11 Scary Stranger Stories That Will Make You Check Your Locks At Night

Collected from the stories told in the Reddit community “Let’s Not Meet”.

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

My husband and I were at the supermarket and our baby was being especially fussy, so he took her for a quick drive, the motion of which usually calms her down.

It only took about ten minutes to settle her and I was still in the store (but was unsure how much longer I’d be and there’s poor cell reception inside) so he pulled back into the parking lot to wait for me. It was an unseasonably nice day, so he took her in her car seat to sit on one of the benches outside the store.

He took a business call and had just sat them down, absentmindedly rocking the carrier, when a woman (well dressed, mid thirties, average height, fit build) approached them.

It’s not uncommon for people to ask to play with our baby, she’s got big rosy cheeks, soft whisps of gold hair, and the most adorable gurgely toothless grin, especially when she’s deep into a good nap.

But her nap schedule is paramount, so my husband was preparing to tell the woman she actually couldn’t play with our baby right then.

She walked over right in their direction, brimming with nonchalant confidence, and before he can even finish his sentence explaining she was napping and not to be touched, she picked up the carrier and started walking off.

He was in shock for a minute, not fully believing someone would be ballsy enough to do something so sinister in plain daylight, so he said “excuse me, put her down” as his panic mounted.

She remained calm this entire time, but when he called after her she started walking away more briskly than when she’d approached. He ran full speed ahead tried to grapple the carrier out of her hands, finally resulting to restraining her arms.

This woman yells “HELP, HE’S TRYING TO TAKE MY BABY, KIDNAPPING, 911, HELP” kicking him in the shin and pulling a pink bottle of pepper spray out of her handbag.

Of course, no one in the parking lot was clocking the earlier interaction, and assumed he really was a kidnapper (a lone man in a Deadpool T-shirt versus a tiny well dressed woman.) Immediately a man knocked my husband to the ground and was holding him down.

He could hear bystanders encouraging the woman to file a police report but she was doing a very convincing job of acting shaken up and insisted she just wanted to get home. To make matters worse for my husband, she was driving a minivan.

He was in a raw state of panic, realizing the entire parking lot had banded together to inadvertently facilitate the kidnapping of our daughter. He was begging and pleading with them, but no one was listening. They just kept screaming at him that the jig was up and he needed to lie still and wait for police and stop terrorizing a young mother.

My husband finally had the novel idea to show them family pictures on his phone. But, too panicked to think clearly, this manifested as him shouting “I have pictures of the baby on my phone!”

Which, of course, everyone interpreted as him having either stalking photos, or worse, pornographic images of the baby.

It was at this point that a man, I can’t entirely blame the man considering what he thought was going on, kicked my husband as hard as he could in the ribs.

It was at this point I was coming out of the store and I thought he was being robbed by these people. I was yelling for security, so panicked my chest constricted and I could barely get any sound out. It was only then I realized he did not have our baby with him.

When I saw she was being held by a woman, I was relieved, I thought maybe the woman had intervened to move my daughter out of harms way while my husband was being robbed and was walking away to get help.

I couldn’t find a security guard outside the store so I ran up to the people holding my husband down, waving my wallet, pleading “Take everything you want, just let up and leave us alone.”

And one of the men holding him down said something like “Lady we need to wait for police to deal with him.” And I was so confused, why would the muggers have called the police? I just kept stammering “What do you mean, what are you talking about” and made out someone saying “He tried to abduct that woman’s kid” I did not understand and was sure I’d misheard him. My husband would never hurt a child. And we have four kids, if he were going to commit a crime, bringing home another kid would be at the bottom of his list. I kept trying to understand what the man was saying and suddenly, it all clicked.

I looked around for the woman who had the baby carrier and she was halfway across the parking lot. I went into total ballistic tiger-cub mode, literally leapt out of my heels, and sprinted across the parking lot. I’m not a UFC fighter, I’ve never even taken a self defense class, so all I could think to do was grab the woman by her hair and squeeze her throat with my other hand (which didn’t do much, she was getting away even as I grappled with her). Amazingly, none of the other bystanders had yet to connect that my husband was telling the truth and this woman was absconding with my baby.

I yanked on her hair as hard as I could and that was enough to make her drop the carrier. I was so scared and surprised that I actually just threw myself on top of the carrier, covering the entire thing like a blanket, and stayed that way without saying or doing anything else. The woman left. Not one person tried to stop her. Even though she was clearly leaving without the child she claimed was hers, which would be pretty damn incriminating if I’d watched this scene unfold.

Within the next couple minutes, police had arrived. After all that, there were still several bystanders who explained it as my husband trying to kidnap the baby.

The police, to my horror, assumed that she must not have had bad intentions. The first questions they asked me after getting her description weren’t investigative, they were questions thinly veiled trying to convince me not to pursue charges. Still placing blame on my husband.

A small sampling “Do your husband and the baby look dissimilar? Is there a chance she thought he was abducting the baby and she was trying to intervene?”

“Could your husband have been doing something inappropriate or violent to the baby that would make her feel compelled to extricate the baby from the situation?”

“Did she seem groggy or confused, could she have mistaken either of them for her own family members?”

They spent more time verifying that the baby was actually mine than they concerned themselves with the fact that the baby was not actually hers.

My husband had called his brother at that point who works in an office with a lot of lawyers and connected with one ASAP who gave us the priceless advice to get every officer’s name and badge number, to request copies of the store’s security tapes right away, and to escalate our complaint higher up the chain if these officers weren’t taking us seriously.

Finally, we had reason enough to believe we were being taken seriously, and we went home, and both just shook and cried until we had to get our other kids from school. My husband is seething with rage and grappling with a feeling of helplessness from how little he was able to do, and has two cracked ribs from when the man kicked him. (To the officers’ credit, they did ask if he’d like to press charges, but considering the man was genuinely convinced at the time that he was on the right side of intervening in a kidnapping and stayed to talk to police and apologized profusely when the truth became clear, he declined to press charges.) Amazingly, and frustratingly, there were still people who stuck around to talk to police who were giving my husband dirty looks and one man who even implored the police to involve CPS to verify it was really our baby.

Parking lot kidnapper (and parking lot skeptics), you better hope we don’t meet.

***

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

Two points of background to make this story make sense:

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

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

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

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

“You must not cross legs”

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

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

“You. Must.”

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obviously we packed up and left immediately.

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

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

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

***

I’ll go ahead and be blunt. I make small, personal videos and upload them to a sex platforms for a few bucks here and there. It isn’t an ego thing, just a small hobby I find interesting.

My first month or two I uploaded most everything to a Tumblr account. I never made it onto huge cam shows or anything. It also allowed for messages that I occasionally replied to. That was my first mistake.

It went smooth for the first while. Until, i ended up getting a message for an account whos username was pretty much jargon. It was something pretty normal, “Looking for a boyfriend?” Which i promptly replied to with “No. Sorry! I’m in a relationship. I appreciate the offer though.” He responded with a slurries of profanities. Now, this may seem like your typical “Nice guy” post but it gets worse.

Soon, i was getting more messages from a different account. It was graphic. He went into depth about he was going to stalk, and promptly assault me. It was sickening, but dropped it because it was on Tumblr and he couldn’t possibly find me. That was wrong.

Within the week, i was getting HUNDREDS of messages. I had to mute notifications because they blew up my phone. A unique message, which were all gross. They got worse, however. He detailed how he would study my behaviour to learn my nightmare and use it against me. At that point, i was angry but stuck. I couldn’t fight back, so I ignored them.

Sadly I made the mistake of posting my face at a diner in my hometown. It was a quick snapshot I had taken at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant and made a comment about the food. He took this as an invitation and reversed image searched it. I had also posted it to Facebook, which contained my hometown, school address, and personal life.

He messaged me from an account with yet another nonsense name. That’s how i knew i fucked up. He told me he knew where I was from because of the photo and Id regret rejecting him. I snapped and said I’d call the cops if he kept acting this way.

Well, he didn’t stop. He actually went the extra mile and headed to my home town. He showed up at my part time job. Lucky for me, i wasn’t at work that day. Another co-worker came in contact with him, who begged for me to come to the front. He got angry when she refused to say when I would come in. Cops were called, Horny psycho finally arrested. The saddest part was when i was interviewed, I learned he had two children and a functioning marriage. His wife knew nothing of this behavior.

I’ve gone through quite a few pervy incidents, but this one was by far the worst.

So, Mr. Perv, let’s not meet again

***

A few years ago I was living alone in a little house which had a heavy back door that would swell up some after it rained and get really tough to open and make a lot of noise.

Late one night I had passed out on my sofa in the living room on the opposite side of the house but woke up to something which I now assume was the back door being opened. (I’m an idiot btw and used to never lock the back door.)

Netflix was still blaring away on laptop as I slowly squinted my eyes open and realized there was the black outline of someone standing still in the hallway looking down at me. They were not very large or tall based on how much space they took up in the door frame.

Being completely disoriented in my waking state, my mind latched onto the first thought that came to mind which was that it must be my girlfriend. I was naked at the time and pulled back my blanket with my legs sprawled and junk hanging out and called to her in my best deep sexy voice “…c’mere baby”

Upon discovering on a naked 6 ft+ 200-pound man beckoning to them with his genitalia, the not-my-girlfriend person immediately turned on their heel (revealing a large backpack) and booked it for the back door. By the time I stumbled up to the door all I could hear was them taking off into the darkness at a full sprint.

I can only guess (based on their height) that they did not come there with the bold intention of being the little spoon.

***

A lot of people may have heard about this girl. She was all over the news after she stalked a guy, bombarded him with 65,000 texts, and broke into his house all over one date. We met shortly after she went on that date with him and we were friends for awhile before she broke into his house.

At first she seemed like a nice, albeit quirky, person. I met her when I spent a couple of months visiting the west coast of the U.S. in summer 2017. I thought she was cute and we spent a lot of time together. We were living next door to each other for a few weeks and we were never really more than friends.

I stopped having any sort of non-platonic feelings after she started to talk a lot about a guy she had met on some dating website. Apparently he was her soulmate and she had somehow been guided to him by following her birth calendar (I would only later come to know that they had only been on one date and he never spoke to her again). I thought that was weird, but I enjoyed our conversations for the most part and she was funny and nice, so we remained friends. Eventually she moved on to short flings with a guy and then another girl from tinder. All the while still talking to me about this guy that she was going to marry, saying that she liked how jealous he got when she would tell him about hooking up with other people.

A couple of weeks later she started to get really erratic. I confronted her a few times about how she was acting, and she told me that she had recently stopped taking her meds but would start taking them again. She came home one day and decided to tell me that she had a court date coming up for a DUI (I have no idea if this is actually true. But if there’s a way to find that out, it happened in Arizona and her name is pretty easy to find. So someone could look it up if they wanted to know). Her plan was instead to leave the country and go to South America. I told her what a dumb idea that was, and even though she actually went all the way to the airport in a different city, she wound up coming back.

Apparently her soulmate was no longer answering her texts and she took that as a sign that she should drag her ass back to where he was and fix their relationship. She was upset that he may be seeing other people even though it seemed okay to her that she was seeing other people. (Later on she told me she had texted him and said if he blocked her she would know that meant he wanted her to come find him. Obviously he blocked her. Obviously that didn’t go over well with her).

So she moved a couple of days later and the summer was ending and I moved back to the east coast. I didn’t hear from her for a little while, but then we started talking again through text and whatsapp. She seemed like she was doing better. She told me she had found a roommate and was working on her art again and just generally seemed like she was in a better place. I was happy to have my friend back and healthy, but that didn’t last longer than a couple of months.

Eventually her behavior started to seem erratic again. She was sending dozens of texts at a time and they were all over the place. Several of them had to do with her soulmate and how she was still following him even though he had called the police and blocked her. I told her to stop, tried to get her to take her meds, and tried to reason with her a hundred times. I was on the opposite side of the country and had no way of getting in touch with her family (who I never knew much about) or friends to try and get them to help her. She was a kind person and a good friend when she was taking care of her mental health and I cared about her, but I couldn’t force her to take care of herself.

One day I set aside some time to call her and I told her that she was overwhelming me and that she really needed to reach out to her family or someone who could help her. She told me I couldn’t do that because she needed to stay with me or she would have to go back to her ex husband. I don’t think any of this is true, but she thought her ex husband was going to have her killed or followed, that he had the entire police force in his pocket, and had paid off her family to give him intel on her whereabouts and what was going on in her life.

I had just moved for a job and I lived in a small studio in a big city. I had no room for anyone to stay long term, and I wasn’t about to do that anyways since she was starting to scare me at this point. She asked me if I was still living at [my address] which really freaked me out because I had never given her my address or put it anywhere online and she wouldn’t tell me how she got it. I asked her to leave me alone and told her we couldn’t be friends anymore unless she took some steps to get better. She obviously didn’t take this well.

Though I hated my tiny, cramped apartment, the reason I was drawn to it was because it had great security. It was actually on the upper floors of a hotel (although the hotel rooms were much nicer than the residence) and no one was allowed through to the residence elevators unless the resident had given their name to security ahead of time and the guest had to show ID. After what happened next, I loved my cramped little apartment because the staff kept me safe.

It had been over a week since I had talked to her because I blocked her number and blocked her on whats app. She tried texting me from 4 different phone numbers (using textfree, etc.) but I just blocked them all and never responded. I was walking home from work one day and I was sure I saw her across the street from my building, but it was storming out and I didn’t get a good view. I rushed upstairs and calmed myself down in my apartment. Maybe I was just being paranoid. It’s a big city. Lots of people have brown hair and glasses. I’m just worried about her. But then the phone rang. The desk was calling to see if I had forgotten to let them know I had a visitor. My heart sank. I asked them who was waiting. They said they tried asking for her name or ID but she just walked out, and I knew it was her from the way they described her.

I texted a mutual friend from over the summer. I wasn’t really close with him, so we hadn’t stayed in touch, but he told me she had lost it and that he had blocked her too. Apparently she had gone back on the dating site she met her “soulmate” on and found someone who looked just like him in MY city. She was convinced it was him and had come to find him. This was a very touristy city, but there was just no way this guy had coincidentally come out here. I was sure she had gone bonkers and I knew she was well aware of where that guy actually lived.

I took a page out of her book and used a textfree number to text her that she should leave me alone and I would call the cops if she ever came near me or my building again. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have contacted her at all, but I was emotional and not using my better judgement. She said she just wanted to know if I could help her find something (texted back really fucking fast and didn’t even try to hide it). Then I deleted the textfree app so she couldn’t reach me again.

I lived in a very crowded area and I knew she couldn’t get into my building, but I was still scared whenever I had to take public transit alone at night or was walking through less crowded areas to get home. I had a friend who used to work for the police (but not in this city or at the time this all happened) and she would drive or walk me home from work whenever she could for awhile. She told me I should go ahead and report it even though they couldn’t really do anything since she hadn’t hurt me and nothing really happened, but I was embarrassed and again I didn’t use my better judgement. I felt like it was my fault for engaging with her for so long. I knew she was mentally unstable and I would still try to be her friend and help her. Maybe I gave her the wrong idea that I could do more for her.

I ended up moving to a new city for another job after that and didn’t hear from her again. I later found out the reason why was that a couple of months later she had once again gone back to Arizona and had been arrested for breaking into her “soulmate’s” house and using his bathtub. They found a large knife in her car. I didn’t want to go into too much detail about her stalking of that guy and what she said about him in our texts because I wanted to try and focus more on my personal experience with her instead of his, but I could answer some questions in the comments if anyone has any.

And a happy ending:

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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