The Lets Read Podcast - 107: Episode 095 | Babysitting & National Park Stories | 23 True Scary Horror Stories

Episode Date: August 24, 2021

Welcome to the ninety-fifth 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 Babysitting, National Parks & Being Stranded In Your Car... 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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Like Toyo's open country family of tires. Find your pro at your local Tread Experts. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca Montana has to be one of the most beautiful places in the world. And it's one of the last beautiful places in the United States that still feels truly wild, unlike my native California where almost every area of natural beauty is plastered with man-made trails, ranger stations, and tourist traps. But I don't mean to offend anyone. I'm sure your favorite hiking spots in Wisconsin or Washington or wherever are amazing, and maybe it is just a little internal bias talking, having

watched too many old cowboy movies with my dad. But to me, Montana truly feels like one of the last untouched wilderness areas in North America. And luckily, a buddy of mine feels exactly the same way about it. So every year around September, he and I would take a trip up to Bozeman to spend some time away from the big city life out here in Frisco. We've been friends forever and pretty much spent all high school and college days together. But since we slammed into our 30s and did all the boring grown-up stuff like get married, have kids, focus on careers, we don't have nearly enough time to spend together. So I honestly relish our year trips out to Montana together, where we can catch up on

stuff, get some serious drinking in, but most importantly, indulge in a mutual hobby of ours that's verged on an obsession ever since we were teenagers. Hunting. Our stomping ground of choice has always been Glacier National Park, right up on the Canadian border. It's about a five-hour drive from Bozeman itself, but we make a point of driving out for a few days, one to get settled into a campsite, another few to actually hunt, all before a few days of drinking back in Bozeman to celebrate our successes or commiserate our failures. Last night, we repeated the same old ritual, driving out to the national park with our hunting gear in tow. We found a good place to park the truck, hiked a few hours out into the wilderness and found a decent little spot to set up camp.

Every year we seem to be a little more exhausted when the days end, call it just a side effect of getting older I guess. So last year in particular, we passed out pretty early in our one-man tents with the intentions of rising at dawn to begin our day's hunt. 6am the next morning, the little alarm on my wristwatch starts beeping. It's the closest thing we have to that feeling of Christmas morning when you're a kid. It's just pure excitement, jumping out of bed to see what hunting Santa has left among the trees for us that day. We have a little breakfast, drink a little coffee, then pack up and head out. For those of you that are unfamiliar with hunting or nature in general,

there are two times in a day when birds sing the loudest, dawn and dusk. It sounds all pretty to us humans, like this wonderful lyrical bird song, but it's actually just pure war cries. What sounds sweet and cute to us is actually like, I'm here and if you come up in my tree I'm gonna mess you up so back the eff up. And it's something that soundtracks every morning hunt, every single time we visited Glacier. But that morning it was almost silent. We could hear the odd squawk in the distance, but our immediate vicinity was as silent as the grave, and that only means one thing, that a large predator is in the area, something that's on the hunt. I remember the

look on my buddy's face when he turned to me and stated that exact thing. How I double checked that I had my can of bear mace on me just in case anything happened. But that area of Montana right near the Canadian border is known to have wolf packs roaming around and I shuddered at the thought of what would have happened if we were cornered by one. Two aging city boys would be run down in an instant. We wouldn't stand a chance. We'd be torn apart and eaten alive right there on the forest floor, probably before we could even get a shot off. Trigger discipline is probably the most important aspect of firearm safety, but I struggled to keep my finger off the trigger of my Remington once I'd racked around into the

chamber. The fear was palpable. It felt like something was close, real close, and in woods as dense as the ones we were in, something could be on top of us in just seconds. Then, just another mile or so walking through the near silent forest, we saw it in the distance. A grizzly, and it was huge. I'd never seen one in the flesh before that day, and I was completely overwhelmed by the size of that thing. I mean, they are monsters, and the very sense of the word. Just a flesh tank, a ball of muscle and sinew, perfectly designed to chase down, kill, and shred whatever they take a liking to.

We watched it staring back at us, this like doll expression on its face before it sniffed the air a little, catching our scent. We must have looked like frightened little boys but to the grizzly, we were nothing. This was just another day and we were just another meal, another kill, business as usual. We just slowly walked on, keeping our eyes on that murder machine the whole time until it was eventually out of sight. We're not dumb, we knew we couldn't just hang around and carry on our hunt with that thing in the area, especially not since it had our scent. So slowly but surely we made our way back to camp with the intention of packing up and moving to a safer area.

But God laughs at well laid plans. And about halfway back, as we were keeping our heads on a swivel, trying to keep an eye out for that thing stalking us through the trees, I heard something heavy, bounding towards us. I couldn't see it right away and frankly, the idea that something so huge could just creep up on us like that is something that is just pure nightmare fuel to me. But Stakas, it did, and in a moment of pure stomach-churning horror, it knocked my buddy to the ground as easy as a grown man might knock over a child. I mean, it just sent him crashing into the dirt and it was on him in seconds. How I managed to miss that thing's head with my first shot is something I'll never really understand. I'm an experienced hunter and I'm a pretty good marksman, but pure panic took over and crippling fear just had me turning to jelly.

The feeling of expecting to see my best friend in the world torn apart before me is something I'm never ever going to forget. I'm not military, I've never had any official training, nothing like that. So I didn't even think to work the bold action and chamber another round. I just went for the bear mace and spraying it right in that thing's eyes as it slashed its claws across my buddy's chest and face, tearing up clothing and flesh alike with deep, gouging strikes. His screams though, that's what I kept hearing in the quieter moments during the months following that trip. These blood-curdling screams as he thought he was going to die. And not just die, be eaten alive, watch his own guts be torn from his body and chewed up right there in front of him. But it worked somehow. The bear mace just worked. It immediately stopped clawing at my buddy.

It started like wrinkling its nose and doing these weird like sneezes or coughs. I can't really think of any way to describe it. But what was obvious is that it was in considerable discomfort as the ingredients in the mace went to work on its nose and eyes. Then, as suddenly it has appeared, it took off again, crashing through the trees, smacking into the odd one or two as it obviously struggled to see where it was going. Then it was just a case of checking on my buddy But Jesus Christ, he was an absolute mess The bear's claws had torn off chunks of flesh from his face, shoulders, and chest And blood was everywhere

And I mean everywhere I was frantic too I kept alternating between trying to tend to his wounds And looking around to make sure the bear wasn't charging us again Like when I think back to it I can only see frames. It's not like a movie in my head, it's like still pictures. Side effect of the adrenaline I guess. The blood is leaking off of my buddy as I help him to his feet. He was capable of running but the attack had stunned him and he shook violently as I pulled him up and started dragging him back in the direction of our campsite. I knew the bear mace or bear spray or whatever

you want to call it had worked, but for how long I had no idea. And so we ran, as fast as our legs could carry us, through trees and over hillocks, until we saw the bright orange fabric of our one-man tents. Another weird memory I have is of my buddy applying his own gauze bandages, like he'd think the guy would be in major pain at that point, but he was just running on pure adrenaline. That bear had torn him up real bad, but he couldn't feel a thing. It was just pure survival instinct kicking in. He was a survivor, and he wasn't about to go down easy,

and in a twisted kind of way, I was really proud of him. By that point, my one major concern was that he would lose too much blood on the way back to our truck. I mean, he'd already left a blood trail from the scene of the attack, so the bear would be able to trace our path really, really easily. So I was stuck in a horrendous catch-22 situation. Leave him with his rifle and risk getting attacked again, or have him come with me to get help and risk bleeding to death or leading the bear onto our trail. But a primal, angry roar that echoed through the trees kind of made the decision for us. The bear was still in the area, not even that. It was close, and it was angry. I wrapped like half my buddy's head in gauze, taped a load of it to his chest, and we got running again. Almost every step we took I

expected that bear to just appear again, only this time, if it attacked me, my buddy wouldn't have a rifle to be able to take this thing out. Although the fact that that bear mace had worked was actually a huge comfort so there was no doubt that it would work a second time. But we got lucky for a second time that day. First time when the injuries to my buddy weren't as bad as they could have been, and second when that bear didn't rally for a second attack. We made it out of the park and down to a place called Ennis pretty quickly, visited a medical clinic, got my buddy all stitched up and patched up, then actually headed to a bar to just decompress and unwind from the nightmare we just lived through. Needless to say, my buddy didn't have to buy a single beer that night,

not as he told the story of getting full-on attacked by a full-grown grizzly. We're not sure if we're going to go on our trip this summer with lockdown and stuff aside, I'm not sure either of us are quite ready to get back on that horse, but I look forward to the day when we are. I'm not going to let a horrific encounter like that ruin the one thing that kept us close for so many years. Back in 1999, I used to work as a park ranger over at Yosemite National Park. It wasn't a job I ever really saw myself doing. The fact was that until I busted my knee and had to stop playing football, the NFL was seriously all I ever dreamed of.

I was obsessed. It was football in the morning, football in the afternoon, and at night, I used to dream about it. But like many young men's dreams, they turned out to be nothing but the stuff of pipes. I needed a job, I needed money and I needed it fast. So when an uncle told me of an opening up at Yosemite for a park ranger, I jumped at the chance. He told me it was relatively easy work, mostly outdoors, and I could rely on it. As long as there was state funding, as long as there were still trees sprouting out of the ground, I'd always have work.

And so there I was, 23 years old, decked out in my park ranger's uniform, hiking through valleys and over hills, popping ibuprofen whenever my knees started to play up. I'd done the job for about two years in March of 99 and honestly, I'd grown to love it. Being out there meant being surrounded by nature on a daily basis. I mean, I'd see things weekly that wildlife photographers would give their left nut to document. But I never in my wildest dreams thought I'd encounter the kind of thing I did on March 18th, 1999. It's something that I've thought about almost every single day since. Something I can't ever get out of my mind, and something I don't think I ever will. And it started off a chain of events that I gradually became obsessed with, and that has changed my life forever. I started with a call about a potential

forest fire. My boss called and told me a hiker had seen some smoke rising up through the trees up near a place called Long Cabin in Sonora County. I probably don't need to tell you that forest fires can be absolutely devastating to an area like Yosemite and are taken very, very seriously by us park rangers. Now, y'all should know that Long Cabin isn't technically in our jurisdiction. It's actually closer to Stanislaus National Forest, but since there was no one up in that area to go check it out, my boss asked me to go check it out and call in the fire department if it was a serious threat. We get a good number of calls like this, and more often than not,

it's just a family whose barbecue had gotten out of hand, or kids whose campfire is a little too big. So I agree to drive up there to check it out, as it was only a couple of hours' drive there and back. So after about an hour's drive, I arrive at Long Barn, and I can see some black smoke rising up through the trees in the distance. This is unusual as black smoke means it's not just burning wood, it's more like plastic or artificial fabrics and it definitely just wasn't wood burning. This is kind of a relief

at first, it meant it wasn't an outright forest fire, but it did mean someone was burning something that was definitely not good for the environment. I park up as close as I can to the source of smoke, then hike off through the trees, basically just following my nose as the smell of the burning plastics gets stronger and stronger. Then I see it. A burned out car abandoned among the trees, still kind of smoldering, but I guessed the fire had been set at night and had mostly burned through before I got the call about it. My first thought was joyriders, something as simple as car thieves that had bust into someone's vehicle, tore it up and

down the quiet country roads up here, then just abandoned it and set it alight to cover up any evidence. Again, this is a pretty unusual crime out here in the sticks, and you can forgive me for associating that sort of wanton mischief with more urban areas. But then I started to smell something else among the smoke. Something more like burning meat. I'm a huge barbecue guy myself, and I know what it smells like when you leave something on the grill for too long. Like that acrid, charred stench that I know is going to lead to disappointment because I've messed up on some expensive T-bone or whatever. Only, you're definitely not supposed to smell that coming off of a burning car, are you?

And as you can imagine, I started to feel very, very uneasy about the whole thing. I circled the burned out vehicle, looking for signs of animal carcasses or, God forbid, human bodies that were in or around the vehicle, but saw nothing. I even checked under the car, but again, didn't see a thing. I pull out my phone to get in touch with the Sonora County Sheriff, who said he'd send over a couple of guys to check the scene out within the next hour or so But who also asked me to stick around so I could guide them in and show them exactly where the vehicle was So given the fact that I had an hour or two to kill waiting for them I went into the trunk of my truck

Pulled out the little fire extinguisher stored back there, and proceeded to put out the few small fires still burning in and around the vehicle. I do so pretty effectively, but when I'm done, I notice that there's still something smoldering in the trunk. Smoke keeps seeping out of the cracks, and the more it does, the more I can smell that burning meat smell. And that's when it really hit me. Something or someone was in that trunk, and that's where the smell was coming from. Waiting for those sheriff deputies seemed like it took an eternity,

mainly because when they got there I knew they'd be able to open that trunk, and I really didn't want to see what was inside. So they get there. I tell them what I suspect has happened and what I suspect is in that trunk. One of the guys uses a crowbar to wrench the trunk open which was pretty easy considering the fire had warped the metal locks keeping it closed. But what we saw inside is something I saw over and over again in my nightmares for many nights to come.

It was a mess of blackened, burned flesh and contorted limbs. The sight of it alone caused me to gag and retch, puking up my breakfast onto the forest floor. Even those deputies, hardened by years of witnessing violence and cruelty on a daily basis, had a hard time dealing with what they were seeing. One just leaned against a tree, mouth covered with a cloth rag he kept on him, probably for this exact reason, while the other called into the coroner to deal with the dead bodies. They told me I could make a move back to Yosemite whenever I was ready and,

boy was I ready. I got out of there as soon as I was able to. From what I understand, the sheriff's deputies soon discovered that the two scorched bodies in the trunk of that burned out vehicle were those of Carol Sund and Selvina Peloso. The two women along with Carol Sund's young daughter Julie had been missing since the previous February, when they were last sighted alive and well at the Cedar Lodge near Yosemite National Park. It was actually one of my colleagues over at the park that had been the last person to see them alive, and the whole thing had drawn national attention, landing them on the cover of People Magazine when some journalist took an interest in the story. And I mean, it was a really interesting story, albeit a very morbid one.

Carol Soon's wallet had been found on a street in downtown Modesto, California, three days after they had disappeared, and Julie Soon's body was found dumped in a heavy underbrush by an overlook at the Don Pedro Reservoir, several miles from the logging trail where the car had been found. Her throat had been slit from ear to ear. Local sheriffs and the FBI initially focused their investigation on a group of meth heads up in Northern California who had previous convictions for stalking and assaulting

lone groups of women. But all those leads were abandoned when a break in that case cast light on another suspect, because the story doesn't end here. In fact, it got even worse for all of us that worked up in Yosemite. One of the staff members at the Yosemite Institute was a young woman named Joy Ruth Armstrong. Joy was friendly, bubbly, and just generally a great person to be around. I'd only ever met her once or twice in my time as a park ranger, but I could see why she was a popular person to be around. I'd only ever met her once or twice in my time as a park ranger, but I could see why she was a popular member of the team. She loved nature and she loved her job, even more passionately than most others on her staff. But in July of that same year,

1999, Joy had made plans to spend a weekend visiting friends down in Sausalito. Team members who lived in the log cabin she shared with them in Yosemite Village said their goodbyes, wished her safe travels and watched as she wandered off among the trees to catch a ride down to Sausalito. But a few days later, when she was due to return to the village, she didn't show up. She'd actually left some contact details with the team just in case they needed to talk to her but when they followed up with a call to check up on her, her friends told them she hadn't actually arrived to spend the weekend with them and that they were starting to get worried. A group of rangers went over to the cabin she stayed at only to find her white pickup truck was still parked in the driveway packed with luggage for a trip.

Having decided to begin their search in the immediate area, the rangers split up into smaller groups. They trudged through dense brush, watching for rattlesnakes and looking for signs of their missing co-worker. Then after only a short while of searching, they apparently spotted footprints, broken saplings, trampled ferns and grass, all signs that someone had recently ran or perhaps even been chased. That's when one of the rangers noticed something metallic, glinting in the sunlight just a few feet away. It was a keyring lying in a shallow ditch. It was a sighting of this key ring that led them to spot something else. A dead body. It had on the white t-shirt and blue jeans that Joy had been wearing the day that she left for Sausalito. Except now, they were filthy, dirt encrusted and blood stained,

but despite bearing such similarities to our missing co-workers, it was impossible to immediately identify the body. That was because whoever had killed this person had also taken the time to cut off the head, decapitating it completely. For those of us that worked in and around Yosemite, Joy's murder meant that the nightmare of those burned bodies, the nightmare we'd all tried to forget about, had come back with a vengeance. The killings were made even more disturbing to us by just how rare it was for anything like that to happen in this area of California. According to one of the

older rangers, the last known murder to occur inside of Yosemite's boundaries happened 12 years earlier in 1987, when a guy pushed his wife off of a cliff in order to collect on a life insurance policy. As you can tell, I've thought about this whole thing and researched the various murders a whole lot, and I've discovered that the chances of being murdered in one of our national parks is about 1 in 20 million. Basically, you have more chance of drowning in your own bathtub, so please don't think that this is an actual thing.

People don't just hang around in the woods waiting to ambush unwary hikers. In the months that had followed the discovery of those burned bodies in the trunk of the car, the cops had almost no luck in finding a suspect. Honestly, we didn't expect Joy's murder to be anything different. But unbelievably, in the immediate aftermath of her killing, local authorities got lucky thanks to a witness statement given by one of our co-workers. They had noticed a blue and white 1979 International Scout parked near Joy's cabin on the night of her death, and the cops put out an APB on it right away. Then a few days later on, two park rangers spotted the vehicle that looked remarkably similar parked on the shoulder of a highway not too far away. What happened next was truly bizarre.

I spoke to the guys who found the truck who said they searched around for it for a while until they came across a guy sunbathing completely naked at a nearby riverbank. They asked who he was and he told them he was a handyman at the Cedar Lodge, some vacation homes built close by, and that his name was Cary Stainer. The guy seemed kind of embarrassed that he'd been caught in the nude like that and quickly left the area, but my co-workers immediately called the encounter in to local cops, who showed up and compared the tire tracks left by the trucks to those left at the scene of Joy's murder. They came back as exactly identical. A few days later, the same weird guy was taken into custody while he was visiting some nudist resort over in Sacramento. When they took him into custody and interviewed him regarding Joy's murder, he confessed.

Just straight up confessed, then also confessed to the fact that he'd murdered Carol Sund, Salvina Peloso, as well as Carol's daughter, Julie. The FBI were called in for additional questioning, and it was then that Kerry Stainer told them all about how he had fantasized about hurting women ever since he was a child, and how he had been completely unable to silence the voices in his head that told him to kill. For five whole months this absolute psychopath had been living right under our noses, hiding in plain sight. He'd been chilling up at Cedar Lodge, doing his job, and eyeing up potential victims out of the pretense of being a friendly, albeit a little kooky local handyman. From what I can gather, no one had suspected him of having anything to do with the disappearances of Sund or Peloso

because he also just seemed way too nice, too much of a regular dude. That and the Stainer family name had been in the news before, for a reason that led investigators to believe that there was no way that Carrie had it in him to do something so terrible. You see, many years before, when Carrie was just 11 years old, his younger brother, 7-year-old Stephen, disappeared without a trace one afternoon while walking home from school on his own. This devastated the family, causing a huge rift between Carrie and his dad. Eventually, Stephen escaped captivity after seven long years as the slave of Kenneth Parnell, a convicted child abuser and former employee of the Yosemite Lodge inside the National Park. He became a celebrity of sorts. There was national newspaper and television coverage, as well as a book and

a TV miniseries chronicling his years of abuse. Whether or not that whole thing shaped Cary into the violent psychopath he eventually became is something I don't think anyone will be able to properly determine. But shortly after, Cary began to claim he'd seen Bigfoot. Yes, the ape-man thing that's said to inhabit the woods of the Pacific Northwest. He was well on his way to being completely detached from reality. At his trial in 2002, Cary Stainer pled not guilty by reason of insanity. His lawyers asserted that the entire Stainer family had a history of abuse and mental illness, manifesting itself not only in the murders but also his obsessive-compulsive disorder, his obsession with cryptids, specifically Bigfoot, and his request to be provided with obscene images in return for his eventual confession.

He was nevertheless found sane and convicted of four counts of first-degree murder by a jury on August 27, 2002. The court then had to decide if he would be executed for his crimes, which it unanimously decided that he should, and rightfully so. Stainer remains on death row as of September 2019. But problems with California death penalty laws are frustrating the process and it's becoming increasingly unlikely that Carrie will suffer the same fate as as many victims. I know this was an overly long post but as I'm sure you can all understand this is something I've been quite frankly obsessed about since the discovery of those burned bodies affecting me most personally. I'm actually considering writing a book about the whole thing and my experience is living and working in the places that most of these crimes occurred. If I can't ever get these things out of my head, why not try to turn the whole thing into a kind of therapy? Turn it into

something that others can enjoy and maybe something I can make a few bucks out of, even if that does make me feel like a freaking vampire profiting off of other people's misery, maybe let me know in the comments section, but regardless, I hope you enjoyed reading this, and maybe, just maybe, it'll help keep you safe in a world where people are out there with the worst compulsions imaginable, driving them to kill. I've worked for the United States Forest Service here in Texas for just shy of 10 years now. I love my job, and it's rare for anything particularly creepy or scary to happen, but having worked this job for so long, I have my fair share of stories I can share that might just make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. For example, we sometimes get jaguars hunting in the forest here. A particularly scary big cat,

and that's because what they do with their prey once they're caught and subdued. So, just picture the scene. You're walking through the trees on some bright sunny day when all of a sudden you start to smell something rotten. You look around but there's nothing to be seen, just the picturesque view of the pines and the sound of birdsong floating through the green. Then something hits the top of your head. Something wet. You place a hand on the top of your head, feeling something cold and slimy dribbling through your hair. You bring your hand down to see what it is. It's not bird poop. It's something way worse. It's blood. You look up and, hanging up in a tree just

feet above your head, is a mutilated, half-eaten corpse of an animal. Guts torn out, skin shredded, face half-eaten with hooves or paws missing, with broken pieces of bone protruding from cracked limbs. It seems an utterly bizarre thing to do, but the jaguar has a good reason for doing all this heavy lifting. If a jaguar doesn't bother to hoist its kill into the tree, it risks losing its meal to other, more ground-based predators or scavengers. Creepy, yeah, but that kind of natural world stuff is nothing compared to some of the other stuff that I've encountered during my time in the Forest Service. So this other time I'm on a routine walk through some of the trails to make sure all the directional signs and information markers for tourists are all in order. There's a large rock protrusion about 100 meters off of this trail like this big sandstone boulder that juts out of the earth that has kind of like a shallow cave carved out

on one side that's been worn away from thousands of years of wind erosion. As I get close, I see a guy in what I first thought was camouflage hunting gear hanging around the entrance. I call out to him, just some friendly greeting, nothing threatening, and he turns to look at me. Only he doesn't say a word, he just runs off through the trees. I start getting worried about what he was doing in the cave, terrified that he's left a body or something there and honestly, I thank god that he hadn't. But it seems like he did leave something behind. I mean, I'm not even 100% sure it was him that did this and I've often considered the possibility that it was him that happened across this little find first and seeing me got the idea in his head that it was me that left those things there. He got the idea into his head, saw me, and just freaked, but when I walked

into that little cave and shone my flashlight around, I saw something that would completely explain why he was so quick to run away, whatever his motivations for doing so were. Teeth. There was a little circular patch of dirt, one that looked like it had been raked over to clear some space, and in the middle of it all were a bunch of human teeth. I don't know why they were there, I don't know who left them or why, but I did what I could. I gathered them up in a little plastic bag that I had on me that had previously contained my lunch and took them down to the nearest police station, giving a little description of the guy that I'd seen run away from the cave. I have the usual wild animal encounters, weird noises during the night, but

I've never forgotten those teeth. I have no explanation to offer up at all, but it certainly does make for a good little campfire story. We'll be right back. to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. When you want to bet on sports, play it on a field or ice or course. BetRivers is the place. Over, under, money, line. Same game, parlays, it's all fine. You'll put a smile on your face. Bet on the sports you love with BetRivers Sportsbook.

Take a chance. Must be 19 plus. Available in Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact ConnexOntario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. I won't tell you who I am. I can't tell you where this happened and I can't tell you when this happened. I got death threats for months after this and I had to quit. I had to move. I had to change my entire identity to stop people from finding me. Some of you sickos will no doubt put in the time and research into working out all the

details yourself but just let me make it clear that my details were expunged from the employment records and you'll never ever find me. And so, I can make my confession in peace. I used to work as a park ranger at a well-known, frequently visited national park. At this particular national park, there was an old ghost story that the veteran rangers used to tell about one of our number who heard a noise coming from a lake one day. The noise had apparently sounded like a puppy yelping and splashing, but the ranger who heard it couldn't swim and wasn't about to put himself in danger of drowning just to save a dog. The next day, the body of a young child washed up on the shore. It was never a dog out there.

It was a child that had fallen in the lake after being out there exploring unsupervised. The ranger was devastated. His spirit crushed that his selfishness had resulted in the death of an innocent child. He was haunted by the thought, took to drinking, wore himself down, until one night, while sleeping in his cabin, he heard a familiar noise coming from the lake. It was the sound of a little boy crying out to be rescued. He ran to the lakeside, dived into the water, and struggled his way into the center of the body of water until he reached the site of the splashing. But there he only saw the smiling, bloated corpse of that same little boy,

who dragged him beneath the lake and drowned him, just as he had. That's the way the story went, and to be honest, i thought it was the biggest load of bull i'd ever heard in my life i told the crusty old-timers that same thing that i'd have to be of diminished capacity to believe a crock of nonsense like that but instead of laughing or whatever like okay maybe this guy isn't as dumb as we first thought they got pretty angry about it they told me not to disrespect the angry spirits of the departed, but then it was my turn to laugh. I could tell the difference between them getting annoyed over me disrespecting the dead or whatever and them getting annoyed over me just disrespecting

their dumb stories. The following week I found I'd had my shift pattern switch to nights. I confronted them about it, told them I was not impressed that they were that immature as to switch my shifts up, but they insisted that it was only cover for a guy whose mom had taken ill and been forced to drive back to his home state in order to care for her. I didn't believe a word at first, and I was just straight up angry at that point, angry that a pair of grown men would lie about something like that, basically just gaslighting me. But I didn't want to show them how frustrated I was. I'd just take it on the chin, so to speak, and not give them the satisfaction.

So the first night I'm there in the lakeside cabin, I'm settling in to prepare for a long night of utter boredom, brewing coffee and playing dumb mobile games when I hear something from outside the cabin. I put down my phone, get up and walk over to the door to open it so I can listen out for what it is. I recognize it instantly. It's the sound of splashing, coupled with the sound of a child crying out for help between spluttered breaths. Ha ha, very funny. I remember shouting out into the darkness. You think you can scare me with your dumb stories? Why didn't believe them then and I don't believe them now?

Try it with someone with an IQ as low as yours. This was obviously their little game playing out. Their attempt to scare me into submission and believing their backward ghost story. But I wasn't about to let that happen. I went back inside, slamming the door shut and jamming my airpods in on full volume to block the noise out. They were selfish and vindictive, that's what I told myself anyway. But apparently not determined enough to keep playing that sound from whatever speaker system they'd set up around the cabin because when I paused my music like 20 minutes later,

the noise was gone and all was quiet again. The next morning, just after sunrise, I pack up my stuff and prepare to leave the cabin. I was so exhausted and irritated by the prank they pulled. I wasn't prepared to wait for them to arrive. I figured if I did, I'd be so angry at seeing them that I might have knocked some of their freaking teeth out. That would get me fired, and I simply couldn't afford that, not with the economy and the estate that it was. But as I'm walking to my truck, something catches my eye from the lakeside. Something small and sodden that the gentle waves of the lake lapped against. I turned to look and saw what it was, and when I

did, I dropped my bag in pure horror and disbelief at what I was staring at. It was the body of a child face down in the dirt. I pulled out my phone, dialed 911, and basically screamed at the operator for an ambulance to get out to that place I was based at. They had to send a helicopter in the end, but before it showed up, the two crusty old rangers rolled up in their truck, and their eyeballs almost fell out of their head when they saw me trying to perform CPR on the dead kid. I tried and tried and tried, but he was gone, long gone, and it was all my fault. I ended up word vomiting about what had happened the night before, telling them everything, how I thought the whole thing was part of the prank, part of the punishment for not believing their freaking story. They claimed to have no idea what I was talking about which angered me even more. But when they asked me why I didn't help

the kid, I flipped. I rushed one of the older guys, tackled him and beat the life out of him before I was dragged off and talked me back down to earth. But I couldn't ever really calm down, not until the chopper arrived and put that kid's body on a stretcher. The paramedics seemed furious that there was no one to save. I remember one of them explicitly shouting over the din of the rotor blades that, kid's been dead for hours. When they took off and I drove back home to go on indefinite paid leave, I thought that might have been the end of it,

and that I'd have time and space to get over what had happened. But I didn't have time. Someone leaked the information out on what had happened. I don't know if it was the old timer I decked, the other ranger, or the paramedics, but somehow, someone got a hold of my contact details and the threatening calls began. I'll never forget the night my girlfriend answered the phone in our apartment, saying hello in that happy, chirpy way she always used to. I watched as her face went from all smiley to neutral to downright horrified. Who is this? Hey, who is this? Call here again and I'm calling the cops. It was the first time of many death threats. The first of many. Many calls and handwritten letters and emails that told me I was an awful person.

That I didn't deserve to live. That I was dead to the world the night I let that poor innocent young boy drown in that lake. When his lungs filled with water and the death spasms wrecked his body, he wasn't the only one to die, as I died too. Needless to say, she wasn't my girlfriend for much longer and I don't even blame her. There are many people who can handle that kind of abuse and I only got through it by myself by the skin of my teeth. And so that led me to where I am today. I live alone in a state far far away from the national park where I allowed a child to drown. I legally changed my name, changed my entire look so no one from my old life would be able to recognize me.

I went through an intense period of transformation and the old me is a ghost, as good as dead and dust in the wind. I thought that this would be therapeutic to write out. I just hope that no one will ever find me. No one. To be continued... so it's no wonder we were all of a certain size and shape. But it always bothered me. I'd see the attention skinnier girls got around school and I know it doesn't align with my mostly feminist view of the world but I wanted that to be me too. So a few years back I started my own personal weight loss journey.

Not so much so I could fit society's view of what beautiful is but so that I could have confidence in myself and in my own body. I wanted to look good for me and if that helped me land a hot guy then cool. This is how I ended up taking up hiking as a hobby and why I spend so much time around Acadia National Park up here in Maine. The views up there also allowed me to indulge another hobby of mine photography and sure my pictures don't make it any further than my instagram account but still it's something that brings me a lot of joy sometimes i drive up there with friends but they couldn't commit to those long trips all the time so there were times when i'd have to go up to acadia alone in order to get

my few hours exercise in. So I'm hiking the trails up there, taking pictures of the way the sun glinted off the ocean through the trees, messing around with filters, the usual photography stuff. I thought I'd manage to get this one amazing shot, something that was bound to get a whole bunch of attention on Instagram when I hear a voice sounding from behind me. Lovely day for it, huh? It was a man's voice. Friendly sounding, but still, the shock of hearing it so suddenly made me jump. I turned, seeing a man in a park ranger's uniform. The hat, the little shorts, the whole getup, walking up the trail behind me with one of those trekking poles in his hand. Oh, yeah, gotta make the most of the nice weather here in Maine, it's super rare.

I try to sound as cheerful as possible, but I won't lie, I didn't really want the attention, at least not from an older guy like that who'd also managed to ruin the composition of the photograph I was in the process of taking. I know that makes me sound unfriendly or whatever, but honestly, sometimes us girls just prefer to be left alone. But he continued to make conversation in that super annoying way that some people do. It's like they can't detect that you just want to have some time to yourself and opt for being gregarious. So I remained polite for as long as I could, nodding along as he talked about how lonely it could get being a park ranger up here, then eventually just straight up asked him politely to leave me to my photography,

making something up about being a professional photographer who was surveying the area for a magazine I worked for. I know, I shouldn't have lied, but I got the distinct impression he wasn't going to leave me alone otherwise. But he took it on the chin. I suppose he got the craving for human contact out of his system. He told me he was so sorry to interrupt, wished me luck with my work, then carried on down the trail. So I take my photos, taking my time over them, but decided to turn back and walk the opposite way so I don't run into him again. I didn't think he was creepy or anything, I just didn't want to have that awkward moment of running into that guy again and being like, oh hi again. Call me neurotic for wanting to avoid that, but that's just the way I felt about it. So I'm heading back the opposite way, taking pictures along the way, capturing the way the trails snake through the trees in such beautiful ways sometimes,

looking like something out of a fairy tale. I happen to take a particularly aesthetically pleasing one, and I'm admiring it on my phone when I happen to notice some small detail in the center right of the frame. It was a figure, clearly wearing a pair of shorts, peeking out from among the trees. I know that's a pretty innocuous little detail, I know it was just the ranger I'd seen like an hour previous, but it sent a chill through me. Just how had he managed to loop around and get ahead of me even though he walked off in the opposite direction that I had. I felt distinctly unsafe, a flash of fear running through me as I began to suspect that this ranger's guy's intentions were far from good. I mean, who just follows someone like that? Or rather,

it wasn't even following me that he was doing, this guy was straight up stalking me. But I had no choice but to walk by him. He had literally put himself between me and my car so I had just to suck it up and walk past him even if it was putting on a brave face to do so. I tried to like cut him off if that made sense. I was prepping myself to just be like, hi there, can't stop, late back for a meeting or something to that effect. But it was him that spoke first. I was prepping myself to just be like, hi there, can't stop, late back for a meeting, or something to that effect, but it was him that spoke first. You know, it's just not safe for a girl like you to be walking around the park alone. I can't remember exactly what he said, it's just my estimation of it.

You're really pretty, and bad things can happen to a pretty girl that walks around on her lonesome. I was ruined. I tried to think of something witty to say, some cutting retort that would shame him for being way, way too familiar, but I couldn't. I was just terrified. Who says that to a total stranger? So I just carried on walking at an increased speed, ready to call 911 if he started to follow me. But he didn't. He just shouted like,

Where are you going? Don't you want some company? Take care of being rude like that, little lady. You might just end up being rude to the wrong person. I thought stuff like that only happened in horror movies or something. That creeps like that couldn't really be walking among us, or that if they were, I suppose I just hoped that I'd never encountered one. So I get to the end of the trail, back to the parking lot where I'd left my car, when I see another ranger milling around the area, taking like little markers out of his truck or whatever. I walk up to him and demand to know who the other ranger on duty was, describing the way the guy looked, how his uniform was all dirty

and stuff, how he carried that trekking pole when suddenly I just started to feel sick. This other ranger, his uniform looked almost nothing like the guy back in the woods. It was clean, pressed, and starched. A lighter khaki color with different styles of patches on it. Some kind of main park service kind of thing, just different looking. I knew what he was going to say before he even said it. There was no other park ranger on duty at the time. He was the only guy in the area and no one else should have been wearing a park ranger's uniform. He saw the look of horror on my face, that nauseous, shell-shocked look as I realized just how much danger I'd been in walking around with that guy on the loose. I told him everything, but I didn't stick around

to see what came of it. I just got in my car and went down back north towards Ellsworth. And it took me a long, long time before I was able to go back to Acadia even with friends. And I make a point of never, ever going to secluded places like that alone. It's just not worth the risk of running into someone like that. Someone willing to dress up and order to trick young women into feeling safe, when in reality, they may well have very, very different intentions. So this is a true story about one of the more real-life threatening moments I've experienced. About a year ago, I drove across the country to California for grad school. Total, the trip was about 2,800 miles, taking me across the middle of the country. I had two other options, to drive the northern route through Colorado or the southern way through Alabama and South Texas.

Although this was probably the most boring way, it was the fastest by about 6 hours and the entire trip took about 4 and a half days. I had recently been through a tough breakup and things back home all around weren't going great for me since undergrad, so that played into my decision to move to California. I really enjoyed the drive itself. It gave me plenty of time to reflect on my life and figure out the stuff I needed to change about myself. I would basically drive 10-15 hours a day until I got tired and book an Airbnb. I took my time on the drive. If I saw a cool national park or landmark to explore, I did it because it was the most free I've ever felt. I was driving through the Ozark Mountains to Arkansas. I'd never watched the show, but figured it would be a cool place to explore. I was making good time on the drive, so I took a 30-minute detour and followed the GPS on my phone to the center of the national park. I drove through a

quaint town, past a junkyard filled with old rusted vehicles, and down a stretch of road that was covered in tall spruce trees. Eventually I lost service, but that was fine because I figured it was still a relatively frequented spot for outdoor junkies. I reached a gravel turnout marked with a wooden sign where people could take small boats to launch. I parked, locked my car and grabbed my knife, some water and hammock, hoping to find a cool spot by the river to get a peaceful rest. I found two trees with the perfect distance and set up my hammock, drifting off into a light sleep for about 30 minutes. When I decided it was time to go, I rolled my hammock into its case and put my large knife and water into the drawstring bag I carry them in. I should add that I carry the knife whenever I go hiking because I'm a paranoid person that's seen too many movies.

I grew up hunting and fishing and wrestled in college so normally I feel fairly safe by my own. As I walked up from the riverbank I noticed a black SUV had parked and a young couple was standing behind it with the back hatch open. The guy was setting up a fishing pole and the girl was standing there just watching. I noticed a medium sized black dog with medium length hair. It looked like a lab mixed with maybe a German Shepherd. My family has always had large dogs and this one looked friendly so the thought didn't cross my mind that maybe it wasn't. As I got closer to their car which was parked by mine, the dog noticed me and started trotting towards me. As I got within 5 feet, I stuck my palm out for it to sniff. I don't know if it felt like I was a threat to the couple or what, but it

instantly started barking and growling, running from its owner and back to me. As it did this, the girl just looked at it, saying nothing, and the guy just kept messing with the fishing line. After a few times of running back and forth, the dog charged at me and I started backpedaling and yelling at it. This seemed to scare it off a little, but it kept charging and lunging at me, biting me through shorts on my mid-thigh, breaking the skin. Thankfully it didn't hold on or shake but I could immediately see blood running down my leg. I had no idea what to do and I felt terrified and also intense anger towards the couple for not calling their dog off.

The guy was still playing with his fishing pole while the girl looked on with an expressionless face. After the dog bit me, it continued to do its charging back and forth. As it ran back to them, I quickly opened my drawstring and fumbled with my knife. It was a large 10-inch blade in a black sheath. I drew it and yelled out to the couple that I would use it if I had to. Out of all the things I could have yelled to make myself seem tough, I just said, Please get your dog! I guess it was all my mind could process at the time. Finally the guy looked up and called his dog back and held it by the collar, allowing me to get in my car. I did so as quickly as possible, no one saying a word to each other. As I drove off, the adrenaline wore off and what replaced it was pure anger. My brain was telling

me that I should go back and confront the couple for being so careless about their dog viciously attacking another person. However, the logical side told me to keep driving and not look back. I know this might not seem like that big of a deal and could have been a lot worse, but imagine being a thousand miles away from home in the remote Arkansas wilderness with no phone service. I assessed the damage once I found a safe place to pull off the road and after I regained service. Luckily, the puncture wounds weren't very deep and I had a medical kit in my trunk from when I was a lifeguard. I dressed it with rubbing alcohol and cotton gauze and drove off. Looking back, I should have called the police or animal control because the dog could have had

rabies. I really didn't even think about it at the time. I guess I was just still too shaken up. If I ever drive through Arkansas again, I'll make sure to never, ever go hiking again. So back in 2007, I found myself working as a bartender at a now-closed pub in my hometown. Not a job I particularly liked, but it paid the bills. At this time, they hired a new kitchen manager that we all simply knew as Kearney. Kearney was a pleasant enough man, mostly keeping to himself, but also stayed late to help the barman do our closing duties, so we all liked him for that. New in town, Kearney had yet to find a place of permanent residence and I had recently lost my tenants so someone suggested he ask me.

He was considerably older than the tenants I usually took in but having had a streak of bad luck with tenants my own age, I thought an older man with a nice steady job may be a shift in the right direction so I agreed. Kearney wasted no time and followed me home that very same night, only he wasn't alone. Enter Lawrence, the boyfriend of Kearney. Honestly, I hadn't even realized he was gay up until that point, but was water off my back regardless, and looking back, what really should have bothered me though was Lawrence's appearance. He looked like he had been sleeping on the street, rather more appropriately as I would later find out. So Kearney moved in, Lawrence was there a lot too and it was easy to know when due

to his mobile ringtone sounding like the quacking of a duckling. Kearney had some habits that were rather noteworthy to this story in particular. One, he basically never closed his bedroom door. No matter what he was doing in there, it was always open and two, although he was a very heavy smoker, he never once smoked inside the house. So Kearney had been living there for about two weeks when I had come down with an awful case of pink eye. This being highly contagious, I was given leave of absence from my bartending job and therefore decided to go wait it out at my sister's for a few days. Apparently, I didn't mind giving it to her. Sorry, sis.

So the day my sister was scheduled to come pick me up, no I couldn't drive yet, I took a casual stroll into the bar that myself and Ben, my good friend from high school, and at the time co-worker had been building in my house, and something caught my eye. All our liquor bottles were completely empty. Now, those who have been frequenting my house at that time wouldn't know that we weren't just talking about one or two bottles of brandy here, but bottles of whiskey, gin, vodka, schnapps, liqueurs, basically it was a fully stocked bar that could host a pretty big party without requiring much in the way of additions. So I called in Kearney, asking him what he knew about this, receiving feedback that Lawrence and

he had been on a slight drinking binge, those were the actual words he used. That had left me both furious about the thousands of dollars worth of stock that he had drunk out, but also slightly impressed that he was actually still alive. Regardless, I said that I will be dealing with this upon my return. So I'm with my sister for a few days and on Friday I get a call from my local police department asking me if I know a Conrad Schultz. Ironically enough I didn't. They finally add that I will probably know him as Kearney and that I should probably come down to the station as they had just arrested his boyfriend trying to sell my camera equipment. So my sister rushes me back home where all my

camera equipment was on display at the police station. It's on this visit that I'm informed that Lawrence was actually a Navy SEAL, who got dishonorably discharged before turning to a life of crime and now had a rap sheet the length of the Bible. The kicker was that both he and Kearney were actually homeless men who had met at the Salvation Army. So Lawrence is in jail and my sister drops me off at home, more or less the same time that Kearney gets home as well. Based on Kearney's account of what had happened, he had turned Lawrence in himself as he couldn't allow Lawrence to do to me what he was trying to do. Although I had appreciated his sacrifice, I still told Kearney that he would have to go,

having been the overall cause of all this. However, not wanting to leave the homeless man, well, homeless, I gave him until the end of the month to make other arrangements. So Monday comes and having just completed staff meeting, I walk home to encounter a very much free Lawrence sitting on the sidewalk across my house, watching it. I confront Lawrence as to why he's there and he tries to apologize before begging for money, rather out of character really. I dismissed him without giving him a cent. scent. Now I go back to the previous night, see, I had mentioned the staff meeting for a reason, as it was at that meeting where he had gotten a rather sizable list of liquor bottles that had

gone missing from the storeroom, leaving us all suspecting each other. I, however, would not have to wait long to figure out who the real culprit was, as a few days later, I opened the garbage bin in my kitchen to see the missing bottles, all empty and staring back at me. I decided to sit on this information for the time being, although I did photograph it, just in case I needed it as evidence later. I had also called over Ben to inform him of the developments. As this was quickly becoming a detective game, we decided to enter Kearney's room to search for further evidence. Nothing of vast significance in there, with one exception.

Two single photographs of Lawrence, before he had turned into the homeless version of Lex Luthor or Charles Xavier. Actually, there were several of Lawrence's things still there. But as Lawrence had spent a lot of time there before the incident, I accepted this as normal. Now I should also add that I had mentioned Lawrence's release to Kearney and had told him that if I even suspected that they were still seeing each other, I would throw him out of the house myself. Only a few days would pass before this came into play. On this particular night, I had been bartending again, and Kearney had constantly been stopping by to help himself to draft glasses

half full of wine and half full of coke, which he would go drink outside the restaurant. We confronted him about this, but as he correctly pointed out, he was still a manager and we had no right to tell him what he could or could not do. On his fourth trip, however, I had grown suspicious no right to tell him what he could or could not do. On his fourth trip however, I had grown suspicious and decided to follow him outside where I encountered Lawrence sitting outside sharing the half coke half wine concoctions with Kearney. This made me livid. So the next day I returned to the restaurant with my photographic evidence that I had

handed over to the general manager who was also kind of a friend of mine. Although I hadn't physically seen it, I had heard the confrontation through the office door when he fired Kearney. Kearney left, obviously upset and apparently had no idea that I had been the one who turned him in. So, we had closed early that night and I was walking home, going past the high school. I saw Kearney coming from the opposite direction. He walked past me, literally only saying two words, I'm scared, before disappearing into the darkness. And that would be the last time that I would ever physically lay my eyes on Conrad Schultz. So we reached the final week before Kearney's eviction

was to take place. Ben had come to stay with me for that duration as we both wanted to monitor the situation and make sure that nothing else happens. It was in this week that Kearney's behavior suddenly changed. He was constantly smoking in his room and his door was closed 24-7. In fact, neither Ben nor I had caught so much as a peek of him in that entire last week, which we hadn't thought much of at that time. So the day of Kearney's eviction comes around. Ben had gone home for a few hours and I finally hear Kearney's bedroom's door open. Someone walks out of the room, opens the front door and leaves. I follow him outside, but somehow he had already completely disappeared.

What was left though was his house keys indicating that he obviously wasn't planning coming back. I follow him outside but somehow he had already completely disappeared. What was left though was his house keys indicating that he obviously wasn't planning coming back. I took a look at the keys noticing something strange. Although the correct keys were all on the keychain, there were also several that weren't mine. Why would he leave me the wrong keys I remember thinking to myself as I walked into his room. His room was in a shock, not because of the state that it was in. The two had broken his bed in an act of wild monkey love but I had known about that already. As I said, he never closed his freaking door. But more that he had already literally left all of his belongings behind with one exception,

you guessed it, the two photos of Lawrence. Upon further investigation, I suddenly realized that all traces of Lawrence ever being there had completely vanished, with all of Kearney's stuff left behind. There was one thing of Lawrence left behind though, his duckling ringtone, which it turned out hadn't been so much a ringtone as an actual duckling, which now strolled around casually in the vacant bedroom, and we named him Neville. So Ben returns and gets updated about the developments, both of us thinking the way that he left was rather weird, of course the whole thing had been weird. It was only when I asked the infamous question that this all became a conspiracy theory.

Did you ever actually see Kearney in this last week? It was to our shock that we realized that neither of us had. Suddenly putting puzzle pieces together, the changing habits, Neville the duck, the wrong keys, only Lawrence's stuff being gone. It was to great discomfort that we both asked the question, who had really been living in our house this past week? During the next few days, Ben and I went on a mission, searching the town, crawling into drain pipes, trying to find any trace of Kearney's whereabouts, but they all added up to nothing. Conrad Schultz had simply vanished off the face of the earth. That wasn't the case with Lawrence though. No, he was still around. Having made some new homeless friends, we encountered him several times begging on the streets. I asked him every time,

Hey, where's Kearney, Lawrence? But he just acted like he had never heard of him. The last time I would see Lawrence was across from work, attempting to break into a car. I called the police on him and they had arrived rather quickly, arresting him on the spot. While he was being led away by the police, I shouted after him one last time, Where's Kearney, Lawrence? But he just ignored me and let the cops drag him away. The next day I filed a police report reporting Kearney as a missing person and suggesting that Lawrence may know something

about it, but nothing ever came of it. So Lawrence, I don't know if you did something to Kearney or not, but if you did, please never show your face around my house. Again. It was a long time ago, before cell phones were prevalent and I was a mom in my early thirties who had just driven our kids to the pediatrician. The Megan Georgia doctor's office was an hour away from our home and I was just taking the two youngest of my three, then ages one and three years old to our scheduled appointment. Because we lived so far away, their office always gave us the last two appointments of the day and we were grateful. The doctor had just built a new building off of a fresh spur of the highway so the location was quite isolated in every direction but a very

nice facility compared to his old spot by the hospital there. His new building was also pretty far back on the new lot and my car, a black jeep Cherokee that we had owned for two years, was one of only four or five cars in the parking lot when we got there. I parked near the front door, removed the kids from their car seats and for the next hour or so we waited, then saw the doctor, paid and finally exited back outside. Mine was the only car left in the lot as I loaded the children in their car seats for our trip home, but as the receptionists locked the front glass doors my car somehow wouldn't start when I turned the key. There was just an odd clicking noise. Gathering the children once again, I knocked on the door until someone allowed us back in and asked to borrow their phone to call a nearby garage for

service. I found one in the phone book and the man said that he would come but that it might be a bit so I told him my location, left to go back out to the car, rolled down all the windows and loaded the children back into their seats once more as we waited. Soon we watched as all the lights were turned out in the building again and everyone left, the cars departing one by one from behind the building somewhere leaving us now completely alone in the parking lot. As it was still light, I spent a lot of that time trying to tend to the children, digging through our car for snacks in a bottle, making sure that they weren't getting too hot, etc. Although the service station attendant said that

it was probably going to be quite a while, I was pleasantly surprised when a truck pulled into the empty parking lot pretty soon and a man got out of his pickup, smiled and nodded to me and said that he was going to raise the hood. He was middle-aged and a bit scruffy but quite frankly many gas station attendants sometimes look that way especially at the end of the day and, waiting for him to tell me to try the engine, but he seemed to be taking a long time checking the connections and I longed for him to just grab jumper cables, yet he never did. Without getting out of the car, I asked him what he thought was wrong and he said, It's just a loose wire, not the battery. And continued doing whatever it was he was doing. I couldn't see his face at all from where I was sitting, and his hands were slightly visible through that long, horizontal slit between the windshield and the raised hood as we waited.

More than once he said it was merely a loose wire, and if I would just come up here really quick he could show me which one it was, so it would never happen again. I remember kind of smiling and shaking my head saying that sadly there was no reason to show me anything as I didn't know anything about cars. I just thanked him and continued to stay in the driver's seat again just waiting for the inevitable signal to try to start the ignition that was most surely coming any moment.

At one point I remember thinking that he was definitely flirting as he spoke but I was trying above all to be polite and kind as he was indeed helping us. We were hot and tired and miserable and truthfully I was distracted with the kids. Oddly enough he was starting to sound a little frustrated with me because I wouldn't come up and look at the engine. I remember thinking that I certainly didn't want to make him mad where he left us there all alone with the sun sinking so quickly. And then the strangest thing happened. Another truck suddenly pulled into that desolate parking lot. And as it did, this nice guy working underneath my hood suddenly slammed it shut, ran to his truck, started it, and drove away very quickly, without even saying a word of goodbye. I was both confused and a little anxious when he did this, because I didn't know who was now arriving.

I even remember feeling a little frightened that he had suddenly left me there alone with two little ones defenseless. Why wouldn't he at least stay and speak to whoever was parking next to me now? It certainly seemed the southerly gentleman thing to do. I looked around and was very aware once again that there were no visible cars on the road, no homes or businesses nearby, and the sun was continuing to set quickly. As this new, also unmarked pickup pulled in next to me, I got out of the car once again, this time more apprehensively. Upon exiting though, he immediately introduced himself, and his name and voice seemed to match who I had spoken to on the phone much earlier. He then actually called me by name, apologized for

being so late, and finally smiled and stared towards the road, pointing and asking who the man was that had just left so suddenly. Relieved and unfazed, I just smiled back in surprise and told him, well, I don't know. I thought all this time he was you. And we both laughed slightly as he then grabbed jumper cables, walked to the front of my car, raised the hood and started to work. I immediately sat back in the driver's seat once more, suddenly grateful that, with luck, that air conditioner would be blowing full blast shortly and once again checking the children. While listening for the familiar words

try it, I had my back completely turned towards the children when he surprised me by suddenly coming to the driver's side door. In the strangest voice he said, uh, ma'am, is this yours? And when I looked into his hands, he was holding a long, thin, dagger-like looking device that was about a foot and a half in length. It appeared to be very old and covered with reddish rust, yet on one end it had tiny circular small finger holes, as if it was a mix of a long thin sword and scissors oddly combined. I remember being amazed but not frightened and I asked where he had found them. Under the hood, he replied.

I said just matter-of-factly that I had never seen them before but how weird was it that those things had somehow been stuck and undiscovered in my car for all those years? And shook my head in surprise. He continued to stand there and stare at them unbelievingly, and he looked oddly pale too, like he couldn't find the words to speak for a bit, just continuing to stare at the unusual object. Honestly, I didn't care one bit about it. All I could think about was getting the car going, letting me pay him, and leaving. He didn't say anything else, just quickly set them on the curb, started his truck, and then signaled for me to start the jeep, and when it immediately caught, my three-year-old cheered. Grateful, I quickly turned on the air conditioner full blast, rolled up all the windows,

aimed the air vents back towards the back seat seat and reached for my purse to pay out. I stood up and took a few steps to meet him so I could hear the amount now owed. With both of my vehicles running, he came back around to my driver's side but instead of handing me the bill, irritated me a bit by walking right past me and picking up that weird object once more. Ma'am, he said slowly, I want you to look at these one more time, and held them out for closer inspection. This time I moved a bit closer and actually really looked. In his hands, the item still appeared incredibly large, possessing an almost bad-nat-looking quality except for the strangely small two loops on one end. I had never seen anything like it and told him so. As he held it, he spoke quietly and slowly to me as if trying desperately to make me understand something that was somehow still going over my head.

These weren't hidden somewhere in the engine man. They hadn't been there a very long time at all, cause they were sitting right on top. They must have just been put there. I shook my head no and half smiled as I said, but they're obviously very old and rusty. To which he pointed more closely and replied, Yeah, but see how sharp they are? These look like they'd just been sharpened. And when I looked down, he was right. The long, skinny, dagger-like shape was unusual,

but by far the oddest quality was just how sharp it appeared to be. The edges at the tip where the rust had been removed were gleaming silver. As I paid him, his final words to me were, Ma'am, I don't know what was about to happen here, but I'm really glad I pulled up when I did. He quietly thanked me when taking the payment, told me that I probably needed to call the police when I got home, and then asked me where I wanted the item. I didn't want to touch it, didn't want to take it at all, but I released the back window so he could place it inside.

We both then left the lot together, him turning one way, me turning the other towards the small winding highway that would lead me home still about an hour away. I did indeed contact the Macon police the moment that we arrived home and I got the children inside safely, but although they listened politely they declined when I offered to bring the scissor-like thing to them later. The officer I spoke to said that they sounded as if though they were specialized surgical shears from my description and measurements on the phone, which I found quite disturbing, as you can imagine. I remember wondering how he would even know that, why he would say that. I had tried so carefully not to touch any of the surfaces hoping that they might be able to lift prints or test it for blood if they wanted, but the story seemed to bore him a bit and

he didn't seem interested. His attitude insinuated that, as there were no longer an emergency, it was of no importance now. At the very end of the call, as if to wind things up, he did say that it sounded as if though I was very lucky and that I might want to keep the shears for a few days, just in case someone from his office got back with me later. But that was all. I wrapped them carefully in newspaper and placed them in the brick storage unit behind her house. And there they remained for several more years, untouched, until we moved away and I finally, not wanting to bring them across several states, reluctantly threw them in the trash. Around that time though, if you look through old news reports, women were going missing all over Georgia.

Some bodies were eventually found, but others remain missing to this very day. I have often wondered what would have happened if the service station attendant hadn't arrived when he did. If my children would still have a mother. If I would still have my son and daughter. If I would have missed all those years with them. I guess I'll never know. But I learned something very important about myself that day. I had always felt that I was pretty aware of my surroundings, pretty good at reading people and staying safe. But because I was exhausted and tired and hot and stranded in a different city, my common sense and intelligence simply left me for a bit and wasn't working at that time. And many of my friends and family still think that our car

trouble that day and my lack of awareness could have easily have cost us our lives. To set the scene, I'm an average height, average size 20 year old female. I've been told I'm very approachable and perhaps too nice to strangers. I sometimes just don't have the heart to tell people to buzz off, and I definitely should. Obviously, I'm not going to give specific details, but I worked in a restaurant which was inside a bigger shopping center. My stalker, an old man named Eric, worked for the actual shopping center itself and not a store inside it like me. When I was 16 and first started the job, I was quite timid and awkward and let anyone say pretty much anything to me. I didn't quite know what to say when older customers and other employees would make inappropriate comments to me. I would simply just laugh it off, whatever people would say or not respond.

In my 16-year-old mind, this was a lot easier to handle. I had one other friend at my job who was my age and her name was Jessica. Jessica had worked there for longer than I had and one day she asked me if I had heard of this guy who worked in the shopping center called Eric. Jessica described Eric as very strange and didn't describe him as frightening or unsettling or even someone to be afraid of, just as a very eccentric man. Really, she and other employees would laugh at his odd sayings and awkward behavior. Jessica has also told me that Eric had brought her a present on Valentine's Day. Chocolate. Anyone would think this was friendly behavior or harmless flirting, if he wasn't a 50-year-old something man bringing chocolates to a 16-year-old

girl he barely knows. I began to see for myself that Eric wasn't just an innocent old man with a slight crush. He had other intentions. The first time I remember Eric approaching me was when I was filling up a machine near the entrance of my work. This machine was out of the view of all of the other employees and the restaurant was empty so this was pretty much the perfect time for a creep to approach without being seen. Eric wasn't supposed to enter my place of work when he was working at the shopping center so he had deliberately gone out of his way to come and speak to me. To describe his appearance, he is your typical creepy old loner. He was gaunt, had grey hair with bald patches and had beady little eyes which he never averted from yours. And I can't get them out of my head till this day.

Eric must have snuck up on me. As I looked up, he was standing right next to me, a little too close. I could feel his breath on my cheek. My name is Lucy. And Eric asked me, Lucy, are you married? He almost giggled after he asked me this. He had a smirk on his face, which made me feel as if he was trying to pretend that he thought I was older than I was,

and at 16, I look 16. Eric liked to ask me questions that he already knew the answer to, just to see what my reaction would be. Letting me know in his own way that he had been looking up information about me on social media, he would do this frequently. I began to clock onto the fact that Eric had been going a little further than just approaching me at work, and instead stalking my social media accounts in the weeks following this first encounter, such as Twitter and Instagram, when he began asking me very specific questions about things I had posted about it in the days before. For example, I had posted on Instagram about a tattoo that I got, which was in homage

to my favorite band. I was serving a customer one day, only to be interrupted by a shrill but quiet voice. It was Eric. His eyes were huge and he looked a pure excitement and menace on his face. He had yet again entered my workplace when he wasn't supposed to just to talk to me. He asked me, Lucy, what's your favorite Nine Inch Nails song? Eric relished in my discomfort. He could see by my reaction that I was clocking on the fact that he had been viewing my personal social media and the thought of that made my blood run cold. I felt disgusting and violated. The tattoo I had gotten was covered by my work uniform so the only way he could have seen it was by going through my Instagram page. This creeped me out majorly but somehow I just forced myself to forget all about it and carried on working.

Over the course of a few months, Eric would come into my workplace more and more frequently, asking me bizarre questions, and still reciting back to me things that I had tweeted about or posted on Instagram. Every time I would see him, I would get visibly uncomfortable, and he liked this and this is what he wanted. All while this was happening, Jessica approached me and let me know that Eric had followed her in his car on her walk home from work, slowly down to ask her where she

lived. I had also been told other disturbing news about Eric from multiple different people. It seemed as if he was becoming more invested in whatever his intentions were towards me and Jessica. News had traveled to one of my managers about Eric's unsettling actions towards me and this manager informed me that a few years ago, Eric was rumored to have followed a young girl who used to work for our restaurant into a toilet. Things didn't quite make sense to me. He was known for being a creep yet still employed at the shopping center? On one hand, I was glad to know I wasn't just creeped out for no reason, but on the other hand, I was frightened as he'd been doing this for years yet no one had stopped him. There was a woman who worked at the same place as me called Rebecca and she had some

sort of disability which caused her to befriend and be trusting to people without knowing anything about them. It seems that Eric took advantage of her as he had asked for her phone number and she gave it to him. Rebecca had shown me her text with Eric. He had texted her things like, Rebecca, are you alone? And, Rebecca, are you sat on the bus alone? But the most unsettling part of all was the text from Eric that read, Rebecca, could you please let me know any information on the girls that work at the restaurant that we worked at? I was stunned. This was quite slowly turning into my nightmare. I was constantly questioning why this

old man was so bent on finding out everything to do with my life. Why me? He had gone out of his way to source information about me through a vulnerable person I worked with and I was scared he was going to go further. Again, this creeped me out but still, for some reason I forgot about it and carried on with my life, which was very hectic at the time, and in a way I'm grateful that I didn't have the time to dwell on Eric's growing obsession. However, this was something I wouldn't be able to ignore forever, as Eric began inserting himself into my life in ways I couldn't just ignore or brush off. One night I was watching the movie Grease with my family and I must have tweeted something stupid like, Grease is my favorite film because it is a great film, right? Anyways, the morning after my tweet, Eric approaches me in his usual way and utters, do you like the film Grease, Lucy? The same usual smirk lit up his face and the same usual wave of

disgust washed over me. He was really making it a point to let me know that he was watching me. I tried to carry on with my day, but spent the entirety of my shift feeling a little shaken up. To someone reading this story, it may not seem as unsettling to you as it did to me at the time, but when someone is going out of their way to make sure you know they know information about you, you spend every waking hour thinking about what they plan to do with this information and why they insist on taunting you with this knowledge. The very second I clocked out of work and got into my car my phone went off. This was a notification for PayPal. I clicked on this notification to see that I had received $3 from an Eric Stanley and a note attached that read,

To Lucy, Greece is the word, from Eric. He literally found my PayPal account to send me $3 with a quote from the movie attached to it. If this wasn't crazy enough, in the days following I received a string of anonymous calls, incessant calls, one after the other. I was in floods of tears and ended up having a huge panic attack. I felt like there was no escape. My phone rang and rang and rang all night. I had to turn it off to get away. Even when I turned my phone back on, the calls continued and every time my phone would ring, my head felt like it was being impaled with the sharpest knife in the world. I was on complete edge. The phone calls that I did answer were just someone breathing down the phone,

making a point to breathe heavy. I even swear that they were trying to sound like they were touching themselves, pleasuring themselves, which sickened me. I had no proof that this was Eric, but it wasn't hard to put two and two together after all the lengths that he had gone to in order to track down my personal information. If he had found out my PayPal address, my phone number, and all my social media accounts, what was stopping him from finding out where I live, breaking in, hurting me or my family? That night I had horrific dreams in which he chased me around my house and taunted me for hours. I still have similar dreams and struggle to sleep without my boyfriend present as I'm scared he's standing right outside my door to this day.

I reported Eric to my managers and they passed my complaint on to managers of the shopping center. At this point I was genuinely scared for my safety. Multiple girls added to my statement and added details of times that they had witnessed Eric's unsettling behavior or times that he had been inappropriate with them too. Eric had been cautioned by the shopping center's management yet nothing was done, except the fact that he was warned not to talk to me. Eric found ways around the no talking to Lucy rule. He would make animal noises at me when he would see me, like a monkey or a dog or any bizarre noise that

would get my attention. I think he just wanted me to think that he had outsmarted me, found a way around the rules. After this I stopped working at the restaurant as a full time job and saw Eric less and less which was obviously great for me. I moved cities as I went away from university and made new friends which distracted me from my old life in my hometown. I still thought about Eric every now and then and when I focus on it for too long I can't be alone. I have fear that he is still keeping tabs on me and the thought of that terrifies me. After moving away and starting my new life, I forgot about the twisted little man who used to obsess over me in my old job.

I forgot he existed, but I was soon going to remember. On Christmas day, I was back home in my hometown with my parents. My phone buzzed and I expected it to just be another message from a friend or family member but I was wrong. I received a notification from PayPal and it was the exact amount of three dollars, only not from Eric this time but from a girl whose name I didn't recognize at all. I opened up the PayPal app only to see a note attached to this payment that I had received, and the note read, Sending on behalf of Eric. My blood ran cold again. I had forgotten all about this man and all he had done to make me feel unsafe and unsettled, and here he was again, antagonizing me, yet this time doing it through other people,

perhaps his way of telling me that him being banned from talking to me himself won't stop him from entering my world. I threw my phone down on the couch and spent the night drinking with family until I forgot about the notification. I probably should have told someone about it, but I just wanted to do as much as I could to block him out. I didn't want him to control me anymore and I since haven't seen or heard anything from him and I wanted to stay that way. I think Eric still works at that shopping center and lives local to me. I avoid my old workplace so I don't have to see him and he doesn't have to see me. So to the creepy, beady-eyed freak that made me live in fear, please, never speak to me again. When I was 16, I would nanny for two boys, Brandon, who was 8, and Randy, who was 15.

Randy had mental health problems because he was born with liquid in his brain or something. Either way, he was a sweetheart, but you could tell something was off by the way he walked and moved his hands. They had a dog, Gunner, that was an Akita and Yellow Lab mix. This dog was huge and protective. I watched the kids every other week all day, Monday through Friday. Gunner watched everything I did the first week. I had to gain this dog's trust. That first week the dog made me uneasy because if I was with the kids and they started being loud and rambunctious, he would get between me and the boys and start

growling. Even if I wasn't playing with them and happened to be near them, Gunner learned to trust me really quick though. There were two times that Gunner actually saved our lives. Story 1. The boys lived in a rough neighborhood. Not scary, just rough around the edges. We went for a walk to the playground a couple of blocks away and a white van slows down behind us. There was a bunch of ghetto guys yelling at us from the window, saying inappropriate things to me, a female, and calling Randy horrible names about his condition. Just ignore them, guys. I said in a hushed voice as I shifted and put myself and Gunner between the kids.

Gunner didn't take his eyes off the van full of them. The tension pulled the fur on his back straight up, signaling to us that he was in protective mode. As the men kept yelling at us, I pulled my phone out and started dialing 911, but I didn't hit send before Brandon started yelling back, defending his brother. Then everything happened so fast. The slider back door to the van opened and two men jumped out. Run. I remember screaming at the boys just as Gunner ripped himself free from my grip on his leash.

Everyone started running but me. The boys sprinted home, the dogs sprinted towards the van and I frantically tried dialing 911. Gunner chased the men back in the van, nearly grabbing the leg of one man and they sped off. Gunner received a lot of treats and praises when he returned home. And story two, and this one really freaks me out. I was allowed to have friends stop by since I practically lived there and the boys liked hanging out with my wholesome teenage friends. If it was a male though, I'd have to go outside and hug them where Gunner could see and talk to them for a few minutes on the porch. Gunner would

assess them. Normally he let them inside without trouble after that, but there was one friend he wouldn't let inside without coaxing. Gunner would never bite anyone unless actually attacked, just for context. One day a man came to the door, knocked and said he had to drop something off for their mom who was supposedly expecting it. We could see through the window that he seemed like a gentleman and was very nice but as I approached the door, Gunner cut me off. He started barking at the door insanely. His back stood higher than my hips and at the time I was a small girl and the dog just forced me back. Gunner literally prevented me from being able to reach the doorknob. He was gentle with me but forceful. I yelled back to the guy to leave whatever was on the porch but

he seemed insistent saying things like, can you really not just unlock the door for a minute? Come on, Randy knows me. But I had to tell him I physically couldn't get past the door so I could call the mom for him. The man got weird and was like, no, that's not necessary, I'll come back another time, and rushed off. Anyway, the guy had some distinct features when I described him to the mom later, and she informed me that she had no idea who he was and that she wasn't expecting anything. We never found out who he was and thankfully he never came back. So, thank you Gunner. You're a lifesaver. My parents got divorced when I was 10 years old and my brother was 8. I'm a girl, for context.

They had bought a house in a fairly big land and decided to split it. The house was demolished and my mom was building a new house to live with me and my brother. We live in a very small city that is known for its safety. Fast forward to when I was 15, I'm now 25, and the house still wasn't ready. Me and my brother and mom lived in an apartment really close to where they were building the house so we would check it from time to time. It was an evening when me and my mom were getting back from the market and decided to go check the house. As we were parking in front of the house, the car light shows a man trying to jump the fence to get in. I was really freaked out but my mom stepped out of the car and shouted

at him asking him what he was trying to do. It was an old guy, maybe in his late 60s. He was really tall, white and skinny. He was starting to get bald having hair just on the sides of his head. He just sent really creepy vibes. He jumped off of the fence and looked kind of scared. He wasn't expecting someone to show up because nobody lived in that place yet. He said he lived in the apartment building next to the house and he was trying to cut down a branch from a tree that was knocking on his window. So my mom said he was trespassing and if he wanted to do something in her house he should have contacted her. She yelled at him to go away and to never come back.

We went home and never really talked about it. A few months later my family finally moved in that house. It's a cute house with lots of trees and space for my dogs to run free. At that time we had three dogs, two small ones and a border collie we rescued. Every day we could hear a teenage female voice yelling at the apartment building next to our house. We figured out it was just some teenage drama because we could hear her say things every teen has said to their parents like, I don't want to live here anymore or you don't get me at all so we never really did anything about it. Some time had passed and my best friend moved to an apartment in that building.

She said that she could hear that teen yelling to her father. Guess who the father was? Yes, the man that was trying to get inside my yard. That freaked me out a little bit, but I didn't have any proof that he was doing something to her. One evening I was eating some fruits in the front of the house with my dogs and I heard some screams, like a man and a woman were fighting. I looked around and figured out that it was coming from the building next to my house. As I looked at the building, I saw a woman falling from a balcony, but couldn't see if

anyone had pushed her. So I call an ambulance, and they were really fast with getting here and taking her to the hospital. At the same time, the police came and took a man that I couldn't get a look at to see if it was the same man that had trespassed here. I didn't get to know what had happened that day and who that man was. My dad started building his house next to my mom's. I spent a lot of time in my best friend's apartment. That was just by the creepy apartment. As I said, my yard was filled with trees and sometimes we could see animals there like lizards, snakes, fox, possums. This day, me and my friend were in her balcony and could see a lizard walking in the wall that separated my house and the building.

In the balcony next to hers, the creepy man showed up with a gun, trying to shoot that lizard. We started to scream for him, begging him not to kill the lizard. He looked up at us, surprised. I guess he thought he was alone. He didn't say anything, just went back into his apartment. I told my dad about it and he said I shouldn't interact with that man. I was already 18 and things started to calm down, or so I thought. It was an afternoon around 4pm and I was home alone. I decided to go for a walk with my border collie dog. She was really sweet and I used to go for a walk with my border collie dog. She was really sweet and I used to ride my bike as she followed me running and so I was doing that. As we were coming back to my house just passing by the building that man throws a really big rock at my dog. She was running so the rock hit her leg. I cursed at him and got back in my house

looking at my dog to see if she was hurt. I told my mom and she said that I should never walk alone again. Some days later, I found a really cute but skinny cat at my college and I was sitting down smoking and this cat jumped in my lap. I came back to watch a class with him in my lap. He slept through the whole class. I came back home with him. He was orange and fierce. As he was a street cat before, we let him go for walks in my street and everyone liked him. He was really friendly

and asked for everyone to pet him. People let him in their houses and frequently sent my mom pics of that cat of their yards or sofas, so we never thought that he was bothering somebody by walking around. At this time, we were forgetting about the violent nature from our neighbor. My family went on a trip to visit my grandma and my dad stayed to take care of our pets. He said one night he heard some footsteps around his house but as he walked out the front door he couldn't see anymore. He thought it was just the dogs messing around and went back to his house to sleep. When we came back we realized one of the trees back in my mom's house was dying. It was a really big tree, I think it was over 100 years old. This tree is the biggest

one in the yard and it was always so beautiful. I should mention this is the tree that the man was complaining about the first time we met him. So my dad went to look at that tree and found a lot of holes in it. He said it's a way to get poison inside the tree to kill it. He also said that we shouldn't tell my mom cause it's going to scare her and make her really sad cause the trees were the main reason that she bought the place and I never told her about it. Some time passes and me and my brother moved out to another town to finish our studies. I wanted to take my cat with me but my mom said it was going to be hard for him to adapt to living in an apartment. He liked so much walking around

so I agreed that she should stay with him. A few days later she visited me and said that my cat had died. I was heartbroken. How did it happen? She found him with his neck broken in front of the apartment building next to our house. His head was twisted, but my cat was still alive. But as she arrived at the vet, my cat had already passed away. She said that she thinks it was that man that killed him. We don't have any proof, but you know that feeling when you just know it. I cried so much, and just writing about it makes me cry again. He was my first cat and he was so sweet. My mom still lives in the same house.

She has five cats now but none of them go out. That man still lives next to her. I'm with her during quarantine and I see him all the time. He walks past our house, always looking up to see if someone's in there. I had broken up with my now ex back in January of 2019. My doing. I was angry at everything and had joined Tinder. Talked to a guy that seemed pretty cool and was quite attractive. I talked to him quite a bit, took a lift down to where he lived. Now his dad had passed away not too long ago so he moved back in with his mom to help out. I found that very sweet and so I thought nothing of it.

We took a lift to Walmart and to the liquor store as his mom had requested some wine. I had bought a pizza to bake at their home to make a decent impression and had purchased her wine, which she gave me cash for despite my protests, again, trying to make a good impression. This home was gorgeous. They had an old-timey jukebox and the freaking sink taps in the bathroom were installed in the mirrors. Water flowed from a spout in the freaking mirrors. His mom was as sweet as southern tea and seemed to have been taking a liking to me. Cool, I thought.

So this guy had been messaging his lesbian best friend C and explained that he had helped her out after she broke her ankle and such. Again, I thought, what a nice guy. We drank, we were intimate, and everything was cool. I had told him I had borderline before we met up and had warned him I had scars from previous cutting incidents but nothing recent. He was fine with it and understood. The next morning I had an interview at a major company call center and his mom offered to drive me. Such a sweetheart. I did great in the interview and was offered the job. I immediately texted this guy to tell him the good news. So one day when I was home and had slept for about 8 hours I wake up to a dozen text messages and over 20 Facebook messages from him. It ranged from, hey how's it going, to, man, it's hard to say this. I had seen how the messages progressed

as quickly as I scrolled through and saw the one that says, and I still have the picture of it, those cut marks on your arm. Yeah, I wouldn't have dated a cutter anyways. Most of them are pathetic that need to get some serious help. Might as well keep doing that since it seems to be your only friend. Dear God. I blocked him immediately. Then I posted it to my Facebook page so if anyone knew him, they could know what he was actually up to. I get a friend request from his friend C that I talked about earlier and she filled me in. Apparently she's not a lesbian. She has broken

up with him hours before befriending me, so they were still dating when he had me over and he told her I was a lesbian. Also that he goes by his middle name. I had done a basic search with the name he provided and on his Facebook page to make sure he wasn't a felon or something crazy before meeting him. When I did the search with his first real name, sure as pudding, so many charges including having illicit images of children on his computer. He'd been stalking her, pinging her phone location and messaging her stuff like, oh what, you're not going to leave your house? And he told her to end her life. She had gotten the cops involved. She had sent me screenshots of the messages he

was sending. We talked a bit more and while I'm not a medical professional, it was kind of clear something was wrong. He was lying, manipulative, aggressive, angry, and obviously his moods would flip faster than mine. I offered to send her what I could of the messages in case she could use them to build a case against him. Shortly after, I got a friend request from a name I didn't recognize, something generic like Mike. Then I got a message saying, hey it's Jay, how's it going? How's your job at the company that I was hired at that his mom drove me to for the interview? I was freaked out. He knew where I worked. The building was secure but the

parking lot not so much. I got pepper spray and called my dad who had been in the police for and such since I was alive. He advised to not carry a baseball bat because if it was wrestled for me it could be used against me but pepper spray was a decent choice. He also said that while online bullying isn't something the police can do much about, if he messages me again it goes into the harassment area and if needed he would be reported ASAP. I was getting off of work after midnight and I was scared out of my mind. I parked as close to the building as possible with my pepper spray in hand. Fortunately, I haven't ran into him since. I do not want to meet with him again.

I've also moved since and changed jobs. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably, probably is. This happened to me 12 years ago when I was a really naive school kid. The more I reflect on it now, the more unsettling it is. I grew up in a rural community which was meant to be really safe, lots of retirees and young families. I'm a trans man but was a few years away from realizing that at the time so I just looked like a young girl. My body had developed early but despite the Jessica Rabbit curves, I was ridiculously baby faced. The day this happened I was wearing my ugly junior high school uniform and had my hair in two plates. Aside from my chest I probably looked about 10.

Ugh. My family lived about 10 miles out of the small town I went to school in and since it was the sticks there was no public transport and I was too young to drive. Normally I'd get the school bus home but if I wanted to go to the public library after school I would go there and wait for my mother to pick me up after she finished work. If anything went wrong I had nowhere to go. So on the day this happened I had gone to the library alone and headed to the young adult section. It's very clearly aimed at teens with posters and beanbags and things of that nature. Normally there would be other kids there, sometimes families, but today there was only a middle-aged man sitting alone

in one of the chairs. He instantly made me feel uncomfortable. It wasn't his appearance, which was dirty looking, badly dressed, balding, overweight, dirty teeth. He didn't look homeless, just like a slob. But this space was clearly for teenagers and their families. He wasn't even reading or anything, just sitting there looking around like he was scoping the place out. His eyes were the scariest thing about him, bugging out of his head as he stared at me.

I didn't want to be anywhere near this man. Quickly I grabbed a few books off the shelf and went around the corner to sit in a chair in the adult fiction section. This section was also deserted. I opened a book and tried to read but a few seconds later I felt eyes on me. I glanced up and saw him staring at me through the bookshelves. He saw me looking and let out this eerie giggle, like he was a child caught while playing hide and seek. It made my skin crawl. Ignoring him, I went back to my book. Next thing I know, the creep was quickly approaching me. He sat down in the chair right next to me, so close I could smell stale sweat and cigarettes.

Again, the whole place was deserted and I felt sick. He put his face close to mine and said, Hello. His breath was disgusting. Still trying to ignore him, I said a dismissive hi, not looking up. This weirdo then proceeded to launch into his life story and talk at me for the next hour. I had no idea how much was true. He talked about his stage parents with no explanation of what he meant. He talked about being in the military and how he was detained in a psychiatric

institution. He told me he had escaped and spent days living in the woods before they caught him. And the whole time, I was terrified. I wanted to get a librarian, but I was so scared he might get angry and turn violent. He had made it clear that he was psychologically unstable. At one point, he told me his name and asked for mine. I was panicking too much to give him a fake one. The worst part was he asked me how old I was. Again, too scared to think him a fake one. The worst part was is he asked me how old I was. Again, too scared to think of a lie, I told him I was 14. I hoped it would put him off. Nope. He brightened up and said that he'd wait until I was old enough to marry him.

He said I was a good looking girl, nice and a good listener and that I'd make a good wife for him. At that point, I hadn't even held hands with anybody. In a huge turn of luck my phone started to ring. Instantly I answered it. It was my mother, telling me she was parked outside. Flooded with relief I told her I'd be out in a moment. Looking back I should have stayed on the phone but for some stupid reason I thought I'd be in trouble if I told her about the man. I grabbed my things and told him my mother was here and I had to go. My blood ran cold when he told me that he had seen me before and would be waiting for me to come back. I don't know why I didn't tell an adult. I think I was scared, both of getting in trouble and even more of him getting

mad and doing something to me. I was so ill-equipped to deal with something like this and probably hoped if I just ignored it, it would go away. The next day I did tell some friends at school. One told her mother who was horrified. My friend had a lot of younger siblings and they often went to that library. Often we went together and they had driven me home before. That turned out to be my saving grace. I have no idea what might have happened otherwise. That day after school my friend and her mother went to the library with other siblings as they were already planning to do. It turns out this creepy man really had been watching me intently. He was back and proceeded to approach the family and ask about me by name. The mother told him he needed to stop harassing young girls and threatened to call the police. I'm still so grateful to that

woman for standing up for me like that. Miraculously, it seemed to work. I never went to the police, but no, I probably should have. I lived in that area for another five years and never saw him again. The worst kid I ever babysat for was named Rory. This all took place about 14 years ago now in a small town called Haddington, just outside of Edinburgh in Scotland. It's a nice place in general but people there can be pretty well weird. I'd have to be to volunteer myself for babysitting jobs in a small town like that where suspicion and malice is rife and there's a dark secret being hidden in almost every household there is. So anyway I'd always been sort of aware of Rory's existence. I'd gone to school with his older brother, Struan, for a few years, who was a similarly creepy little person, but I'd never really encountered Rory on a personal level. That was all about the change. After I put the notice up in the local off-license that I was offering sitting services, I grew to dread it when my phone rang. I mean, it was mostly normal jobs

for normal families, but every so often I'd get a call and I'd just know it was going to be a bad one. And when I got the call from Rory's mom, I knew it was going to be rough. But I couldn't just turn down the job. If you get a reputation for being flaky or unreliable, the phone calls and the money quickly dry up. So once the family had promised me my usual rate, the job was on. It seemed pretty simple, Friday night, 6pm until 10pm with money for a takeaway delivery included. I arrived a few minutes early, just to kind of get myself oriented in the house. It's super important to know where the basics are but also where stuff like plasters and other first aid supplies are located just in case the kid has an accident. Rory's parents seem pretty friendly but the parents are always

friendly when you're giving them a night off from parenting. But no matter how friendly and chirpy they were you could kind of tell that they weren't exactly the most normal of families. So just before the parents leave for whatever event they were going to, they introduce me to Rory. And the moment I lean down to say hi, I can tell straight away he is not keen on the evening's proceedings. The first words out of his mouth are, I don't like her. He looks at me, says nothing, then looks at his mom and dad and says straight up, I don't like her. I just sort of laughed awkwardly while his parents reassured him that I was there to look after him and that they'd be back before he knew it. But still the wee laddy glared at me, scowled and then ran

upstairs to his room before slamming the door. I'd be lying if I said that I hadn't faced that kind of hostility before but it's also a huge buzz to win the kid over, to go from not wanting me there to not wanting me to leave. So Rory's parents leave, telling me he's got a microwavable meal in the fridge that I'm to heat up if and when he gets hungry. But I decide to employ my primary winning over tactic, walking to the bottom of the stairs and calling up, Rory, I'm going to order a pizza. You can have some if you want, just come downstairs whenever you're ready. Now this usually has a shy, moody kid smiling and warming up to me, but not Rory. He didn't make so much as a peep. I mean, if I'm honest, there was a moment that I

thought he might have like climbed out of his bedroom window or something. I'm serious. That never ever happens when you offer pizza. So I go up, creep towards his room, and I'm about to knock when the door swings open, and the little guy is stood there, fury in his eyes, and he screeches out, Get away from my bedroom! before slamming the door in my face. It scared the absolute life out of me, so I just went downstairs

and hoped the night would be over as quickly as possible. So since Rory didn't want any pizza, I ordered Indian instead. The delivery driver arrives, I get my food, and I'm sitting there eating it on the couch when I hear little footsteps coming down the stairs. Rory appears in the doorway and I ask if he's hungry yet. He doesn't say a thing, not for a good minute, so I just kind of smile and carry on eating my chicken korma. Do you have a boyfriend? He suddenly asks. I nearly spat out a load of rice, just like this involuntary awkward laughter rising up from my throat. I mean, I literally couldn't believe he just asked me something like that.

Of all the questions to make a babysitter feel incredibly awkward, this tops the list. I just reply like, yes I do actually, he's lovely and he lives just around the corner actually. A lie of course, I was painfully single at the time but anything to deter the little brat. As expected, little Rory does not take this well, then sort of marches off into the kitchen. I suspect he's after his food but I've been given strict instructions not to let him mess around with the microwave or let him try to prepare any hot food. He wasn't quite tall enough to reach the countertop yet and he was blatantly at risk of scalding himself with the hot food. Only when I follow him into the kitchen to politely tell him

that I didn't mind making his food for him, I see him climbing onto a chair that he's pushed towards a countertop. Just as I'm about to stop him, he pulls the biggest kitchen knife he can find out of the knife block before turning towards me with the biggest, most evil looking grin on his face. I turn, run out of the kitchen and slam the door behind me, leaning on it to prevent him from getting through. That's when this little monster starts stabbing the door, or at least that's what it sounded like. And it wasn't the thickest of wood, so I squeal in fear and like hold my body away from the door while leaning on the door handle. I had to hold that door shut for like a full half hour while he proceeded to absolutely trash the kitchen. I could hear plates breaking, glasses smashing, all kinds of chaos going on behind the door.

I called the parents with the intention of telling them that they had to come home immediately, but they actually just patched my calls. I was left alone, to basically barricade myself into the living room for the remaining few hours of the night. When the parents got back, they went mental, proper rage and refused to pay me for my services. They basically blamed me for his shocking behavior and swore blind that they'd be telling everyone what a horrible babysitter I was. I cried all the way home. Luckily the calls didn't dry up and I actually talked to one family who said they'd completely sympathized with what had happened, knowing full well what a nightmare child that little brat could be. So that's the scariest time I ever had babysitting and I implore you if you're

getting into it, be careful who you choose to babysit for. Non-payment could have been the best possible outcome to that night as I might not even be here to be able to tell this story. I've never been a babysitter, unless you count looking after my little brother on the odd occasion, but I do have a babysitter story for you all. This all happened back when I was about 10 or 11 as it was the last year of primary school for me and I remember being really excited about going to big school as my mom and dad phrased it. They were off to some work function and I needed a babysitter. I distinctly remember them being worried that they wouldn't be able to go as I think they left it quite late and were worried that they wouldn't be able to find a sitter. I didn't want to be left alone with a stranger so I remember being absolutely gutted when they said they'd managed to find someone to stay for a few hours on a Saturday evening.

But when the time came and the babysitter arrived, I remember thinking that it wouldn't be so bad. She was very pretty and seemed genuinely lovely. Some university student called Sarah, I can't quite remember, but she pretty much won my parents over in the first few minutes and well, since they liked her so much, I kind of liked her too. She told me we'd have a little slumber party, that we could watch my favorite film and my parents sweetened the deal by saying that they'd leave us money for some pizza. So I really did perk up for a bit as they showed the girl around the house and actually warmed up to the idea as they left the house and Sarah, who we'll just call her now for

the story's sake, she began to order us pizza. Only, that's when things started to get a bit weird. She asked me what my favorite topping was in a voice that didn't sound nearly as jolly as before. When I told her I liked pepperoni the most, still my favorite, she just laughed and told me she was a vegetarian. I tried to tell her we could always get two smaller pizzas but she just ignored me as she placed an order for a large spicy veggie one. I hated spice and I still do. I can't handle chilies for the life of me even as a grown-up so the younger me was absolutely heartbroken that I'd been pretty much shut out of the pizza party that we were supposed to be throwing and it all went downhill from there.

There was a knock at the door a little while after she called and I suspected it was the delivery guy but it wasn't. From the top of the stairs I watched as some lad in his own clothes stepped out of the cold and into our hallway. I was confused as to what was going on, where the pizza was and all that but when the pair of them started sharing this really horrible wet kiss I got onto the fact that it was obviously her boyfriend or something. And this is all after hearing my parents make it clear to her that she wasn't allowed any company around. So I was really bloody annoyed at this point, like furious. So I snuck down into the kitchen to try and find the house phone to

call my mom, only it wasn't in the charger. I trot around for a wee bit trying to find the thing when I realized there's a good chance the babysitter had it with her. I walk down the hall to the living room where she and her boyfriend were, open the door and pretty much recoil at what I see. They're doing stuff, right there on the couch. Sarah screams at me to get out and shuts the door and I respond with asking her for the phone. She doesn't even acknowledge my request, gets up from the couch with fury in her eyes and slams the door on me before screaming through the wood to get back up to my room and be quiet. I told her I was hungry but again absolutely no acknowledgement. So I went back up to my room and just bawled my eyes out.

So it's pretty important to remember that this was like the mid 90s back when the internet or mobile phones weren't exactly available or affordable for a family like mine. If this had happened nowadays, it would be a piece of pie to just phone my parents or, hey, even take a photo of the boyfriend being there and that would be that. But I just didn't have those options available to me and even if I had, this girl was so conniving that she'd probably have found a way around it. But that sort of maltreatment wasn't what scared me. Yeah, it was upsetting, but another danger became more of a priority when I realized that they had trapped the family dog inside the living room with them. I went back downstairs facing my fears and hoping I could at least get Jazz out of the room with them. She was an Australian Shepherd, one of those dogs that's dead shaggy but also looks like someone spilled a can of

paint over them or something. I loved her so so much and I had to rescue her. So I knock on the living room door, only to get told to go away. I knock again, telling the babysitter that it was important that Jazz had to go outside to have a wee or for her to be taken on a walk so she could do a number two. Again, she barked at me to go away. I wasn't about to let this happen to my best friend in the world though, so I push the door open just in time to see the boyfriend do something frankly unbelievable. So in England, we play cricket, don't we? And the balls are insanely hard, like I think they might be even harder than baseballs you Americans play with. Solid cork on the inside with a tough leather binding. People actually died from getting hit on the

head with cricket balls. Jazz loved her cricket ball. We tried throwing tennis balls and stuff for her but I think she just liked that leather smell the cricket ball gave off. Maybe it reminded her of actually chasing an animal or something, I don't know. But either way, I opened the door of the living room to find the boyfriend of the sitter just lashing the cricket ball at Jazz. So hard that when it hit her back leg, she yelped all high pitched. I tried to run and rescue her, to pull her into my room where she could be safe, but the boyfriend was fast. He pushed me back into the hallway, shut the door and then, I'm certain he wedged something against it, because I couldn't open it at all from then on.

I went up to my room and cried myself to sleep, only waking up to hear my parents talking to the sitter when they got home. I didn't make a sound, I was just too scared. For some reason I had it in my head that the boyfriend would hurt them. I don't know, kids are daft like that I suppose, but of course he wasn't there. He left before my mom and dad got home. I think the real nightmare was that the sitter had actually spun some pure sob story about how I'd been really bad and terribly behaved all evening. How I'd been a brat and demanded this,

that and the other. And they made a huge bloody mistake. The absolute wankers, because that cricket ball had left a huge welt on Jazz's hind leg, and when my dad found out that, I'd at least been partially telling the truth about what they'd been up to, and god, you should have seen how livid he was. I won't bore you with the petty details, but let's just say that that sitter and her boyfriend ended up actually getting arrested on animal cruelty charges and I know for a fact that he ended up getting convicted and fined for it. So, I suppose a silver lining to a of my entire life so far. I was just 15 at the time, babysitting my little sister who was a toddler, like about that kind of age where she could walk and open doors. My parents were making a quick run to the store and left me in charge.

I was chilling in the TV room, sis was in her bedroom playing with her dolls or whatever After a few minutes of watching TV, I noticed it was a little too quiet I checked a room and she wasn't there I checked everywhere else with growing alarm looking and calling for her but she was nowhere to be found. To my absolute horror I realized the person I'm supposed to be babysitting is definitely no longer in the house. There was this kids swing park across the street that she liked and this wouldn't be the first time that she worked the doorknob successfully and toddled over to play there by herself. So I sprinted over there to look for her, running on pure adrenaline

and panic, but there was still no sign of her. I spotted a group of three grade schoolers there, so I described her and asked them if they had seen her around. One of the boys told me he saw a girl matching her description get into a blue car. We don't own a blue car, nor do any of the family friends. I can't adequately describe the feeling of dread, panic, and hopelessness that completely overwhelmed me. It was kind of feeling like my heart actually fell out of my chest. I sprinted from one end of the block to the other, hoping to catch a glimpse of this blue car. I ran through and around the adjoining elementary school hoping maybe she was there. Never mind that I'd already been told that she had gotten into a stranger's car.

I was completely irrational as hoping that I had misheard that kid or something or maybe please, God she was back. After some kind of eternity I ran back home to call 911. By this time my parents were back and lo and behold my sister was with them. It turns out she did open the door and wander off but only to the store and back. A stranger had asked her where she lived and then walked her straight back to her house since it was obviously dangerous for her to be out alone. In my panic, I'd completely missed her coming home and I was furious as to why my parents didn't think to notify me, so I guess it ended okay.

I locked myself in the bathroom and sobbed for a while. Then I was overcome by an overwhelming urge to punch this little turd who had lied to me. I bolted back to the playground with no clear plan in mind. He wasn't there when I got back. I suppose that's good because I was sufficiently older, bigger, and utterly blind with rage that I probably would have murdered him at that point. An apology, however physically coerced, would have been nice though. Oh, and I'm fairly certain the boy wasn't just mistaken. After all was said and done, I recalled that one of the kids and

his little group of friends had started to chime up when she saw me running around in a panic. I just vaguely remember her saying something like, hey mister you should know about your sister. Something in the tone of her voice was apologetic like she realized how messed up their joke was. I was completely irrational at that point and ran off to keep searching and had failed to register until later. Point being, there's a reason why the front page of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says, Don't panic. Never truer, a word said. Back when I was 17, I used to babysit for our neighbor, who at the time was a single mother who happened to be going through a particularly nasty divorce. She had two young sons, one of

which was 8 years old while the other was only around 18 months. They were absolutely adorable and very well behaved kids, but you could tell that they were going through a lot and the older one definitely showed signs of stress over the whole thing. I'll never forget the time he asked me why his daddy couldn't live with them anymore and it honestly broke my heart. Not because I didn't have an answer for him but because to hear it would have just been too much to bear. Too much for anyone to bear. Anyway, after a few months of being alone, she finally decided to get back on the old dating horse. I was so happy for her. After such a rough time, she deserved to find happiness again, to find someone who had the wherewithal to be a real father to these two adorable little boys.

So one night, she leaves on her date and says she'll be back around midnight and not a moment later. Only she doesn't tell me exactly where she's going and I have no way to contact her because this was back in the 80s and no one had a cell phone. Well they did exist but not in the available commercial sense. It was all landlines back then. Otherwise this might not have gone the way it did. So on the night in question, I'm chilling on the couch, absentmindedly flicking through the TV channels. I put the kids to bed an hour previous, they're sleeping like rocks and everything seems

fine and dandy. When suddenly there's a knock at the front door. I wasn't expecting anyone, but then again again it wasn't my house so I felt kind of obligated to answer and take a message or whatever. Only as I started walking down the hallway towards the front door, whoever is on the other side starts banging against it and cursing up a storm. Cheryl, I know you're in there. Open the door. Now what was exactly said, I don't remember but I'm not keen on repeating some of the words they used. It was really, really harsh. So I'm just frozen, looking at the door in total fright when the oldest boy came flying out of his room and down the stairs,

running to the door and yelling, Daddy's home! I grab him, pull him away from the door. I had no idea what this guy's intentions were, and after all, they were probably divorced for a freaking reason. But I almost fainted with fear when I hear the words, I got my shotgun in my truck, and tonight, I'm going to teach you a lesson you'll never forget.

He screams this, but then I hear his footsteps move up the gravel path. It appeared he wasn't bluffing at all. And if that was the case, then our lives were clearly in danger. When he gets back, he's banging on the door and threatening to start shooting through it if no one opens. I grab both kids and run out the back door and across the street to my house where my mom calls the police. When the police arrive a few minutes later they actually find the ex-husband taking a massive dump on Cheryl's porch. He was arrested and I wait with the kids at my house for their mom to show up. Everyone was in

tears by that point, even my mom who was normally a pretty reserved woman. I mean maybe he was just having a manic episode and no one was in real danger but honestly, it was one of the most terrifying nights of my entire life. So, for the longest time in my teenage years, I earned a few bucks a week by doing babysitting work. It always made me giggle at how there are so many urban legends based around babysitting. The serial killer that stalks the unwitting teen, the call coming from inside the house, pretty much every Halloween movie in some manner that seems to present babysitting as the vocation of those with a death wish, when in reality, the only thing likely to kill you is the boredom. Sure, you get a bratty kid and it makes an evening a little more

challenging, but you get a good one and you're basically sat on the couch for hours on end watching tedious cable TV shows and counting the minutes until the parents get home. Saying that, I did babysit for one family that ended in a frankly terrifying experience that ended up in me never, ever sitting for them ever again. It only happened once, but sometimes once is enough. So I arrive at this big old house a few blocks away from my parents house at around 6 30 one Friday evening. The parents of the kid seem incredibly charming and the kid is one of the more adorable little tykes that I've had the good fortune of minding. We go over a brief list of rules. What the kid is and isn't allowed to eat, how much I'll be paid and how long I'll be sitting for and that sort of thing. Then the parents head out to whatever fancy party that

they had been planning on tending. All goes well for a little while. The kid wouldn't eat their carrots but when I pretended that they were delicious by taking little bites myself, they soon broke into a smile and pretty much demolished the little bowl of hummus that we were sharing. With a kid fed, I gave her a bath, tucked her into bed, and that's that. It was honestly one of the easier jobs I'd had, right up until the sun started to go down. So once the kid's asleep, I head downstairs to order a pizza on the parent's dollar. Like I said, they were perfectly nice and polite when we first met and it's not often that job comes with free food. Pizza arrives pretty quickly and I even tip the delivery guy a few dollars just to say thank you for being so fast.

He's literally counting out the change in dollar bills when his head snaps to the side like he's looking into the bushes at the side of the house. I ask him if everything is okay, peering out from the door to see what he's looking at, but there's nothing, just dark bushes. He says something along the lines of, sorry, guess I'm just tired, mind's playing tricks on me. He laughs awkwardly then walks back to his car while thanking me again for the tip. I didn't think anything of it. I mean, it was probably just a cat or something, right? So we got back inside to eat, have a full-on carb overload,

and end up just lying there on the couch watching TLC. There were these big bay windows in the family's TV room and I had drawn the curtains earlier to block out the glare on the TV. Only I hadn't drawn them all the way and there was a slight crack in the curtains that allowed me to see into the dark front yard. At one point my eyes were drawn to this little crack and I could swear I saw a dark shape where street lights were previously visible. I sit up, focusing my eyes on the shape and wondering if it were my mind playing tricks on me this time, when it moved. I wasn't going nuts.

I had been looking at someone or something who was in turn looking at me through the big old windows. That's about when I started to freak out. I had been super chilled all evening but now I was getting that distinctly paranoid feeling like someone was watching me. Someone who didn't exactly have the best of intentions. I run around the house making sure all the doors and windows are locked as a precaution. All before keeping their cordless phone as close as possible so that, if it came to it, I could call the cops. I was sure I had seen someone, but the chances of them just vacating the area at the sight of flashing lights then returning later could be a huge possibility and a terrifying one at that.

So I decided to shoot my shot only when it would be absolutely necessary. Appearing to waste police time would not be doing me any favors. I suppose I'm just trying to explain why I didn't call the cops right away. I've had friends of mine say that they have just called 911 right then and there, but I wasn't 100% sure of anything right then. I'd seen a shape, not Michael Myers pointing a knife at me. Life isn't black and white most of the time, I was thinking. Anyway, I've secured all the windows and doors, shoved the cordless phone into my hoodie's front pouch, and have even positioned a little league bat near the

couch so that I was sort of armed. So by that point, I started to feel relatively safe again. If there was some creeper lurking outside looking to prey on a teenage babysitter, they would get one heck of a rude awakening when I waved my bat at them and screamed that the cops were on the way. So I lie back on the couch but naturally find myself unable to relax. I open the curtains back up so I can see if anyone is hanging around in the front yard, keeping my eyes on the windows every so often in between watching whatever social train wreck is on TLC. Nothing happens for a while and I start to think it was all just in my head or

something. Right about the time I get up to wander into the kitchen to grab a drink of water. As I'm in there, I get that intense feeling that I'm being watched. I turn to see that same dark shape in the kitchen window only this time I rush into action. I hammer 911 into the phone telling the dispatcher I need the cops to my address ASAP that there's a home invasion in progress. I honestly don't know if it was the adrenaline or I was just sick of pervs thinking they can get away with stuff like that but I just sort of charged. After screaming out that the cops were on their way I ran into the TV room grabbing the little league bat and just ran for the back door which led out of the kitchen and

into the backyard. What happened next is frankly astounding. As I ran at the guy, baseball bat in hand, ready to bash his brains out right there in the yard, I recognized him instantly. It was a face I'd seen before, not long ago at all. It was the kid's dad. So long story short, the dad of the kid I'd been babysitting had, for whatever reason, decided he needed to see what kind of babysitter I was. So apparently he drove his wife to whatever party they were headed to, turned back saying he'd forgotten something, then decided to watch me over the course of about an hour or two to see if I was worth the cash that they were spending. Obviously since no crime was

actually committed there was no one to charge. The dad offered me a sincere apology, he even offered me double the cash just to finish the night up but I refused. No amount of money could have persuaded me to stay and needless to say I was very selective with who I babysat after that. So this story isn't about me babysitting anymore but rather a close relative babysitting me and my sister when we were much younger. My parents told us this story when we grew up and honestly this has to be one of the last things any babysitter would want to happen to them or anyone in their guardianship. We wince every single time they retell it and I'm guessing you will too. My parents had decided that they were going to have a little date night for the wedding anniversary and called up a family member to see if they would babysit us

for the evening. She adored babies and would always play with us when she would occasionally visit so she must have appeared to be the best person for the job. Although by the end of this you might well dispute that idea rather violently. My parents were in the living room getting ready to leave for the night and we were in our room playing with her. After a little while, she starts throwing me up and down in the air in that playful way that grown-ups do with kids sometimes. Apparently our dad happened to notice this and warned her to be extremely careful since the ceiling fan was at full blast, but decided she was aware and responsible, so he just headed back to the living room to carry on

getting changed. After a few more playful tosses in the air she put me down and started to do the same thing with my sister. Except she wasn't quite as lucky. According to my dad no more than like 30 seconds had gone by when a loud gasp followed by a blood curdling scream echoed all around the house. My parents came rushing to the room and what they witnessed was something my mom has never ever been able to get out of her head she just stood there in shock for a moment surveying the pure horror the scene before her our babysitter had accidentally tossed my sister into the fan while it was still on and it wasn't one of those flimsy cheapo ceiling fans that you can pick up

from a walmart it was one of those solidly built steel blade fans, built with safety features sure, but still super heavy. Also, the fan setting was thankfully not set to high, but only to medium. God knows what the damage would have been if it was. And the way my mom tells the story, for the first few moments after walking into the bedroom she thought my sister was dead blood was splattered all over the wallpaper almost as if someone had been brutally beaten my sister was on her bed's blood-soaked sheets with a huge gas on her forehead and you can only imagine what kind of horror was going through our babysitter's mind. An ambulance quickly came to get her cleaned up and was given a lot of stitches in her forehead. My parents were more than relieved the blades

didn't strike an eye that she actually only managed to pick up superficial injuries. The babysitter didn't come around after that even though everyone got over it pretty quickly since it was an accident. She still has the scar on her forehead today. We would joke around about the scar and how it was actually my plan to take her out to be an only child or how she got her scar wrong and it's supposed to zigzag like Harry Potter's lightning bolt scar. I suppose at best it's an interesting story to tell if anyone asks her about the faint scar on her forehead. During my teenage years my family and I lived in military housing here in the US. A few doors down there was a new couple with two kids who were referred to me since I made a

little weekend cash working as a babysitter for some of the families who lived in base housing. Their house was pretty bare and undecorated since they had only been moved in there for like a week or so. When I arrived my mom was showing me around the house with the three month old baby in her arms, showing me where the baby's formula was kept, where I could get myself a bite to eat and stuff like that. I had to admit that I was a little worried about that particular job. Three months old was by far the youngest baby I'd ever sat for, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't think that that mom was having similar thoughts.

However, they were only going to go to their welcoming event for a couple of hours and it was right there on base though so not very far at all. I mean what could possibly go wrong in such a short space of time? Well, something did go wrong and it occurred at the very top of the staircase as her three-year-old called her and she followed me down. A strap on the mom's flip-flop snapped off and she suffered a terrible fall, completely taking me out as she toppled hopelessly down at the bottom and as she did, she ended up dropping the baby from her arms. Honestly, I'm not sure how it happened as I'm not exactly famous amongst friends for my agility, quite the opposite in fact. But as I was being sacked, I reached up and just sort of snatched the baby out of the air, grabbing a hold

of her onesie and holding her up high as we all hurtled to the bottom. I ended up with a black eye and some bruises where the mom essentially bowled me over but, and I thank god whenever I think about this, the baby was luckily completely unscathed. Whereas the mom, she ended up with an open fracture of one leg, right above her knee and a pretty solid concussion. I mean the wounds looked horrendous, she was bleeding all over the new cream carpet but she didn't act as if anything hurt at all though. She just kept saying, thank you, you saved my baby, god bless you, you saved my baby, over and over again as the kid's dad called 911 and rushed an ambulance crew over to the house. They ended up paying me like $200 for a 4 hour gig that night which in 1987 was practically a king's ransom especially to

a teenager like me. But I don't think my pulse slowed down for a week. I'm serious about that. Sometimes I'd think about catching that baby out of the air and I'd feel like I was going to have a panic attack. I pretty much stopped babysitting shortly after that because it freaked me out so much. Not just the event, but word getting around that I was like some superhero with cat-like reflexes when I'm pretty sure if that happened again, I couldn't grab that baby if I tried. I know that sounds crazy, that I probably just should have soaked up the praise and used it to make a ton more money, but it was all just way too much pressure for a young girl like me. This story takes place all the way back when I was still in high school. In order to earn money to fund my video game addiction, I regularly tutored this adorable little 11 year old girl. We actually got along so well that the parents

ended up asking me to babysit her and her little brother a couple of times. One night in particular, the parents were meant to go downtown to watch a baseball game before a few drinks with friends, telling me they'd be back earlier than midnight. Basic babysitting job, right? Wrong. Right around 8 o'clock in the evening it started raining pretty heavily. We all lived in a golf city at the time and storms can blow in fast before turning into flooding way way fast. Once it became horrifyingly clear that we were in for one heck of a big storm, the parents tried to get home as quickly and safely as possible but the streets had already started to flood and apparently they ended up trapped in a parking lot. The irony was lost on me at the time,

but not today. Anyway, the kids' parents called and we agreed I'd spend the night in their guest bedroom. While they booked themselves into a motel, I had the kids go to bed, which was kind of dumb as they got absolutely no sleep thanks to the pounding rain, while I sat up in the kitchen to do homework and watch Netflix. After a little while, I start to notice water seeping in from the back doors. They had a large house with like three double doors to the back so it was a buttload of square feet. I got every towel in the house and started wiping up the water and using the towels to block the door.

After this had mostly been cleaned up, I went back to the kitchen table to watch more Netflix. Nothing else much to do, right? But I couldn't have been any more than like 15 minutes later when the power cuts out and all the lights shut off. This freaked me out a bit, but I tried to stay as calm as best I could, and that's when the burglar alarm went off in the other room. I pretty much soiled my pants. I was in the pitch black house with two young kids surrounded by flooded roads that no one could drive on. After a minute or so of almost blind panic, I realized to my horror I was the closest thing in the house to an adult. There was no one looking after me in fact. I was directly responsible for these two kids.

So I grabbed the biggest, sharpest kitchen knife I could find and went to go check all the doors. They were all still closed and no one was in the house so I called the parents. It turns out the alarm went off when the power cuts out and I just needed to shut it off with the code upstairs. This happened about three more times over the next few hours. After the power came back on I thought things had chilled out but then when we got a tornado warning I went and got the kids from upstairs and we all hung out in the study for about an hour until the warning passed. At this point it was about 2am and I passed out in the guest bedroom. The parents woke me up when they got home at around 7am and I drove home past giant fallen branches and stalled abandoned cars. It was surreal but thank god everyone was safe and well in the end.

First and last time I babysat, back when I was 16 in the early 80s. I'd just gotten a driver's license and needed gas and insurance money for the old beat up car I'd bought. I was watching two boys about 6 and 10 while parents went out to celebrate some anniversary or something. They had promised to be home at 11. At the time cell phones were pretty rare so no way to contact them other than calling the restaurant. Evening was going great until about 9.30 when their large aggressive Doberman goes

crazy running around the house barking and growling before running into the basement refusing to come up. Sort of freaks me out a bit because this dog is huge, aggressive and very protective of the house and kids. I do a quick check of the house and kids and everyone was okay. I let the dog stay in the basement, put kids to bed at around 10 as instructed by the parents, job done. So I'm watching TV at around 10.30 when suddenly I begin to smell something burning. Running into the youngest boy's room and find the oldest boy in bed with him. Both are asleep so I wake them both and tell them that we need to get the dog and go outside. But the dog just straight up refuses to leave the basement,

and I had to prioritize, so I get the kids outside and tell them to sit in the front yard while I go in to call the fire department, not showing good judgment here, but I was 16. Oldest says, I left a candle burning under my bed, as I go back in, yup, a candle burning under my bed As I go back in Yup A candle under their bed

Since apparently monsters couldn't live anywhere where there's light I know Dumb kids As I open the door to go back in There's this huge explosion behind me across the street And power goes out The kids start screaming and follow me back into the house I grab the phone but there's no dial tone screaming and follow me back into the house. I grab the phone

but there's no dial tone. I get the kids out of the house again, onto the back porch this time and make it really clear that there's stay there. I can still hear the dog whimpering in the basement. I run to the oldest kid's bedroom with the fire extinguisher and flashlight from the kitchen and look under the bed through hazy smoke. The offending candle has gone out but has burnt a hole in the box spring which also has gone out. I flip the box spring and blast it with the extinguisher just in case. I then run to the front porch to see the transformer on a telephone pole had exploded, lighting the pole on fire and taking out the phone and electricity service for the street. I run and check on the box springs which are still out. I open the bedroom windows to air

out the room then get the kids off the back porch into the living room onto the couch where they both are just crying their eyes out. The oldest was apologizing for the fire but insisted that if he didn't keep the candle lit then, of course, monsters would get him. Fire department shows up for the transformer at around 11. Kids fall asleep on the couch at around midnight after watching the firemen across the street put out the transformer fire. The power comes back on at about 1.30am. The parents show up at 2.30am when they were supposed to be back by 11. They're somewhat buzzed and start complaining that the kids are not in bed and the oldest room is trashed with a flipped over mattress and dry fire extinguisher powder covering the box springs.

And to add insult to injury, they straight up refuse to pay me. The situation gets really tense and would you believe it, the Doberman picks this time to come out of the basement and starts aggressively growling at me. Walked out with a dollar to my fan and I've always wanted to be able to send in a true scary story of my own, but I've never really had anything actually scary ever happen to me. Awkward moments, sure. People being outraged mean that too, but never anything legit scary. But all that changed just a few weeks ago before lockdown when I was asked to babysit a neighbor's kid while they went to a party relating to one of their jobs. I'd never, ever babysit for anyone before so admittedly I was pretty nervous. But if I'd have known what kind of night I had in store for me, I'd have turned the job down in a second.

It was made all the worse by the fact that my parents pretty much assured me that it would be an easy 50 bucks and the night would be over before I knew it. I had a bad feeling about the whole thing from the start but my dad actually managed to talk me out of that headspace. Now I wish I just trusted my gut and stayed well away. So I wandered over to the house at around 7 in the evening introducing myself to the parents and the kid before they go over a few ground rules. At first, it seemed like my dad was right, but I was just being silly in that if I played my cards right, I could turn this into a regular earner to fund my weekend shopping habits. The parents were lovely and so was the kids, so

I got pretty chill pretty quickly and ended up sort of enjoying myself. Entertaining the kid after they left with the help of Disney Plus which I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a huge fan of. Anyway, everything is going well until it comes time to put the kid to bed. Then things start getting a little awkward. The kid straight up refuses and our new happy little friendship starts to quickly deteriorate. I felt super mean having to lay down the law with the kid and he went from crying and wailing to shouting and screaming at me that like I wasn't his mom, he hated me and I didn't belong there. Stuff like that. I actually kind of hurt and I started to

realize that maybe I wasn't ready for that kind of responsibility yet. To be a parent or a guardian you need to be tough enough to be able to kind of like be the bad guy if that makes any sense. And if there are any of you out there that are looking to get into babysitting thinking it'll be an easy few bucks, please reconsider. I've done way way easier things for money before and since. Things that don't make you feel terrible for having to have shouted at a kid. But after a while the whole temper tantrum seems to have tired the kid out and even though he still seemed upset with me he went up to his room, got into his pajamas, climbed into bed to sleep. He asked me to read him a story and since he'd actually done as he's told,

I obliged and when his eyes finally closed over and his breathing slowed, I snuck out of the room and downstairs to leave him get some rest. So about an hour or so later, I was sitting on the couch texting a friend of mine, telling them how babysitting was way harder than I thought it was going to be. I'm working through the leftover chicken pot pie that my mom had given me to take over there, catching up on some episodes of The Mandalorian when the family house phone starts to ring. Thinking it was the parents looking to check up on me, I pick up, greeting the caller with the cheeriest voice I could manage. Only no one on the other end responds. I say, hello, a few more times, assuming it's a butt dial or a bad line and hang up, heading back to finish off my pie. No sooner am I sat down again,

the phone rings again. I was kind of expecting it, I suppose maybe the parents had gone through a tunnel or something. I don't know, but either way, I get up again, head over to the phone and pick it up. Only this time when I do, I can hear breathing on the other end of the line. I give another cheery hello, but there's just the same breathing coming from the other end. When the person finally speaks, it's a super deep voice, obviously a guy, telling me to check on the sleeping kid. I thought it might have been the kid's dad, but there was also something really weird and distorted about the voice too. I responded like, okay, I'll go check, and the line goes dead immediately.

The kid is fine, sleeping like a rock, so much as I'm kind of creeped out by the weird voice. I figured it must have been the dad, maybe the parents had argued, I don't know, I try not to think so much about it. But then pretty much as soon as I'm back downstairs, the phone rings again. No caller ID, no nothing. So I answer, unable to prevent this fear from entering my voice. Big mistake whoever is calling senses this and starts to like giggle down the phone line in that same weirdly distorted voice. What they said next made my blood turn to ice. Gonna snatch him up. Gonna snatch up the kitty when you're not looking. Gonna get him.

I went silent. Totally silent out of fear. And that's when I heard a creak in the floorboards above me. Someone was moving around in the room upstairs. I pretty much dropped the phone and bowled upstairs and into the kid's room to find that he's still asleep, or rather that he very much appears to be asleep. But that same deep, slow breathing isn't there. The more I look, the more it seems like he's almost holding his breath or something.

Not only that, but his arm is at this weird angle that makes it look like he's holding onto something under his pillow, something he's trying to hide. In a fury, I pull the pillow up slightly then I realize what's been happening. Whoever thought it was a good idea to buy an 8 year old kid a phone is straight up crazy. But under that pillow wasn't just a phone, There was a voice distorter under there too. I grab both and run out of the room, back downstairs where the kid starts throwing another temper tantrum. I felt so dumb, completely played by the kid, made to feel terrible and vulnerable. How could someone be so young yet so malicious and mean-spirited? The parents arrived back shortly

afterwards and I didn't mention a word of what happened until they paid me in full. Then I read them the riot act. I was never going to babysit for them and they were completely irresponsible letting their kid have the things like a phone let alone an actual voice distorter. Turns out the creepy little gadget was their older college age kids and that the little guy was fascinated with it and wouldn't give it back to him. But I didn't care. I wasn't about to put myself out there like that. Ever. Again.

Hey friends, thanks for listening. To be continued... 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, I kind of forgot what I was supposed to remember.