.

I was on the football team, and while I wasn't in the jock clique, I will say that I wasn't in her normal friend group. The reason I ended up being friends with her was because in freshman year, I actually ended up in a group with her for a final project in our biology class, and I learned that she was a pretty interesting individual. I wouldn't say that we were close friends, even, but we were friends.

and we would chat whenever we were together in a classroom or whatever, but nothing beyond that. She never showed any interest in me beyond friendship, and I wasn't interested in her beyond friendship. And that was that. However, in junior year, things did change a bit. I started a relationship with one of Lisa's friends, Shelby. Lisa actually got us together because Shelby had a crush on me,

And I kind of had a thing for her too. So, obviously the relationship had Lisa's blessing. Being with Shelby meant that I did end up spending more time with Lisa. When we would hang out after school, Lisa would typically want to come over. And again, Lisa was alright, but she started to feel like a third wheel. It got to a point where Lisa would start texting me, asking me what I was doing.

And at first, I just thought she was being friendly. At one point, it got to be a bit much when she called me at 3 in the morning to ask me if Shelby and I were going to hang out that day. I got a bit cross with her, telling her not to call me in the middle of the night, and she just sort of sheepishly apologized and hung up. That day, when I went over to Shelby's house, I told her about the call, and she freaked out.

saying that Lisa had been doing the same thing to her, that she had called her every night for the last two weeks, asking about random things. We talked it through and we both decided that we needed to put up some boundaries with Lisa, especially when we were spending time together. We got to a point where we would make plans to go somewhere, and we wouldn't tell Lisa. We wouldn't mention it around her at all.

One weekend, we went to the movies just to get out and go on a date, and after we'd sat down during the previews, who else would show up but Lisa. She walked in the theater with a large popcorn bucket in her hand, and when she saw us, she excitedly yelled, ''Oh my god! There you two are!'' The entire theater looked back at us, and I'm sure that they immediately thought that we were going to be a problem.''

I just shushed her and asked her what the hell she was doing. She said that she wanted to see a movie, and that she saw us walk into the theater earlier, and that her seeing the same movie was a complete coincidence. I didn't buy it. And based on the look on Shelby's face, she didn't either. Shelby just said something like, ''Wow, what a coincidence.''

Lisa sat in the seat next to us, and the whole time she was being obnoxiously loud and annoying. It got to the point where one of the theater employees came into the room during the movie and actually asked us to leave. We tried to tell them that we weren't with her, but they didn't buy it. She was being loud and sitting with us, so we were all asked to get out. I didn't want to end up getting trespassed from the movies or told not to come back,

So Shelby and I just got up and started leaving. Then Lisa started yelling at the employee. She started screaming about how everyone in the theater was discriminating against her, and how she, as an American, was allowed to say what she wanted. I'm gonna be honest, I have no idea what she was going on about with all that, but it was embarrassing to be seen as associated with her.

I nudged Shelby to go, and she agreed, and we made our way out of the theater as quickly as we could. When we got out, we heard Lisa yell for us and asked why we left her there like that. Shelby actually went off on her, telling her that she was an embarrassment, that she was acting like an absolute idiot, and that she had completely ruined our date.

At this last part, Lisa's shocked face kind of turned to a slight grin, which again telegraphed exactly what she was doing. Ruining our day was her plan, and she'd managed to do so. After Shelby finished saying what she had to say, she grabbed my arm and pulled me away, saying that she couldn't stand to be around Lisa right then. I agreed. We walked away and got in my car to leave.

Lisa just stood there with that same stupid grin on her face and waved at us, saying that she'd see us around. It didn't end there, of course. It got to the point where Shelby had to block Lisa's number, because she started calling at all hours of the night again. Sometimes she would be sobbing, telling her how sorry she was. Some nights she would call and be pretty obviously pretending to be drunk, and talk about how she and I had slept together.

which was a complete lie. One night she called and told Shelby that she was in love with her, and that they should run away together and never come back. Mind you, Shelby and I were 17, and Lisa was still 16 at this time. After Shelby blocked her, Lisa started texting and calling me randomly, telling me that she was in love with me, and that we should be together.

I told her that she was nuts, and that I loved Shelby and wanted nothing to do with her. She laughed when I said this, saying that I didn't love Shelby, and that I was just using her as a means to get with her. I hung up on her, and then I blocked her number. One of the last occurrences happened one day after football practice. At this point, it had been around a month since Lisa had really done anything or contacted either of us, probably because we'd blocked her number.

When practice was over, Shelby and I went to get into my car and get home, and when I opened my driver's side door, I saw a manila envelope sitting on the center console. I asked if it was hers, and she said no. I knew it wasn't mine. I got in and grabbed it, and when I flipped it over, my heart stopped. The front said, From Lisa to the love of my life. I just stared at those words and kind of froze.

How had she gotten into my car? And worse, what was going to be in that envelope? Shelby asked what the hell it was, and I told her that I didn't know, and that I didn't want to know. She asked if I should open it, and at first I considered it, but then I had a second thought. I told her not to open it, and that I knew what we should do. I put my car in drive, and I went straight to Lisa's house.

I went and knocked on the door and was actually thankful when her mother answered and not her. I asked her if Lisa was home, and she told me that she wasn't. That she had to stay after school and would be home soon, which was the second blessing in this situation. Thankfully, her parents knew both Shelby and I. They knew Shelby a bit more, but since I was Shelby's boyfriend, they knew who I was.

I asked her if we could come in and talk with her a moment about Lisa, and while she was confused, she invited us in. When we got into the living room, I handed her the envelope, and I told her that I had found it in my car, and I then started telling her about all the things that Lisa had been doing. I told her that I respected Lisa and that she was my friend, but that something needed to be done about how she was acting.

Her mother then asked what was in the envelope, and I told her that I had no idea, that we hadn't opened it. I watched her open the envelope and pull out what looked to be a stack of Polaroids. As soon as she flipped through the first few, her face went completely white as a sheet, and she quietly said, ''Oh my god.''

Almost as if on cue, Lisa walked in the front door, and the three of us all looked over at her as she quietly asked what was going on. Her mother stood up and turned to look at her, and when she did, I was able to catch a glimpse of one of the photos. It was exactly what you might think. It was a photo of Lisa in a very inappropriate way.

I then stood up and said that Shelby and I should probably leave them to talk about things, and her mother told me that she appreciated me bringing this to her attention, and that nothing like this would ever happen again. Shelby and I left, and the whole time we were walking to the door, Lisa was watching us with an incredibly angry look on her face, which should have left me feeling guilty, but what she was doing was way over the line.

As we were walking down the front steps, I could hear her mother starting in on her, asking why she was taking nude pictures of herself and giving them to her friends like that. Again, I probably should have felt bad, but there's only so much that one can take until pity no longer becomes an option. As we drove back to my house, Shelby asked if what we did was the right thing to do.

I told her that we could have handled it differently, but that it had been months at this point, and that Lisa hadn't gotten the hint. I then mentioned that, since Lisa was still 16, what she had put in that envelope and in my car was 100% illegal, and that she could have called the cops and told them that I was in possession of those pictures, and I very likely could have been arrested for it.

When I mentioned that, I think Shelby understood what I was saying, and agreed with my sentiment. She asked me if I thought that was her plan, and I told her that I didn't know, but that I wouldn't have put it past her. That was the last major event with Lisa, thankfully. She still tried to talk to us some, and she would sometimes send us texts from a different number, asking if we could talk about everything.

but we pretty much just cut her out and told her that we were done with her. Shelby and I are actually married, happily so, and we have a two-year-old now, so thankfully Lisa wasn't able to drive a wedge between us like she wanted. The only reason that I even thought of this story was because Lisa tried to send Shelby a friend request on Facebook, as is the cliche reason.

Shelby considered accepting it, and I told her that it was her choice, but also mentioned that junior year was only 10 years ago, and that there's a high chance that she's still the same person she was. In the end, I hope that Lisa has a great life. I hope that she finds someone else to fill the role of, quote, love of her life, because it's not me. And I hope that she can live out her days with them,

because I never want to see her again. When my dad first told me this story as a kid, it gave me chills. And since I stumbled upon this sub, I might as well share. I still remember every detail. Before going into the details, I'll give some context to set the setting and background of the incident. Bear with me. They totally add up to the scary elements of the story.

Back in 1985, my 19-year-old dad was serving in the Greek Army Special Forces, in the paratrooper division. It's kind of irrelevant, but I'm a proud son, so I thought I'd mention it. Army service in Greece is mandatory for every male that has reached their 18th birthday, and so everyone has to go. Military camp, where each company is stationed at...

are mostly positioned in the countryside and usually there isn't much going on near and around the camps. They're fairly secluded. Closest town to my pop's camp was about 3 kilometers away. One night, while serving, it was my dad's turn to go on guard duty in the camp that he was posted in. Every night, 5-6 of the soldiers were selected for guard duty and they slept in the same barracks.

Half an hour before it was time for the previous guards to be relieved, another soldier would come in the room, wake up the new batch so they would get ready to go to their positions. Each shift was two hours. The 12-6am shifts were the worst, according to my pops. It gets extremely cold in the winter, and you're half asleep, standing beside your booth freezing your butt off while keeping watch.

Only way to be vigilant and keep warm is if you take a few steps up and down. So, it was 2 AM, and my dad was standing there next to his booth with his M1 Garand rifle. The Greek army used World War II weapons in the 80s. Yes, absolute silence. He could only hear the wind. He mentioned that the moon was helpful with visibility, but there's only so much you can make out at night, even with the moon apart from dark shadows.

especially at longer distances. There were some tree lines far away, but there wasn't much vegetation around the camp at all. It was more like a clearing. Everything was going well, just like every other night, until a tall, dark mass appears from the path, coming out of a tree line, and it's headed right towards my father's booth. My dad's heart starts pumping when he spots it, and he said that he is scared witless at this point. The mass is moving slow, but steady,

and is closing the distance. It's almost like it's floating with big slow steps. My dad does what he is instructed to do and what every guard does in a situation like this. He raises his rifle, aims and screams, "Halt! Identify yourself!" No reply. The shadow continues to approach. Second time, "Halt! Identify yourself!" Nothing.

He told me that at this point he is certain that he's seeing a ghost in real life. He says he thought to himself, "Alright, let's see if a ghost can die." Before he engages, he has to scream a code word that raises the alarm. The way that works is, the next guard on the next booth that is hundreds of meters away will hear the scream and then scream himself. And with a chain reaction like that, the alarm goes from booth to booth and reaches the patrol.

The patrol is an office with five soldiers that makes the rounds between booths every night and makes sure everything is okay with the guards. If you're caught sleeping or away from your post by these guys, well, rest in peace. They're also the ones to investigate the alarms. Only problem is, the patrol might take a while to get to the booth that raised the alarm, as they don't know which one it is, and they might be far from the correct one.

They run double time, through every booth and until they locate the original source of the alarm. My dad hears the other guys screaming and he knows the alarm is raised. He knows that the patrol is going to be there in a few minutes. He also knows that the penalty for falsely raising the alarm is prison. Prison means a soldier gets X amount of days added to their service.

The service back then was two years plus prison days that had been added to a soldier along the way from penalties. They don't actually lock you up in a cell unless you commit an actual crime, and then the military police comes in. But he doesn't have minutes. This eerie figure is 50 meters away and closing in. He gets ready to fire. Then he hears, "'Relax,' my dad's name. "'It's me!'

Another soldier covered in a black blanket that my dad knew was trying to sneak back into the camp at night, after having fun in the nearest town without permission. He was holding a bottle of liquor, too, and was fairly drunk. My dad let him through, but he knew that he was about to get a serious amount of prison time for falsely raising the alarm once the patrol figured out it was his booth that the alarm was raised from.

The patrol gets there, and my dad doesn't snitch on the drunk guy. The officer tells him that they'll see each other the next morning. Next day in line, where the penalties are being announced by the officers, my dad is waiting to hear his name called, but they never mention him. Even though an alarm raise is extremely rare to happen, nobody tells him anything. Turns out, the patrol officer and the "ghost" were buddies.

The guy sneaking in told the lieutenant what happened, and to not mention my dad. The officer apparently pulled some strings, and the whole incident was like it never even happened. So, it was a happy ending after all. Hope you enjoyed. I'm going to tell you about an event that happened to me quite recently. For practical and economic reasons, I use the taxi service.

The fixed price, which costs me less than taking my vehicle, especially given the place where I live, as already said, an ultra-rural village, isolated from all cities, and where, to go to the bank, or go shopping, you have to go 10-20 kilometers. In general, the taxi service I use is ultra-professional.

Recent vehicles, clean, maintained, friendly drivers, always a friendly random conversation, always on time and almost always the same drivers. And one day, 3-4 weeks ago, I was given a new driver, but nothing special, and it was the same. Impeccable service, we're talking about rain and good weather, nothing to really complain about.

Two weeks ago, this gentleman who already told me to call him by first name gave me his age, his nationality, information that came out of nowhere. And he continued his conversation by explaining that he bought a connected printer but couldn't get it to be recognized by his smartphone. I tried to give him advice and it stops there. But again, I'm just there. He's in too much of an enthusiastic mood for my taste.

I don't pay much attention to it. He starts to talk about his printer again, and blurts out to me, ''You work in this field. You can help me. I can't do it. I can't get it connected. If you want, you should add me on Messenger. Since we had arrived at my destination.'' I stammered an answer, just something like, ''Yeah, I'll think about it. Later.'' But I didn't know this guy. I never talked about my work.

Yes, I am a computer technician among other things though. I did think about it afterwards, and it's information that is easily found on Facebook, for example, even if my profile is not fully public. I ended up forgetting about this, since I had to help a friend mired in a complicated divorce where there was domestic violence. Suffice it to say, this divorce worried me a lot more.

And that moment with the taxi, it wasn't that important. Except, when I had to leave, I had to call another taxi. And wouldn't you know it, it was this driver again. I was hesitant to get in. I had a sudden urge to just get out of the vehicle, and he said hello to me, but then used my first name. He then started asking me questions about my father's health, and even made a few jokes about it.

I specify that once again, I never mentioned my first name, nor had I ever mentioned my father to this driver. Suffice it to say, that trip was heavy, and I was completely silent. I did what I needed to do, and then in the store parking lot, I called the taxi center to order a taxi for the return. The gentleman replies that there's already a vehicle that has just dropped off another person,

and that I could meet with them and notify them that they could pick me up. I arrived at the car, and as expected, it was that driver. He had a big smile, he helped me with my bags by placing himself behind me, against the trunk, and then put his hand on my back. He kind of caressed it, it made my blood run cold.

The driver then asks me to get in the front, because the rear doors have a problem unlocking. I just want to run away. Quickly. Very quickly. I get in the seat, telling myself it's just 10 kilometers by car and it'll go quickly, and I try to hide my emotions. That was a mistake. This driver started talking to me, and asking questions trying to get answers out of me.

Questions very focused on sex. Increasingly disgusting questions. Saying things like, "You get compliments when you finish a man?" "Have you ever tried the Moroccan cigar?" Allusion to the fact that I had bought cigars. He said all this with this awkward smile, putting his hand near me, moving it in my direction.

while I was trying to cram myself against the door holding onto the handle, and planning to unlock it quickly. Doors which, by the way, seemed to have no problem, since it didn't indicate that there were any issues. And, of course, instead of taking the shortest route, he took the longest, which makes the time go from 10-15 minutes to almost 50 minutes, in an ultra-isolated wooded path.

I just responded vaguely to his comments or tried to make little jokes hiding my growing anxiety. I don't know. I don't really want to know what this guy was up to. We got to my house. I jumped out, grabbed all my bags in one go and went home. And while I was at home, in the hour that followed, this driver tried to message me on WhatsApp. I blocked him immediately. I didn't even read it.

After calming down a bit, I contacted the taxi company and explained the situation. The gentleman asked me, "Are you talking about this guy?" and I answered in the affirmative. And then he told me, in a very mafia-like tone, "Don't worry, we'll take care of it." At the end of this, I said to myself that I may not have been the first to report him, which is kind of scary. And with his "we'll take care of it,"

I decided to look into another taxi service. This whole thing is still spinning in my brain. P.S. I forgot to specify it in the story and would like to remain as anonymous as possible, but I'll say that I'm Belgian and I am a man. This really changes nothing. Whether you're a woman, a man, an adult, a teenager, or a child, this is not acceptable behavior.

I met Karen at a summer barbecue that was hosted by a mutual friend of ours. She was a bit of a wallflower at the party. She didn't seem to want to bring too much attention to herself, but I thought that she was cute. And after a couple of drinks, I figured, why not go and introduce myself to this rather cute and shy gal? I think she was surprised when I walked up to her and just introduced myself. But we hit it off pretty quick.

She made a joke about something that I apparently thought was hilarious in my slightly buzzed stupor. I laughed way too loud and caused a bunch of people to look over at us, which made her blush a bit, which made me think that she was the cutest thing ever. My point is that we were pretty much bound to get together, and I think that we both saw it. So, we started dating, and for a while things were heavenly.

We would go on long drives, have picnic dates in the park, and we even spent a weekend on my couch watching some TV show that she loved. But as the weeks turned into a couple of months, I did start to notice some unsettling traits in Karen. She had a bit of a temper. I don't mean the, I'm not in a good mood, please don't talk to me kind of temper, but

I mean the "if I'm in a bad mood and you do anything wrong, there's going to be a new hole in the wall" kind of temper. She would get explosively angry over the most trivial things, like if I forgot to buy milk at the store, or if I had spoken to a female coworker for too long. I tried to be understanding. I thought maybe she was going through something and she just wasn't ready to talk about it or something like that.

But I'm also an adult, and I'm not going to be controlled or chastised for things that really don't matter in the end. We ended up having a pretty massive fight, one where we both said words that we probably shouldn't have, and it was at that point that we decided to break it off. We clearly were not as compatible as we thought. She packed up the few things that she'd been keeping at my place, and she left.

The apartment honestly felt eerily quiet without her, and something about that silence actually had me feeling pretty depressed. I spent most of the evening lost in thought, replaying parts of our relationship in my head, and doing what I should not be doing, drowning my sorrows in alcohol. Yes, I know it's wrong to pour your emotions into a glass, and then drink them until you don't feel them anymore, but...

It's what I did. I eventually passed out on the couch, the TV still playing in the background. I woke up rather slowly and groggily the next morning. My head was hurting and I was hesitant to open my eyes. I could tell that it was light out because the sunlight was peeking through my eyelids, telling me that it was probably around 6 or so in the morning. When I finally did open my eyes...

Thinking that I needed to get up and go to the bathroom, and start my day, I was surprised by what I saw. Karen was sitting right there in the armchair across the coffee table, holding a rather large kitchen knife in her lap. My heart stopped. For a moment, I thought that I still had to be dreaming, that this was just some weird drunken nightmare playing out in my head, but...

The look in her eyes told me that this was all too real. I managed to choke out the words to ask her what the hell she was doing there, and she just stared at me with this blank and emotionless stare. She was completely devoid of all emotions as she sat, and watched me struggle to comprehend the situation, her hand still gripping the knife's handle. I... I just want you to know that I've been here all night, and...

I really considered doing it. She dropped the sentence like she was just trying to tell me something in passing, like it didn't mean anything more than the words that she said. Those words were suffocating, and I cannot overstate the fear that I felt in that moment. She stood up from the chair, placed the knife on the coffee table with a clattering noise that honestly made me jump, straightened her sundress out,

and then walked straight out the front door. I sat there on the couch, feeling paralyzed and really unsure of what to do. Should I call the cops? And tell them what? That my ex-girlfriend broke into my apartment while I was drunk, sat in my armchair to watch me sleep, and contemplated murdering me? I don't think it's illegal to think about murdering someone. And she still had a key.

A detail that I hadn't thought about when she left, so I'm not even sure she did anything illegal. She scared the hell out of me, that much is for certain. Instead, I did what I could do. I asked the office to change the lock on my apartment, informing them that I had an ex-girlfriend that had a key. I had to pay for it, of course, but it was a small price to pay for my safety.

I also sent a message to her sister, letting her know that she needed to get help, informing her of our fight and what she had done that morning. I'm pretty sure that she blocked me after that, but oh well, at least someone knew just in case. It's been about a year since this happened, and I haven't heard from nor seen Karen, but that memory definitely lingers.

I absolutely cannot sleep on the couch anymore. I sleep in my bedroom every single night, or any time that I want to take a nap. And I lock both the front door and the bedroom door whenever I do. This is, without a doubt, the closest I have ever come to dying. And I'm pretty sure that if she had just been pushed just a little more...

She would have done it. Hey Raven, I wanted to share the story with you and your audience, as it's one of those stories that is creepy, but can also be used as educational, as you always say. It's one of the only times I've ever felt scared for my life, honestly, and it's been a few years now and thankfully nothing else has happened minus this one event. To start, it was a pretty good night.

I'd gone out with a couple of friends. I hadn't been drinking or anything, we had just been out having dinner as a small group and went out to see a movie. It was a bit of a silly night, but it was a good time. I wanted to stay the night with them all as they were staying at one of their houses, but I had to work in the morning, so I unfortunately had to drive home after we were all done with the night's events. I was in pretty high spirits on the drive home, though.

I had my windows down, my music was up, and I was breathing in the night air. It wasn't a terribly far drive, like half an hour or so, so I was just coasting on autopilot through most of it. I assumed it would be uneventful, until I was heading down one road about ten minutes from my house. I was driving as I had been, and down one of the side roads, there was a car that was going the opposite direction.

Nothing scary about that. People drive on roads. They passed me, and after they did, I happened to glance up into my rearview mirror for whatever reason, and I watched them slam their brakes and start into a K-turn. Then, they got behind me. Now, I thought that maybe they had intentions on doing this anyways, and it was just bad timing or something, but... They sped up pretty quickly to get behind me, which was a tad alarming.

After a couple seconds of them driving behind me, they kicked on their flashing lights and my stomach dropped. I looked down at my speedometer. I wasn't speeding. I hadn't done anything stupid or illegal as far back as I could remember. My headlights were all in working order. I had no idea why they would be pulling me over. I thought about the situation for a moment and even started preparing myself to pull over at the first available shoulder.

The road that I was on didn't have a shoulder, so I couldn't have pulled over there. After thinking about why I would be being pulled over, something clicked in my head, specifically about the car. I didn't see any markings on the car that indicated it was a cop car. The tag that I saw as it passed was not a government tag, which is required on unmarked vehicles. Plus, the unmarked cars where I live are usually SUVs, which this was not.

As I started piecing the thoughts together and thinking about the whole thing, I realized something else. The light that was flashing was just a single blue light, and it looked like it was on his dashboard. My state uses full light bars, blue, white, and red, and they're typically on top of the cars. I think that this was even implemented as a requirement at some point, but I can't say for sure. As all of these pieces started falling into place,

It occurred to me what this was, most likely. It was not an actual officer. With how the light was set up, the lack of markings, this was an impersonator, and they were trying to pull me over for god knows what nefarious reason. At this point, I decided I would take a chance. I figured that I would drive to the police station, and if this was a real officer, they would just tack on a possible evading charge that I would of course fight.

and it was going to suck if they were real, but I was pretty certain that they weren't. I kept on down the road, they kept on tailgating me, and we made a few turns through the town. The person kept right at my bumper, and they kept the light on the whole time. The further we drove, the more I was absolutely convinced this was a fake. Not once did he go over the speaker saying to pull over. Not once did he hit a siren.

He did hit his horn a few times, but that was even more suspicious. I kept on going for a while until I was close to the police station. I turned down the road that the police station was on, and then hit my signal to indicate that I was pulling into the parking lot of said station. As soon as I hit my signal, he got over into the oncoming lane and took off down the road past me, going way too fast down the road, and obviously trying to make a break for it.

There was an officer that was outside the station, just getting out of his cruiser that saw the whole thing happen. When I pulled in, he ran over to me and asked me a couple of questions about the car. I told him a really quick summary of what had happened, he told me to go in and let the front desk know the situation so they could get a report, and he jumped back in his cruiser taking off with lights and sirens going.

I did what he asked. I went in, told the officer at the desk that I was followed by someone pretending to be a cop. He took my statement very seriously, thankfully, and I heard him get on the radio to the officer that had taken off after him. I then made a formal statement, detailing all that I could remember about the car, the location where he started following me, what I was doing, etc.,

After a while, the original officer came back to the station and I spoke with him about it too. He, unfortunately, was not able to find him, but he told me that he got a good look at the car and confirmed my statement as being what he saw too. He also told me that I did the right thing, that me going to the station instead of stopping may have literally saved my life.

He also informed me that, in cases like this, where I think it may be an impersonator, that I should dial 911 and confirm that the officer is legitimate, and that the dispatcher will have all the information to confirm it. So, this was an educational situation for me, one that was terrifying because I almost did stop. If he'd been a bit more convincing with his props, specifically the light, I likely would have.

Because I wouldn't have thought twice. Hopefully the story can help someone out there to avoid any situation like the one I was in. I know that most officers out there may take offense to you not stopping right away, but if you aren't feeling safe, you should at least call 911 to confirm that you are being pulled over by someone legitimate. Of course, if you're being followed by a fully marked cruiser with full light bars and sirens, odds are it's legitimate.

and you probably shouldn't push your luck. Either way, that's my story, and it's one that has stuck with me for these past couple of years, because it really was scary how close I was to something that was potentially incredibly dangerous. It happened in my bedroom, at the age of 10. I always had trouble sleeping and spent most nights tossing and turning.

I was a horror film fanatic as a child, and being scared was something I didn't have much experience with. I was not afraid of the dark, nor was I easily swayed by strange sounds or odd encounters. I did, however, know when to haul back-end out of the situation, or to find a trusted adult. I always slept with my closet doors open, which will come to be some significance later in the story.

I should also mention that my family home was in a heavily wooded area, in what some may refer to as the middle of nowhere. One night, around 1:00 AM, I awoke to a sound coming from underneath the bed. It sounded like one of my cats was scratching themselves with one of their feet or doing something to cause a thumping beneath me. I'd heard this same sound many times before, and its source had always been one of my fuzzy friends.

So, this time, I didn't look. I closed my eyes and tried to resume my slumber. I turned over onto my left side, which left me facing the wall which my bed was pressed up against. I heard the sound again, thinking that my kitty was directly beneath me. I said goodnight, and I was able to fall asleep once again. The next time I awoke, it was to a surreal and shocking scene.

The sheet and comforter of my bed were no longer covering me. I saw a man standing over my bed and poking me, just poking me with his finger, and the way in which he did so was truly horrifying. It was not the way that a child would poke at a friend in jest. It was as if he was touching another human being for the first time, exploring the sensation of the tip of his index finger jabbing at flesh. What I saw was so unbelievable.

so impossibly strange, that I believed I was dreaming. I tried desperately to awake from my nightmare to no avail. The poking continued. He poked at my chest, my belly, my legs, my arms. Paralyzed and scared witless, I yelled, "Wake up!" And with this, the man threw himself to the floor and closed his eyes. It was as if he was trying to lead me to believe that he was asleep or dead.

I have no freaking idea. It was at this time that I realized I could not have been dreaming. I somehow found the ability to move, and I jumped from the top of my bed over the man lying on the floor next to me and ran towards my parents' room. When I got to their bedroom door, something came over me. I told myself that it was all impossible, that there was no way a person could have entered our home without breaking in.

as we had always kept every door and window locked at night. I'd seen many strange things in my home whilst either falling asleep or waking up. By the third or fourth time, after speaking to my mom or dad about it, I knew that it was my mind playing tricks on me. Plush toys do not have the ability to turn and whisper into each other's ears. Do not ask why, dear reader, as I have no explanation to offer you.

But I turned away from my parents' bedroom door, and decided to hastily check the house for a break-in. What I found was that nothing was out of the ordinary. No broken windows or locks, no busted doors, nothing. I assured myself that I had to have been dreaming or hallucinating, and blamed my obsession with horror for this. I made my way down the long, dark, and narrow hallway to my bedroom. I peeked inside and saw no one.

I turned on the light, got down on the floor just outside the doorway and looked under the bed. Nothing. I proceeded to check both of my windows for signs of a break-in, which were not present. Both windows were closed and locked. I knew it. I was totally seeing things. I crawled back into bed and decided to watch some TV in order to calm myself down and distract from thoughts of the scary as hell dream or hallucination I had just had.

I turned on the TV, flipped to a channel with a seemingly boring program and put the remote control on my bedside table. I was lying on my right side, facing away from the wall that I mentioned previously. As I laid there, my eyes began to adjust to the dark room with the faint light from the TV screen. Just beyond the TV,

I saw something that made my heart sink into the pit of my stomach. Inside my closet, with one of the doors now slightly closed, I saw the man standing perfectly still, facing the wall, hiding, waiting for me to fall asleep, I imagine. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. I sat and stared at the man in my closet for what seemed like minutes, but was likely only a few seconds.

I quietly got out of bed, hoping that the man wouldn't notice and that my dad could catch him hiding in the closet. I once again made my way to my parents' bedroom door, still remaining as quiet as I possibly could, and went inside. I shook my dad and my mom at the same time, and when they awoke, I said, Don't make any sound. There's someone in my closet. My parents both jumped up and said, What?!

I repeated myself and asked them to please call 911. My mom immediately picked up the phone. Neither of my parents doubted my claim, as I had always been honest and forthright. They both knew that there was no way I was making this up, or that I was mistaken. I'm sure that the look I must have had on my face made it clear that this was really happening. My dad told my mom and I that he was going to look,

and urged us to stay in their bedroom and lock the door. So, we did. At this point, I was beyond scared. I didn't know what the man was capable of, whether he had a weapon, or whether my dad was safe. I just stood in the room with my mom and cried. After what felt like hours, my dad knocked on the door and told me it was him, and that it was okay to open the door. My mom unlocked the door and let my dad inside.

I said something to the effect of, "Did you get him?" and my dad looked at me with the most unsettling and confused look imaginable. He said, "There's no one there." I assured him that there was indeed a man in my room, and that he'd been poking me. My dad said that he had just checked every inch of the house and found no one. He had also checked the doors and windows, just as I had done. Then, it hit me. He must have had a key.

As soon as I said this, my parents looked at each other in absolute terror. Our nearest neighbor, a trusted and beloved friend whom we considered family, was in possession of a key to our house, as she had regularly babysat me since I was a toddler. She was the only person outside of my immediate family with the key to our home. Soon after this revelation, the police arrived, took statements, checked around our property, and left.

None of us got any sleep that night. The next day, my dad went to the neighbor's house and asked if she knew where her key to our house was. She said yes, and when she went to show him, she saw that it was missing. Her home had no signs of a break-in, and she had always kept her doors and windows locked. My parents had all the locks on our doors changed, and opted to never again give a key to anyone.

except in the wake of an emergency. I never discovered the identity of the man that lurked in my bedroom that night. The events left me traumatized, and it took a very long time for me to accept what had happened and moved on. My sleeping trouble turned into full-on insomnia, and for about a decade, I wasn't able to sleep without a light on.

It's been 20 years since that night, and apart from my parents, I have never told a soul about it until now. I've actually found writing this to be very cathartic, and I'm glad that I stumbled across Let's Not Meet. My heart goes out to anyone who has suffered a trauma in their lives, and I hope that you are all able to find peace within yourselves. This happened a couple of years ago now.

I was in an extremely unhealthy relationship at the time, and after one of my partner's fits of rage, I went out for a late night drive to clear my mind. I was 22 at the time, living in a small town in rural Alberta.

Now, if you know anything about Alberta, you know that a lot of our residents are the redneck types, with huge jacked-up trucks, sporting massive aftermarket bumpers and headlights that can probably see clear to Mars. Now, I'm not a tiny girl. I grew up training in MMA, and I'm damn near six feet tall, but I drive a tiny silver sedan.

So, me and my tiny car made our way out to the local fishing pond. It's also a bit of a lover's lane, but it was pretty much deserted at this time, aside from one other car in the parking lot. I pull in, hugging tight to the curb to put as much space as I can between myself and the other occupant of the lot. There's a chain guardrail thing to the immediate right of my car, as well as in front of me.

but I wanted to keep my splotchy face to myself while I texted my best friend about the fight that I'd just had with my partner. As I'm sitting in my car, doors locked and the ignition off, I see a vehicle coming down the road. It's important to note that this parking lot is at the top of a T intersection, and there's not much to do in my hometown other than drive around aimlessly, so I don't think much of it.

That is, until the vehicle pulled in behind and slightly to the left of me, blocking my vehicle in. I was still upset and borderline ready to end myself anyway, so although it freaked me out, I didn't do anything about it. I just stayed in my seat, doors locked, texting my friend. After about 20 minutes of this, what I could now tell was a massive truck with an iron cross bumper. You can look it up, they're distinctive.

sitting behind me with its damn lights from hell shining in my car. They drove off. I paid no more attention to them, though. Once I felt calm enough to go back home, I started my car and went to put it in reverse. Remember how I said the lot that I was in was at the top of a T-intersection? Well, all of a sudden these lights come on from just up the road behind me.

I pull onto the crappy gravel road and start making my way back towards town, and the truck followed. I drove slowly and calmly, and they got so close behind me that they nearly clipped my car with their bumper, and they kept backing off and pulling in close again, like a cat playing with a mouse. I completely ignored them and continued to drive normally, until I made it to the turn into town where they decided to finally screw off in the other direction.

I've never felt that kind of fear before, nor since. I'm not really sure what was going on or what their intentions were, and I don't really care either. I've never really shared this story before, mainly because it still causes me mental distress every time I think about it, even all of these years later.

But after reading a bunch of other stories posted in this group and seeing that a lot of people have gone through terrible things, some of them even similar to mine, I decided that I should put this out there and see if it helps me get past it. Maybe it'll help others see the severity of obsessive behavior, and if it helps anyone, then that would be an added bonus in my mind.

Back whenever I was in high school, there was this kid named Carter, who was always a bit odd and out there. He was quiet, very quiet. He kept to himself for the most part, but he had a bit of a fascination with me, in that where he never really spoke to anyone else, he always treated me like I was a good friend, like we had talked all the time.

Now, I didn't mind Carter. He seemed like an okay person, but outside of that, I never really paid much attention to him. Assuming that he was just shy, or that he might have had a bit of a crush on me or something, I figured it was completely harmless, that it would pass, and that would be that. However, of course, that's not how things went.

What started as him having just that small crush turned into him getting a bit... creepy. He started seeming to always be around, seemingly by coincidence. He would be in the hallways nearby when I walked to class. At lunch, he would sit at the table next to where I was regardless of who else was sitting there, or he would stand with his back against the wall near the table if there were people already there.

He joined the drama club randomly, and would be there every day after school when the meetings would occur. I tried to pretend that it had nothing to do with me, that I was just noticing a bunch of coincidental occurrences, and that he wasn't doing it to be around me. Then, the notes started.

There was a random note in my locker one day, handwritten and not signed, and it was filled with a bunch of compliments and declarations of love. Flattering, sure, but it was cringe-inducing too. It had compliments about random things that really didn't make sense to me, like the straightness of my teeth and how I walked. And, of course, that wasn't the only one. Oh no.

It happened every day for a few days. And then there were a few days where there were multiples, and it started getting beyond unsettling. They started mentioning details about my life that no one should have known. One specifically mentioned the color of the underwear that I was wearing that day, and how it matched the color of my bed covers. Worse yet, it was actually accurate.

When I read that, I started to feel sick to my stomach, realizing that this guy was stalking me. I could no longer pretend that it was all a coincidence. I had to accept and address that this boy was pushing boundaries. I will say that I was only 16, and I really didn't know what to do about it beyond telling an adult, and I figured that I should tell my school counselor since it technically was happening at school.

So, I went to my counselor, and I explained everything that was going on, and I gave her those notes, including the last ones that I mentioned. She read them, and after getting through it and taking a few moments to think about it, she looked at me and said, "'And you think you know who sent these?' I told her that it was Carter, and she asked me how I knew for sure."

I tried to explain that he had been stalking me, that he was always around and such, but she mentioned that none of the letters were signed, and that I couldn't just accuse him without being able to prove it. I asked how I was supposed to prove it, and she shrugged me off, saying that, as serious as this sounded, there was nothing to show that it was actually him, and that I should talk to him about it.

She seriously recommended that I talk to him about this whole thing. That I talk to him about how obsessive he was. About the fact that he had obviously been peeping in my window at some point. That was not going to happen. Obviously. I walked out of that room and I finished the day and when I got home, I just went and laid down in my bed and sobbed.

I was feeling paranoid, freaked out, like he was watching me while I was sitting there crying. I kept glancing out my window thinking that I would see him, thinking he would be right there for some reason. When my dad got home, he asked me what was going on, and I explained the whole thing to him, and I even told him that I tried to talk to my school counselor, and that she basically told me she couldn't do anything about it.

He was shocked and angry, and when I told him about the counselor and he read the part about how the guy was looking in my window, he became furious. He told me that he was going to talk to the counselor that next morning. The next day he drove me to school and went in to talk to her, and when he came out, it was pretty clear that everyone was unhappy. He told me that I was going to be staying home from school that day, and we left.

When we got home, he told me some of what was said, and he mentioned that the counselor was going to have a conversation with Carter, and then said that things would be okay. The day when I went back, the next day, I was nervous that I was going to run into Carter in the hallways, but from what I could tell, he wasn't at the school, which made me feel a bit better. That is, until I got home.

When I got home from school, as was normal, my parents weren't home yet. I went in and grabbed something to eat and then sat in the living room to watch something on TV. After about 20 minutes, I heard something in the garage. Like something had fallen down and without even thinking I got up to see what exactly it was. When I opened the door, my heart dropped. There, in the middle of the garage, was Carter.

just standing there trying to pick up what he had knocked down. He looked up at me and gave me this horrible grin, and then immediately started toward the door. Thankfully, there were two things that were going to be my saving grace. The door upstairs from the garage had a deadbolt lock on it, and my dad was going to be home within only a couple of minutes. I slammed the door and locked it, with the deadbolt and the knob lock.

After a couple of minutes, I could hear Carter smacking the door and yelling at me, telling me that I needed to let him in, that he loved me, and that I needed to let him be close to me. With the door locked, there was only one way out of the garage, and that was through the garage door, which was now opening because my dad was pulling in. I heard my dad pull into the garage, I heard the door open, and I heard my dad shouting at Carter.

yelling at him to get on the ground and Carter saying that he wasn't there to do anything wrong. That may have been believable had he not somehow broken into the garage to wait for me to get home. A bit after this, my dad told me to call the police and tell them that Carter had broken into our home and, long story short, the police did show up. I explained what had happened, that I'd come home and found him in the garage.

After a lot of talking to the cops and then putting Carter into the back of the car, I was just sitting there staring at him in the back of the police car as they asked us questions and got more info. They pulled off, and I had never been happier than that day. Thankfully, that was pretty much the end of it. I don't know how far into the legal system Carter ended up getting, but I never saw him at school again. Obviously, I never got another note in my locker either.

I never had to deal with his craziness again, and my life got back on track almost immediately. I'm thankful that my dad took me seriously, and screw that counselor for not even thinking to address the whole thing beyond saying, "Oh, we can't prove it." Oh, and Carter, I'm glad that you and I never met again, and please stay the hell away from me.

The story does come with a content warning, as it does involve sexual assault. If you do not want to listen to a story that contains that, go down to the timestamps below and skip to the next story. I will give a few moments of silence here, just so anyone who wants to do so can.

I've been a long time lurker on a number of true scary story groups and platforms, and after reading all the horrifying things that everyone else went through, I thought I should go ahead and share what happened to me my senior year of high school. Well, I guess it didn't happen to me, it happened to my friend whom we're going to call Lily for the sake of privacy. But it was a terrible situation, and I was definitely a part of it.

It also involved an instructor at our high school, who we're just going to refer to as Mr. Smith. To set the stage a bit, Mr. Smith was a new teacher at our school. Our senior year was his first year teaching at our school. He wasn't the youngest teacher, he looked to be in his mid to late thirties, but he was charismatic and quickly became popular because he seemed to relate to us kids.

He was one of those teachers that was in the know about pop culture and things that the students liked. And a lot of us students really adored him and his class. He was an English teacher and he actually made the class engaging and entertaining. My friend Lily and I were in the same hour with Mr. Smith, and from the beginning I couldn't help but notice that Mr. Smith did seem to pay her an unusual amount of attention.

At first, I thought it was just him trying to help her out a bit extra in class, making sure that she was understanding things and not struggling, which I've seen before. However, there was one day that completely solidified all of the suspicions that I'd had, and made me see that the attention that Mr. Smith was giving to Lily was not innocent or professional. One day, at the end of the school day...

I realized that I had accidentally forgotten to turn in an assignment for Mr. Smith's class, and I made a beeline for the room so that I could get it turned in. When I opened the door, I saw Mr. Smith and Lily in the room, and while they weren't doing anything obvious, the feeling of the room was definitely inappropriate. They were both clothed, obviously.

but it was pretty clear to me that something was going on or being talked about that shouldn't be talked about in a classroom setting. I timidly entered the room and handed my assignment to Mr. Smith, and as I did, he thanked me and said something like, "Anyways, Lily, if you need more help, we can set aside a time here in the near future to figure things out." She said okay, and she actually walked out of the room with me. Obviously, I asked her what that was all about.

and she just shrugged it off, saying that he was helping her with homework. That was obviously a lie, but I also didn't want to just jump to conclusions. Maybe it was innocent. Maybe nothing had happened and I was just looking at it wrong. Yeah, those justifications were completely wiped from my mind as the next few days went on. After having walked in on whatever that was...

I started noticing everything that pushed me into believing that it wasn't innocent. I noticed how close he would get to her, how much extra attention and extra help he would give her in class, which would require him to be, like, right against her. How he would randomly say things like, Oh, you look nice today, Lily. Things that would sound guiltless, just small compliments and the like. But these virtuous compliments to me were anything but...

Then, it came to a head. About a month after I walked in on their situation, Lily came to me in tears after school. I was at my locker getting my stuff together and she tapped me on the shoulder. When I turned around, she was a mess. Her makeup was running and she looked absolutely miserable. She asked me if I could give her a ride home, which was surprising to me. We'd always been friends, sure, but we weren't that close.

I told her that I could, and we made our way out to my car. The way that she changed from in tears to sobbing uncontrollably the second the doors closed was horrible. She exploded into telling me about what was going on between herself and Mr. Smith, basically what I anticipated. She said that it wasn't anything serious, that he'd flirted with her and she had reciprocated, but they hadn't gone any further than that.

Until that day. That day, she had gone to his room to ask about an assignment, to actually ask about schoolwork, and without going too far into the disturbing details, he pushed himself onto her, and he had definitely gotten handsy.

She said that she tried to push him away, but struggled with him and he said something like, "You know you want this as much as I do." She said that she reached up, slapped him, and that's when he finally let her go. She then ran away from the room and found me. Of course, my first thought was that we needed to report him. She agreed initially, but then mentioned that she didn't think anyone would believe her.

She said there was no one else in the room, there were obviously no cameras in the classroom, and she was worried that she would be labeled a liar, or that people would claim that she was just trying to ruin him. We spoke about it a bit, and the conversation ended with her asking me to let her consider things for a couple of days before we did. For those few days, I genuinely tried to respect her wishes.

but seeing how he was still making comments towards Lily, and how he was still trying to get close to her during class, even when she was no longer showing interest in him, my conscience wouldn't let me stay silent. I couldn't help but shake this thought that he would go further, and assault her again if they met in private, because it sounded like he was more than willing to escalate. So, I made a very difficult decision.

and I went to the administrators and reported Mr. Smith. I told them everything that Lily had told me, and I told them about when I walked in on the meeting. The administrator that I talked to took my statements very seriously. She asked me how certain I was of these allegations, stating that it was a very serious situation. I told her that I knew how serious it was.

I told her that Lily had asked me to wait because she was scared that no one would believe her, but that I felt like I needed to tell them. The investigation was actually a lot quicker than I expected. It turns out that Lily wasn't the only girl that Mr. Smith had targeted. During their short investigation, after talking with a few other students, there were actually three other girls that were willing to tell them about comments that Mr. Smith had made.

One of them even told them that he tried to go further with them a few months prior. As the evidence mounted, the school actually got the police involved. And one day, after school, Mr. Smith was arrested for what he had done, and was eventually charged with multiple counts of sexual misconduct with a minor. The whole school was definitely in shock as the news got around, and a lot of people felt really betrayed by this guy.

My friendship with Lily, however, was pretty much over. She was angry that I had gone behind her back and felt like I had taken away her control over the situation. I tried to explain that I did it to protect her and others, but she couldn't see it that way. We drifted apart, and by the time we graduated, we were no longer friends. It's been a few years since then, and I still think about Lily often.

I wonder if I made the right choice, if I could have handled it differently, or if there was something more that I could have done to help her. But, ultimately, I have to believe that getting a predator like Mr. Smith out of our school was worth the cost. I want to tell this story to warn others. I, 18 female, live in Maryland, USA.

I work at a very popular burger restaurant, and I work at the payment window, which is where I stand all night. I'm very friendly. I know sometimes a smile and a compliment can make someone's day a little better. Just this night, before the creeper came, I had a customer tell me that I was so freaking happy and she loved me for it. That gave me the courage and energy to survive this next interaction.

I'm used to the awkward comments and stares from old men. I'm sure it's my friendliness that attracts them. Our uniforms are not revealing. They think that I'm naive, and maybe I am. A lot more than I thought. I'm fully aware of the dangers of trafficking. This particular old man came through just before 6. He pretended to not hear his order, and then laughed like it was a joke between two friends.

This is not uncommon. It's an old man thing. No red flags yet. I tell him his total and he hands me all but the change. When he does this, he waves the money around, making me chase it. I was able to snatch the cash, but again, it was just an old man thing, so not concerned yet. He stared at the company name on my shirt and asked if that was my name. I don't wear a name tag for this reason.

I joked that I was going to change my name permanently to that, and he perked up. At this point, I should state that he was white, mid-60s to 70s, driving a small white SUV with a kayak on top. He had some scruff on his face, and he was holding a phone to his ear the entire time. When I finally began to engage with him, he moved the phone to be facing me. Looking back, I believe he was recording me.

At no point did he speak into the phone nor acknowledge it in any way. He started to probe with more pressing questions. Here's the thing: I have the same last name as someone from US history. Most old people like talking about that stuff. So I told him my last name. He didn't reflect or laugh. He just accepted and continued asking questions. That's when I started to get that sinking feeling.

"He still owed me change," I told him. He grabbed another dollar and handed it to me, but he wouldn't let it go. He wanted to know my first name, and I dodged answering because I was getting creeped out. He would not let go of the money and was practically drooling for more information about me. I gave him a name that I don't use, and he smiled, finally letting go. I got him his change, and I told him to have a nice day.

I then immediately left the window and told one of my coworkers about the weird experience. He returned just two hours later. I didn't recognize his car on the cameras until he got to my window. I hadn't thought too much about our interaction and was busy texting my dad about whether or not a chicken sandwich was a burger. My stomach dropped when I saw his face. I have many regulars, all of whom I would be happy to see.

and I hope he doesn't become one. I'll call the police if so. He smiled and said, "Hey." The one with the last name. I half smiled back and wished for the days when we all wore masks. I tell him his total, and he makes me chase the money again. For the entire time he had his phone against his ear, facing me. He starts asking even more intimate questions about me,

I lie or dodge them the best that I can, giving him zero correct answers, wanting our interaction to be as short as possible. Some of the questions he asked me, How often do you work? What time do you leave? And how old are you? For that one, I knew that he would not leave without a number, and I had a nasty feeling the younger wouldn't be better. So I said, probably in my twenties.

He then joked about me being legal. I made a face and tried to get his change even faster. He then asked if I had a boyfriend. I was getting more and more nervous, so my answers started getting more sarcastic. I told him that boys were trouble. He specifically talked about himself, and then said that he would treat me right. I handed him his receipt and told him to have a great night. He threw his hands in the air and was saying, "'Don't be like that. I'll treat you right.'

I shut my window and said bye. He made a bit more of a fuss, but eventually drove forward. From his questions about when I got off work, I believe he was watching the restaurant. I was shaking by this time, and I called my mom. She immediately drove up. I talked to the manager, and I was a little unsure of the car's color, so he checked the camera for me. Shout out to my manager. He's the best.

I continued at my window and watched for the old guy, but I didn't see him again. I then left an hour early and gave my manager specific instructions to not place a girl at my window. And he agreed. These interactions are, unfortunately, what cause formerly happy and cheerful service workers to become sour and quiet. I think I'll be taking a couple of days off. I already had another job lined up, and I'm excited to start it.

And thank you for reading. The OP then added two edits. The first one being in regards to the fact that their story had a title stating they believed they were almost trafficked at work. Edit 1. I did not mean to make light of trafficking victims with my story. I did feel trapped by this guy, and felt fear that he would be waiting for me, no matter when he thought I got off shift. I do not have a car, and I take myself home on a bike after dark.

I think that I would have been very easy to follow and trap, but I did not tell him how I get home. People seemed to be confused, and I guess I didn't elaborate enough on his phone. He held it facing me for the extent of both of our interactions. Roughly 5-8 minutes. He wouldn't leave. He never moved it or lowered it. I have two guesses.

He was recording me and could be preparing to use that video or send it to someone, or he was on a call with someone listening in who I can't identify. Trafficking was not my first thought. I'm more concerned about how easy I would be to kidnap at night on a dark suburban road. And yes, after kidnapping, any number of things could happen to me. Just because I have a job and people assume my father lives in state doesn't mean I shouldn't feel threatened.

That's the reason that I left so quickly, by car, with a trusted adult who picked me up. And the reason I made this post was to warn others in my area. That's why I gave a description of him and his car. I used to hang out with my cousin a lot. We were both 10 and male at the time of this encounter, and I'm now 33. It has stayed with me ever since.

We would mostly spend our youth roaming the streets. Not causing trouble, but kicking footballs around fields, climbing, hanging out with kids our age. The typical stuff before iPads and Netflix became commonplace. One day we decided to go and explore a part of the town that we had never explored before. It meant going through alleys and back streets.

The trail would actually end approximately two to three minutes from my house, which was a safe part of the neighborhood. It was a sunny day, albeit not too warm, and my cousin and I had been walking for what seemed like miles. The journey we'd planned was supposed to go on for longer, but we'd gotten bored and decided to take a detour home. The detour involved cutting through an alleyway that looked a little bit like the Coronation Street Gentle,

if anyone is familiar with the TV show. To the left of us were terraced houses, and to the right of us were steel fences with sharp points to deter any would-be thieves. We continued up here, and soon enough, one of the kids from our school lived there, and his mom shouted, ''What are you boys doing here?'' We ran, and I don't know why, we just didn't like her son and her tone was accusatory.

As we ran, we bumped into another kid. "Don't go that way," he said, as his voice trailed off as he ran further and further away from us, down the opposite end of the alleyway. We shrugged and continued on. It got darker with the trees and the foliage, but we soon emerged from the alley, and that's when we saw the lone boy. A boy aged 10 to 12 just stood there. His eyes were empty.

He had a vacant look on his face. Well, the half of his face that we could see well enough. Above his mouth was covered with a veil, somewhat like a Halloween mask of some description. Except it was June. Halloween was still months away. As we got closer, we noticed the boy had a kitchen knife in his hands. I mean a fully real stainless steel kitchen knife, both hands on the handle.

The sunlight made the blade glisten. We cracked a joke like, "Are you cooking outside?" But he looked at us blankly. No emotion. Nothing. We were too freaked out to move. And that's when we realized that he hadn't moved either. Not a muscle. We saw him blink, but physically the knife hadn't been raised up or pointed at us. Just held closely to his chest. Blade pointing upwards.

We figured that we should get away because instinct told us that this was weird and a bit freaky. Going back down the alley didn't seem like a safe option. Being stuck in an alleyway with a strange kid with a knife didn't seem smart. In front of us was a road on a steep hill. It was our best bet. We walked up to the top of the hill, just keeping an eye on the kid. The top of the hill was two to three minutes from my house in terms of distance.

At last, we felt safe. As we looked back down the hill, the lone kid had put the knife by his leg, now holding it in one hand, but remained in the exact same spot and stared right back at us, expressionless. We told our parents what had happened, and they called a local community enforcement team to scout the area. Apparently, the kid was found with the knife, but we never heard why he was there,

or what he was doing, 23 years after this all happened, and it is still on my mind. I have always been the kind of person that likes to take night drives. The roads are less congested, the world seems to settle into a settling calm, and my thoughts drift freely as I navigate the dark, quiet streets. I have one drive, however, that changed a lot of things for me.

one that sort of ruined things for me, and made me realize how close to death my simple little drive got me. It was about 2 in the morning, and I was returning home from a friend's house. The drive was a smooth one, I knew it like the back of my hand. I was just drifting along, my headlights piercing through the darkness, the radio playing softly in the background, as I kept on down this seemingly endless road.

flanked by dense woods on either side. As I was breathing in the cool night air as it blasted me in the face through the window, I noticed a car stopped on the side of the road with its hazards flashing. I kind of paused mentally for a moment, thinking, should I stop? It was really late, and I was alone, but the idea of leaving someone stranded in the middle of the road like this just didn't sit right with me.

I decided to stop just ahead of the car, a safe distance away from the stranded vehicle. A man stepped out of the car, and I noticed that he was limping slightly, but a look of relief spread across his face as he approached my window, so I assumed that he did need help. He looked a bit disheveled. He was wearing a dirty shirt and some old-looking sweatpants, but nothing about him was screaming red flag.

He just looked like he chose to dress lazily that day. Or maybe he just didn't have a lot of money. Hey, thank you so much for stopping. My car, um, broke down. His voice trembled a bit from what I assumed was the cold. Is there any way that I could ask you to give me a ride to the nearest gas station?

I hesitated a bit, torn between wanting to help this guy and that nagging feeling that something was a bit off. "I could call a tow truck for you." I figured I should at least offer that to see if it would be enough. The guy sighed and looked around for a moment and then shivered again. "I appreciate that, but that would take so long. It is seriously freezing out here. Please, just a quick ride."

This is where I started to feel a bit guilty. It was pretty cold, and he was definitely not dressed for the weather. I hesitated, but then I decided that it was just a quick ride down the road, so I let that part of me that wanted to help out win. He got in, thanking me profusely, directing me to a gas station a few miles down the road. After he gave me the directions, he just sat there silently staring out the window.

I glanced at him occasionally, noticing that he was clenching his hands, sweating a bit, and just looking a bit unsettled. This kind of bothered me, since he said that it was too cold outside, but now he was sweating? It wasn't that hot in my car. It was a bit strange, but I just figured that I would get him to the gas station and it would all be over.

We finally arrived at the gas station. He thanked me and got out of the car, his voice still a bit shaky. He shut the door and as he was walking away, I noticed something on the floor of my car. I was about to roll the window down and call out to the guy to tell him that he dropped something, but when I clicked on the cab light, I noticed what it was that was on the floor. It was a knife. A small kitchen knife, smeared with blood.

After a second or two, it kind of clicked. He was holding this knife in his pant leg, and that's why he was limping. It must have fallen out during the trip, and I guess that he just didn't notice that it wasn't there anymore, because he was walking towards the gas station. I immediately grabbed my phone and called 911, telling them that I just gave a ride to a guy that I think may have stabbed someone.

I had to explain the whole situation, and as I was doing so, I thought about the car. I realized that he was in the seat, but I didn't see him driving it. I just saw him get out, and he didn't want me to call a tow truck, which made me think that, maybe, his victim could have been in the car. To wrap this up, I drove back in the direction of the car with 911 still on the phone, informing them where I was going.

and I told them that I would wait for the officers. I had to give them all the information that I could. What the guy looked like, what he was wearing, everything he'd said. I will also note that there was no one in the car, so I was wrong on that thought. They took the knife, obviously. They took his car, and I was questioned a lot about the whole thing.

After a while, I think they were satisfied that I wasn't involved, but they told me that they would give me a call if they had any further questions. I have literally no idea if they ever caught that guy, but I did get called in again for some more questions, but the questions seemed really vague, like they didn't know where to take the investigation. I do hope that they caught him eventually, and I hope that they found whoever it was that he'd stabbed.

To this day, I cannot shake the visual of that man as he got out of my car. I will remember his face for probably the rest of my life. And, with all this said, I hope that he and I never meet again. I was 21 and in college in a relatively small town in western Colorado. I lived in an apartment building on campus, and our doors opened up to the outside.

I was out smoking a cigarette, and it was around 10:00 PM. I had class the next day, pretty early, so I was planning on going to bed right after I was done. Even though the town was small, there was a significant homeless population. There were a few shelters that would put up homeless people in hotels for a few nights, but they would have to go and request one during the shelter's normal business hours.

As I was sitting there, planning out my next day, a disheveled homeless man walked up to me. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties. He asked if he could bum a smoke, so I obliged. Normally, the homeless population would stay off campus because there were no shelters around the college. I have no idea why this man was there. I expected him to just walk away after obtaining his cigarette, but instead he sat down and started talking to me.

Being the nice person that I am, I asked him about why he was there. He told me that he was just trying to find a warm place to sleep for the night. Since it was late fall and the weather was turning cold, I told him that there were a few shelters about two miles from where we were. He told me that they wouldn't let him stay because he'd been drinking that night. I then offered to get him some Gatorade from my room because he told me that he was really thirsty.

I grabbed the Gatorade and he asked if I had any food. I told him no because I got all my food from the cafeteria, and he then begged me to let him stay on my couch for the night. I told him that I wished I could, but my roommates wouldn't appreciate waking up to a random person in our apartment, and also it was against the apartment rules. What I did next was, admittedly, very stupid.

I offered to walk him to the student center, about a five minute walk from my apartment, and see what they could do for him. When we got there, I asked the desk attendant if they could help him in any way. They told me no because he wasn't a student. At this point, I was getting some weird vibes from this guy.

I tried to tell him that I needed to get back to my place because I had class early the next morning, and he insisted that I needed to help him find a warm place to sleep for the night. Me, trying to be as nice as I could, proceeded to walk him all across campus, trying to find a good place for him to sleep for the night. He had a small sleeping bag. I told him the parking garage might be a good bet, but he said he had done that before and security had banned him from campus.

At this point, alarm bells were going off in my head. I couldn't just leave him though, because I was in too deep. We walked together to the soccer field nearby to see if any of the bathrooms were open for him to sleep in. They were all locked. So, we tried the baseball field directly across the street. It had been around an hour since I met this stranger, and I needed to get out of this dangerous situation. There were no other people around since it was getting pretty late,

and he begged me again to stay on my couch, and again I refused. What I did next wasn't my proudest moment, by any means. I told him to try the bathrooms around the back of the baseball field, even though I had no idea if any were actually back there. As he turned to go check, I ran as fast as I could out of there, and kept running for ten minutes back to my apartment.

I got in, and I looked out the window for a long time since the room was right next to the door. The man did know where I lived since I'd met him right in front of my building, but I saw absolutely no sign of him. The moral of the story? No matter how nice of a person you are, please don't try to help random homeless people that you meet late at night.

I have a thing that happened to me a couple of years ago that scared the hell out of me, and I thought that your audience would at least find it interesting and creepy. It was a pretty normal day, a fairly basic day off which meant that it was either a Thursday or a Friday. Back then, I lived in a townhome that was owned by and on the edge of an apartment complex. It was a day off.

And on the first day off, I always take care of my grocery shopping and any other random things I have to do. Because of this, I'm usually not home from 10 in the morning to sometime in the afternoon or evening. I know this sounds like it's irrelevant, but it actually does matter as to what happened, because it sets the scene a little bit. On this particular day, I had spent the entire day out doing a ton of errands,

and at the end of the day I had to go grocery shopping. After I did my shopping, I got home and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I pushed the door open, and the first thing that I did out of habit was reach for the light switch. It clicked, the overhead light clicked on and flooded the room, and then I turned into the main part of my living room. Much to my surprise, it wasn't just the normal empty room.

There was a man sitting in my armchair, a complete stranger just sitting there. He was wearing fairly nondescript clothing, jeans, a black t-shirt, and a black leather or pleather jacket. He was literally just sitting there and staring off into the room. He didn't even acknowledge that I had entered my home. For a few seconds, or maybe a few minutes, I don't really know-

I just stood there with my four grocery bags in one hand, and my keys in the other. My mind was racing through every terrifying possibility. Was this man going to rob me? Attack me? Did I upset someone to the point that they had sent an assassin to my house? That's how weird it was. My brain was going through all possibilities.

The man didn't move for several moments. He just sat there and stared out into the room like he was in a meditative state or sedated or something. I stood there, frozen in fear and confusion, and was slowly trying to reach for my pepper spray that was clipped to the purse that I had accidentally dropped when I jumped the moment I saw him. Then, as abruptly as the whole event had started, the man stood up from the chair.

He stood up slowly, and again I started thinking he was about to leap on me. As soon as he stood up completely, he let out a slight sigh and said, "'Well, I should probably get going.' He didn't look at me, didn't acknowledge me, just said what he said completely devoid of all emotion and then walked past me toward the door. He got close enough to me that I could smell the tobacco on his clothing."

I remained completely rooted to the spot that I was in, actually too scared to even move at this point. He just reached for the front door, pulled it open, stepped outside onto the front porch, and then disappeared into the night. Just like that, he was gone. Once I finally managed to move, the first thing I did was lock the door. The second thing was call the police.

I tried to explain the whole situation, and then within minutes there was a cruiser right outside my front door. I told them all about how he was just in my house, how he didn't do anything other than say that he should go, and then he left. I described him as best as I could, told them what he was wearing, what he looked like, etc. The officers were thorough, but thankfully gentle with how they asked things, because I was freaking out.

They cleared the rest of the townhome, confirmed that nothing looked ransacked, and that they couldn't find any signs of forced entry. They then said that they would patrol to see if they could find this mystery man. When they left, I confirmed what they said. All the windows were shut and locked. Nothing was missing. If this man hadn't been obviously a physical person that opened the door, I would have honestly thought that it was a damn ghost.

I have no idea how he got into my home. I have no idea why he was there. I have literally zero knowledge as to why he was in my townhome, sitting in my chair and just waiting. This was a pretty major violation of my security, and I ended up buying a doorbell camera for my front door. I needed something to make me feel safer, and a camera was the only thing that gave me the slightest semblance of security.

For the first few days, every time I got the notification of motion, I would check it, thinking that it was going to show me someone opening my front door and walking in, but it never was that, thankfully. The cops never found the guy, and I never saw him again, and thankfully nothing like this has ever happened again. Despite that, that night was probably the most terrifying thing that has ever happened to me.

To enter my home and to have a stranger sitting in my chair like that, only to have them just stand up and walk out, it was surreal. So, again, I know that not a lot happened here, but I thought that your listeners could find the creepiness in the whole situation, and I hope that I never see that man again. I was nearly abducted early one morning.

In June of 2015, I was a single woman settling into a new apartment with my dog. The location was close to major shopping centers and only a few blocks away from the interstate highway, but was somehow pretty quiet and felt more residential. Perhaps that's why I didn't feel particularly uncomfortable taking my frail, elderly cocker spaniel out for an early morning potty break while it was still dark outside.

She was suffering from kidney disease, so she needed to get outside at odd times. The street in front of the apartment building was not very well lit. There's a single street light right at the corner, and then no further lighting until well down the street. Parking is only allowed on the side of the street directly in front of my building.

As the building was pet-friendly, management had installed a waste bag dispenser and receptacle at the edge of the property furthest away from the building, and usually I had no concerns about walking over to it to toss my dog's bags, even in the dead of night. I felt fairly safe. Besides, throwing the waste bag away in my inside bin made my unit stink.

I work from home as a telecommuter, and once my dog and I got back inside, I needed to log into the system to start work. I didn't want to sit and smell dog waste until my morning break, when I could take the trash out to the dumpster. As I was standing in the front yard with her and waiting for her to finish, an older model boxy maroon sedan turned the corner and drove past us down the street,

turned around in the cul-de-sac, and then came back toward us. This wasn't weird to me as people can only park on the one side of the street, so it's not uncommon for drivers to just do this to get turned around to park. Being new to the building, I figured this person was another resident of the complex, and no alarm bells were going off yet.

However, that changed when the car stopped and parked in the dark area of the street, near the dog waste station, instead of pulling up in front of the apartments. There were no other cars parked on the street that particular morning, and where this car stopped was not close to any other buildings or entrances. Although I thought this seemed strange, I still wasn't all that concerned.

Maybe the driver was just coming home from an overnight shift, and wanted to park their car in an area they felt would be shaded from the daytime sun. Still, I kept it in my peripheral vision. A lanky man stepped out of the vehicle, tall with scruffy dark blonde hair. He looked to be in his thirties, wearing jeans, a white t-shirt, and what looked in the dim light to be an army green light jacket or shirt.

He was smoking a cigarette and didn't approach me, but instead stood in the darkened street next to his driver's side door and stared across the apartment building's yard toward the parking lot. Okay, I thought. He must have a girlfriend or wife that doesn't like him smoking, so he's hiding while finishing his smoke in the hopes that he can't be seen from their windows. Maybe that's also why he parked in probably the darkest part of the street as well.

By this time, my little dog had finished reading all of the pee mail in the yard and done her business, and I was fumbling with trying to open the waste bag that I'd brought with us. Finally managed to defeat the static cling keeping it closed, I slid it over my hand like a glove and bent down to pick up my dog's gift.

That's when I noticed the man was no longer standing by his driver's side door, but had instead moved to the back of his car to stand by his vehicle's trunk, still in the street. He was still staring toward the parking lot across the yard, and perhaps it was simply paranoia kicking in, but I got the sense that he was watching me from the corner of his eye. His posture seemed kind of stiff, not like he was just casually looking off into the distance.

It felt predatory. Now, the alarm bells are starting to go off. If he were just innocently finishing a cigarette before going into the building, then wouldn't he be standing on the boulevard where it's safer, instead of the middle of the street where he's at risk of getting hit by a passing car?

As previously mentioned, I don't like disposing of dog waste in my house trash, but my normal routine of walking to the waste bin at the edge of the yard would have taken me right past this guy, who, if he was truly planning to grab me, would only be a few short steps away. I decided to just deal with a little bit of stink in my apartment until I could get the trash out later.

I quickly tied off the bag, scooped my dog up into my arms, and hurried back to my unit. My windows faced the street. In fact, where I'd been out in the yard with my dog was directly in front of my own balcony. So, as soon as I got back inside, I ran to my window to see what the guy was doing. That's when his intentions became frighteningly clear.

While I'd run back into the safety of my apartment, he'd gotten back into his car and taken off down the street. I looked outside just in time to watch him blow through the stop sign and make a left around the corner, squealing his tires as he headed toward the main arterial road. That's when I realized that he was waiting for me to walk past him. What he'd intended to do after that, I don't know.

but had he grabbed me, he could have been out on the interstate and headed out of the state within minutes. I lived in that apartment for another five years, and I never saw him or his car again. Attached is an aerial view of the area for reference. I've added some colorized markings to show where I was, where the car parked, etc.

So, this was a few years back, and I was walking home from a friend's house after hanging at her place after school. It was around 9:30 PM in the summer, so the sun had for the most part set. It was relatively dark, but still bright enough where I could make out the things around me. I was stoned and was walking very slowly down the road to my house, which was only about a 20 minute walk away from my friends.

The majority of my walk was spent on a straight, quiet suburban street that was very familiar to me, as I had done this walk plenty of times before. After maybe five minutes of walking, I noticed the first and only car to drive past. It was an old, beat up white Honda, which I didn't take much notice to, until another few minutes passed and it drove by again.

Still, I wasn't concerned and continued about my walk admiring the cracks in the pavement or doing whatever else a stoned 14 year old does on a walk. Another minute passes and this car drives by again, this time more slowly and I feel my stomach drop. I couldn't make out who was inside but I knew that something was off.

I've always been very timid, so I tried to convince myself that it was just paranoia and that I was being dramatic, until it drives past again, about two minutes later, and then parks maybe ten feet in front of me. As I approached the car, I kept my head down, but I hear a, Hey there.

And sure enough, I look up, and there was a rough looking man who you could tell just from appearance alone that smelt like stale cigarettes and potty odor, sitting in the driver's seat smiling at me. The lack of teeth and dirty shirt this man had on gave me a horrible vibe, so I just gave a little smile back and continued walking. I look up, and notice that he's driving alongside me and asks if I had directions to the closest gas station.

I stopped and pointed in the general direction and told him where to go, and that it was less than a five minute drive, when out of nowhere he just started to laugh. I guess I just kind of stared in confusion and fear as he squinted his eyes at me, like he was trying to get a better look at my face. Then he said, ''I'll take a guess, but I think I can tell from those eyes, you've been smoking, little miss.''

I kinda just laughed and tried to walk away when he said, "Hey, come back!" So I stopped in my tracks. Why I didn't just keep walking is beyond me, but I turned around and he pulls out a rather large bag of weed and asks if I want it. I tell him I'm okay and that I don't have any money, and he said something along the lines of, "I don't need your money. Take it." I reassure him I'm fine and that I don't need it.

I just try to continue walking, but nonetheless, he continues driving alongside me. He then asks me if I needed a ride, and tells me it's too dark to be walking home alone, which really frightened me. He continued trying to coerce me into his car, and I became more and more unsettled. I begin to look for the closest house with the light on, and after finding one, I tell him, "'This is my house. Good night.'

and then walk up some stranger's driveway and walk straight into their home. There was a middle-aged couple sitting in the living room, and they looked extremely shocked and equally angry, and I just started to sob out of shock and relief and apologize profusely. I explained to them what just happened, and the very kind lady assured me that I did the right thing, and then gave me a ride home.

Looking back, I probably should have knocked, but I was scared, under the influence and still a child, and the homeowners were very understanding. This is still one of the scariest things that has happened to me, but I'm so glad that I trusted my gut and got away from the man whose intentions seemed anything but pure. I still consider myself lucky that I even got away. Thank you for all the positive responses."

I'm guessing some of you were wondering whether or not the police were called. They were. They took a statement from me, but because I hadn't remembered the plate number and didn't know what model or year the car was, nothing really came of it. The police were super unhelpful, and while taking my statement, the officer was super unprofessional and was almost yelling at me, telling me that I needed to speak up, which made me cry.

Keep in mind that that was the day after, so I was still very shaken up by the whole ordeal, and I've always had a very quiet, shy nature to me, like I mentioned before, but there was an alert posted on the local school's website, and the story did circulate around the community Facebook page, telling people to keep an eye out, and to make sure their children were accompanied while playing outside.

I'm glad that my story helped potentially keep other children in my community safe, but it was disheartening that they never caught the guy. Hello. Long time lurker on Reddit. Specifically for this thread. This isn't my main account due to privacy issues. I'll be posting this on this secondary one. I forgot about this instance until recently, and...

It may not be the creepiest or most suspenseful events to happen, but it definitely sparked concern at the time. Also, sorry if my writing isn't the best, as I am on mobile. This happened almost 15 years ago, when I was 7. My best friend's mom would babysit my brother and I before and after school. My mom would usually drop us off at her house around 6 a.m.,

She would make us breakfast and the three of us would walk to our elementary, that was less than ten minutes away. For preface, we would walk through an adjacent neighborhood, through this small wooded area that had an enclosed bridge, and that led us to the back of our elementary school. The elementary sits back in a long tree line that runs about half a mile north and another mile south.

Anyways, we're about to get to the turn where we walk into the tree line to the bridge, and this guy comes cruising down the street. At first, I don't even think we noticed him considering how young we were, but right when he's about 10 feet away from us, he slows down to virtually zero mph. There was nothing that stood out about his appearance either. He was middle-aged, white male, very generic.

Well, we all stare at the car and start walking super slowly. If we stop, he would stop. If we walked, he would slowly go. During this whole ordeal, he has a blank expression on his face. Not anger, no smirk, just this sinister deadness, almost. This went on for probably five minutes, because we were too scared that he would jump out of the car if we turned our backs on him,

and I was mainly scared for my little brother. Finally, he speeds off, and we run the rest of the way to school. Immediately, we go to the principal's office, and at this point, we are bawling. We gave them our version of the story, his description, and whatever else a seven-year-old is actually capable of giving. They take action by calling the cops and our parents. The cops come, and we explain where it happened and the story again.

Then our parents ended up taking us out of school. From then on, we weren't allowed to walk to school anymore, and our babysitter would just take us. The reason this ended up being so creepy is because, apparently, there had been reports around that time of a guy who would sit under the bridge we walked over right by the school and watch people. They didn't know if he was homeless or if it was this other guy who we encountered.

They never caught the guy, and we never saw him again. Whether this was a more sinister encounter than we thought, or he was just bored, well, we will never know. I do know how bizarre it was, though. Who stares at children that intently while driving by? He even turned his head around as he was driving. By his chance of luck, no other cars drove by during this whole situation. But weirdo driver...

Let's not ever meet again. This happened in November of 2014. I went to Walmart to buy groceries while my 16 year old daughter was attending her homecoming dance. I tried to do my grocery shopping to coincide with her 11pm pickup. All at once, I realized that it was about 5 till 11pm, and I was still standing in line to get checked out.

About that time, one of their customer service supervisors walked by me, and I mentioned to her explaining that I had to pick my daughter up, and if she could hold my cart, I would come back and check out as soon as I picked up my daughter. She agreed, and had someone take my cart to the cooler and told me to tell them at the service desk when I got back. So, off I go to pick daughter up, and we arrived back at Walmart at about 11.15pm.

My daughter came inside with me, and as we were coming into the store, a man about 50-something walked over in front just past me, and peered down the front of my daughter's strapless pink formal, which from a couple of hours of teenage booping around and dancing had become looser, and he then mentioned what he could do with her, and that she happens to be well endowed.

He had a female companion with him when he walked in. I could see him and her out of the corner of my eye. I don't know if this was his girlfriend or a relative of his, but she watched and heard him say this and said nothing. I felt like I was in a stupor. Like, did this just happen?

The split second I was stunned that anyone would have the audacity to walk up and say this to my daughter, right in front of me, her mom, walking right beside her. I became completely enraged, and I stepped between his leering eyes and my daughter. He asked her another inappropriate question, and after stepping in front of him and putting myself between him and my daughter, I asked him if today was a good day for him to die.

Honestly, I was running on pure rage and adrenaline, which probably gave me more guts than brains in that moment. He glared at me and tried to walk in tighter and intimidate me. I told him to get the F away, and he finally walked back over to who he was with, but continued to glare at me as they went on inside Walmart ahead of us. I absolutely could not believe that this had actually transpired.

My daughter was in tears and scared beyond all reason. I took her straight back to the women's department and had her put on a sweat jacket and zip it up. We paid for it in line with my groceries. If I'd really thought about it and not been running on adrenaline and still having the shock factor going on, in hindsight, I should have left the store, called the police, and gone straight home.

At the same time, the thought crossed my mind that he might just follow us to the car, and then what? I think if she had been alone regardless of what she was wearing, he still would have approached her. If someone is this brazen inside a public store, what is he capable of in a dark, isolated place? The whole situation chills me to the bone. I think the only reason he walked away was because I stood up to him and didn't flinch.

To have walked up to my daughter, passed me on her left and stand so close to her, and then look down the front of her dress and say what he said to her is unbelievable. I never thought, I just reacted with pure rage that he would dare to do what he did.

I never again went to that Walmart late at night again, and have warned my daughters to always be aware of their surroundings, not to be carelessly talking on their cell phones, and to always pay attention to things coming and going. For context, I am 20 years old and female, and at the time of these events, I was around 12 to 13, so I grew up in a very rural area.

Like, my town was so small that it was legally considered a village. My house was one of four on a span of 40 acres. My childhood home, my grandparents' house right up the street, and my two neighbors. One of the neighbors, not the subject of this post, we're gonna call him T.,

had been living across near my family for as long as I can remember, and he rented out a trailer that he owned which was inhabited by the fourth neighbor, the subject of this post. We're gonna call him J. J, and his girlfriend who we're going to call A, had moved in a few months before these events, and I hadn't really met them. I knew of them, but I hadn't interacted with them directly. The day that I met J and A was extremely awkward.

As I was a kid and I didn't really want to talk to them, but my grandma had made me go with her to drop off some vegetables that she had grown in her garden. When they came out after my grandma knocked on the trailer door, I was first struck by how they looked. I know that sounds bad, but I'm not judging. I now know that both of them were addicted to meth.

My grandma started the conversation, and I tried to be polite, as I was raised to be, by introducing myself when told to do so. I wasn't really able to finish my sentence, as I noticed Jay was staring at me very intently. He looked like he was either mad, or hungry, or both. Not the creepiest stuff off the bat, as they both seemed polite enough, and I brushed off the stare as him just trying to be polite.

looking at me as I spoke to him as most people do. The creepy part is that as time went on, he began to try and be near me more and more. He would ride his bike past our house over and over for what seemed like hours, while me and my brother played catch in the yard, with baseball gloves and a softball. Then he began to go to church with me and my brother and my grandparents.

He would make sure to sit right next to me in the backseat of the car as he rode with us. If my brother tried to sit in the middle, so I wasn't right next to Jay, he would throw a fit about how my brother was squishing him against the door. Then, he started coming to my grandma's house when she would have me and my brother after school, offering to tutor me with various subjects. What really scared me was that I'd begun seeing him walk near our house at night,

trying to shine a flashlight into my window. He tried various things to get close to me. Tried to convince my parents to let him teach me how to golf. Tried to help me practice my catching positions for softball. He tried to get me to go with him and A to the movies. And none of these things ever included my brother. Only me. Things finally came to a head when I was playing with my dog outside in our front yard. She was a boxer.

and he started repeatedly doing laps on his bike down the road again, staring at me, like he did the day we met. I was extremely uncomfortable. I've always had very good intuition about people, and something was always just off with him. But that day, I was terrified. He parked his bike right in the middle of the road and got off. He then started walking towards me at almost a jog, and I just kept backing away.

What happened next is why I believe that dogs are a better judge of character than people could ever hope to be. My boxer ran up at him and she launched herself onto him when he was about six feet from me. She tore into his arm and I saw blood. I screamed and my mom ran outside shortly after.

She was trying to pull my dog off of him, but as soon as she was able to, holding onto the dog collar, she started yelling at him, asking him why he was in our yard with me alone. He couldn't answer her, and just started running back to his bike, riding back to the trailer. My grandma ended up driving him to the hospital, as J and A didn't have a car, and I later learned that he got 16 stitches.

He never gave a reason as to why he was approaching me, and they moved out shortly after. I haven't seen him since, and I'm still terrified to this day that I'll run into him again.