The Lets Read Podcast - 105: Episode 093 | Cemetery & Field Trip Stories | 28 True Scary Horror Stories

Episode Date: July 27, 2021

Welcome to the ninety-third episode of The Lets Read Podcast! This podcast includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Cemeteries, Field Trips, & Crazy Friends... HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?► www.Reddit.com/r/LetsReadOfficial FOLLOW ME ON - ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsReadCreepy ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ♫ Background Music & Audio Remastering: Simon de Beer https://www.instagram.com/simon_db98/ PATREON for EARLY ACCESS!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead

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If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Right after I dropped out of high school and moved out of my parents' house, I needed work real bad. I'd have done pretty much anything for rent money about that time in my life. So I'm lucky, or unlucky depending on how you look at it, that the local cemetery needed employees. At first the old timers who had been working there for 20 or 30 years just wondered why someone so young would ever want to be a gravedigger. It was hard work, really bad on the lower back but I soon adjusted and it turned out to be something more akin to a free gym membership than an actual job. I mean it, I got swole pretty fast

and if I'm honest it only ever felt like work if the weather was bad or we had an actual funeral on site. Otherwise, it was just nice to be able to spend time outdoors. So the way our cemetery was set up was pretty simple. The majority of the grounds were just regular grave sites, all pretty much the same size and same price. But the northwest corner of the grounds was a private site that contained much larger plots. These were reserved for much wealthier families, and the local undertaker made a lot of cash from selling extravagant grave setups to them. I'm talking whole mausoleums, statues of angels, and stuff like that. We hardly ever visited that area of the

site except for cleaning and maintenance duties, and those were never left to me. I didn't take it personally, but the older guys just didn't trust me with all the cleaning chemicals and whatnot that kept the marble and brass fixtures looking fresh, which is why it was so weird when I got a call one of my days off asking me if I'd been up to that area recently. My boss was livid, I could hear it in his voice, and he pulled no punches when he asked me if I'd been screwing around on the northwest plots. Of course I told him no, that the last time I'd been up there was to watch one of the old timers using the marble cleaning chemical as part of my training, and that had been months

back. He sighed, seemed confused and confounded, so I asked him what exactly the issue was. He replied that it could wait until the next time I was at work. I was worried, sure, but I was pretty sure that I hadn't done anything wrong, not deliberately anyway, and especially nothing that involved the northwest plots. A couple of days later when I rolled into work, the atmosphere was incredibly tense. I knew something fairly serious had happened. All I knew is that I wouldn't have to badger anyone to find out why. The boss man walked me out to the northwest plot, silent the whole way, and I knew better than to open my mouth until I found out exactly what was going on. There was already a worker up in the plot,

tending to one of the graves, and that's when my boss told me that if I'd been hanging around the area, maybe during my lunch break, eating a few snacks among the opulent grave sites, now would be the time to tell him. I swear to god that I hadn't, that I knew better than to eat stuff near the graves, as I'd been well informed it attracts wild animals that can in turn do damage to some of the resting places, and that's when he broke it down for me. Something had tried to dig up one of the freshly dug graves out in the northwest plots. He said something in particular, not someone, because we each had enough experience to recognize when a grave had been dug up by tools or by hand, or in this case, by claw. It was rough around the edges, obvious claw marks in the dirt

as opposed to the straight lines carved out by a shovel. This was something in an emergency, I mean, for obvious sanitary reasons but for sentimental reasons too. If local families discovered that wild animals were trying to dig up their deceased relatives, there would be an uproar. Something had to be done, and quickly. A meeting was called among the gravediggers in attendance. As far as we knew, the mysterious digging had been taking place overnight and was most likely undertaken by some kind of scavenger animal. A coyote, black bear, maybe even an escaped dog. The solution was obvious.

Night watchmen would have to be present in the cemetery every night until the situation was resolved. And guess who was voluntold to be the night watchman for the first full week? You guessed it. The young guy. The new guy. Me. The only thing that made the proposal even vaguely attractive was the fact that anyone doing the night work would be paid double the regular rate, and I could definitely have done with the extra cash. First night of being on watch really sucked. All I had for company was a flask of strong coffee and a.22 pellet gun loaned to me by one of the other workers to take down any varmints. It was long, boring, and lonely, but once I

adjusted my sleeving pattern it got a little easier. Then, on the second to last night of my watchman duties, I was on a little foot patrol walking towards the northwest plot with a flashlight in my hand. And that's when I saw it. A flurry of frantic limbs digging at the earth. I could have shouted something, maybe even fired the.22 in the air to scare the animal away, but if I killed whatever critter was causing us so much trouble, I might be out of the extra pay, but at least I'd have my daytime life back. I crept up slowly, turning the flashlight off and sneaking stealthily towards the dark shape working away at the earth. I've hunted rabbits at night with my uncle before, so I figured I'd

use the old flashlight technique to cause the animal to freeze for a second so I could take the killing shot. But when I did, when I aimed that powerful flashlight in the direction of the digging thing, I almost cried out in fear. It wasn't an animal at all. It was a human, crouched on all fours digging away at the earth with his or her bare hands. I couldn't bring myself to aim the rifle. I was too shocked at what I was looking at. So all I did was start making as much noise as possible. Telling them to get out of there.

Saying I'd call the cops if they didn't comply. They complied alright. But not out of fear. The look in that person's eyes was one of fury. Pure anger that they'd been interrupted in their obscene little act. I swear if I hadn't had that rifle with me, if I hadn't the means to defend myself that were obvious to them, I honestly don't know if I'd be here today to tell this story. Needless to say, the other workers didn't believe me and what I saw. Some of them told me they didn't doubt that I'd seen something, that they disputed what that thing was, and I get that, I really do, but still, I don't know what I saw. The police

struggled to determine anything other than maybe a few boot footprints, but it really didn't lead to anything else as that individual ran far, far into the tree line beyond what I was capable of seeing. All I know is that it was definitely a person. For the longest time, I was a tombstone caretaker for a cemetery in rural Georgia. It was only a summertime job for a 16-year-old, nothing too crazy, just cleaning off the grime and build up dirt from off of the tombstones and stuff. Now to kind of set the scene a little, the cemetery included one building that housed bathrooms for the five caretakers employed by the cemetery, in addition to one small, simple mausoleum. Other than that, it was all just flat earth with tombstones littering the entire site.

The whole place felt pretty cut off too, as surrounding the place were some of the densest forests in the entire state of Georgia. Naturally, because of the eerie surroundings, I was always a little bit more paranoid than maybe I should have been. That, and I watch a ton of horror movies and such, which I get as a terrible combo for someone working at a cemetery. So one night, I'm doing my rounds when I have to go into the small mausoleum. We had some of the wealthier families in the area entombed within and it was my job to go in, make sure all was neat and clean, making sure it met the standards of these uppity folks. I'm walking over to it and right off the bat I feel like something is off. I couldn't quite put my finger on it at first, just this general sense that I wasn't alone. That's about the time that I noticed candlelight coming from the small mausoleum.

I was also pretty certain that I could hear voices coming from inside too, like younger voices, kids my age at the time. They were giggling and laughing and didn't sound particularly wholesome. Now I hadn't seen anyone enter or leave the cemetery but I also wasn't about to potentially take on a bunch of drunk teenagers on my own as I definitely would have got my butt whooped. So I call the lone security officer on duty, the dude that does a few rounds on the lot. He was an older retired cop but he was definitely tough and I knew he'd jumped at the chance to help me out. When the ex-cop finally turns up we both go inside. It was empty which made absolutely no sense as I'd literally just heard voices and stuff inside.

There were indeed lit candles inside burning around one of the tombs. A tomb that had been opened up to reveal the remains of a child-sized skeleton. Nothing other than that was disturbed but that was bad enough, mainly because the open tomb contained a rotten old child's doll like the knitted kind. It was seriously disturbing to see that old thing smiling away while slying hand in hand with an actual kid skeleton. Me and the security guard quickly got out of there, doing a lightning sweep of the grounds to try to at least get eyes on these sick idiots that desecrated that girl's final resting place. Neither of us saw a soul, which was more frustrating than it was scary,

and after about a quarter of an hour, we met back at the mausoleum to set the girl's grave in order by sliding the stone tablet back on top of the tomb. When we stepped inside, the doll that was previously hand-in-hand with the dead girl was sitting on the other side of the mausoleum, like, just sat there, upright, with that same uneven smile stitched across her face. Whoever was messing with us had actually gone back to move that doll to taunt us. I quit the next day and never went back, not even to visit.

My name is Sarah. I'm 20 years old and I'm from North Carolina. Last November, exactly 101 years since the armistice of the Great War, my Penn State Contemporary History class went to visit the Allied war graves over in France. I had never been out of the country before, not counting a small two-day trip up to Canada to see a cousin of mine who was studying in Toronto. So I was extremely excited to see a little of the world outside of the east coast of the US. I even learned a little French to be able to get by, taking a few online lessons on basic conversation and asking directions, lessons I worked super hard at too. With every little word

that I learned, every time I mastered the difficult pronunciations, I got a little bit more excited to the point where, when it was finally time to pack and drive out to the airport, I was positively shaking with anticipation. But when we arrived, it wasn't quite the Parisian dream that I had envisioned. Aside from the weather being terrible, the French can be really, really rude to tourists, like unfathomably so. It made me realize how nice people can be in the US.

Like sure, we can get a few jerks that are all like, speak English, this is America, but we certainly don't go around correcting minor mispronunciations, especially if it's a foreigner speaking English, which is exactly what some French people decided to do. I'd ask directions to the nearest patisserie and end up getting a 10-minute grammar lesson from some sour old lady. And she was actually one of the less rude ones.

The really mean French people simply ignored me altogether or turned to say something like, I'm sorry, no English, even though I'd just ask them a question in passable French. After a while I got over how lame they were and it helped that there were a lot of nice French people who made up for all the jerks, but I made up my mind to focus on the reason I was there in the first place, to enrich my knowledge of history with a plethora of physical visits and first-hand sources. So in a small quaint town called Sorangenel, my class visited a war cemetery dedicated to American servicemen who died defending mainland Europe from the German Kaiser's brutal war machine. In the Wazan American Cemetery,

the remains of over 6,000 fallen soldiers are interred in a series of plots labeled A to D. Under a blanket of iron-gray clouds, our group walks silently among the rows of pristine white crucifixes, each one representing an American who had ventured to Europe on some great modern crusade but had not lived to tell the tale. I saw a man in uniform, standing in a small patch of delicately pruned grass that showed no obvious markings of gravesites. This area was marked Plot E. Plot E was not mapped on the plastic notice board that depicted the locations of the gravesites. There were no mentions of it in the visitor's guide, no mentions of it in the English language pamphlets, nor any mention of it on the cemetery's website. It was as if the plot didn't exist at all. Officially, it didn't. As I walked solemnly toward the uniformed man, I noticed his fatigues were

of the old kind, the same olive drab that was worn during the Second World War. I figured he must have been some kind of tour guide, a reenactor or something. Then I began to see them, all of the 96 white markers the size of index cards, carrying only a small ID number, no name, no place of birth, just simple little ID numbers that made them appear more like a subterranean filing cabinet more than anything else. Unlike the other plots, there were no stars and stripes flying, no indication that these were Americans and all. It was terribly sad and I wondered why there was a complete lack of reverence to those graves, but I didn't have to wait long to find out. They're buried with their backs facing the other plots, the man solemnly said.

But here, apart from the others, lie the dishonorable dead. He smirked at the look of confusion on my face. U.S. soldiers who happen to be dishonorably discharged by the military before their execution for other assault or murder of European civilians. Oh, ah, I see, and whose grave is this one? I quietly pointed down to the small white plaque at his feet. Ah, this one. He smiled, but he couldn't hide the melancholic look in his grey eyes. This one belongs to a criminally inclined soldier who happened to be caught poaching on some rich English aristocrat's country estate. They were caught, an argument is sued, and the landowner received a single gunshot wound to the head. The murderer was a Pennsylvania man, his name, Georgie Smith.

There he lies, like Corporal Clark and Private Guerra over there. He said, gesturing to a pair of the small white markers, who savagely assaulted and strangled a 15-year-old girl while based in the UK. Or Louis Till, a black soldier executed for his alleged involvement in the murder of an Italian woman. Louis Till, sir? The name seems so familiar, but for all the wrong reasons. That's right. Emmett's father. Hanged on foreign shores while his son was just three years old, a dark foreshadowing of his own death just eleven years later.

I honestly couldn't believe what I was hearing. It was the very same Emmet Till whose mother gave him that open casket funeral to show the world how terribly her son had been treated in his final moments. How must she have felt knowing she lost her husband and son in the exact same way? A false accusation, jumped upon which such violent zeal that her loved ones were taken away within moments of their supposed transgressions. How could she have coped with that? How could anyone have coped with that? It was exactly how the guy had phrased it. A foreshadowing. Like Emmett's death had been decided many years before, his fate entwined with that of his father's in the most hideous way possible. It's the most intensely creepy fact I've ever had to come to terms with.

One that made me question my entire worldview to wonder if there really is some sort of plan God's plan the devil's whatever for some people maybe just maybe there are people out there that really are just doomed I remember the night my father died like it was yesterday. I was literally about to leave my apartment, go to work in the bar I was the deputy manager of, finishing off an episode of The Sopranos when my phone started to ring. For some reason I got it into my head that it would be work calling, asking if I could come in earlier or some other nonsense reason. So I took my time to answer, and when I did, it was incredibly nonchalant. If I was pressed for a single emotion to sum up that

moment, it was boredom. But a boredom that really wasn't to last. The news hit like a freight train. He had died suddenly, unexpectedly, of some kind of blood clot in his brain. One moment he was healthy and happy, the next, he was announced dead on arrival. The funeral was rough. It sounds cruel to say, but I feel like if a relative is old or has some kind of terminal illness, at least the family and friends have time to prepare to ready themselves for the loss. But with us, we didn't have that time. It was like going 0 to 100 in seconds flat, bored to grief stricken in the time it took to say, I have some bad news. So instead of this kind of unwilling acceptance that has characterized the funerals I've been to in the past, there was just this shell-shocked sense of loss. Like everyone

had taken this one-two punch and were walking around in a daze, unable to quit process the loss that we were feeling. I've never been big on visiting graves either. It sounds a bit callous, but what's the point? It's only ever to comfort the living. The dead don't know we do it, and quite frankly, I would want someone to remember me, sure, but some ritual visitation that brings up all these feelings of mortality and impermanence? Nah, just raise a beer glass for me and that's all I want when I'm gone. But when it came to my dad, I had next to no closure whatsoever. So I ended up going against my own previously held convictions, scrambling for that sense of attachment, desperate to feel like he wasn't really gone. Weekly visits became monthly visits,

all with the same routine. I i drink a can of his favorite lager over his grave talk to him a wee bit about what's going on in my life it never made me really feel any better but i could feel myself taking baby steps along the grief cycle each time i walked away it was helping in a way, but it was still helping. So the little ritual played itself out in exactly the same way, until one day when I saw an unfamiliar man standing near to where he was buried. He was dressed entirely in black, a long coat with a similarly dark umbrella under his arm. It wasn't clear if the man was visiting my father's gravesite or simply one near to it, but as I walked closer, he caught sight of me. He quickly began to walk away from the gravestones and towards one of the cemetery exits. Nothing unusual about that,

right? People are entitled to grieve in privacy, I get that. So I didn't really think anything of it. That was until it happened all over again, in exactly the same way. I put it down to coincidence the second time around, but as the second time became a third time of seeing that same guy standing near the headstones, I started to think something weird was going on. That third time I tried to approach out of sight as quietly as possible. I wanted to figure out if he was really visiting my father's grave, not just one of those close to it. That's the time I realized he was. I watched from a distance as he knelt down near the headstone and touched it for a second. I didn't recognize him from the funeral and although I couldn't exactly see his face,

I knew for certain that he wasn't someone I knew nor someone I'd met before even in passing. My curiosity got the better of me and I made up my mind to get to the bottom of whatever was happening. I kept my stealthy approach, staying light of foot and out of sight as I got closer and closer to the gravesite. But as I leveled with him, he turned, saw me, got this look of pure shock in his eyes then actually started running in the opposite direction of me. I mean hurtling through the graves in the direction of an exit. I just sort of reacted and chased after him. It was that or face the possibility of never getting another chance. After such a confrontational approach, he might never visit my father's

grave again and for the second time, I would be left in the dark with no closure whatsoever. And there was not a single chance that I was going to let that happen again. And so that's how I came to be chasing a guy through a freaking cemetery, running full pelt, screaming at him to stop, how I just wanted to talk to him. The handful of other visitors looked on in a mix of shock and disgust, unable to quite believe how someone could be so disrespectful around the final resting places of so many of their loved ones. But if I'm honest, I really didn't care. I knew that if they were in my place, they'd be doing exactly the same thing. I caught up with the guy

near one of the exits. I actually managed to grab hold of him by the arm at one point, pulling so that the guy was forced to spin around as a result of his own momentum. What I saw made me feel sick to my stomach. The face that I saw, barely covered by the black scarf anymore, was the face of my father. It was identical in every way, only the way he carried himself, minor perceptions of body language and stature, was much different than I remembered. When he spoke, it sent my head swimming. My father was from south of England and his accent reflected that, but this guy had a distinctly Scottish accent. At least, that's what it sounded like. It definitely wasn't my dad. He told me to leave him alone before he took off again, and God help me, I did. My legs were jelly, and not just from the burst

of sprinting that my decidingly unathletic self had seemed to conjure up. I couldn't move, I couldn't bring myself to follow him. After a sit down discussion with my mom, the only thing we can agree upon is that the man must have been my father's identical twin. She had seen his body after all and she had identified him at the morgue and there was no way that he had faked his own death or any of the other overly paranoid things I initially suggested. But as my mom asserted, he had never ever mentioned having a brother, let alone a twin. It's something we're obviously going to look into, as if this guy is who he thinks he is. Some long lost sibling of my dad's, then I'd really like to get in touch with him, soon. For as long as there have been people walking the earth, we have required a place to memorialize our dead.

Whether it be the sky burials of the Native Americans or the fireship funerals of the Vikings, mankind has developed a series of complex ritualistic processes by which we process the loss of our loved ones. Not only that, but we have also found ourselves in need of a place to remember them. A modern age has brought us the burial and marker system that we often call cemeteries or graveyards. There are places shrouded in a deep sense of human mortality, places of profound reverence. One might even go so far as to call them outright sacred. A few find any real comfort in such a place and the natural association with death had led them to be a focal point of horror fiction, both past and present. So quite frankly, I can think of no worse place to meet a grisly end.

The horrific irony of being murdered in a graveyard is one very few of us will have to endure. Yet for these two poor unfortunate souls, that's exactly the cruel fate that the Reaper served up to them. Such is the fate of Jessica Lynn Keene, a 15-year-old girl from Columbus, Ohio. Jessica was an exemplary student and a joy to be around according to friends. An honor student as a result of the hard work that she put into her school work and a cheerleader as a result of the passion she brought to her extracurricular activities. However, as Jessica advanced steadily into her teenage years, her behavior began to change. And not just in the innocent, rebellious manner that most young people

manifest at that time. Jessica became reckless, self-destructive and worryingly wild. She quickly threw in the towel with regards to her cheerleading practice. She stopped hanging out with her regular friends. Teachers noticed her waning attentions in class and naturally her grades plummeted as a result of her lack of focus. After some discussion, her parents decided that her poor behavior was a result of the boy she was seeing, an 18-year-old from Central Ohio by the name of Sean Thompson. There is little doubt that Sean was a bad influence on the young Jessica, as he introduced her to alcohol and cigarettes, something the formerly outgoing girl had eschewed from her entire life. The pair regularly stayed out late together, attending rock shows and hanging around dive bars until they were kicked out for lack of ID.

She came home later and later, drunker and drunker, until her school attendance was badly affected by her inability to get up in the mornings. Her parents despaired over their wayward daughter, trying and failing with every supposed solution they devised to set her back on the straight and narrow. In the end, they decided to take drastic action and placed her very much against her will in a home for troubled teens on the 4th of March, 1991. However, in light of the fact that she most definitely did not want to be there, Jessica quickly began to plot her escape from the girl's home. Then, one chilly March evening, she waited until the staff members' backs were turned before slipping out of the secure building, only a bag with a few meager belongings to her name. Her parents were

livid with those responsible for her care, furious that they could be negligent enough to allow such an escape. They quickly got in touch with Ohio police. Filing a missing persons report expedited as a result of her status as a vulnerable young person. Police contacted Sean Thompson, Jessica's on-and-off boyfriend who lived a few hundred miles away. The pervading theory was that Jessica would somehow find her way back to central Ohio in order to re-night with Sean, but on their arrival, police discovered that not only was Jessica not present at the boy's home, but that he was completely unaware of her escape attempt. It was only then that Columbus P.D. realized how grave the situation was. Tragically, after being missing for merely two

days, Jessica Keene's dead body was located at the rear of Foster Chapel Cemetery, just over 20 miles from the girl's home that she had been forcibly interred at. Jessica had been stripped, assaulted, and severely beaten. She was still wearing her ring and watch, but terrifyingly enough, a pendant that she wore with the word taken on it was nowhere to be found. In a horrendous twist of fate, her on-and-off again boyfriend was the prime suspect of her slaying, but early DNA testing technology proved he was not responsible. Columbus police's main theory was that Jessica had escaped from the girls' school and, without any money to buy a bus ticket, attempted to hitch a ride along the route back to the city. It was then that a car had stopped and that two men had offered her a ride.

Either Jessica had outright refused based on her perception of the driver and passenger, or had become suspicious of the men's intentions and changed her mind about wanting to ride with them. Whatever happened, a foot race had ensued, whereupon Jessica had attempted to escape her pursuers by running into the Foster Chapel Cemetery. Investigators discovered evidence in the cemetery that showed how Jessica had tried to hide behind gravestones. One of her socks was found, and a knee imprint in the mud behind a gravestone was found with or near the discarded sock. She was killed near a fence in the cemetery, presumably by her abductors, who had followed her. A cross with her name on it was placed where her body was discovered near the fence in

the cemetery. On April 9th, 2008, police in Burlington, North Carolina arrested Marvin Lee Smith Jr. based on DNA evidence. Smith was charged with unlawful intimate conduct on Jessica Keene, a felony, and was quickly extradited to Ohio to face the charges. Shockingly, in 2009, Smith admitted to a Madison County courtroom that he in fact had had his way in murder Jessica. Smith told the court that Keene had escaped his car and ran into Foster Chapel Cemetery, where she collided with a fence post and fell. Smith said that he beat Keene to death with a tombstone, then discarded it over the fence nearby.

Reports show that police had indeed found bloodied pieces of a tombstone where Smith had indicated. In exchange for his confession, Smith avoided a death penalty trial that was set for March 2009. He pleaded guilty to one charge of aggravated murder with specifications of defilement and was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison. We can only imagine the final terrifying moments of Jessica Lynn Keene's life, fatally pursued in a place where the concept of death is all-pervading, only to be beaten to death with something that symbolizes our very impermanence. It seems the Grin Reaper has a sick sense of humor. I see there's been a call for creepy or unexplained stories centering around cemeteries.

Well, I mostly definitely have something to offer in that regard. You see, I'm from Hong Kong and I work at Pok Foo Lam Cemetery, one of the most overcrowded burial grounds in the entire world. Constructed in 1882, the private Pok Foo Lam Cemetery on the western side of Hong Kong Island is an absolutely magnificent sight. Even having lived here all my life, its grandiosity is something that has never grown mundane for me. Built into the mountainside and terrace steps and interconnected with staircases, the cemetery resembles a giant outdoor amphitheater.

My story starts just before the festival we call King Ming. Also known as Tomb Sweeping Day, the festival in early April dates back 2,000 years to the Han Dynasty. On this day, families will visit their deceased relatives' grave sites to clean them. This is mainly a show of respect to our ancestors to show how we keep them in our thoughts and prayers, but it is also a status thing, as a family with clean and well-tended graves is the most worthy of prestige. And due to the extreme overcrowding at the cemetery, where some families can pay over $30,000 for the privilege of being buried there, some years we have to do a fair amount of work before the family visits commence,

and sometimes this work is not pretty. So last April I was given the job of moving some remains into newer grave sites to make room for those who had paid vast sums of money for the most attractive burial sites. It's something I'd never done before, and quite frankly, I was actually dreading it. Cultural taboos of moving a person's remains aside, it was apparently some of the hardest, most grueling work for me or my colleagues we would ever have to do. Wrapped up in layers of protective equipment on some of the most humid days of the year, those charged with the task had to be meticulous to be able to move remains up and down hundreds of seats of stairs without losing so much as a speck of dust or bone. And so it came to be that one very early morning I put on my mask, goggles, and forensic suit. We have a name for this in Cantonese, but this is the most accurate

translation, and set about beginning my task. I worked eight hours straight on just breaking the grave seal. Since we have to move the entire grave along with the remains, every piece has to stay intact and undamaged. This is a very old and unkempt grave too, one which the family of the deceased had happily accepted money from a wealthier family for. With the cash injection resulting from this, they could afford to spruce the gravesite up a little, or maybe even keep the money for themselves. But that was unlikely. I could not even read the name on the headstone. It had been worn away by the elements over the years so I was hoping the family would invest in making the grave look like a little more presentable. The next day came the time to actually start bagging up the remains. It was a painstaking process, collecting every individual

bone after breaking through the rotten wooden coffin that housed the body. I came to realize that it's also a very hard task because you're faced with your own mortality. Yes, being around a cemetery all day, five days a week, makes you reflect on death, but our jobs are consumed with the banalities of maintenance and cleaning tasks, and so it's easy to distract oneself with smaller jobs so that the overall theme of death slips quietly into the background. But it's not possible to compartmentalize so effectively when faced with another human's corpse. Picking through this long dead person's bones was horrific. Singling out each little piece of them, placing the pieces into the relevant plastic bag.

It was seeing a human being in their most basic pieces. Like a broken down Lego set that would be impossible to reconstruct. It made me think of how fragile we are. How temporary and fleeting our lives are. Part of us do stick around long after we're dead, just not the pieces we want. Now I feel I need to preface this by saying that I don't believe in the supernatural or the paranormal. I know there is a perfectly rational explanation for what happened to me during this time, but it's an explanation that has thus far escaped me. You see, on the nights after I began performing these tasks, I began to have the strangest dreams. Ones in which I would be working in the cemetery only to be approached by a young woman who was apparently visiting her ancestors' graves. She was very beautiful, tall for a girl in Hong Kong,

and chose to dress in a very traditional Chinese style instead of the western dress that seems to be much more popular here, especially among younger people such as myself. It was a very lucid dream, so lucid that when I awoke, I had the woman's name on my lips. Her name was Li Yanke, and all the next day I couldn't stop thinking about the dream that I'd had about her. The dreams persisted for a few nights, departing and returning as the week dragged on, and I didn't really think anything of it until the time came to restore the engraving and the painting on the tombstone itself. We had to consult old, handwritten databases to discover the name of the person interred in the particular plot. These were huge, thick tomes retrieved from the back of some dusty vault somewhere and if it wasn't for the meticulous organization of these records our job would have taken much much longer to complete. Only when I came to the records of the remains I had been excavating I thought I must have made some kind of mistake.

The family's name, Lee, then the middle name, Jan were the first words I read. Immediately I thought of the reoccurring dream I'd been having, the one with the pretty girl saying hello as she visited her deceased relatives. I dreaded seeing the next word, desperately hoping it wouldn't be K. And thank God that it wasn't. It was Fon. The deceased person I had been moving was named Lee Yeon Fawn. But that wasn't enough to calm me down.

It was still far too much of a coincidence that the family name and middle name of this dream girl and the dead person were exactly the same. The dreams started to abate once the remains had been moved and the grave sealed up again. There were no more nightly visits from Li Yan Ke. I still can't quite explain why I had those dreams, but I'm almost certain that it was just my way of processing the stressful, painstaking process of moving a once-living person's remains. But even when I try to rationalize what happened, I never fail to be intensely creeped out and uncomfortable. I spend a lot of time in a local cemetery. I know, it's weird, but it's a very old place, culturally significant you might say, and sometimes it just suits my sensibilities to be around the dead rather

than the living. One of the weirdest things about this particular cemetery to me is that there's a small section located a little bit off to the side that's filled with lots of really old graves, marked only by three digit numbers. I'm not sure how many there are exactly, but if I recall correctly, I've seen the numbers go up past at least 300. Some of them have a little flag stuck into the ground near them, indicating that they're a veteran of foreign wars, yet no name or dates accompany the number. I never really figured out why they were just numbered and had no identity, but I guess it's just the bodies of people whose names they couldn't identify. Must be horrible to be lost to history like that, just a nameless grave.

In roughly the same area there's a grave that has no number but does have a name, dates of birth and death and birthplace, but it's entirely in Greek. I once took the time to translate the letters using an app on my phone, and it revealed that they were born far away in Lycadia, Greece, and they share a last name and birthplace with another entirely Greek grave located all the way across the cemetery. Thing is, the birthdates are all different, varying from like 1900 to 1983, only the death date is all the same for each name. Hundreds of people died on the same day in much like the nameless graves. I've never quite figured out the story of what happened there. Only I have actually researched it despite Google turning up nothing.

There was also a grave in one of the newer sections that has notes posted next to it from the wife of the man buried there. Not just one note either. On some days there are hundreds of them. All these little posted notes stuck all over the grave, most only bearing a few words of poorly scrawled writing on them. Almost like the woman of the man is continuously coming back to like running conversations with her dead husband. Or I suppose it could be a sister or something. And I suppose I'll never really find out. Also, I've seen things and felt things in my presence while I walked alone between graves. Quick caveat, I do not believe in ghosts. I describe myself as an agnostic person. I don't quite believe in the concept of

God like a lot of people do. Like it's dumb thinking that God is this giant bearded white dude, Santa Claus without the costume, some all-seeing all-knowing presence, but I do believe that there are things in this world that we cannot explain yet. Just like in years before when scientists didn't know why the sun appeared to move around the earth, only that it did. For example, on more than one occasion, I've been looking at a person's grave studying the intricately carved morbid designs, when a bird had suddenly swooped down and landed either on the tombstone or on the grave itself. I've seen cats meowing and pawing at seemingly nothing, like staring intently at something that I'd apparently can't see at all. Again, I'm sure there's a perfectly rational explanation for this, but overthinking it during a graveyard walk can

get pretty intense at times, let me tell you. Okay, so years ago, my dad purchased a cemetery when I was in middle school, and I worked for him through high school graduation. I did yard work, mowing, weeding, tended to flower beds, etc. And aside from the occasional shadows seen out of the corner of my eye or hearing strange sounds, the cemetery was actually quite a peaceful little place. But the strangest is when you have a burial in the crypts. Basically, you dig down about five or six feet to expose a giant pair of stone slab doors. You pull the stone doors off and then drop down into a tiny cold dark room. These rooms can either fit two full-size coffins,

four children's coffins, by far the hardest to deal with, or years and years worth of cremated remains. So back in the 50s and 60s, families would purchase one crypt and the entire family tree would be cremated and interred inside it. Some just put the cremated remains in it and close it up, but others lit candles and leave mementos, flowers and souvenirs, pictures and stuff like that. It's really creepy opening up one of those things after like 50 plus years and finding all kinds of melted candles and old pictures of the deceased people inside. Not only that but when you hop down in there enough times eventually you have a weird realization that you are at the same level and completely surrounded by bodies. And that one day, inevitably, you're

going to be joining them. Another time my best friend and I were earning a little money over summer at the cemetery working as groundskeepers when we were juniors and seniors. It was easy money. We got paid five bucks an hour, mostly for edging or trimming and generally keeping the whole place nice and tidy. We raked a lot of leaves and dug a lot of holes that summer, but we also got to tear around the grounds in what was basically a souped-up golf cart with our tools in the back. There was a lot of dead flowers to dig up, not to mention a lot of empty liquor bottles, beer cans, and unfortunately on occasion, even some used condoms. There was a widow who left scribbled notes on her husband's grave,

almost all of them completely illegible. Also a lot of sodden stuffed animals left on the graves of children. It felt so wrong throwing that stuff in the trash, and take my word on it that it sucked even harder than digging holes. It was annoying to work in the rain and it rained often but it was truly a gravy job, no puns intended. The creepiest thing I saw was one of the old style baby dolls that had been left on a graveyard. Not inherently spooky I know but what creeped us out was the fact that it was badly burned, almost like someone had gone over it with a blowtorch or something. Not just that either, it had what we discovered to be these big iron nails that had been driven into the spaces its eyes should have been. Probably just some local college kids playing a prank or something. Heck, it could have been my buddy but he never admitted to it. It just really creeped

me out to see that thing one early morning when there wasn't another soul in sight. Having said that, there was something far far worse I encountered while doing that job. It was the naked corpse of a young woman my age left neatly with her arms at her sides one foggy Saturday morning. She had been strangled right there. Whoever murdered her had also bludgeoned her horribly. She was identified quickly, and it turned out that she was a student at a neighboring high school, but her clothes were never found and to my knowledge, her murder was never, ever solved. My friend and I were grilled by police on two separate occasions,

and honestly, I think that was the scariest part, knowing we were actually implicated in the murder. But we didn't know a thing, and each had alibis, so thankfully we were eventually rolled out, and thankfully, the cops never bothered us anymore. I just pray that she's resting in peace. Former funeral director here. A bit of a setup first.

The cemetery I run is real old, like by a good few hundred years. At least it must be since the church next to it was constructed during the 17th century. Considering the fact that it is a pretty rural place as well, most people back in the day were buried with only wooden crosses and such, no stone or marble. So as time goes on, crosses rot and wither away, new people get buried, etc. Nowadays, due to less people living out here in the sticks, which means our budget is increasingly limited, the cemetery is really run down and overgrown. It is a really pretty place, and it's honestly pretty depressing. So that's something you can imagine, when you keep burying bodies in the same small patch of dirt for that many centuries,

eventually the soil has been worked over dozens and dozens of times. So in the end, it consists of mainly bone meal. You can't even rake over the flower beds there without accidentally uncovering some teeth or finger bones or something equally grim. It's nothing but fragmented skeletons all the way down under the thin turf. The soil sort of resembles the kind of dirt you see near sandy beaches, except on closer examination all the light colored parts are just bone fragments rather than crushed seashells. Not really scary or unexpected, just super eerie until you eventually get used to it. You learn to treat anything recognizable as human remains with respect and just

tuck it away out of sight under the plant or whatever else you were putting there. Anyway, so someone was taking care of their relative's grave and decided to expand the area around the grave. For some reason, the people around her are not particularly fond of grass, rather preferring a well-leveled ground with zen garden lines made with a rake. The person removed the grass and was sprucing up the place with a rake when they pulled up a bunch of snow-white hair from the dirt. They must have just freaked out and ran out of there, leaving the cemetery attendant to

stumble across what was essentially hair coming out of the ground. She reported it to the church and supposedly they reburied the remains. Even with all my years as an undertaker, I'm not entirely sure how there could have been a body so close to the surface, but there's another incident that sticks with me even more than that one. My business partner and I had just gotten back to the funeral home from a call for a 27-year-old woman who tragically passed away due to terminal cancer. As we were moving her body from the cot to an embalming table, we heard an audible click and the radio across the room turned on full volume of static. It's one of those old radios you turn the volume dial until it clicks to turn it on. We both looked at each other, pale as ghosts.

He happened to be extremely religious and this event visibly shook him. He found an excuse to leave early, not long after the incident. So I shut the radio off as I typically use my iPhone to listen to music while doing embalming work. When I'd finished the procedure and was attempting to move her from the embalming table to a dressing table, I heard that click from the old radio and it turned on full volume yet again. At this point I was fairly freaked out and got out of there not long after. My partner and I never spoke of it again and nothing like that had ever occurred to my knowledge before or after. The weird thing about dating someone with a mental illness is that they can seem like an otherwise normal person. At least until they snap in whatever way they do.

This happened to me with a girl I dated back in high school. We didn't go to the same school though. She went to our neighbor rival school. There was something of a friendly competition between our two schools. Believe it or not, we actually met at a football game. Anyway, I ended up dating this girl. It was sad because she was actually a really nice person, but her mental illness made her extremely unbearable. She wouldn't get into this extremely depressive and anxious mood, and then would act really strange. It would come about from the most random stuff. I had previously been dating a girl for about two years, even before I was in high school, and I totally had a crush on her for a long time before that. Things ended when I found out that she had tried sleeping with one of my friends,

and thankfully my friend put bros before hoes and let me know about it immediately. But yeah, I had just stopped with that relationship, so I was in need of a good rebound. And that's where this girl comes in. We'll call her Erica. It was a few weeks after I had been single. I was at this football game just trying to pass the time. That was when I looked over and saw the perfect goth girl. She wasn't overly goth or anything. She didn't even have any piercings or tattoos that I knew of, but she gave off that vibe if that makes any sense. I had always been interested in girls like that so I made eye contact with her, got her phone number and texted her that night. The thing that really made me like her was that she played Xbox.

How many times do you ever get a cute girl's number and she also plays video games? I wasn't sure if I was going to ask her out until that point but she told me her gamer tag was badchickx42 and I knew I had to go for it. I was normally more careful about vetting girls than I planned on dating but I figured it would make for a good time. Worst case scenario, I broke up with her because I didn't like her and then I never saw her again. I tell you all this backstory so you can get a good picture of what me and Erika had going on. It was very relaxed, it wasn't serious and I never once got the idea from her that things were a big deal. She also told me that she had really bad anxiety. When she told me I didn't think much of it. I figured that everyone

gets anxious once in a while and I had no idea how bad her anxiety actually got. I remember there being this one day when I had a field trip in my school. It was as lame as you can imagine but it beat sitting in class so I signed up and was looking forward to the day when it came. The night before the field trip I didn't text Erica which was unusual because we normally text each other every night, sometimes into the early hours of the morning. I just wasn't feeling it that night. I was kind of sad and I just wanted to be alone and eat pizza rolls while I watched that 70s show. The next day came around and I forgot that it was the day of the field trip. I wasn't quite dressed to walk around, I had my jeans on, but it wasn't the day of the field trip. I wasn't quite dressed to walk around,

I had my jeans on, but it wasn't the end of the world. Me and two of my best friends sat together on the bus and waited to get there. I think there were about three or four buses from our school that left. It was a pretty big field trip and I think just about everyone in my school went. Now, on to the interesting part. I saw my ex-girlfriend on the field trip. She went to my school by the way. It was around lunch time and she approached me. She tried apologizing for being a bad girlfriend back in the day and tried to actually get back together with me. I wasn't a jerk toward her but I did tell her no. I told her that I would never be able to trust her again.

About a day or two later she reached out to me again but this time she asked me if I knew someone. A gothic looking girl. I guess this gothic looking girl had approached my ex-girlfriend and asked for a whole bunch of questions. I immediately knew it was Erica. I told my ex not to worry about it and that she wouldn't be hearing from this goth girl again. At this point I felt uneasy about the whole situation. It just seemed like a really strange thing to do. Again what me and Erica had was not very serious and the fact that she was kind of stalking me made me feel really anxious. I only knew her for a couple of weeks at this point and if this was what she was going to do, where is this possibly going to lead? I talked to her about it. She straight up admitted to stalking me while I was on the field trip. She said that she felt anxious

about me cheating on her because I didn't text her the night before. Then she told me that she took a couple of pictures of me talking to my ex-girlfriend. She told me that she had somehow found her and confronted her. I felt really anxious at this point and tried not to act shocked. The entire time I couldn't help but think about how much I regretted asking her for her cell phone number and this is where things seriously got out of hand. I guess you could tell by my facial expression that I was really freaked out and that's when she decided to threaten me. She looked me right in the eyes and said that she would kill me if I told anyone. I know what you're thinking.

It doesn't sound as bad as it was. If you could see the look in her eyes when she said that to me, you would have been anxious about it too. I continued texting her and acting like nothing happened for a couple more days. She apologized and said that she gets carried away sometimes. And I gave it about a week before I just kind of straight up blocked her. She really freaked out. I knew I was taking some kind of risk when I did so. I wasn't sure if she was

serious when she said that she was actually going to kill me or not. I remember being really paranoid for a couple of days. She didn't know where I lived but she knew where I went to school and she had the ability to track down someone that she only had a picture of. I have no idea how she tracked down my ex-girlfriend just from seeing her one time and having one picture of her. The scary part of the story is that she told me that she would end my life and then end herself. She sent it to me as a message and I read it through email so I'm not sure how serious she was about it. All I know is that she is an extremely capable person. Again, just think about how much went into finding my ex-girlfriend or even stalking me on the field trip in the beginning.

You couple that level of capability with someone who is seriously mentally unhinged and you throw a violence threat as icing on the cake and you got yourself a real recipe for disaster. I really don't want to say anything to anyone because I know that if the word gets out, my reputation could potentially be ruined. People would think that I'd be the kind of person to run and hide and start crying at the first instance of a small goth girl threatening me. I know that's not how the situation is, but I know that's how people would react to it if they heard. It's been a while since I've had any form of communication with Erica.

I blocked her email, phone number, and every social media account you can imagine. I'm just hoping that she can let sleeping dogs lie and let me live my life. And as worried as I am about it, I still feel bad for her. I really hope she gets the help that she so desperately needs. I don't remember very much about the story. It happened when I was very young, but looking back, it may have been one of the most horrifying in my life. We were going to visit the panda bears in Washington, D.C. They were going to be so cool.

I remember our entire class looking forward to the field trip for weeks before it actually happened. The day of the field trip, I was in awe. I've never actually seen panda bears in person, and I just remember being so mesmerized by everything. The first half of the day went by in a way that you might imagine. After about 40 minutes looking at the panda bears, that got kind of old and we moved on to something else. We started looking at some of the other animals and I remember looking at all of them and wondering how these animals even existed without me knowing about it. I remember just sitting there for a long time and just staring at these animals because I knew that it was going to be a long time before I ever got a chance to see them again. I know, I know,

I was a pretty weird kid. We got lunch and then moved on to some more animal observing. We ended up breaking off into smaller groups. There weren't very many of us, so there was about 5 groups of 3. I was with one of my friends and his grandfather who was one of the nicest old men I'd ever met in my life. He was so nice that he bought me cotton candy when I didn't have enough money myself. But either way, back to the story. Everyone was having a really good time. But when we got into groups, my friend's grandfather was a little bit slower and not as observant over us kids. I'm not saying that he was negligent or

anything, definitely not, but he wasn't staring at us the entire time like some of the teachers were. And for that reason, something pretty weird happened to me. I remember standing over by the snakes and looking in and being amazed. As much as they frightened me, I knew that I wasn't in any real danger so it was pretty cool. I vividly remember there being this one really long snake that had a really colorful design to it. I was staring at it when I noticed something that pulled my attention away. It was a man a few feet away from me taking pictures. Now there weren't very many other people around and it was weird the way his camera was angled.

I assumed that he was trying to take pictures of the snake but for some reason he was standing in a position where I was between him and the snakes. It was like I was getting in the way. Without really thinking about it I moved out of the way like the polite little kid I was. I didn't want to ruin his pictures, but that's when he followed me. He kept taking pictures of me and it was hands down one of the creepiest things that had ever happened to me. Keep in mind, this guy literally had sunglasses on and a mustache. I don't even know how he managed to get into the zoo looking like that, but he did. And he was following me around for a good while, taking pictures of me, and being a naive little kid, I didn't think anything nefarious of it at the time.

The whole concept of child predators was very foreign to me. I'd never really heard anything about that due to my parents kind of sheltering me for most of my life. He said in this really, really creepy voice, take a pose. And that's exactly what I did. I started acting like a model for him. Again, I didn't really think anything bad of him at this point. In fact, I was under the impression that I was going to be a supermodel. I mean, if you rule out the predator aspect, why else would some random stranger be taking pictures of me? That was my childlike mindset. I remember hearing my friend's grandfather whistle for us to get back over by him, and I did. I looked at the man who had been taking pictures of me really quickly before I left, though.

I told him that my name was Jen and I told him that I wanted my supermodel name to be Jenny Fabulous. I ran back over to my friend's grandfather and we started making our way to the next exhibit. I don't think he had noticed the man who had been taking pictures of me and a couple more hours went by and we were wrapping it up for the day. We were going to see the very last thing which was going to be the lions. We had gotten back into our class group so all of the teachers and students were together. This is when that creepy photographer man started noticing me again. He began taking pictures of me in front of the lion exhibit just like he had earlier.

Again, I started striking some more poses as you might expect. That was when one of the teachers started getting involved. She motioned for one of the teachers to take me away while she said something in a very stern tone of voice to that man. They were really good teachers and were looking out for my well-being so I don't actually know what was said to that man. All I know was that we didn't spend very much time looking at the lions. It was only a few minutes later that we got back on the bus and got back home. It was only years later that I was telling a friend of mine about it when I was in high school and then it dawned on me. That creepy old man was a child predator and he was taking pictures of me

in hopes of finding me again or possibly doing something horrible to me, maybe even selling those photos. Again, I don't know what exactly my teachers had said or done but my parents found out about the situation. I don't know what happened to that man but thankfully I never heard from him again. This story happened when I was just a little girl. I think it was in the third grade, and I remember the day like it was yesterday. In fact, I don't really remember very much else about that time period. Anyway, I was your pretty average Catholic schoolgirl. I was nice to everyone and came from a pretty good home.

The day that it happened was on a field trip. We went to one of those old historic home kinds of places. It was used as some kind of base during the Revolutionary War or something like that. I don't exactly remember what, but I vividly remember making some cornbread the old-fashioned way. That was a really fun experience. Makes me kind of sad that one of the most traumatic experiences of my life happened on the same day. What I want you to understand, though, is that the school itself was very small. I was one of twelve students in this class. It was a fairly expensive school, and that's how it was able to operate that way. All things

considered, I actually got a really good education there. The thing about coming from a small school is that you have a very tight-knit community of students, parents, and teachers. There were very few security checks or anything like that, especially when it came to something like one of these field trips. Well, I guess one of the boys in the class had an uncle. He just happened to tag along on the field trip along with his nephew and nobody batted an eye. Like I said, it was a very trusting community of people, at least until the day this happened, because I'm pretty sure the rules changed after this.

The kid's uncle was very strange. He had a really weird mustache and had these creepy sunglasses that covered his eyes in a way that you couldn't tell where he was looking. He may have been looking in a completely different direction, or he may have been looking right in your eye. He never really knew. And that became a problem for me early on in the day. I remember when we were lined up outside of the buses. There he was, just standing there. It seemed like he was looking right at me and I remember thinking to myself that it would have been really weird if he was.

I immediately looked around to see if I was doing something wrong. Being an innocent kid and all, I assumed that I must have dropped something out of my book bag or something. I didn't though, and I continued standing there, feeling the weight of his gaze on my body. I kept glancing in his direction every couple of seconds to see if he was still looking at me. I really couldn't tell, but I felt like he was. My first impression that he was going to be one of those overbearing and overprotective helicopter parents that comes along and ruins the trip for everyone. Like he was watching out for one of us to make a mistake so he could call us out on it. That first impression was dead wrong. When we got to the house, we split everyone up into groups.

There was maybe 50 or 60 people there all together and we thought the best way to go about it was to have everyone get into groups of five. That way, there would be one adult with four kids. It worked out perfectly that way. Of course, I ended up with this guy's creepy uncle and his menacing sunglasses. He barely said a word the entire time. I remember looking over at the other groups who had a fun parent with him. This guy was just weird. He seemed like his mind was somewhere else and it's only after everything happened that I knew exactly where his mind was. It wasn't very long before he did something that crossed

many lines. As we were waiting in line to see one of the older historic exhibits, he started to pet my hair. I remember being so weirded out. I remember looking back at him and giving him one of those, the heck are you doing, kinds of facial expressions. He just smiled at me. He did that and a couple of other extremely odd things to me. I don't think any of it crossed the line to assault, but he did some pretty strange touching. Little things like petting my hair, adjusting my shirt, and other stuff that just made me extremely uncomfortable. It was so obvious that he was more interested in me than any of the other kids. He practically ignored his nephew, and he paid no mind to the other kids in the group. Thankfully for my sake, that was the extent of my day with him.

One of the teachers caught on to this very strange behavior and pulled this guy aside. He then claimed that there was an emergency at the mechanic shop that he worked in and had to leave immediately. Of course, I know in retrospect that he was an emergency at the mechanic's shop that he worked in and had to leave immediately. Of course, I know in retrospect that he was probably threatened with some kind of legal action. It's been years since all of this went down, and I found something out very recently that truly shocked me. Well, I still keep in touch with that one friend of mine. I was talking to him on Facebook and we were reminiscing about our days in Catholic school. I asked him about his uncle because I randomly remembered it and he said that his uncle was in jail for a few more months and was actually about to be released that week.

I asked him what he was in for and what he proceeded to tell me chilled me to the bone. I guess his uncle had been caught with illicit pictures of children on his computer. It was truly disturbing. I don't think he ever acted on his desires in the real world. I'm pretty sure they would have locked him up for good and thrown away the key if he did but just the thought that someone who was a confirmed predator had touched me like that as a child makes me feel sick to my stomach. So yeah, the moral of the story is no matter how small or close your little community is, there is always the potential for bad actors to enter the scene and forever change the trust amongst everyone else. This happened a very long time ago to me and my best friend at the time.

We'll call him Steven. Me and Steven had been very rebellious kids growing up. We both came from single mother homes and spent most of our time doing things that we knew we probably shouldn't be doing. When we were in 7th or 8th grade, I can't remember anymore, we went on a field trip. Now we live in a small town and it was as boring as you might imagine. But the field trip was to New York City. This is going to be the trip of our lives, or so we thought. For a couple of days leading up to the trip, we talked about all

the stuff that we were going to buy and it was going to be amazing. Nobody was more excited for this trip than we were. When the day for the field trip finally came, it was actually really bad weather. The rain was pretty bad and was also a little foggy for some reason. Suffice to say, the visibility was actually a lot lower than it usually was, which is going to be important later in the story. The teachers told us before we even set foot on the bus that we had to stick with the class. They told us that we could walk with our friends if we wanted to, but that we all had to kind of stay together. Me and Stephen thought this was lame, and again, we were those rebellious kinds of kids, so I'm sure you know where this is headed.

We actually didn't want to break away from the group right away, but the teachers refused to bring us to the store we wanted to go to, literally a store for aspiring rappers. Oh, and if you're wondering, yes, I'm out of that phase by now. Steven isn't, but thankfully I am at least. We were convinced that we needed to buy some equipment to launch our rap careers. And looking back, I don't know what we thought we were going to even buy in there. We both had about $20 or $30 each, and all the recording equipment and stereos and whatnot were easily in the hundreds of dollars. But we weren't the brightest of kids, I guess you could say.

About 15 minutes later, we hashed our plan secretly. We were going to just sneak off when no one was looking and sneak our way back into the group after we got what we wanted. We figured that because there were so many students on the trip, then we were going to be fine and nobody was going to notice. And that's when we did it. We waited until the entire class was crossing the street and we just kept walking on the sidewalk that we had been on. It took us a very long time to actually find the wrap store that we wanted to go to. But we eventually found it and it was as disappointing as you might imagine. Walking into a store when you want to buy everything but you can only afford a pack of gum.

After making the walk of shame out of the store we realized that it was time to find our class again. Now it's probably important to note how obvious it was that we were young. I said that we were in the 7th or 8th grade. We looked even younger than 7th or 8th graders. We probably looked like we could have been the oldest kids in the elementary school. Stephen was really short, maybe around 5 foot 2 and I was only a little bit taller than he was. We were also carrying around backpacks which made it even more obvious that we were kids. So there we were, walking around the streets of New York City wandering aimlessly in hopes of finding our class. This was probably our worst mistake because we eventually wandered off into one of the sketchier parts of the city.

Have you ever gone from a nice part of the city where the tourism happens and then you find yourself in the run-down part of the city where you roll up your windows because you might get shot? It's a really weird experience and to be so young and to go through it without a car made it especially memorable. Me and Steven had no idea what we were going to do and that was when a strange man started following us. He was a lot older. He had to have been at least 50 or so. He was very overweight and just gave off one of the creepiest vibes you could imagine. He started telling us that he lost his dog and that he needed help finding it. Surprisingly enough, we did decline helping him because we were a little worried since he was so sketchy. We just told him that

we were too busy looking for our class. Again, another stupid move on our parts. That was when he started getting closer and closer to us. Me and Steven gave each other one good look and knew that we had to run, especially because this was one of the parts of the city that not many people were around. If this guy really wanted to get us and do something horrible, he could have probably brought us into an alleyway and done whatever he wanted, and nobody would have known or seen it. But by a stroke of luck, we managed to sprint our way back to the populated part of the city. There was a lot of people around and we looked back around to see

if he had followed us. Neither one of us had actually turned around while we were running. We didn't see him, but we still felt really uneasy. We were leaning against the wall trying to catch our breath when we saw him again. He grabbed Stephen by the arm and started yanking on him. I remember being so horrified and not knowing what to do. Thankfully, Stephen started screaming at the top of his lungs and someone had intervened and told the creep to buzz off and let Stephen go. He didn't put up much of a fight, just kind of let Stephen go and started to walk off as if though nothing had happened. We also lucked out because our class just happened to be within an earshot distance and heard Stephen screaming. I guess one of the teachers had recognized his voice.

They got back over with us and the teachers were so angry as you might imagine. We got in a lot of trouble for breaking away from the group, especially because that really put us in harm's way. I remember one of the male teachers going on this massive rant about the stupidity of our decision. He told us that if we had been a little less lucky that day, we both could have ended up dead. This turned out to be a really big event in my personal life because that was when I kind of straightened out and stopped it acting so rebellious all the time. It's a little sad that something so traumatic was what straightened me out but if it happened to you,

I'm sure you would feel the exact same way. Because now I have this really strong association with breaking the rules and possibly ending up dead or kidnapped. I know it's not logical and doesn't actually make sense, but I guess that's the impression something like this leaves on you. But anyway, that's the story of how me and my best friend Steven were nearly kidnapped by a creepy old man when we visited New York City a long time ago. This is hands down one of the worst things that's ever happened to me, and yet ruined a day that could have otherwise been one of the happiest of my life. I was friends with someone named Jack in middle school and high school. He was a strange guy.

He always seemed to get along much better with girls than he did guys, but it wasn't like he was flirting with the girls. He was just better at being friends with them. I now know in retrospect that he was gay, and it explains everything perfectly. But at the time, I just thought he was really good at talking to girls. I first became close with him when I had a study hall class with him. The teacher was extremely rude for absolutely no reason.

There was this one time when she told me and Jack to stop talking because other students were trying to work and not ten minutes later she called one of her friends to gossip about something that happened on Facebook. She didn't even leave the room or talk quietly or anything. She just blabbered on about her cousin's horrible Facebook post. That was when me and Jack knew that we had to make our mission to troll this teacher and make her life horrible. And that's how me and Jack became close. We would leave a whoopee cushion on her chair, throw out some of the papers inside of her desk and other little things like that. It never amounted to malice on our part but it just felt kind of like revenge at least in our eyes. And this was one of the first times that I really noticed something about Jack. He loved doing stuff like this. I'm not sure you could call it a streak of rebellion or what but he definitely loved to make people feel bad.

Maybe you could call him something of a sadist. Not to an extreme degree or anything like that. Bad enough that it's not an accurate description. Anyway, he came out of the closet sometime in high school during her sophomore year. I was still friends with him, though not as close as we had been when we trolled that teacher. We kind of fell out of contact and stopped hanging out as much after that study hall ended. I was really supportive when he came out of the closet, though. I always had a lot of sympathy for that community. I never quite understood all of the hate that they got, but I just knew it was a really difficult thing to be openly gay.

We were in New York State so people were more accepting than they otherwise would have been. Jack wasn't rejected or denounced by anyone as far as I knew. There were definitely a few guys who were jerks about it, it was still high school after all, but all in all we lived in a fairly progressive town. Toward the end of our sophomore year there was going to be one big field trip and everyone looked forward to it. It was going to be a trip to Disney World and we stayed for a couple of days, like the entire class or whoever went at least. Those kinds of theme parks always seem kind of lame otherwise because you can only go with your

family. I know that might be bad to say but I always thought those family trips were boring no matter where we went. I always just wanted to go with my friends. I thought that was the best time and I knew that this was probably going to be the only chance I had to do that. The trip didn't go at all as I had planned. Most of my friends couldn't even go because they were failing a class. I ended up only being able to hang out with Jack. He was pretty much the only person I knew who went on the trip so I just kind of stuck with him unless I wanted to be alone the entire time, which would have been horrible. But something I didn't really expect happened. When I started hanging out with Jack, he wanted us to ditch his friends. He just wanted it to be me and him which

I thought was pretty weird because I didn't think much of it. The rest of the day went by pretty good. We started pulling innocent pranks on people. It was actually a really fun time. I remember him saying something about it being like how we had done back in study hall. It honestly brought me back to those days too. All in all it was a great day. But then the time came to go back to the hotel. This was when things got weird because I noticed that when we started winding down for the day Jack and his mood seemed a lot different than they had been throughout the day. I don't exactly know how to explain it but it made me pretty uncomfortable to say the least and I don't mean like I to explain it, but it made me pretty uncomfortable to say the least.

And I don't mean like I was in danger kind of uncomfortable, but it was more awkward than anything. After all, outside of that day, me and Jack really weren't that close. And seeing him in such a different way made things a little awkward for me at least. But the night went on. Me and Jack ended up rooming together. The teacher said that we had to be in doubles and once we had an accountability partner we were going to be sharing a hotel room in the back of my mind I got nervous that Jack was gonna try something but I chalked it up to me just being randomly paranoid everything went as you might expect and we went to sleep in our separate beds but there was some point throughout the night that he woke me up. I don't know what came over him but he came to my bed and started doing things

of a certain intimate nature. I don't really want to go into too many details and quite frankly, I think they're pretty disturbing. On top of that, I don't really want to think about it too much. It was kind of traumatic for me. And suffice to say, I was assaulted by him while I was still half asleep. Took me a while to understand what was even going on. I'm a really deep sleeper, so it was really weird. I didn't want to tell anyone because I was worried that people were going to think that I was gay. I know that's probably a horrible thing to think, that I was more worried about my own reputation than my own well-being, but I guess that's how it is with high schoolers and how they think at the end of

the day. The rest of the trip was horribly awkward between the two of us. I tried changing out partners, but the teachers wouldn't allow it, so I was stuck hanging out with Jack the rest of the time. I didn't really say all that much to him. On the second half of the last day he just straight up ditched me and I was left by myself at the snack bar. I just ate food. We haven't really had any contact since. I moved away to go to college and I don't have any plans on going back to my hometown. My parents retired in Florida anyway so I don't really have a reason to go back.

Especially not if Jack is there. One of my biggest problems is that I attract the weirdest kinds of people. There are a lot of people who say that but you have no idea until you've met some of the people that try to hang out with me. There was one guy who took the cake though. His name was Jonathan. He lived down the road from my parents house. This was years ago and thankfully I hadn't had anything to do with him in a very long time. I was your average looking girl. I was in high school at the time and I was extremely naive. I've had a couple of really bad experiences. I've kind of been shown the true horror of the world firsthand. Not trying to turn this into a pity party or anything but you don't realize how cruel the world is until horrible things happen to you. and if you were idealistic about people the way I was you'll just have to live through some bad

experiences to find out. But anyway back when I was a sophomore in high school and extremely naive about people and their intentions I was friends with Jonathan. I thought that he was kind of a nerdy guy but that he was capable of being a friend bear in mind he was a 30 year old who lived with his grandmother who collected social security he didn't have a job didn't have a girlfriend and he thought it was a good idea to hang out with a girl in high school that lived down the street that's the kind of guy Jonathan was I wasn't really close with my parents so they didn't really know anything about who I hung out with. I didn't hang out with Jonathan very much but

I would say hi to him and have the occasional conversation from time to time. Looking back, I knew that he had some kind of crush or romantic feeling for me but I knew that it would be against the rules for him to date me and I knew that he knew that too. But I remember when I got my first boyfriend, Jonathan was not exactly happy about it. He kept warning me about being used by boys my age. He told me that I should look for an older man who was more mature and could take care of me. Of course, he was always hinting that I should have been with him. He didn't want to come out and say it though, but every single time I ever talked about my boyfriend, who had only been dating for two weeks or so,

Jonathan always had something bad to say or some kind of warning. I remember getting the whole possibly catching something from him talk from my parents, only to get it again from Jonathan. I specifically remember the way he phrased the conversation. He talked as if though my boyfriend definitely had some sort of disease and by the way he didn't. It was a very strange ordeal nonetheless. But then came the day before our field trip. It wasn't a big trip or anything. My school was divided into certain sections and it was an annual event where the science department would take certain sections

of students down to the park and help us scientifically observe nature. For three days the scientific department would take a third of the students down in this park. It was pretty stupid. Everyone kind of agreed that it was just a nice way to get out of those horrible classrooms that we sit in all day. Outside Science Day, that's what we called it. I remember Jonathan asking about Outside Science Day. He asked what day I was going to be in the park. I told him and I was scheduled to go Wednesday. I didn't think anything of it. After all, he did go to the same high school I went to and it was kind of a tradition. I thought that he was just kind of curious or reminiscing. Why was I wrong? Wednesday came and I was really excited to be going down to the park. I was hanging out with

my best friend Rebecca. We got down there and started observing nature. The teachers made me bring notepads and pencils to make some scientific observations, but after a few sentences they didn't care what we did after that. The teachers sat by the picnic tables and drank lemonade, and us students were pretty much free to do whatever we wanted. Me and Rebecca were having a deep conversation about life. She said something about her stepfather and how it made her feel like marriage was a bad idea or something. I don't really remember, it was a very long time ago. I just remember being 100% engaged in this conversation with Rebecca.

And all of a sudden, I felt a hand touch my shoulder. I thought it was one of my friends playing a joke on me or something but I turned around and it was Jonathan. Things got extremely awkward really fast. Me and Rebecca were kind of in the middle of it and here was my awkward older neighbor showing up at my school class trip. Jonathan asked me if I wanted to go back with him to hang out at his house for a little while. I told him that I would get in trouble but he promised that the teachers would never find out by this point I knew exactly what he was doing and I wasn't about to play into that I told him that I couldn't leave my best friend Rebecca but then he offered to bring Rebecca too and that was even creepier I remember getting a look from Rebecca like,

why do you know this freak? After Jonathan kept pleading with us, me and Rebecca finally decided to just walk back to our teachers and hope that Jonathan would get the hint. But when we started walking through, Jonathan grabbed me. He grabbed me by the ankle and I fell to the ground. We were standing on wood chips and I remember getting some in my mouth when I fell. He started dragging me. We were far enough from the teachers that they couldn't see us easily and our view was mostly obstructed from the rest of the students by a swing set. So nobody noticed that this grown man was dragging me away. I lucked out in the end.

Rebecca actually started fighting him. She punched him in the nose and started screaming for the teachers. Right after she did that, Jonathan started running. He ran as fast as I've ever seen anyone run away in my life. I didn't realize how quick he actually was. The teachers asked about the incident and questioned me as to whether or not I knew this man. I told them that I didn't. It turned into a giant headache. They called the police and everything. I told the police that it was just a stranger and then I was as vague as I could be when I described him. For some reason I felt like I would get in trouble if they knew it was Jonathan. Now, I understood that I should have reported him to the police, but I foolishly didn't at my naive age. The experience turned into a good thing for Rebecca too.

She always bragged about punching a grown man in the face and him running away. I was pretty sure that Jonathan was running because he didn't want the teachers to see him, and not because Rebecca's punch necessarily hurt him that bad. But I never told Rebecca that. After that incident, Jonathan never showed his face anywhere near me ever again. I think he was familiar enough with my schedule that he knew when I got on and off the bus and he just stayed away from me. That was the first time in my life that I was faced with this sort of dark reality. The sad reality that someone who claimed to be my friend

actually had very dark and sinister intentions all along and anyone with two eyes could have seen. If you're like me, do yourself a favor and be more cynical about people. At least that way the only surprises will be good ones. When I was much younger I was considered one of the popular girls. You would think that this would be an amazing privilege. For everyone to look at you and think that you were the best looking person in the room most of the time, to get all the attention from the guys that you could ever want, and sometimes even making other girls jealous felt kind of good. But let me tell you the truth about it. It really sucks.

More often than not, I felt kind of bad for the girls who weren't as pretty as me, and I also felt bad for having to constantly reject a bunch of guys who were trying to date me. This was especially bad in high school. I got hit on all the time. It honestly became very distracting. I hadn't had a boyfriend up until that point, and it really went out of my way to be a good girl. I always thought that if I just dated any guy that tried to pick me up, I wouldn't get the best guy that I could. So I just waited until I found a guy that I thought was worthwhile. I spent most of my time with my best friend Destiny. Me and her were really close, but I remember she almost got kind

of jealous when I finally got something of a boyfriend. Me and this boy, Jake, never actually dated, but we were talking, for lack of a better term. It was one of those situations where people kind of knew that we were somewhat romantically involved. Like, we would talk on the phone at night and sometimes bring each other gifts to school, things like that. People always blew it out of proportion, but it was what it was. I remember Destiny being very disapproving of Jake. She said that he was a loser and that I could do way better than him. He definitely would have not seemed like the first guy to have gone after. At first, he isn't the best looking guy in the world, but I think he's really cute.

Or at least I did at the time. I thought his real redeeming quality was that he was the most compassionate guy I'd ever met. Unlike most guys, he actually listened to me when I spoke. I felt like he really heard me, and that was a heck of a lot more than could be said of any other guy that ever tried to date me before. And if I'm going to be honest I felt more heard by him than anyone I'd ever met up until that point. The sad part was that Jake had quite a few issues. He wasn't just something of a loner, he also had this dark and mysterious side that I didn't really know anything about. Even to this day I don't really know what was wrong with him,

I just know that there is something about him that isn't quite right. Looking back, I was extremely naive to not have seen the signs before. He was disliked by so many people and it wasn't like your standard reaction where people think he's awkward or something. He totally was, but there was something else that was completely off about him. Even my dog had a bad reaction when I brought him to my house one time and as anyone should know if a dog doesn't like you then there is really something wrong with you. Anyway nothing bad really happened between us until we had a field trip one day. Our entire grade was going to a theme park about 30 minutes away. It was supposed

to be a really fun thing. As long as we stayed in small groups of at least three, we could pretty much go wherever or do whatever we wanted. The idea of not having to be followed around by a teacher all day was extremely enticing. On the day of the field trip, it ended up being me and Jake and Destiny in a group of three. He really wanted us to ditch Destiny so we could go and have some fun but I wasn't about to do that to my best friend nor did I really want to do anything like that with him on this field trip. Most of the day went by and it was actually pretty fun. There was one point when I had walked by a water slide. Some of the kids who were riding on

it splashed some of the water and got me completely soaked. I had a spare shirt in my book bag and I went to the girls locker room to change. But this is where things got weird. There was no one in the girls locker room. I went in there and started to change and then I heard someone else walk in. I just assumed it was another girl or a woman. It was a pretty crowded day after all, but no, it was Jake. He started touching me very inappropriately. I told him that I really wanted to do stuff with him, but just not under these kind of circumstances. But he wasn't getting the hint, and it really started to freak me out. I could feel it in his pants rubbing against my leg. His breath got heavier and heavier, and he got himself really worked up.

Finally, I just had to yell at him to stop. I told him that he was really freaking me out, and I just got the rest of my clothes, and I walked out. But he didn't follow me. He just let me leave. I stood outside of the girls' room for a few minutes waiting for him to come out. But it was a little while before he did, probably close to five minutes. As you might imagine, I was not excited to go back in there and get him. Destiny

also gave me a look when I came out. I told her that Jake was in there, but I didn't tell her what he was doing. She just asked why he was in the girls locker room at all. I couldn't think of a good excuse. I didn't want to tell her that he was being a complete and total creep with me that day. Destiny was fed up because she wanted to go buy a pretzel. She knocked on the girls locker room door and told Jake that he needed to come out right now. We stood there for a few seconds and we all heard some strange grunting noises. It was honestly really awkward and me and Destiny just stood

there and looked at each other. Jake finally made out one last grunting noise and a few seconds later walked outside. He didn't say a word. He was kind of out of breath and it was one of the most awkward moments of my life. We told him that we were going to get a pretzel and he just shook his head. He slowly followed behind us as we made our way to the snack bar. At the time I don't think I consciously knew it but now that I'm a little older, I think I have a pretty good idea of what he was doing in there. As you might imagine, that was the end of mine and Jake's

little romance. That was the creepiest thing I've ever seen anyone do, and it was so shocking coming from him. I felt like I'd spent so much time getting to know him only to find out that he was even creepier than all the other guys. To be continued... takes about 7 minutes to do when I notice something was off. I didn't see anything at first but I just knew that something was wrong. So my brother and I start walking home as the only two who got off at our stop were him and I. This blue and silver beat up truck drives past us and I think nothing of it. It never slowed down or stopped, it just kept going. Alex and I were holding hands as my grandmother always told me to do with him as he's my baby brother and I want nothing to happen to him. Nothing happens at first but then the same truck drives around again, driving our way this time. There was a cul-de-sac

at the end of our road. He was driving slower this time and went up the road and turned out of sight. Now Alex and I were nearing the three-way intersection that connected the cul-de-sac road to the other side's road, right off the main road the man had just drove down. I happened to look down the street and see the truck driving, real slow, down the street towards us again. I knew we had to run. I knew there was no other option. I knew that if we didn't, my brother and I would not be safe. Call it a gut feeling. I don't know how I knew, but I did, and as soon as we passed a house that blocked us from the view, I turned to Alex and spoke to him exactly four words. No questions. Just run.

And we did. In our driveway, which is about 100 feet long, there's a row of bushes and pine trees that divide our home from the next door neighbor. I dragged him in there and told him to be quiet and that I'd explain later. I watched as the same truck drove down and around the cul-de-sac again before coming to a stop right in front of our house. I had to hold my brother's mouth shut because he was crying and I was scared that whoever was following us would hear him and hurt us. I was more worried for him than for myself at this point. I was in fight or flight mode. I was the big sister and I had to protect him. I looked at him and said that the

truck was following us and I told him not to be scared. I said I wouldn't let anyone hurt him and it seemed to calm him down a little. After what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, the door to the truck opened and out came a man. He was tall, skinny and messy, short hair covered by a torn baseball cap. Ripped jean shorts and a puke green tank top. He entered our yard and looked around a bit. Alex and I were still in the bushes and I was trying to find a way to get to our house safely without getting this dude's attention. The guy left after what felt like forever and entered his car. He started it and drove away slowly. I waited a few minutes to make

sure he was gone before turning to my brother and saying, we need to run. When I count to three, we're going to run behind the house to the back door, okay? He agreed and we waited a few more seconds before I started counting. I still didn't have a good feeling about this but I knew that we had to move. I started counting and as soon as I hit three we booked it across our driveway into our front yard to go around the house. As soon as we left our spot I heard it. The sound of accelerating. He saw us. He was waiting for us to leave.

He chased us up our driveway as soon as we ran around the side. I grabbed Alex's hand and practically dragged him around the house and made him run ahead to the garage door to see if it was locked while I searched for my house key. The garage door was open. I swear to god I saw this man round the opposite corner of the house that we did as I entered the house. We entered and I slammed it shut, locking it and deadbolting it. I didn't stop running until I opened the house door and ran downstairs with Alex screaming our safe word. My grandmother made a safe word for us that was a normal everyday word that we could use if we were in danger, just had to scream it basically. It woke my aunt who worked the night shift and was sleeping. We told her everything and she stayed up with us until my grandmother got home.

We called the police and that was my first ever interaction with an officer. Unfortunately, the man was never caught. To this day, I don't know what he wanted but I'm sure it definitely was not good. I'm just glad my grandma drilled stranger danger into my head. I don't know where my brother or I would be right now if she hadn't. When I was 17, I started working at my local grocery store. About three weeks in, I got transferred from the front end at baggers and cashiers to produce. My first week in produce I met all the people in my

department and all was going well. One night on my second week in produce I was closing a loan when this girl comes in. My back turned to her I hear. You're new when did you start? I turned around and we start to have a conversation while I put the last few things from my cart on the shelf. I had about 10 minutes left on my shift and was trying to go downstairs to crush my boxes but this girl continued to talk and took no social cues that I was trying to leave. I finally get tired of listening to her talk and start to pull my cart through the produce section as she slowly follows, still talking. Eventually we get to the doors, employees only, and I start to make my way through and she comes in right after me. I explain that unfortunately she can't come this way and she needs to just go check out as our store was closing soon.

She says bye and leaves and I thought that was odd but maybe she's just a bit weird. Crush my boxes, go home and don't think about it. Two days later I'm closing again and the same thing happens. This time she asks for my phone number. I explain that I don't have a phone at this time, hence why I had a job so I could get one. Okay, well, would you want to hang out when you get off? I felt kind of bad at this point as I thought she was just a bit odd and just looking for friends. I tell her, maybe next time as my mom was picking me up. So every night I worked, she would come in and just pick up one grapefruit and then walk around basically acting like she was either on the phone or pretending to shop and then casually stop by me. It got old really quick to the point where I would

hide in the hallway and watch her till she left. Eventually other people in the store heard about her and rumors went around that she was stalking me. The deli manager explained that she and her boyfriend, he also worked in the deli, also had been stalked by her for a number of months. Eventually she stopped coming by at night as I was always hiding when she did come. A few weeks go by and I had just gotten off of work, early shift for a change, and my friends were meeting up at work to hang out after two guys and one girl so I head out to the parking lot and meet up with them when my stalker comes out of nowhere and hugs me. I haven't seen you at work in so long. Oh yeah they switched my hours and now I don't work late anymore you know.

Well one thing leads to another and my friend a female starts to talk to her and basically invites her to hang out with us. She jumps on the opportunity after I explained to my friend, a female, starts to talk to her and basically invites her to hang out with us. She jumps on the opportunity after I explained to my friend that she was stalking me and so we all started walking back to my friend's house to hang in the backyard as it was a nice summer's night. The night wasn't bad, we all just hung out and I kind of avoided the stalker while my friend, a female, kept her entertained. The night came on pretty fast and eventually it was 1am and my friend's mom came out and told us that we had to leave. Me and my two male friends and stalker head out and were waiting at the bus stop that my friend needed to catch when stalker explains that she can't go home this late and that she needed to stay over.

So I beg my other friend to stay with me which she agrees. We wait for the bus to pick up my other friend and head to my house. Things got super weird at this point. Basically the stalker refused to sleep on the floor and only wanted to sleep in the bed with me. I eventually gave up and said okay while my friend slept on the floor so I'm lying in bed and this girl stands up and just takes her bra and shirt off and then her pants and gets in bed with me. I at first was pretty dumbfounded and didn't know what to do so I acted like I didn't notice and then she started trying to kiss me and have me touch her. At this point I realized this girl had serious issues. I don't know if they

were mental or just social but I didn't want to find out. I lightly push her off of me and explain I'm trying to sleep and she wouldn't take the hint and kept insisting that we cuddle. I was getting fed up and so eventually I wake my friend up. Pretty sure he wasn't asleep at this point. Nathan, you asleep? He sits up. No, why? So he covers up in blankets so he doesn't see her in the buff and then I basically explain that I wanted to go for a walk and so I have Nathan leave the room and get her dressed so we can go for a walk. On our way out I tell Nathan to get his bike. We walk outside at this point, it's almost 3.30am Me and Nathan walking with our bikes and the girl beside us I'm thinking of ways we can get rid of this girl At first I suggest me and Nathan just take a walk in the alley and go pee

But she says she's scared and wants to go with us Eventually while walking and talking she says how she was on track in high school Oh, you run track? I bet that you can't beat us to the end of the block. At this point, Nathan looks at me and smirks as he knows we're about to ditch this girl. For it to be 3.30am, this girl was excited as all get out to go sprinting. She takes off running for the end of the block and we take off in the opposite direction back towards my house. We rush back inside and hide our bikes in my house instead of the porch and go to the living room making sure to not turn on any lights.

We sit in the living room talking about how crazy this chick is when she starts banging on the door. We stayed quiet for what seemed like two or three hours of her just banging on the door, talking to herself, banging on the door then talking to herself. Eventually, we heard the downstairs door open and we watched her leave. I lived on the second floor of an apartment building and my mom was out of town. So, the next few days I go to work and I don't see her, which is good. Then about a week later she comes in and she completely ignores me. She gets her random grapefruit and pretends to shop while me and a co-worker are talking. She's wearing a backpack this time and she walks right in between me and

my co-worker and we're maybe 6 feet apart. She turns to walk away and her backpack touches something on my flat cart. She turns around and starts screaming and throwing all of the boxes off my cart. A bunch of juices, some tomatoes and a few other things I don't recall. She starts saying I grabbed her and that she wanted to talk to a manager and so my co-worker, an older guy in his 40s, tells me to go downstairs and just get away from the situation. I head downstairs and sit in the break room. About 10 minutes later I'm called up to the hallway where my store manager is talking to the girl. I see from the door that she leaves and he comes in the hallway to talk to me. So this girl says you grabbed her and shoved her and that you were swearing at her?

I explain what happened to my manager and he goes and finds my co-worker and then comes back to me after talking to my co-worker. My manager comes in and looks at me. You need to go sleep with her already. We kind of chuckle and then he tells me not to worry about it and that she's probably just insane. Eventually she left me alone but then my girlfriend started working with me and the girl would come in and see me and my girlfriend and then go to her line to check out. The girlfriend was a cashier and was always really rude to her. Eventually she stopped coming around altogether and from the looks of it she's married to some 50 year old man on Facebook. She's 24.

Last summer, I, a 17 year old female at the time, started working at a local hole in the wall pet store in my city. They were grossly understaffed with only 7 employees. Not only that, but I was the only girl and the only employee under the age of 22. I was very naive and trusting of people at the time and constantly gave people the benefit of the doubt. After working there, my mindset changed dramatically. A lot of the customers were really predatory towards me and I could make an entirely different post about that, but I'm going to talk about two of my co-workers, Mike and Jim. Mike was a seemingly nice, albeit a little weird guy. He was super tall and skinny and honestly could have passed

as like a 20-something stoner. Jim was a retired army vet who wasn't technically an employee, but volunteered there in his free time. He was also very tall, had some piercings and a shaved head. Jim and Mike were close buds and actually lived together. I'd strike up conversations with both of them when work was slow and I wasn't intimidated by them at all. The first red flag though, my first day of working there I was taking out the trash and had to open the garage at the back of the store to get to the trash bin. I asked Mike for help since I wasn't strong enough to lift it. He said, it's not that you're not strong, you're just small. You wear it well though. And looked me up and down. Weird, but I thought he was just trying to be nice.

My third day working, Mike and I were the only ones closing the store. We were making small tuck. He told me he was 32 and that he had three kids with three different women. He then proceeded to tell me in vivid detail how each of those kids were conceived. Like super personal stuff you wouldn't want to be telling a co-worker, much less someone you knew for three days. Again, weird, but he was a weird dude and I thought maybe he was bad at picking up social cues or something. Mike would also walk me to my car a lot after work. We were usually the only ones closing and it was always dark. At first I thought it was a really kind thing to do. We would talk for a little bit and I'd get in and drive off, but he would talk to me for longer periods of time each day. He would walk out and sit on the curb near my car, lighting a cigarette and inviting me to

join him. I'd politely decline because I didn't want him to know that I smoked and I was worried about my reputation there. Kind of funny looking back. And one day he actually put his hand on my car door after I opened it, holding it open so I couldn't shut it. I made some excuse that I had to leave, and he let go. I thought it was just an accident and that he didn't even realize that he was holding it open. I was constantly making excuses for him. A couple of days later, I heard Mike talking to a customer. I have no idea what the context was, but I heard Mike say,

If an underage girl and a guy are together, the girl should be charged with something. When I went to court, they couldn't arrest me because this girl was blackmailing me. I seriously can't make this stuff up. I met Jim after working there about a week and a half and he had a super dry and sarcastic sense of humor and I honestly used that as an excuse a lot of the things that he said to me. When he found out that I was 17, I'm assuming Mike told him, he would always make fun of me. Say things like, isn't it past your bedtime? But whatever, I thought it was kind of funny. I call him an old man even though he was only 35 and we joke around. One day I forgot to do one of my pre-closing

duties but Jim told me he would take care of it. I was super apologetic about it and he put his hand on my arm and said, at least you're good to look at. I just laughed it off and he would constantly make comments about my appearance after that, telling me my shirt was too tight or that I looked a lot older than I should. It started getting more serious. One time I signed my name for the pre-closing checklist and Jim picked it up. He was like, hey sweetie, I know your last name. I could totally stalk you if I wanted to. Another coworker heard him and was like, dude at least wait until she's 18 jim turned and asked me well how long till you turn 18 i told him around two months and he was like nah i can't wait that long the next day jim came in he looked at me and asked me if i drove a

green car i said yes he then recited my license plate back to me and asked me if I drove a green car. I said yes. He then recited my license plate back to me and said, I told you I was going to stalk you. This definitely made alarm bells go off in my head but I desperately wanted to believe that he was kidding. Even typing this out really gives me chills. After this incident, there were multiple times that I was followed after leaving work by a white car. Luckily my work was in the downtown area of my city and I lived very far west so most of the time I lost the car before I got close to my home. Though one time the car did follow me all the way out to my neighborhood. Instead of entering my neighborhood I just kept driving and ended up in the countryside outside of my city.

I am very familiar with this area and was able to lose the car out there. It honestly was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. I have no proof that this was Jim since he never closed the store and I didn't know what car he drove. It only happened while I was leaving work and it stopped after I quit. Unrelated, I put in my two weeks after about a month of working there. Once Mike and Jim found out I was leaving, they'd tell me how much they'd miss me and kept inviting me over to their house for co-worker game night where they'd had everyone over to play board games and drink. I reminded them that I was 17 and couldn't drink and they told me that they didn't care and that I'd probably drink anyway. Mike constantly asked for my phone number to set

up a time for a game night but I always ended up getting distracted with something else before I could. My last day working there I was closing with Mike and he was like, I bet your boyfriend's happy that you don't have to work with me and Jim anymore. Like an idiot, I told him I didn't have one. I asked him why and he just said, well, me and Jim are kind of creeps, but we take pride in being creepy. It's like running a competition between us. The rest of closing, he was all over me, touching me, walking right up to me and essentially putting his body against me. At one point I was leaning against the counter and he put his hands on either side of me and was towering over me, trapping me there. He said, we're never going to have another girl working here like you.

I left quickly after that. I was driving home, I finally added up their behavior and comments and connected all the dots in my naive mind at the time, and I couldn't believe I was so oblivious. I genuinely think that if I kept working there, literally a two minute walk from my door. Since all this lockdown mess, I've been staying up later than usual, till maybe about 2 or 3am most nights. So, last night a little bit after 12, I had a taste for some chips and decided I'll just go across the street to 7-Eleven, which I go to regularly. I make my way over and on my way in, I had to pass this man who was browsing the Redbox kiosk. I don't think much of it. I go inside, get some snacks, pay, head out the door. As I'm coming out, the red box man is literally staring dead at me with these

scarily bright light blue eyes, but not wanting to freak myself out even more, I say to myself, maybe he's zoned out and deep in thought. I wandered into la la land myself sometimes, so by thinking that, I was trying to make myself more comfortable having to walk past the strange man. So I'm headed back into my apartment complex which is on this side of the street. As a creaky gate door I realize as I'm walking I have never heard it slam behind me like I always have before. I look back and this man is right behind me. Not close up to me but still definitely following. Once again, trying to ease my mind, I'm thinking he must be going home but I also noticed he didn't have any disc in his hand for as much as he was at

the kiosk the whole time I was in the store, taking my sweet, indecisive time. So now I'm wanting to come off as scared, I keep my same, but I probably should have sprinted because forget being nice. Anyways, I'm literally just a few steps from my door, which is upstairs, and the man randomly calls out to me. Hey, do you have a light, stranger? Out of instinct, I turned my head to the fact I knew someone was speaking to me and responded, no I don't, sorry. I didn't want to go up my stairs because I didn't want to let this man know exactly which apartment I lived in so I was planning on walking around until I lost him but he asked me another question. Could I use your bathroom? I tell him, ah no sorry my roommates probably wouldn't be comfortable with me letting someone in this late.

I don't have roommates, but I sure didn't want this man getting any ideas, thinking I was by myself. I keep walking, but this man was still following me. I simply ask, Do you live around here? And he tells me, I got a buddy that does, and he was supposed to meet me across the way there, but maybe he fell asleep. I've never been here before, but I do know his door is number 201. Could you help me find it? 201 is my door. And if you have a friend that lives over here,

why are you asking to use my bathroom? I knew this man was lying and up to something. I quickly came up with, 201? Well, that should be right past the pool right next to the laundry area. My friends are waiting for me, so I should be get going. My gut told me to head to my car though because what if he watched where I was going and decides to give me a surprise later on No, I've watched too many movies and read too many stories uploaded on here So I start heading towards the parking lot Not running but definitely walking quicker than before when I realize the man is chasing me at this point I hurry up and pull my keys out of my pocket and get in my car and immediately lock the doors.

The man starts pounding on my driver window, telling me to open the door. I can't help but focus on those creepy blue eyes, but I also noticed he was reaching for his pocket. I start up my car before I can see what he's pulling out. I heard a pop, but I didn't care in that moment as long as I could get out of his presence. I drove maybe five minutes down the street to this Arco gas station and called the police. Waiting for the police to arrive, I noticed what the popping sound was. The wacko popped my back tire with probably a switchblade. Of course, when the police arrived and went to check the area, this monster was gone. They did question the 7-Eleven clerk and he let them know that the man has been up there for a few times since last week and never has been a problem but is obviously homeless. I'm still shook up about what went on last night and

I'm going to chill on the late night trips to 7-Eleven for a while. So this happened to me almost 7 years ago. I should give some background info before getting into things. At the time this all happened I was around 16 years old and I had a friend I'll call Karen who was dating a boy named John. At this point in time Karen and John had been dating for maybe 6 months and after going out with Karen and John on many occasions they decided that they wanted to hook me up with John's friend, who we'll call Cameron. At this point in time, I had met Cameron in person once. He was nice, so I gave him my social media and we chatted a couple of times. It's important to note that he didn't have my number or know where I live. Fast forward to one night, maybe a week or two after I met Cameron. I'm laying in bed. It's about 2 or 3 in the morning and I get a call from an unknown number. Thinking why is an unknown

number calling me at this time of night? I decided to answer it and see who it is. So I answer the phone and say hi and a man responds saying hi back. Since I didn't recognize the voice on the other end I asked the person who they are. Instead of giving me an answer to this question, the man on the line tells me to look outside my window. Thinking this is probably a prank call, I tell the man to F off and hang up the phone. Once I did this, the number calls back again. Didn't answer it. The person then proceeds to call me another four times until I finally answer the phone, which again I ask who the heck is calling. This time the person responds and tells me that one of my friends gave him my number

and that I'm the guy he's been talking to. At this point my stupid 16 year old mind is trying to rationalize this and the only person I can think of is Cameron. Before I can say anything to this person he again tells me to look out the window and that he's outside and I begin hearing noises outside my window. Now I should mention that my room is right beside my parents room and being stupid my first thought was that this fool was going to wake them up and I'd never hear the end of it. Let me tell you, that thought soon turned into the last thing I would worry about that night. Anyway, at this point I'm also starting to get creeped out. I'm thinking to myself,

okay, if this is Cameron and Karen did give him my number, how would he know where I live? So I reply to the man and say, Cameron? The man says yes and tells me to look out my window. I reply telling him to go home and hang up the phone again. Weirded out, I decide I'm going to get up and go into my basement and call Karen so that hopefully my parents don't hear me talking from my room. This is really important because to get into my basement I have to pass a door that is partially made of glass. So I get downstairs and call Karen. She answers, clearly half asleep. I tell Karen about the unknown call which I'm assuming is from Cameron and how he is telling me to look out my window because he's outside and on top of this, that I can hear someone out there. Karen, now clearly awake,

tells me that she has never given Cameron my number or address and calls John quickly from her phone to see if maybe he did. At this point, John answers and tells Karen that not only had he never given out my information, he's with Cameron, and they tell me if someone's outside I need to hang up and call the police immediately. So I hang up the phone, and before I can even go to dial for anyone I get another call. Guess who? The unknown number. So I stupidly answer again, and before I get a word in the man tells me that he knows I'm in the basement and he saw me walking by my back door.

Now I'm clearly disturbed as I did just walk by my back door to get downstairs so I know someone is outside. Again before I could say anything the man tells me to come outside. So stupidly I tell the person I'm calling the police and hang up the phone. Why I didn't call the police at this point I really don't know. Probably because I was 16, stupid and literally in panic mode. Not more than a minute later I get another call, an unknown number. I answer again. The man then tells me to come outside or he's coming inside to get me. Clearly panicking at this point, I have this deep gut feeling that if I go outside, I'm never coming back. However,

I do have to go by the door again to get back upstairs and that was equally terrifying to me. So I hang up the phone again and muster up the courage to run upstairs because the last place I wanted to be was in a part of my house no one else was in. I get more calls, unknown number, unknown number, unknown number. Again, my 16-year-old stupidity answers that this time, the voice on the phone sounds shook, and says to me that police stopped him outside my house and want to speak to me to make sure I know him. The phone then gets passed off to someone who identifies themselves by name with some title I no longer remember and asks if I know the man outside my address. He says my house number and street. I quickly tell the voice on the phone I have no idea who the person calling me is and hang up the phone. Never got another call again. However, I did sit

there all night holding a bat and had problems sleeping for months. I should also mention I didn't have very many friends at this point in my life and looking back on this night I thought maybe this was a prank taken too far. However, I begged the few friends I did have for months to admit that one of them was the person who pulled this off and to this, they all insist none of them did it. This happened when I was around 12 years old. It was in the middle of the night at my house. My dad would work the graveyard shift at his work. Since it was the weekend, I had stayed up most of the night. It was somewhere between midnight and 1am and my dad had told me to lock the doors and to go to sleep, which I did. I went to my room and finally went to sleep, but only for about an hour. At around 2am, I woke up to the sound of knocking on my back door. It scared me awake. After taking a few moments to process what I heard, I decided it was probably just my dad knocking on the door.

Maybe he just forgot something. Me being really exhausted, I knew he had a house key on him so I just told myself he had unlocked the door himself. But the knocking continued. It was pretty creepy. Then the next thing I knew, the knocking stopped, and then it started again but at a different location. Someone was knocking on the window in my kitchen. I continued to assure myself it was my father. I didn't understand why he couldn't just unlock the door himself. He always had a key on him. I felt pretty freaked out so I wasn't

answering the door. If anything, my out so I wasn't answering the door. If anything, my dad would call me to open the door on my phone which was next to me. The knocking started again in another window and I was terrified now. Too scared to get up and check who was out there. The knocking wasn't stopping and the next thing I know the knocking moved to my front door at a harsher level too. That's when it hit me that I couldn't move. I was actually frozen in fear. I couldn't scream or talk or move any muscle. My heart was dropping as the knocking moved to another window closer and closer to my bedroom window where my curtains were see-through. I still could not move. I didn't know what to do or say.

I could only stare out as my fear consumed me. I moved my eyes over to the window and my heart stopped when I saw a man peering through my window. A tall man with a dark ski mask. I could hardly make out the details because it was so dark but I think his mask had some sort of skeleton design on it. He tilted his head slightly. I tried to scream, but nothing came out. I closed my eyes hard and started telling myself, It's not real. It's not real, over and over.

I opened my eyes, and there was no one there. I sighed a sense of relief until I heard a loud whisper tell me, I'll cut you out. Everything suddenly stopped. I could finally move again not long after, and I really couldn't sleep anymore that night. It definitely didn't feel like a dream. I've never experienced sleep paralysis before,

and everything felt so real. I don't know what happened, but I pray I'll never have to experience that again. It was one of the most frightening moments of my life that I've ever dealt with and I do think it was real. I was home alone that day so nobody could back me up, but the following morning I asked my dad when he came back from work if he came back earlier that day and knocked on my doors and windows. He didn't. This happened a few months ago. A new guy joined my boarding school. He was this skinny dude that even though he seemed a little bit off, he was extremely nice.

We immediately hit it off quite well since we had pretty similar music tastes. He was a little bit weird but overall a very charming normal dude. He wouldn't get along with most people though so I felt some sort of responsibility to make him feel welcome and at home. I would help him out with cigarettes when he needed any and generally I would be very kind to him. One time I arranged the meet up with him and with my girl outside of my boarding room school since we would get the weekend off and we met in the central city of where I lived and decided to go get some drinks and sit at a park. It was getting late and conversation was flowing and

everyone was having fun. He kept being sort of weird but his fun self until well he snapped. I knew for a fact that he wasn't inebriated since we had only been drinking beers and he only had one. He suddenly just had this crazy look and he kept holding onto my girl really hard. I could see that she was starting to panic so I just pushed him off. He calmed down for a second and then picked up something from the floor and tried to shove it into her mouth. At that point I charged at him full speed and threw him to the ground. I held my fist up and he immediately started to apologize but he would only say, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Over and over again. Once I got up he immediately tried charging towards her as if I didn't just tackle him down. I stopped him before he could touch her and threw him on the ground again. I gave him a few punches but stopped. Something about his expression really scared me. He had this look, like he wasn't even there. It was like he had one goal which I didn't want to find out. I put him in a headlock and got him far away from my girl and where we were sitting.

I then pushed him as hard as I could and went to get my girl and where we were sitting. I then pushed him as hard as I could and went to get my girl and leave. He kept trying to follow us for a while until I went up to him and he still had this weird hollow look on his face. I tried getting him to leave until finally I told him, look man, we forgot something back in the park, can you go get it for us? Somehow that dumb idea worked. He started walking back and the second he was out of sight me and my girl made a run for it and took the first bus home. The beginning of my junior year in college I moved into a new house with a really awesome girl named Jess. One day after classes, my friend Meg and I were on the front porch smoking when this guy walked by.

He then went up to my driveway, which we shared by the house right next door where we lived. He said hi and asked if I knew Jess. Jess had lived there before I did for a year so apparently he knew her. I said yeah, she's my roommate and we made small talk for a second. I asked if he wanted a hit, he took one and then carried on. After Meg had left I was still on the porch just finishing up some class work when that neighbor came out of his house again and said hi. He walked over to my porch and came up to the stairs. I didn't think

too much about it because he was really chill earlier. He went on to ask me some relationship advice. But all kinds of weird stuff like, there's this girl I'm talking to but she's also sending me nudes and hooking up with another guy. Why won't she do that stuff for me? I tried in the nicest way to explain that maybe she's not into him. He then asked if I would hook up with someone right after meeting them and if I found him attractive. I definitely didn't want to hook up and I didn't find him attractive but I said that also in the nicest way possible. He kept calling me beautiful and one of the most beautiful girls that he ever met. The conversation got really awkward so I excused myself inside and said I'd see him later. Later that night I had just gotten back from hanging out with a friend. She dropped me off

and as she drove away I was opening my door. My neighbor came swiftly out of his door almost like he was waiting for me. He ran over to my house and posted himself up against my house and asked me if I wanted to hang out. I declined saying I still had class work I needed to finish before bed. He was eager. We can do work together then maybe cuddle. I declined again and again. He eventually gave up and was asking me more intimate questions, but about my preferences and if I would hook up with him. I kept deflecting and trying to leave. He eventually asked for a hug, which I also declined,

and he didn't give up on that one. He ended up grabbing me and pulling me in tightly to his arms and squeezing me, which left me feel so sick to my stomach. I quickly pulled away as fast as I could, ran into my house and locked the door. Some time goes by and I'm cooking in my kitchen when I hear a knock at my front door. None of my friends were coming over so I was clueless as to who it was. I peeked around the corner and saw my neighbor and my stomach sank a little. Instead of answering the door I just snuck myself into the bathroom and hid for a second, hoping he'd think I'd fallen asleep. Another

three knocks came, and then another. Finally, silence. Then all of a sudden, he calls out my name through the open window next to my door. Amy? Hello? Amy, I know you're home. I just have a few questions to ask. Amy? At this point, I was sick. I texted my friend Corey who lived in the fraternity house just right down the street from me to quickly run over here and act like he was there to hang out. Corey came and met the neighbor at my doorstep. I overheard the neighbor's conversation which consisted of, are you her boyfriend? She told me she was doing homework tonight but now she's having friends over? Do you think she might like me? Can you tell me more about her? Corey did an awesome job at deflecting and I opened the door to get him inside as fast as I

could. The neighbor asked me to come outside real quick. I did, only because I felt safer with Corey just behind the door. He ended up asking almost the same questions from before and ended the conversation with, Can I have a hug? I said, I'll see you later and ran into the house. The next day, Jess returned from her boyfriend's and I told her all about our neighbor. She surprisingly knew all about him and his ways. He had pretty much waited outside for her numerous times like he did for me,

watched her run up and down the street and try to hang out and hug and touch her as well. Jess eventually told her boyfriend about my encounters with our neighbor and went over to have a word with him. I'm not sure what he said, but the neighbor never made eye contact with me again. I'm afraid that if I didn't speak up and tell Jess, things could have quickly gotten worse. I know lots of people had had far worse stories than me, but this always sends a chill at my spine, thinking about it. subreddit, rletsreadofficial, and give and receive feedback from the community and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. And join my discord to interact with me and other listeners

directly. And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. And check out the Let's Read podcast where you can hear all these stories in long compilation form and save huge on data located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the bio. Thanks so much, friends. And remember to always read the outro.