The Lets Read Podcast - 115: Creepy Neighbors & Pokemon GO Stories | 21 True Scary Horror Stories | EP 103

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

Welcome to the One Hundred Third episode of The Lets Read Podcast! This podcast includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Creepy Neighbors, Pokemon GO, and Being Kidnapped in a Jungle... 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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Find your pro at your local Tread Experts. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca Back when I was a law student at a prominent London university, I moved into a shared house in Peckham during the final years of my studies. Half the reason I was so keen on that particular house was that only one of the other apartments was occupied. The trouble with being in a student house is that they tend to be pretty rowdy places. You never know quite when someone is going to bring home a bunch of friends from a club night and spend the wee small hours blasting music in the kitchen or whatever. Obviously that's not conducive for a good sleeping pattern and the last thing I wanted was to mess up my important final year by living in some bloody party house. So with the help of some close friends, I moved all my stuff into the flat one morning,

with every intention of going upstairs to greet the person that lived on the top floor and the only other person living in the house. But at one point, as I'm moving some bags up the stairs, I looked up the stairwell and saw someone looking down at me, with a cold, dull expression on their face. It was a guy, a rather tall one too, with short cropped blonde hair and very, very pale blue eyes. I mean they were so pale it was like they shined out of his eye sockets at me, this rather alarming shade of icy blue. I said hi to him and as friendly a way as I could muster, but instead of returning my greeting, he just stared at me for a few moments before slowly backing away from the stairwell. Then I just heard a door slam as he disappeared back into his apartment. The person I was with just kind of gave me an awkward, amused look

as we whispered our hopes that he wouldn't end up being a weirdo or anything like that. God, when I look back on it, it was such a hauntingly prophetic moment. If only we knew how right we were. The first few nights were nothing unusual and I was actually relieved that I get the peace and quiet that I've been hoping for. That was until one evening when I'm sitting in my computer chair and doing some research on international trade law and I heard something coming from the hallway outside. At first it didn't bother me too much and I simply put on some ambient music that always seemed to help me concentrate and tried to ignore the sounds coming from outside. But as the night went on they seemed to get louder and louder and eventually I couldn't contain my curiosity, walking over to the door so I could get an idea of exactly what they were. It was the sound of screaming in particular, a woman screaming, and it was coming from the apartment upstairs.

At first I thought the guy up there was just watching a horror movie or something and that's what the screaming sound was from. But the longer I listened, the more I realized that whoever was up there was listening to that and only that, like to the point I could hear the audio file or whatever looping at a certain time. He was just up there, listening to the sound of a woman screaming in pain for like an hour straight. I know I should have just gone up there and asked him to turn it down, but the idea that he was just sitting in his apartment listening to the sound of a woman screaming for that length of time, my god, it scared the life out of me. It was hours before I was silent again. I'm talking like one in the morning before I could finally even think about getting to

sleep. Questions were rolling around my mind as I was lying there in the dark. Like what kind of person just listens to stuff like that for hours at a time? Or worse, what if he was watching something criminally violent? What if he was up there watching some kind of snuff film? I lay awake for hours absolutely terrified of my new situation, one I couldn't just escape from so easily since I'd spent such a huge amount of money on the admin charges, first month's rent and that sort of thing. I was so bloody worried and it was with those thoughts echoing through my mind that I finally drifted off to sleep. I was absolutely exhausted during lectures the next day to the point where my mates

were asking me if everything was okay since apparently I looked as rough as a bear. I told them I was fine but that something was seriously weird about the bloke who lived upstairs. A few of them consoled me with tales of their own weirdo housemates and that as creepy as he seemed to be at least he wasn't a perv who was constantly trying to get in my pants or whatever, and I suppose that, in a manner of speaking, they were right. But that night I just found myself getting pretty angry that this guy was so bloody and considerate, so I put on my big girl pants and marched up to his apartment with every intention of getting him to turn the volume down. So I rock up to his door,

knocking on it loudly as I wait for him to answer. Little side note, I've dealt with noisy neighbors before. Usually the moment you knock, the noise turns down. They're embarrassed, apologetic, generally reasonable people. Only with this guy, the noises didn't turn down at all. I can't even describe how unnerving it was to hear what was coming from inside that apartment. I still don't know what those screaming sounds were from, be it a movie or a weird noise core album or some other bollocks but I'm telling you now, they sounded real. They were utterly blood curdling, the kind of screams you only get out of someone when they know they're about to die. I was positively shaking with fear by the time I heard the door begin to unlock and when it opened, what I saw was more unnerving than I could possibly imagine.

The weird blonde guy that I had seen looking down the stairwell at me just a week or so before, well I assume it was him anyway, was wearing a mask. One that I find hard to describe when I think about it. It was made of varnished wood, I know that. And it looked kind of like a death mask. Like the cast of a person's face that's made when they've recently passed away. Only there was something horribly, horribly wrong with this mask. Something that sounds deeply unnerving.

It was misshapen, warped, with indistinguishable words or symbols carved into it. But that's not what really freaked me out. Because when he opened the door, he was also completely and utterly stark naked. I remember backing up on the spot, putting a bit of a distance between myself and the masked man before I asked him, in the politest way imaginable, if he would be so kind as to turn the music down just a little bit. He didn't even move. He didn't speak.

He just stood there, staring back at me from the eye slits that had been cut into the mask. I just kept backing up, shifting my tone from polite requests to outright apologetic that I'd been so rude as to disturb him. But still he didn't move. He didn't make a sound, he just carried on, staring at me. By the time I saw the scars that ran up and down his chest, I just ran back downstairs into my apartment and locked the door behind me, almost hyperventilating with fright as I called a friend who lived nearby and asked if I could stay at their place for a while. They were curious as to why I was so upset and especially as to why I suddenly didn't want to stay at the flat that I'd previously been so made up with. But once I explained, they invited me around immediately and told me to stay as long as I wanted.

From there, I contacted the police and made an indecent exposure complaint, but the officer I spoke to said that without any witnesses, it would be essentially my word against theirs and it was nothing to build a case on. They recommended that, as inconvenient and disappointing as it was, that it was best that I just stay away from this disturbed masked neighbor person as much as possible. I ended up moving out of that flat as quickly as I could, going back with a few friends during the daytime to collect my things and once again, the guy upstairs watching from up the stairwell just staring again, completely emotionless. After that, I started to realize why the rest of the flats remained empty. I ended up graduating with a first in my law degree and now I help run a law firm in the city of Birmingham.

I remember my time in London well, but I tried never to think about that empty apartment building ever again. I'm from a city in the northwest of my country called Guaranuns. It is a very beautiful place. Some call it the city of flowers. I love Guaranuns but I cannot live there anymore. There are too many bad memories for me and people accuse me of something which I am innocent of. You see, eight years ago I lived next to a family called the Negromontes. They seemed like very nice people, but they did not have a lot of money since the man of the house, Jorge, could not find a job for some reason. It was spoken in our neighborhood that Jorge could

not work because of an illness he had, but he had helped support his family by making and selling pastries to his neighbors, including myself. Jorge made the best empadas and salgados, which are traditional Brazilian pastries that we all love to eat, and on more than one occasion, I found him knocking at my door with a tray of delicious empadas for sale. They were very affordable and very delicious, and I know I'm not the only one in our neighborhood who used to buy them very regularly from him. It felt good to be able to help him support his family like that. Some people said Jorge was mentally ill but it seemed obviously to be that he had some kind of physical condition too. Sometimes when Jorge called over at my

apartment he would burst out laughing for no reason at all, like he had heard someone tell a funny joke that only he could hear. Sometimes his arms seemed to shake when he had out the tray of empathers for me to look at and one day he started having a nosebleed which dripped all over the pastries. He apologized a lot and seemed very nervous as he walked away from my door, but when I assured him it was okay and that I hoped that he would feel better soon, he broke into this high-pitched laughter as he disappeared around a corner. Jorge could act very strange like that, but I just felt sorry for him and kind of admired how determined he was to support his family like that by working hard at making delicious food. But one day I came home from my job to see a few

police cars outside the Negromonte house. All of the neighborhood had come out of their homes to see what was going on and we were shocked when a forensics team showed up too. These are the police who wear the white overalls and masks, the ones who look for pieces of dead bodies when there had been a murder. There were many rumors about what the family had been doing, but we did not have to wait long to find out what was going on. The pictures were all over the newspapers one day and everyone heard the story being told on the local radio and TV stations.

Human remains had been found in the family's backyard and they were identified as belonging to a local homeless girl named Jessica who had gone missing sometime before. The news reports told us that the Negromantes had apparently lured her into the house with lies that they were looking for a nanny to look after their young child but had then killed her and buried her in the house with lies that they were looking for a nanny to look after their young child but had then killed her and buried it in the backyard. We were all shocked by the news but as time went on even more disturbing facts were made public regarding the murders. I remember the day that the police had a press conference with journalists from all over the

country. They claimed to have found a 50-page book that had been written by Jorge that he had titled Revelations of a Schizophrenic. The book was all about how he claimed to have been hearing voices talking in his head about how he should kill women, how what he did was all part of some kind of terrible satanic purification ritual, and that he had a plan to purify the world and reduce its population. I found this to be extremely disturbing and upsetting as I would never have imagined that Jorge could ever think like this. He always seemed like such a sweet person but I guess I was wrong to think that. But somehow as the weeks went by we heard things that were

somehow even worse. Things that destroyed my life as I knew it. Forensics teams had analyzed the entire Negromante house and discovered traces of the murdered woman's body tissue on cooking utensils used by the family. What's more, rather large chunks of flesh had been found to be missing from the bodies most recently buried in their backyard. Police could only come to one conclusion, that the family had been butchering the murdered women before cooking and eating their flesh. But what's more, rumors began to spread that not only had the family been practicing cannibalism, but they had actually sold some of the meat to the neighboring community in their empadas and salgados. It was horrifying to learn as of course I had bought Jorge's pastries from him many times before and not only had I eaten them, I thought they were very tasty. I remember sitting on my couch watching the TV when I heard the news. The room began to spin. I felt numb for a few moments, unable to properly

compute the information that I had just heard, and it all became clear to me in one single horrible moment. I had eaten human flesh without my knowledge. I ran to the toilet and was violently sick. This was all traumatizing enough for me, but then rumors began to spread that the whole community was part of some satanic cult, and that we actually knew that we were eating it. People from all over the city came to our neighborhood to harass the people living there including myself. Despite our denials, they called us all cannibals and told us that we were no longer welcome

to live in Garonuns. I personally had a note posted through my door from someone anonymous telling me that I would be killed in revenge if I did not leave the city. I didn't want to risk my life, so I left for the coastal city very far away from Garonuns, where I currently live alone. I don't eat meat anymore. I am purely vegetarian because the taste of meat brings back horrible memories for me and makes me instantly sick every time I taste it.

So, now you understand why I don't wish to give my name or give too much information as to where I live as I'm afraid I'll be hunted by these people seeking vengeance for Jorge Negromonte's terrible crimes. But I swear to Jesus Christ I did not know what I was eating, and if I ever did, I would not have eaten it, and I would have reported Jorge to the police. So please, although you think you might know who your neighbors are, ask yourself, do I really know who I'm living next to?

Do I really know what they're doing behind closed doors? Because for some of us, we don't know exactly who our neighbors are. Not until it's far too late. To be continued... asked her what the matter was, she gave me that fateful line. We need to talk. She told me she wasn't happy in our relationship anymore and that she thought that we should take a break to see other people, essentially so we could decide if we really were supposed to be together. I really didn't want to, but I loved her enough to respect her decision and I agreed. I thought if I at least gave her idea a try I'd eventually win her back but a few weeks later our relationship was well and truly over and I had to move out of the apartment

that we shared. Since it was technically her apartment first obviously I had to find a new place to live and fast so I definitely didn't take all the time I should have to find somewhere decent and I ended up paying for it pretty badly. The place I ended up renting was a one-room studio apartment in a building that straight up looked like a haunted house. I mean that probably should have been a warning right there but it was cheap, available and the landlord only wanted a month's rent in advance to exchange for the keys. Plus there was absolutely no way I was about to move back in with my mom and dad, like they'd be nice enough to offer but it would have felt like way too much like a step back and so I opted for the studio. Moving in was easy enough, I didn't have all that much in the way of

possessions to take with me and honestly I just couldn't be bothered arguing with my then ex girlfriend about who was entitled to what. The whole thing had been unpleasant enough without souring the broken relationship even further with petty arguments over furniture. Besides, as long as I had my Xbox and my 4K telly, I'd be happy enough. So the day after I move in, I knock at the flat across the hall from me to introduce myself to my neighbor. There was this thumping bass beat coming from the other side so I knew someone was home, but when they answered, I was pretty shocked at how frank and unfriendly they were. The guy was quite young with thick dark beard and a cockney accent and he didn't open the door the whole way, He just opened like a little crack before peering out.

I introduced myself, told him I moved in across the hallway from him, and added that if he ever needed to borrow a cup of sugar or anything, he knew where to find me. But all I got in return was this cold, nervous stare. I figured I might have interrupted him in something, so I apologized and added that my name was Ollie. He replied telling me my name was Ollie. He replied telling me his name was Jack. I know this sounds mad but I got the distinct impression it was a name that he just plucked out of the air. Just something in my gut told me that as weird as this sounds and that he just made it up on the spot. But I'm not really the paranoid type so I just put it down to

him being a generally awkward person or whatever before I disappeared back into my flat. A few weeks later I was just leaving my flat to head off to work when I saw a guy leaving Jack's flat. I wished him a good morning and he wished me the same and I followed up by asking if he was one of Jack's friends or his flatmate or something. Who? He replies. It was then that I smelled the alcohol in his breath. I repeated the question, pointing towards the door of the flat and reiterating that it was Jack's flat. Uh, yeah, yeah, I'm Jack's mate, he said, before continuing down the stairs and out the front door. Now this one I definitely knew was a lie and it was that which clued me into the fact that the original guy had been lying to me too. Something weird was going on with that flat but

just exactly what it was I couldn't possibly imagine at that stage. So this keeps happening for about a fortnight longer with me catching different people going in and out of the flat across the hallway at all hours of the night. So when the landlord calls to pick up the next month's rent, I bring up the tenants from across the hall and ask him exactly who it is that lives there. He racks his brain for a moment, finally coming up with the name Stephen as the name of the tenant, adding that he's the best tenant he's ever had. How there are no noise complaints, how he always pays the rent on time and on the first day of every month via direct debit deposit into his bank account. I was on the verge of telling him all about the different people I'd seen but

it wasn't really any of my business was it? I mean yeah it was probably something a bit dodgy going on over there but as long as no one was getting hurt, what did it have to do with me? I'm not a grass so I've never been, it's just not my nature so I kept my gobs shut even though in time I'd really, really wish that I hadn't. About a week later I was asleep in bed when something woke me up, a sound coming from outside my flat. It was of heavy footfalls on the stairs and somehow I knew it was something to do with the flat across the hall. As I lay there all blurry eyed I finally decided that I was going to put a complaint into the landlord but was nearly scared out of my skin when I heard a series of loud bangs on the front

of my flat. Merseyside police! Open the door or we smash it in! My heart began to race, so hard that I could actually hear it pumping in my ears. I was frozen to the spot for a moment and it took another few bangs and another shock before I could even get my head together. I ran to the threshold, pulling back the mortise lock before opening up the door. The next thing I know there's a torch in my face, completely blinding me as a pair of armed, tactically dressed policemen storm in my flat and throw me to the ground. Hands behind your back, move and you're getting shot, one screamed, not even waiting for me to obey him as he pulled my hands into the small of my back and placed them in cuffs. Get the bloody light on, Rich, he said to the other policeman, pulling me up onto my knees and telling me to stay put. So I'm up on my knees, facing the door of my flat with the other officer keeping his back against the door, drawing it open.

I can see that there is another pair of police officers who have been banging on the door of the flat across the hall, only there is no reply from inside. No one comes to open the door. So up comes this other policeman with one of those door basher things. I don't know the proper name, only that one of the police called it the Big Key. They smashed their way into the door, screaming as they went. I figured they'd start dragging out whoever was in there, or at least being as aggressive as they were with me, but bizarrely it was almost the opposite tone. It was verging on a minute or so later I watched in absolute horror as one officer walked out of the flat carrying a girl who couldn't have been any older than a teenager.

She was barely dressed, covered in bruises, and her hair was a greasy mess that was plastered to her scalp. I looked up at one of the officers. A look of pure shock and revulsion on my face. Let me guess, you didn't know anything about it. Why don't you just save it for the interview, he says. But I didn't. I swear to God I didn't. And I told the police who questioned me down at the station the exact thing when they asked me all sorts of things about human trafficking rings. I broke down in tears when they tried to get me to admit that I was the ring leader or something and swore blind that I had no idea what they were talking about and that I'd

never do anything like that and that I just didn't have it in me. Eventually they let me go, satisfied that I didn't have anything to do with it but I was horrified that something like that couldn't have been going on right under my nose, that I'd smiled and joked with some of the scumbags that I'd frequented that flat, completely unaware of the hellishly cruel things they'd been getting up to inside of it. I ended up moving back in with my mom and dad not long after, I just couldn't live in that place anymore, and I couldn't cope with looking for a new place,

not with the intense paranoia of not knowing what was going on behind the closed doors all around me. So please, as much as it might go against all of your F the police mentalities, just call the police if you think something weird is happening like that near you, because it is our business, it's all of our business, and that decision might be the difference between someone's freedom and an existence of pure torture. Back when I was a kid, my family and I lived in this super religious neighborhood out in Utah. I know the main reason we moved out there was for peace of mind and security since, although our family wasn't hugely religious, we still went to church on Sundays and stuff like that. We figured that it would be a nice place to live since all the neighbors would be super Christian and whatnot. I mean, they were. Everybody was super friendly. But certain people were really, really weird. Like the neighbor that lived on the right side of us, their whole family seemed

really wholesome. And I suppose they were in many ways but in others they were just downright creepy and frightening. So take the first time they came over to visit after we moved in. Their whole family came over for dinner and everything is going really well despite the fact that we could barely talk to the neighbor's kids. They didn't have a tv over there so half of the things me and my sister referenced just went right over their heads. But like I said, they were still super nice and you don't need a TV to be able to have fun on a trampoline. Anyway, right in the middle of dinner as the grown-ups are chatting away and we're all tucking into the homemade lasagna my mom had made, one of the kids starts babbling about something. Like I thought they were about to have a fit or something.

They came out with this long stream of nonsense words. Not like in another language or whatever, they were just saying one big long word really fast. I remember my dad gets up from the table about to grab a pen or something just in case the kid is having an epileptic fit and starts asking the neighbor's dad, is your kid okay? I don't blame him either. The kid's face was all screwed up and it did look like they were in some measure of pain. But instead of getting up to check on the kid, the neighbor's mom clasps her hands together like she's all proud, while the dad raised his hands to the ceiling and starts saying things like,

praise be, praise be to God for we are blessed. Then he starts explaining to us that the kid talked in tongues sometimes, how they were often possessed by the Holy Spirit and spoke the pure language of the seraphim. I just remember being completely and utterly freaked out, like I'd never seen anything like that in my young life. Then another time I got up one morning and headed into the bathroom to brush my teeth. So we had frosted glass on the windows but one was slightly ajar and through it I hear this grunting sound coming from the neighbor's backyard. I push the window open slightly and then freak out at what I see. The neighbor dad is standing there in the backyard with what I'm guessing was the Bible in one hand and a kind of whip in the other. He was whipping his own back

while reading Bible verses aloud and he was whipping hard. There were all these little cuts on his back that were just streaming with blood so I just run to tell my mom and dad about what I'd seen, who actually doubted me for a moment before they too got to look at what was going on. My dad called over to politely ask the neighbor guy not to do that in his backyard, and apparently he warmingly agreed to not do it in the view of our house anymore. Needless to say, we didn't invite them over for dinner anymore. But what still kind of freaks me out even today is how nice they were, even with such violent tendencies and despite how crazy he obviously was, the neighbor dad was one of the

warmest, friendliest guys I'd ever met. At least, that's the front he put up. And I wonder if he was the same behind closed doors. I also wonder if the kids really were as well adjusted as they seemed or if they struggled later in life having grown up in such a weird environment I grew up here in Germany and used to live near this older man who lived with his wife and his dog a few doors away in this really big fancy house. His wife was considerably more sociable than he was and the man himself seemed very anti-social and grumpy and very rarely did he actually talk to any of us neighbor folk.

There really didn't seem to be anything wrong with either of them, just your average childless married couple. One morning I left my house at the usual time to catch the bus to school. Our suburban street was relatively quiet and normally there wasn't much going on, it was generally a pretty boring place to grow up. But that particular morning was a little bit different. A few of our neighbors were standing out in the street and I'm pretty sure I heard some of them talking about how something was wrong with the other guy in the big house but exactly what that was I had no idea. So I went off to school and didn't think much about it. But when the school day ended and I headed home, I saw that

the whole street was cordoned off and evacuated by police. Police cars were everywhere and there was even this big GS G9 truck there which is like German version of SWAT. I had no idea what was going on. I saw my parents near the cordon and they explained to me that the old guy had tried to end his own life and planned to take the whole street with him. This guy had filled his entire basement with petrol and had an improvised explosive hidden in his garden shed which was essentially a big pile of propane gas tanks tied together. The whole thing was rigged to explode in the morning, but thankfully something had gone wrong. A smaller version of this explosive was placed in the garbage can of the people who live

right next to this maniac. Before the old man triggered the bomb, he wrecked the entire interior of his house with an axe and then went to the garage with his poor dog, locked the gate, and turned his car engine on. He locked his poor dog in the boot of the car before sitting himself in the driver's seat waiting to die from carbon monoxide asphyxiation because he was too cowardly to wait to be blown up by the bomb himself. Luckily, the plan didn't work out, because the neighbor heard the car engine and became suspicious. He looked through the garage window and at first thought the man had a heart attack, so he broke the window and entered only to see the man more or less conscious in his car. Then he noticed the distinctive smell of petrol. He broke the door to enter the house and discover the mess the old guy created.

The neighbor immediately called the cops and the bomb squad took care of the explosive just in time. Unfortunately, the dog suffocated in the trunk and was already dead. The authorities arrested that guy and put him into a mental health facility. He will remain there until the end of his life. The estimated blast radius of the bomb would have been enough to destroy several houses and do an incredible amount of damage to the surrounding area. This all happened back in 2010 in the city of Ingolstadt and the story was all over the German news, so you can look this up for yourself to see that this is not something I simply made up for karma. You can get it from our tread experts. Until May 30th, purchase four new Michelin passenger or light truck tires and receive up to $70 by prepaid MasterCard. Conditions apply. Details at Michelin.ca.

Find a Michelin tread experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there at treadexperts.ca. I had one of those moments recently where a lot of things came together in my brain to make sense of an event that my child mind couldn't properly comprehend at the time. So my mom was born and raised in the UK, but she is of South Asian descent, and since I'm mixed, she tries really hard to make sure I'm in touch with my culture. This meant that as a child, we made a lot of frequent visits back home. It's like every summer I can remember was spent there and then it suddenly just stopped after this incident. My mom's family back home live in an extremely rural part of the country.

There's a lot of poverty surrounding our family home so we rarely left our relatively nice part of the village. I was never allowed out to explore and coming from a concrete jungle that is London I was always so curious. I'm going to explain what happened on this particular day the way I remembered experiencing it and then I'll explain what I failed to realize at the time. I was 8, one of my uncles from a neighboring village would often visit with his children and when they did my mom would let me go with them to a small hut like shop that sold sweets and snacks like 15 minutes away from the family home. My cousins were 11 and 19, both male, and it was broad daylight. To get to the shop we walked through a small DIY road and on both sides is what I would call the jungle.

It was basically just lots of trees and bushes as far as you can see. You can't really see anything beyond the trees, it's just a lot of greenery. I'm mixed with East Asian and I definitely get my looks from my dad's side so being an obvious foreigner in a rural part of back home meant that I was pretty used to strangers staring and asking me questions. I was also used to creepy men that would tell me that I was beautiful because I have pale skin. My mom warned me about these men and made sure that I knew to stay away from them. So the road to the hut was paved with creepy people making creepy comments and my cousins basically telling them to leave me alone in less pleasant terms. There was also a group of young guys, some of them had motorbikes and some were just chilling.

One of them waved at me and he seemed friendly enough and I had met so many people that my mom was convinced that I must remember them from last time that I had zero recollection of so I just waved back and went about my day. Once we got to the HUD we immediately started losing our self control with the snacks. The owner was super friendly and he let us try a bunch of sweets that he had and he also had kulfi ice cream for the first time. I distinctly remember it being really excited because my mom and one of the ladies that worked as a cook both loved kulfi ice cream so I thought it would be a nice surprise for them. I asked for three and the nice guy gave me four and so my hands were full and they were quickly melting and he told me to run, run, run, go home quickly, quickly. I told my cousins I would get a running start and once they finished they could catch up.

I would still be in their line of sight plus it was daylight and it was a busy road. I started running back. There were a few older aunties stood up at the top of the road and something about their presence gave me a sense of security. I felt a lot safer knowing that they were there and paired with the fact that my cousins were able to see me clearly, I felt comfortable enough to just walk back leisurely, minding my own business, eating my ice cream. I passed the group of guys and the one that waved at me came over to me. He said I was X and so and so's niece, right? X being my uncle. And he basically took one of my ice creams and said, she got an ice cream for mama. Mama means uncle in

our language and so I just assumed he was a friend of my uncle's. He asked me when I arrived and how I was finding the country. He was so friendly and he didn't look like a stereotypical creep. When I said that I was going to go home, he said, why don't you let uncle take you? You can ride on my motorbike. I think that's when something clicked in my mind that he maybe wasn't the friendly uncle I thought he was. That's also when I realized I was pretty much circled in and was surrounded by the group. That's also when I realized I couldn't see my cousins or the group of old ladies, which also meant that they probably couldn't see me. I wish I could explain in words how helpless and afraid I was. I had all the threats in the world explained to me by my mom, in a country where I knew I was vulnerable, and had to be cautious and still manage to find myself in a dangerous situation. Luckily my cousins came

running and shouting, probably because I was their responsibility and the guy ran off into the jungle. This creeped me out because there was nothing in the jungle, it was just trees as far as I could see and I knew that it would be nearly impossible to find them and all of that. We caused quite the scene and the villagers seemed to react as if they were already on edge. When we told my family what happened I was basically on house arrest and my mom refused to let me out of her sight. I was pretty shook up about the whole situation and so honestly I was kind of grateful for that. I put it down to my paranoia but at the time I would get overwhelming feelings of being watched.

Our village is quite small, like amongst them it's an everyone knows everyone sort of thing. My uncle is also a big community figure and he's very well known amongst the villagers which is why the men probably put two and two together that I was his niece. Having foreign family over is usually a pretty big deal and having a niece that is mixed race was also a very big deal. I'm sure word got around. He realized that there was a group of men on motorbikes who would frequently go past our house. They stayed a decent distance from our home though and that they weren't anyone we would have known. It's creepy to think about now, the lengths that they were going to. A couple of days before we were due to fly back, I had my second, last and worst encounter with this particular friendly uncle.

It was night, and it was like every other night where we would play board games or card games in the front room. Because it was so hot, I went to my bedroom and I was playing on my Nintendo DS when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, someone at the window, staring directly at me. It was him. The worst part is that he had the most creepy, sick, and twisted smile I'd ever seen. He put a finger to his lips, but I did the literal opposite and started screaming hysterically. I had been on edge since the ice cream incident so what might seem like an overreaction was just my natural response. I can't really tell you what happened next because no one had ever told me.

My very large uncle and also his very large friends are not known to be the friendliest of people but I was told he was dealt with and that he would never bother me again. We recently received a wedding film from one of my cousin's weddings and part of the film was her leaving to get to the venue and I noticed that the jungle was no longer there. It had basically been cut out. For the first time I could see beyond the greenery. That's when my mom explained to me that my uncle had it cut down not long after that particular visit because of the

head cutters. It sounds even more sinister in my native language. My entire life I've wondered what would have happened to me if I had got on that motorbike but now I know with reasonable certainty what his intentions were. During that time, a gang had been kidnapping beggar children. It took a while for the village to realize because it's not unusual for beggar children to go missing but when we were there, people were vaguely aware that it was becoming a trend. A couple of months later, a head was found. It became known in our village, but people tried to keep it quiet to avoid getting a bad name. The problem went away once a lot of the greenery was cut down so there was nowhere left to hide, but it's also when they realized the magnitude of what had happened. The weird thing is, I've known about the head

cutters for a while. I knew it was something that had occurred in our village, but for some reason, until recently, I never put two and two together. But now that I have, I think often about what nearly happened to me, but more importantly, what happened to a handful of children in our little village. I think about that fact that beyond our relatively small circle, no one thinks about them and no one is haunted by their deaths. I moved to Sandbach in Sheshire, England around three to four years ago with my ex. Him and I had broken up by this point and we were just friends in the house we rented and everything was great.

We weren't hostile towards each other and I found out we were better friends than in a relationship. I started going out to the bars and local shops and make friends and see if anyone was as lonely as me by this point. I had moved from Chelsea, London to be with my ex and I didn't know anyone there. This was when I met Craig. Him and I became best friends quickly. He was a little odd, had family in the area in his own flat. So my ex moved away back with his family and I couldn't afford the rent on my own. So Craig and I rented our own house in Worcester where his dad lived.

His dad would be 5 minutes drive away from the house that we settled at. Him and I were just best friends. We didn't do anything romantically and he always had a few poor girls in tow. He would tell each of them that they were the one for him, he loved them, etc. He had around seven girls on the go at one point. I started seeing this guy Jay. He would stay over a few times and would eventually become my boyfriend. Craig hated it. We would argue about him. The fact that why should he care anyway? Him and I were only best friends and he needed to stay out of my dating life. It was then that things got physical. One night Craig literally got on top

of me in my room, put his knees on my arms and started to strangle me. He was saying things like, where is he now? And I honestly thought that I was going to die. My brain switched to my mom who was 4-5 hours away and she would never know or would have to come identify the body of her only child. I don't know what it was but I managed to kick Craig and I ran. He had double locked the front door. He had hidden my bag and had smashed my new iPhone that I had gotten from my parents for my birthday. I was literally running down the stairs with him in tow yelling how he's going to kill me. It went 0 to 100 real quick. I knew the back door was open from him having a smoke earlier and there was a garden gate. All I needed to do was open that. I ran for it,

opened it, and made it. The next thing I'm out on the street in short shorts and pajama top barefoot and I just ran. I ran for a good half an hour towards town and used a payphone to call 999. The police picked me up. I couldn't get back into the house as Craig had my door key. I told them the story. They took me to the station, had to unlock it as it was past one in the morning by now. They took photos of my neck that had bruising and my head that was bleeding where he had smashed me into the kitchen wall earlier. I had to sit in a patrol car to go to my house and they picked Craig up. He was on the streets looking for me. I had to point him

out and say that's him to them. He said he was out looking for me as he was worried about me. I don't think that's true. I think he was out looking for me to silence me so I didn't tell anyone. They arrested him and I got told that he would stay in a cell overnight and a policeman would let me into my house as they used a key Craig had. While I was in the house alone I gathered my things. I left my laptop, some clothes, shoes and makeup in the rush. I thought I could easily replace them and I just wanted to get away and I was so worried that he would come back any second through the front door. I had no purse, no money, no phone. My parents lived five hours away. Thankfully, I don't know why, but I had the sense to hide my car key and my bra earlier that evening.

I got into my car and drove to Morrison's petrol station. I was bleeding from my head, no shoes on and bruised. I broke down there and used their phone to call my mom. At first she was annoyed that I had woken her up, but then I explained everything to her. She ended up putting £200 into the petrol cashier's account for me to fill my car up, get some food and a hot drink to calm down. I then drove to my parents. I later got told through friends of a friend that Craig got released in the morning as it was his word against mine and he smashed my laptop up when he found out I wasn't home anymore. Whatever. My stuff got replaced and

I'm now with an amazing guy who treats me like a queen. Sometimes I get flashbacks of the night where I truly believed I could have died. As for Craig, I blocked him, deleted everything to do with his family and him, changed my number, and even broke off friendships 10 years ago when I was 17. I had just started university and was excited about having a fresh new start since I've always been a nerdy outcast in high school. I never had a boyfriend before. I've never even been on a date, so I was naive and optimistic about boys. My introverted and awkward personality hadn't magically changed since entering university, so it's safe to say that I didn't meet any interesting guys at school.

One night I was in my room working on an assignment on my laptop when I received a request on MSN Messenger. The email address was a boy's name with some numbers. The name was clearly ethnic and likely someone of the same origin as me. Intrigued, I accepted. For the sake of the story, we'll call this boy Ken. We got to chatting and I asked him how he got my email address and he dodged the question. I let it go, not thinking too much of it. This was from a time when it was normal to accept anyone and everyone as a friend on Facebook and other social media platforms. As Ken and I continued to talk, I learned that he lived in my city and apparently wasn't much

older than me. As I guessed, our roots were in fact in the same country. Let's call it Motherland. I asked him why he didn't have a picture of himself on his display picture and this prompted him to suggest that we turn on our webcams because he wanted to see me too. I declined but he insisted. Somehow he convinced me and we both switched on our webcams. I was pleasantly surprised and somewhat relieved to see that Ken was a good looking young guy chatting to me from the comfort of his bedroom, seemingly very normal. Our MSN chats carried on for a couple of weeks. They developed into texts and we even had a few phone calls after I had agreed to give him my phone number. I started to develop a crush on Ken.

He'd asked me to go out with him a couple of times, but I was always pretty busy with school and our schedules weren't lining up. Finally we found one afternoon when we were both free and decided to schedule a lunch date. Ken had a car and offered to pick me up from my university after I was done for the day. I was a little too dressed up for my C plus programming class but just right for the lunch date that we had planned at a local vegetarian restaurant. Stupidly, I didn't tell any of my friends where I was going or with whom because I was embarrassed about going on my very first date. At almost age 18 was someone who had randomly added me on MSN. I waited outside my building when a black car with heavily tinted windows pulled up beside me. The passenger side window rolled down and sure enough, there was

Ken, sitting in the driver's seat. I was happy to see that he was as cute in person as he was on webcam. However, what I wasn't expecting was the intense smell of marijuana floating out of the car. Not relevant, but part of the first impression. Admittedly, I was a bit taken aback and was concerned that he might be driving high. He unlocked the doors and motioned for me to get in, so I did without dispute. As I sat down in the passenger seat and he immediately put his hand on my thigh, I nervously shifted my leg away. So, I started. Do you know where the restaurant is? I can guide you if you want. He smirked at me and didn't say anything but just started driving.

Okay, kind of weird. I thought maybe he was just kind of nervous or awkward, both of which I could sympathize with, so I let it be. I was about to try my hand at a little small talk, which I'm no good at, when I noticed him heading towards the highway ramp. I started to worry because the restaurant was not far from my campus and there was no reason for us to be getting on the highway. Um, you don't need to take the highway, the restaurant's really close by, I can guide you. I tried to keep my voice steady but I could hear my own nervousness. Ken finally spoke for the first time since I had gotten into the car. I thought maybe we could go to my place instead.

We can play Need for Speed and I can make you lunch. I was 17 on my way to the house of a guy that I'd just met for the first time and I hadn't told anyone where I was going. My mind was racing. I knew that this would be an utterly stupid thing to do. Despite the clear red flags waving in my face, I decided that I didn't want to ruin our first date by rejecting his offer to make me lunch and play Need for Speed together, which I told him that I liked playing. So, like an idiot, I reluctantly agreed to avoid being rude. We made it to his house.

It was apparently his family's home and was situated in a sort of shady neighborhood. We stepped inside and of course, no one was home except us. It was sparsely furnished and looked unkempt, which struck me as pretty odd for a family home. He informed me that his Xbox was in his bedroom. I hesitated in the doorway, but he sat at the foot of his bed in front of the TV and padded the empty space beside him for me to have a seat. There was literally nowhere else to sit in his room so I cautiously sat down, keeping as much distance as I could between us. I started to relax as we played Need for Speed and he made us PB&Js to munch on.

I was about to laugh at myself for being overly paranoid when Ken did something bizarre. He got onto the bed and sat down directly behind me, his legs on either side of me in an extremely awkward position and tried to guide my hands to the controller. I started to ask him what he was doing and, as if this wasn't uncomfortable enough, his hands moved from the controller and slid under my shirt. That's when I really started to panic. I thought he was going to try to grope my chest but instead he started squeezing and massaging my belly. I was more than a little chubby back then, freshman 15 and then some, so you can imagine what that might have been like. I dropped the controller in pure shock and quickly stood up, fixing my shirt. I was at a loss for words and he did nothing but smirk at me and tell me he liked it.

I felt completely disgusted and violated, and I'd had enough. I lied and told him that I had a group project to work on and needed to go. He asked where I lived so he could drop me home. Thankfully, I had the common sense not to tell him and I asked him to drop me back at the school instead where I would be supposedly meeting my classmates and he obliged. After our very uncomfortable first date, I decided I didn't want to talk to Ken anymore. I didn't block him on MSN or on my phone, our only two methods of communication, but I rarely responded to his messages and I ignored all of his calls. Once he messaged me on MSN at around 11pm asking me to come over and telling

me that he would send me a cab to bring me over to his place. Thoroughly annoyed, I responded, what do you take me for? Why do you even think I would want to do that? He replied saying, Nothing creepy, I promise. It was bizarre. I was disgusted and didn't even respond. He continued trying to get in touch with me for months and then suddenly vanished. I figured he'd finally gotten the point.

Now, I wish the story ended here, but it didn't. The last I heard from Ken in late February, he had stopped trying to contact me shortly after Valentine's Day. In April, two nuclear family members and I went on holiday to visit another relative who we'll call Anne, who was living in the Caribbean at the time. Anne, whom I love dearly, was and still is a bit of an eccentric. She considered herself very spiritual and is an active member of a large well-known spiritual organization. She is deeply connected with the motherland, more than the rest of us are, and goes back for frequent visits. While we stayed with her in the Caribbean,

she told us about her most recent spiritual trips to the motherland where she met a wealthy and well-connected local woman through the organization who quickly became a very close friend. Let's call her Connie, the con artist. During our visit, Annie introduced us to Connie virtually over Skype because Connie lives in the motherland, and we chatted with her a couple of times throughout our vacation via Skype and got to know her a little bit. Little did we know then that Connie, who Anne had spontaneously met halfway across the world in the Motherland, would soon wreak utter havoc on our lives. Now that's a story that I'm just not and may never be ready to tell because of how many lives were affected and the severity of the damage that had been inflicted.

What you need to know is that Connie was an outright criminal and con artist who had been targeting our family for long before Ann had actually met her. Their meeting was not coincidence. Not only did she manage to steal over $100,000 from our family, but she took any peace of mind or sense of security we'd ever had. When we finally caught on and confronted her, she insisted that we were mistaken, but disappeared into thin air once we forced her out of our lives. You're probably wondering what on earth this has to do with the story about Ken. Well, get this. The situation with Connie lasted many months. The whole thing is kind of a blur to me now, but we first spoke to her online in April and I remember the whole ordeal lasting well into the fall. While she normally resided in the motherland, Anne had invited her to visit and stay with us where we, my whole family and I presently live. That's when things really took a turn for the worst. Some of the things I clearly

remember and are important to the story were that 1. The whole time she was staying with us, she was trying to convince me to transfer schools to a very obscure school and program in the US. I don't even live in the US and was actually getting very pushy about it. And 2. She had asked me if I was a virgin and told me to save myself from my husband. It was kind of disturbing to be saying that. During this time, I was so emotionally drained and stressed that I didn't really think of anything but the situation at hand. In fact, I had stopped socializing almost entirely and even started habitually skipping classes. I had lost contact with my high school friends and my university friends who were too new to really care, so my strange behavior and new destructive habits went unnoticed.

Fast forward to one day after Connie's final disappearance in the fall, I was at home with my dad when my cell phone rang. I looked at the caller ID and it was a number I didn't have saved, so it was showing the contact information as whatever name the phone was registered under. My heart dropped in my stomach. My phone displayed a name. The first name was a man's name and the last name was the same last name as Connie's. I started to panic and ran into my bedroom to answer the call. I had no idea what to expect. When I picked up the phone, I was greeted by a familiar voice. It was Ken.

I honestly thought that I was going to puke when I came to a sudden realization that he had been part of this whole sick plot. Of course, I don't have hard evidence to prove that he was connected to Connie, but let me explain. The timing of his appearance and reappearance into my life, the last name, a fairly unique surname originating from the part of the motherland where Connie is from, and I had never known Ken's last name until then. And the fact that he contacted me out of the blue and I had no idea why or how were all just too bizarre to be a mere coincidence. Of course, I freaked out at Ken when he called and I told him that if he ever called me again, I would call the police. His response was just a weird, dry half-laugh and then he said, Well, okay then.

In the most creepy voice you can think of and hung up. I knew in my gut that this was their last attempt to get back in touch and somehow slithered their way back into mine and my family's lives. Thankfully, I never heard from Ken again after that day. A while after this all ended, I was having a conversation with a family member, who was also closely involved in all of this, about the whole ordeal, and she told me that she'd sensed something extremely wrong when Connie was pushing to have me sent off to the US, to that obscure school. She had an unshakable feeling that Connie was involved in some sort of human trafficking scene and that if I left, she would never see me

again. The horrifying pieces came together for me at that time. I was just too naive to have seen it before. The memories flooded back when I heard that, how Ken had told me, nothing weird, I promise, when he invited me over and how Connie was telling me to remain a virgin. As I said, I had never told a soul about Ken, nor about the weird v-card conversation with Connie. I strongly and firmly believed that Ken had been some sort of player in Connie's game and was just there to keep me away from guys and prevent me from having a boyfriend. For those who may have been wondering, we never called the police on Connie or Ken because nothing illegal happened at face value. It's very hard to explain. I'll also mention that I tried to find Ken online many times after this all ended.

I don't know why, I felt like I wanted to expose him or call him out, and was not able to find even a sliver of information on him, not by the name Ken nor by the name on the caller ID. It was as if he didn't even exist. Also, I am awful at directions and didn't remember his address or where his house was exactly. I'm sorry if this is all convoluted, I'm trying to get my points across without giving out any names or too many details, which makes it a little challenging. I hope this can serve as a warning to young people to never trust anyone, to do your thorough checks on people, especially those you meet online and to be very aware and wary of people's intentions. From this incident onward, I can't stomach a lot

of those spiritual organizations. I never liked the idea of them to begin with, but now I've truly experienced how they can attract both vulnerable people and also unsavory characters who are looking for someone vulnerable to prey on. No judgment for those who are into that sort of thing, it's just definitely not for me. I'd like to hear what you guys think about this. Do you think my suspicions are plausible? What do you make of this? So I, a 33 year old female, live at a funeral home owned and run by my dad. I live in the apartment upstairs and do some side work for my dad but I don't work for the funeral home outright. Since I live here though I tend to interact with a lot of people who are here for funeral related things and what not. I represent my dad when I'm speaking to someone here here for funeral related things and whatnot. I represent my dad

when I'm speaking to someone here so I'm always nice and helpful. Had a couple of crazy people I've dealt with but nothing like this. This was in mid-March sometime because it was right at the beginning of the whole COVID takeover. I had gone to pick up some food for my family at around 6. Unless there is a service, the employees are usually gone and I believe it was a Saturday as well. So I pull into my parking lot and as I park, a car drives by me going towards the entrance's side. It was a dark SUV and there are so many people who work here who have similar cars that I couldn't see from that far who it was but I gave a quick wave thinking it was someone I knew. Bad idea.

So the car stops and the guy gets out. Like I said I'm used to having to help people and tell them where they can drop things off or pick stuff up. So this guy gets out and comes towards my car. I roll my window down a little expecting to just say hello and tell him that no one is here working. He comes right over to my window and starts leaning in and peering into my car which was a red flag already, it was very invasive. I'm glad my doors were locked and I only put it down a little. So this dude basically had his head in my car and it creeped me out. But before anything else his eyes scared the life out of me. He was very, very pale with bright red hair and his eyes were literally the craziest and scary eyes I've ever seen. It was chilling. I don't know if he was on drugs or just nuts, but I'm here, blah blah blah. I tell him no one is here working, please call tomorrow in the morning and you can speak to someone.

Thought that would be it. Not even close. This man came to bring an application to my father to work for the funeral home. He was apparently in IT or something but had studied embalming and also volunteered for the Red Cross. He was talking a mile a minute and I was so incredibly uncomfortable but even more so when he started to tell me about how certain embalming techniques he studied included hanging cadavers by their feet and other insane sick stuff. He had absolutely no experience embalming though. He cornered me in my car for 15 minutes and just rambled. I told him several times, please just call tomorrow morning. I really can't help you. So now I'm sitting here in my car with this insane man

outside my car and I also had food on my seat. He was looking into my car so he saw it and you would think he would take the hint. At some point I texted my husband and said, come outside now. And thank God he actually saw my text and came out. So he comes out up to this guy and he was like can I help you? So this guy starts corning my husband also. This guy had absolutely no idea what personal space was and my husband kept backing up and he would move in closer every time. I took an opportunity to grab the food and get out since he was outside. When I got out he started telling my husband and I, this virus is going to be around and there's going to be bodies piling up. I'm going to need extra help here when there are hundreds of bodies dead. It almost seemed like he was excited at the thought. He had a resume and I told him multiple

times to please bring it by again. I didn't even want to touch anything he had but he forced it into my husband's hands. I went to the stairs and gave my husband a concerned look and motion for him to come in. This guy made me so extremely nervous and I didn't want my husband out there any longer. But this guy was almost impossible to walk away from. He didn't understand that it was done. So eventually we got away from this freak and got inside. I immediately called my dad to explain what had happened and warn him of this guy. I told my dad I had never felt more uncomfortable in my life and there was something seriously wrong with this dude.

I wanted to warn him that he would probably be back the next day. And he did. A couple of days later, mid-morning, I'm upstairs in my apartment and there are several employees in the office upstairs. I hear someone ring the doorbell. Once, twice, three times. He then proceeds to ring it non-stop for 15 minutes. They assumed it was him and didn't answer. I went out and I was like, what's up with this doorbell? They knew it was him and didn't answer. I went out and was like, what's up with this doorbell? They knew it was him apparently because he had called earlier and wanted to talk to my dad and

one of the employees told him we are hiring but he insisted on talking to my father so he came by. Then after the doorbell went off for several minutes the phone started ringing off the hook. Next he was going around to all the windows and pounding on them relentlessly. I told them how crazy he was but I was glad they could now see what I meant and that I wasn't overreacting. Eventually my older brother went down with a mask on and like I said this was right in the beginning and people weren't even wearing masks regularly but this guy had zero boundaries. He then cornered my brother the same way and would not let him leave and end the conversation.

We're all just thinking, God, what's wrong with this guy? My dad did not want to talk to him, but he wouldn't give up. And the next day, he comes back again. Same thing, banging on all the windows and ringing the bell, calling incessantly. Eventually my dad's secretary answered the phone and put him in his place and told him if he called again they would call the cops. The best part is every time he showed up, he showed up in a full top to bottom biker gear. Spandex, helmets, knee pads, even though he apparently lived a few streets over. This guy was just absolutely nuts.

I'm currently staying in a remote part of the United Kingdom and having a break from working, which means more time to pursue my hobbies, one being photography. I had scoped out a creepy looking tree formation in a nearby forest and set my camera and tripod up as the sun was coming down, you know, for that extra creepy vibe. As I'm happily taking photos, I see a woman past the entrance to the arched trees. This woman had parked her car next to mine when I arrived. She went past a couple of times, looking at me for prolonged periods with each time she passed. I assume she wants to come up this path, but sees that I'm taking photos so decides to walk elsewhere. Approximately five minutes go by and she appears again, this time walking towards me, dragging her left side slightly with

this strange limp. She stops once and stares at me for a few seconds then starts walking towards me again. I ask her if she's okay. I'm starting to put my camera away at this point and readying my tripod to use for self defense if necessary because the vibe I'm getting is way off and she starts grunting at me then stops and stares again. It's at this point that this woman is close enough for me to realize that she's actually a man in woman's clothing with a wig. An uncomfortable moment passes and she starts grunting again, walks towards the edge of the path, grabs a pile of leaves and starts throwing them around, grunts some more and then walks off aimlessly into the forest. I call my friend to tell her what has happened and ask that she stays on the phone in case this person comes back. I'll just take a couple more photos then

I'm out. For a good ten minutes I hear the crunching of leaves circling me in the forest and I just convince myself that it's the wildlife. Then silence. I take the photos and I haven't seen or heard the person for around fifteen minutes now so I assume I'm safe. I leave the path and see that the car had gone. Thank God. However, I very quickly notice that there is a man walking towards me from the entrance. It's the same guy. He had changed into men's attire and as he walks past me, he shoots me a grin that sends shivers down my spine. I don't scare easily but this guy just gives off all of the wrong signals causing this overwhelming feeling of dread to wash over me. I'm still on the

phone at this point and I'm holding my tripod over my shoulder just in case. I quicken my pace and got back into my car. As I did so I saw him come out of the lane that I had been down, stop and look, then start walking towards my car with intent. I start videoing for a while then haul it out of there, driving past his car that he had moved down the road thinking, what in the grey beard eff just happened? Limping, leaf throwing, forest stalker who cross dresses, I hope we don't meet again. For context, I'm a 5'3", 24-year-old female and working as a programmer for an IT company in the Philippines. Now, the area where my office is comprises of three buildings.

Building A, where my office is in. Building B and Building C. To get to the other building, it would take you like around 10 minutes to get there. This happened to me a year ago around the end of February into March. I just got out of a bad breakup at that time and I really intended to just focus on myself and not meet anyone yet. I just got out of work and it's around 7pm on a Friday night and went to my usual waiting spot which has benches and is located at the back of a building near the entrance of the underground parking lot for our company's shuttle and Omar, our shuttle dispatcher, is there. Now I've known Omar for two years and is someone I considered

now as a friend and we would often chat about our lives, even the breakup with my ex then, and joke around. He's a 40 plus year old guy and he gives out this big fatherly vibe so he is really someone that I trust. That night he was there and with someone new that I didn't recognize. Our convo went like this. Oh hey there. Good thing you're here. I'd like you to meet someone since he told me he really wants to meet you for a long time now. And then this guy stood up and shook my hand. I greeted him as just to be polite and this new guy, let's call him Ray, he's average looking and a little shorter than my height, about 5'1", and he's instantly giving off a vibe as soon as I shook his hand.

I thought that would be the end of it, but he proceeded to talk to me for a few minutes while I wait for my shuttle to arrive. Omar has purposely left me and this Ray guy so that we could talk and get to know each other. I'm actually puzzled at this point. One, I have no clue who this guy is and why he would be so eager to meet me. And two, I clearly told Omar before that I'm not into meeting anyone just yet. But for the sake of being polite and nice, I talked to Ray but we never reached any personal questions, exchanging numbers, social media accounts, or even telling him my full name.

I just told him my nickname, and I left it just as that when I finally got on the shuttle. Fast forward to a week and Friday again. I got off at work at the same time, and surprise, surprise, Ray is there again with Omar and a security guard. They were chatting but as soon as I came, Ray instantly greeted me and at that point, I'm a little creeped out as I expected our encounter would only be a one time thing. I just said hi and brushed him off and sat on the benches to wait for my shuttle again and of course, as this guy doesn't seem to know the definition of personal space, sat beside me and talked to me again but this time he's asking for my cell phone number. I told him off and clearly said that I'm not giving out my number to strangers and

just giving him one word answers just to give an impression that I wasn't interested at all. He would ask, why wouldn't you give your number, I just want to be friends and I could see in his face that he was getting frustrated every time I told him I wasn't giving it to him. This happened while Omar and the security guard was looking at us from afar but this went on until I got on the shuttle again. As soon as I got home, I mindlessly scrolled through my timeline and saw a notification that I have a new friend request and guess what?

It's Ray and he even messaged me with a please accept my friend request. I just deleted his request but now I'm pretty shocked since I didn't tell him my Facebook account so how did he manage to find me? The following day was the last straw when I decided to get off at an earlier time so that I could avoid him but to my surprise he was there, again, waiting for me, along with Omar and the security guard. Ray immediately ran up to me to say hi but I brushed him off and dreaded the fact that I would have to wait with this creep again when I saw my shuttle wasn't there yet. He immediately asked if I accepted his Facebook request and I decided to play dumb and said I haven't been active on Facebook and haven't seen any requests. He got disappointed and he fiddled with his phone for a bit and then

revealed his phone to show my Facebook profile and asked me if this was me. I said yes and this time I was completely ignoring him at this point and playing with my phone and told him I wasn't going to accept his request because I don't know him. And then Ray grabbed my phone out of my hands angrily and said that he was going to add himself using my Facebook account if I won't. I muttered an actual WTF and grabbed my phone from him and with perfect timing I got on the shuttle in a hurry and told the driver to go. At this point I could confirm this guy could be stalking me and now knows my daily schedule and social media accounts. I reported this incident to my manager and told her how this has already been happening for some time now. She was surprised I didn't report it earlier but I blamed it on my lack of assertiveness and fear that I would be overreacting to his advances.

We reported this incident to office security and told them what happened and that they couldn't do anything at first as 1. I needed actual evidence about my allegations about him and 2. I only knew Ray by his first name and they would need more information than that. I didn't bother to ask where he's from or if he's even working in our office and building which is dumb of me and I should have asked in the first place. My manager then decided that I should at least be accompanied by some of my office mates to confirm the situation and the guys volunteered to accompany me every time I got off of work. They accompanied me for a few days and no matter what time I got out, Ray was there to harass me. I felt bad for my office mates as they had to deal with his BS as well. First instance when he saw I

was with my office mates I could see the visible anger in his eyes and he would try to butt in our conversations even if we were ignoring him. At one point when I'm talking with my office mates he lets out an exasperated sigh and said, Can I just talk to you for a second please? What do you want? I just want to talk to you. If you don't, I'll leave. Okay.

And then I went back to talking to my office mates. He butted in once more and asked that I should introduce him to my office mates when I didn't. He proceeded to introduce himself instead, which irked me and my office mates as his behavior doesn't seem normal at all. After that incident, my office mates and I told my manager what happened and how dangerous this guy might actually be. She decided that we should escalate it to HR and have them deal with it immediately. Gladly, HR responded and took the situation seriously and began to do an investigation on who Ray might actually be. Same day, they sent an email that, after searching through records, turns out Ray wasn't an employer of our office and they might need to talk to building security to find out more about this guy.

HR also requested our office security to escort me and observe the situation. I honestly felt relieved as now I felt safe for the first time while they searched who Ray might actually be. He still showed up even if I got out late or earlier than usual but never went near me when I saw I was accompanied by security but he would just keep his distance and stare at me, smile creepily and linger outside my shuttle until it left. HR contacted me for a meeting with them and with my manager about some news on Ray and I was shocked by the information that they'd found out. Ray was not an employee of our building or office but in fact a temp in the security office of building C. I then thought, okay this creep is really putting an effort for someone who is clearly not interested and if he's

a temp meaning there's a chance I won't be able to see him after this. But then what HR said chilled me to the bone. He was a temp assigned to work on the security cameras, meaning he had access to all the building's cameras. It has been his way to spy on me and the reason why he was able to be there the exact time I got out. HR has already spoken to his supervisor and gave him a warning to Ray and of course Ray denied the allegations even if I had witnesses against him. The supervisor wanted to apologize to me in person but I decided not to as I just wanted this to be over with. After that meeting I never saw Ray again and I reckon he must have been kicked out after HR issued a warning against him. And as for Omar, I had never seen him as well and I felt bad but he was also part of the people who enabled Ray and didn't do anything when I was clearly getting harassed. I received a bit of backlash from security guards in the building for a while as well, hearing them say that I was overreacting and I should have accepted his advances which was disgusting as I heard the same thing being said by female building staff as well.

Nothing strange happened for a few days but then the security guard that was with Omar at the time when Ray was harassing me added me on Facebook but I didn't make much of it and just deleted the request. I was still working in the same office as the building as of today and had been totally shaken up by the incident and that I decided to just keep my distance from people so I could avoid a very hardworking student. I wasn't a troublemaker, but I was an incredibly lazy girl, working just the minimum so that my parents wouldn't get angry. I've always had some kind of easiness regarding schoolwork and never knew what it truly meant to make any efforts. So I spent all of my classes drawing on my copybooks without many consequences. My junior year's math teacher, who was seen by everyone as uptight but very caring,

was pretty upset about this, as were many of my previous teachers. He wanted me to work harder. I wasn't bad at maths. I was around 13 or 14 out of 20. I'm French, but I assume this is like a B or a B-, but sometimes my grades would be very low. During a teacher-slash-parent meeting, he told my mom that I was wasting my capacities, that it was infuriating how much I was lazy. My mom then replied that she agreed with him and that she wouldn't blame him for pushing me harder and for punishing me if it was for making me work harder. And from this day

on, he did exactly what she told. In every math class, he would always question me first before everyone else and was always sitting next to me when we were doing exercises. During the test, he was always telling me, you can do it Elisa. It made me incredibly uncomfortable because at this age, no one wants to be the attention's focus. My classmates started to realize that my math teacher was a little obsessed with me and were teasing me a lot about this. The last class before Christmas break, the math teacher threw a little surprise Christmas party. It was very nice, but he gave us chocolates and mock champagne. We had a lot of fun.

During the party, he poured me another glass of mock champagne, telling me that I deserved it because I was doing better. It was true, because all of that attention, I was forced to work, so my grades were around 15-16 out of of 20 which I think is like having an A- or an A. I accepted it but didn't drink it entirely. I have diabetes and already had too much chocolate. But during the next class I was feeling really bad. I almost fainted and finished my last day of school before Christmas in the nurse's office. At that time I wouldn't even think it was because of the alcohol free champagne. I thought this was due to my diabetes, that I indeed had too much chocolate, even if it didn't look like my usual crisis. A few weeks later, my class threw some kind of charity event. It was a class project and we were very proud. In my country, we don't have proms,

so it was our occasion to wear pretty formal clothes and to dance together. The math teacher was invited and he was helping some of the boys to tend the bar. He served me an alcohol-free cocktail, but before I could drink it, a classmate of mine, Flora, poured me some vodka in it, even though it was forbidden to bring alcohol to the event. I was mad because with my diabetes, I couldn't drink alcohol, so I told her that she could just throw the cocktail out. At the time, I thought that she did, but now when I think about it, I wonder if she didn't choose to drink it instead.

The event ended pretty badly because of the alcohol Flora had brought. Some guys were very drunk. They started breaking things, and Flora passed out because of all the alcohol she had and this ended the event. Flora had been admitted to the hospital because her coma was pretty severe and we spent the next day being lectured by all the teachers of the school. Flora got expelled from the school and never went again. I was very upset with her because of her every event would now be forbidden and our project was a failure and we gave a very bad image to the association that we were raising

funds for so I kind of ghosted her and never asked if she was doing better. Now I feel bad about this but at that time I was immature but because of that I will never know if she was ill because of the alcohol or because of my cocktail. A few weeks later, I failed a math test. It had been a long time since I failed a math test and the math teacher was very angry. He yelled at me in front of everyone, saying how much of a disappointment I was, that I was hopeless and that I would just end up living in a cardboard box under a bridge. Something was off. I was feeling it. He had a very weird look in his eyes.

It chilled me and I couldn't help it and I started crying. He calmed down a bit and said that he would just give me an hour of detention during which I'll copy my lesson. I was a little surprised because normally detention is for bad behavior, not for bad grades, but just a little relieved because it was a small punishment. My parents would never know. Indeed, I lived kind of far from the high school and there was only one bus every night between my high school and my home at 5pm.

Because of that, even when I finished at 4pm, I would never actually go home before 5pm. And when I've had detention between 4 and 5 my parents thankfully would never know. But then when he officially gave me the detention hour, he said that he wanted to be personally present during my detention and that the only possible hour was during 5pm and 6pm. I was really nervous because I would have to tell my parents to come get me at 6pm and then they would know everything. As I said earlier, I wasn't a troublemaker so at first I planned to go to the detention hour but during the day, my friends and I talked a lot about it and I was feeling more rebellious because of the sensation of being supported by my friends.

So, I decided not to tell my parents that I was in detention and that one of my friends would pick me up at 6pm and drive me home. At 5pm when heading towards the detention room, I was angry, mumbling that it wasn't fair to be in detention because of only one bad grade. When I arrived in front of the detention room, I realized that I was the only one waiting. I then realized that I would be the only student in detention, alone with that math teacher who was a little obsessive. And it was getting dark outside. It was during late winter, early spring, so the night was early. And it was a big nope for me, and when I saw him coming, I panicked. I said something like,

I'm sorry, I have an emergency, I have to go. I'll email the school for rescheduling the detention hour. And I ran off. He started to yell at me that I had to obey. I'll email the school for rescheduling the detention hour. And I ran off. He started to yell at me that I had to obey him and go to detention and that he would call my parents. At this moment I didn't care. I sprinted towards the bus and caught my bus and went home. I was afraid that he would have called my parents so when I arrived I was shaking but my parents greeted me normally so I assumed that eventually he didn't call them. He never came back the next day nor the next weeks. Eventually I learned that he quit

his position. A shrink came in during an hour to ask us if we wanted to talk about the math teacher but as nobody knew what was going on with him we didn't have much to say and the shrink left, and we never heard of him again. Until a few months ago. I became a teacher, how ironic given my laziness when I was a teen, and one day chatting with my coworker I mentioned his name, talking about my weird bizarre math teacher and how I skipped a detention hour, and one of my oldest coworkers went very pale hearing his name. In fact, a few days after the detention hour incident, my math teacher was arrested for having downloaded quite a few videos and images of young children from the dark web and some kind of snuff movie starring

children and young teens. Maybe this detention hour was just a detention hour and I would have gone out of it without any problem. But now I will never know and will always wonder what would have happened if I stayed there and didn't catch my bus. We'll be right back. prepaid MasterCard. Conditions apply. Details at michelin.ca. Find a Michelin Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there, treadexperts.ca. None of my friends were into Pokemon, and they actually made fun of me quite a bit for wanting to play it. So I was forced to actually walk from gym to gym in hopes of actually finding someone to battle with.

Time and time again I stopped at the gym sites on the little map and saw no one around. It really sucked. I guess it just wasn't as popular in the area I lived in and I didn't really want to go exploring around other areas in the city and risk getting lost somewhere that I didn't know. But this one time I was just out catching Pokemon when I see someone on their phone near one of the gyms. I got so excited, like, ridiculously excited. They didn't seem like someone who would even be into Pokemon, but I guess Pokemon fans come in all shapes and sizes. So, super shyly, I walk up to them and try to summon the courage to ask them if they were playing Pokemon Go.

But at first, the words just wouldn't come, and it was so embarrassing just standing there, like, staring at them with this dumb look on my face. But they actually looked up at me, and instead of being like, what are you looking at? The guy was like, Pokemon Go, right? With this really sweet smile. I just nod and get out my phone, smiling like an idiot as I bring up the app and prepare to challenge his gym. But out of the corner of my eye, I see something shiny in the guy's hand, something that goes click all of a sudden. As soon as I look up from my phone, my stomach just drops. It's a knife. He's put his phone away and taken out a little flick knife out of his pocket. He tells me not to run, not to shout, just to hand over my phone so I could go home safe.

I was shaking so hard when I reached out to give him it, knowing my parents could definitely not afford to buy me another iPhone so quickly and it was then that they got pretty mean or rather really really mean. So I'm a gay guy and I'm pretty femme and I honestly thought that I was used to the kind of abuse I get sometimes but this time it was different. I went from a guy seeing that guy there and thinking he was a go player to such a low having basically been mugged for my phone. So when he started calling me all sorts of mean names about how I look and stuff it really got to me in a way that it hadn't since I was a teen. I thought he was

going to hit me at one point but it was just like a faint and I flinched so hard and the guy just started laughing at me and he continued to laugh and throw insults at me as he walked away, reminding himself that he wouldn't have to run away since I had no means of calling the police. I cried all the way home, trying to hide it in my hoodie but I know a few people saw my face and it was just so, so embarrassing. When I got home, my dad pressed me on what happened. I didn't want to tell him, I was just so, so embarrassing. When I got home, my dad pressed me on what happened. I didn't want to tell him. I was just so ashamed that I could have been that dumb,

but he demanded to know why I was so upset. When I told him, he just got mad, asking me how I could be so naive to be walking around with such an expensive phone on my own, and that made me cry even more. My mom had a lot more sympathy for what had just happened and it really softened the blow to know that they'd taken out insurance on the phone when they bought it. So as much as it might take a few weeks, I would indeed be able to get a new one.

My dad ended up apologizing for getting mad too, probably because my mom had told him that he should be ashamed of himself for getting angry instead of comforting me like a good father should. But honestly, I get it. He grew up real poor and I don't think he ever had anything as expensive as that phone until he was in his mid-twenties with an actual job. And there is kind of a happy ending to this. I wasn't the only person to get targeted by this guy that stole my phone. In fact, when the cops arrested them, they found out that he was actually a Pokemon Go player in a manner of speaking. He'd hang around taking over gyms, waiting for people to obviously set up to take the gym back, and then he'd steal their phones at knife point. It's absolute scumbag behavior, right? But he got what he deserved, and I'm not sure for how long, but he definitely got some prison time.

When I got my new phone, I was much more careful about where I went with it and with who. Everywhere I was, I'd stop to look up every few minutes just to make sure that there was no one around that looked too sketchy or suspicious, and I strongly recommend that you all do the same. I've been a huge fan of Pokemon for pretty much my entire life. When it was released in the UK in October of 1999, I remember having to wait two whole months until Christmas for my parents to buy it for me. In the meantime, all I had was this game guide that I'd gotten for free with a gaming magazine. I couldn't wait to dive into this whole world of magic and mystery inhabited by all kinds of fantastical, trainable creatures. I'm sure a lot of you remember how fun it was, but as time went on and I grew into my teenage years,

I kind of just lost interest as my attentions were turned towards drinking and girls and other less wholesome pursuits. But then, in July of 2016, I got word of something that absolutely captured my imagination. The news that Pokemon Go was being released sparked a childlike excitement in me that I hadn't felt since that Christmas in 99. I remember the first few years of secondary school when my friends and I would fantasize about some future virtual reality game where we could capture Pokemon in real life and now it was basically happening for real. So on release day, I downloaded the app and went out to my local park to catch Pokemon, and it was everything I dreamed of. The only way the experience could be improved now was if actual real-life Pokemon were engineered and released into the wild. But after a while,

I pretty much exhausted a lot of the local hotspots, catching all the available Pokemon and building up quite a collection. So I was forced to look further afield, and using a few online forums, I learned that particularly rare Pokemon could only be caught in very particular areas, and it was on the hunt for a rarer than rare Dragonite that this story takes place. So there's a place in town I live in which has these really big, really old houses. Some of them date back all the way back to Victorian times, meaning in some cases they're almost 150 years old. We're a very working class town, mostly factory and warehouse jobs, so there's not actually that many people that I can afford to fix up or live in pretty much any of those big old places. One or two are occupied but the rest are just run down and abandoned, which is a real shame, but beside the point.

It was on a walk around this particular area that I saw that there was a Dragonite really close by, but as I closed in on it I realized that it was actually inside one of those old abandoned houses. I was faced with something of a conundrum. I either break into that house and bag myself one of the rarest Pokemon around at that time, or turn tail and maybe have to wait weeks or even months before I got another chance to catch one. And so I went ahead and did one of the dumbest and most reckless things I'd ever done in my adult life, and forced my way into that abandoned old building. So the whole thing was fenced off by these big old sheets of metal but they were pretty easy to work around. But it did take me a while to wrench away the plywood from

one of the big old doors and scratch myself up something awful as I did so. But still I told myself it would all be worth it and I'd be the envy of the local go community when I managed to get my hands on that Dragonite. There was no lock on the door behind the plywood, which was relief, quite frankly. I was desperate to get that Dragonite, but I'm hardly some seasoned housebreaker. But once I was inside, I noticed a little glass panel in the hallway that had been smashed out already. So, my only thought at the time was that I'd gone to all that trouble when I probably just could have climbed through that little opening. You could tell that there had been some glass here at some point, but not a single pointy shard remained to snag or cut me,

so I didn't actually think through what I was looking at how I probably wasn't the only person to have been here recently and that I might not be alone in that big old place after all. The inside of the place was an absolute wreck. Rotten staircases, all kinds of graffiti and empty plastic cider bottles littering the inside. I had to carefully tread over broken glass and used needles in order to find my way into the back rooms out of the house but when I did, with my old phone in hand, I finally saw that Dragonite, the one I'd been looking for for so bloody long. I started frantically tapping my phone screen, throwing Pokeball after Pokeball in that thing's direction like a madman. I was so focused on capturing that Dragonite, completely tunneled

on it so much so that I completely lost track of my surroundings, which in retrospect was really, really stupid. I'm talking to myself like, come on, come on you little bugger, get in the pokeball. Completely oblivious to anything that was going on around me, because when I heard the voice from behind, the growl that demanded to know what I was doing there, I almost completely peed my pants. I spun around and shoved my phone back into my pocket, having not even caught the Dragonite and see this really grimy looking what I assume was homeless fella staring at me from the doorway to the room I was in. Christ, I can see his face as clear today as the moment I laid eyes on him, and it scares me just to think about it. He had this mess of dark brown hair, all greasy and matted,

along with a similarly scruffy looking beard. His eyes were sunken and ringed with big black circles, and I know it sounds crazy, but they had this yellow look to them which I later learned could have been down to hepatitis and severe alcoholism but I think the scariest thing about him and I feel kind of mean bringing this up because it definitely wasn't his fault at all was the fact that he had this large bald growth on his scalp one that jutted up through his mess of brown hair. He looked truly monstrous. He asked me what I thought I was doing in his house. At first, I couldn't bring myself to answer. How was I going to explain that I was catching some fictional sprite thing that he

couldn't even see? That might make him angry, and the last thing I wanted to do was make him angrier than he already seemed. So I just blurted out some nonsense about exploring or something then apologized for intruding and told him that I'd leave right away. I walked towards him, expecting him to move out of the doorway but he didn't move. He just stood there staring at me with those yellowing eyes. Then he asked if I was from the council, there to tell him to clear off the private land. I told him I wasn't and that I was just there exploring but that was a lie and he heard it in my voice. I made another move to get past him in the doorway and he mirrored my movements

blocking my exit. Then he asked me to show him my wallet. When I asked why, he told me that I really wasn't from the council about to grass him up and there wouldn't be any council ID in there. I was terrified so I did. I got my wallet and showed him that there was no council ID in there but obviously as I showed him, he saw the fiver note that was crumpled up in there too. He snatched my wallet out of my hand, scrambling through it to make sure I was telling the truth and snatched the fiver out of it before tossing it back at my feet. But something told me that he wasn't quite satisfied.

He asked me if I was going to grass him up for squatting there. I swore blind that I wouldn't, that I'd keep quiet so he could keep on living there for as long as he could. I was serious about that too. I don't want anyone having to sleep rough, especially not anyone who was obviously not well. But that answer wasn't good enough for him, and he slowly began to edge toward me. I backed off instantly, begging him not to do anything too hasty, but he reaches down and grabs this old table or chair leg and starts telling me that if anyone comes by to kick him out, he'll find me. How he'd walked the

streets for weeks looking for me. How he had nothing to lose. How being in prison would be better than living life on the streets. All this really horrible, depressing stuff. I thought he was going to brain me right there and then, but he didn't. I think he realized that I was more trouble than what it was worth. As soon as I had the chance, I just legged it out of there, hearing him screaming after me as I went, and not once did I look back. I was much, much more careful after that. As much as I wanted those rare Pokemon,

no bloody AR game is worth getting heard over. So this isn't a traditionally spooky story by any stretch of the imagination. It's not about Dogman or Slenderman or any kind of ghostly or paranormal experience, so don't go thinking this is going to be some dumb creepypasta or anything like that. This is the true story of one of the most frightening and traumatic experiences of my entire life. One that I know my friends think about often too, even though we rarely talk about it. It's something that I sometimes wish that I could just un-remember, if that's even a word. Something that gave me nightmares for weeks after, and I still see from time to time when I fall asleep, even at a time when it seems like I'm over the whole thing. And it all happened while playing Pokemon Go, of all things. So me and my friends

were hooked on that game for months. Most of us were into Pokemon anyway from back when we were kids and the Game Boy Advance version of the game came out. We used to battle in school, trade Pokemon and all that. We were verging on obsessed with it. That's when the augmented reality game came out in 2016 and we were obsessed with that too, since it basically brought the whole fantasy of real life Pokemon into kind of a reality for us. But not just that, I know it's hardly the coolest thing in the world to admit, but all the gym battling and social side of the game was actually a pretty good way to meet girls. Not that we ever actually had much

luck with that side of things, but I suppose it was somewhat of a motivation, especially whenever you would join certain Pokemon Go discords and Facebook communities around town and you could meet up. But as I was saying, we were obsessed with it, to the point that we'd spend most of our weekends one autumn just hanging around and catching Pokemon wherever and whenever we could. We had like a running reigning champion thing going, and honestly I think we wanted to make the most of the semi-decent weather before the British winter made going outside pretty much unbearable. So we're exploring some woodland near where we lived one day, messing around and generally making idiots of ourselves

by getting way too excited about the whole battling thing. One of us decides that we needed to go take a pee break so they wander off into the trees for a minute before they come running back, still doing their pants up and laughing, but like in a way that they were trying to keep quiet. They tell us to follow them, which we do, before we hear some grunting and stuff coming from a set of bushes close by. Our mate announces with a kind of perverted pride that he found two people shagging out in the

bushes and we're peeing ourselves from a few minutes of the sounds that we were hearing, some bloke grunting and groaning away with some faint whining sounds mixed in, obviously from the girl in the mix. But then we hear something that sounds like the girl isn't having as good a time as we'd first thought, which elicits a little bit of nervous laughter at first before we hear something that makes our blood run cold. If you tell anyone about this, this panting voice says, I'll kill your mom and dad. Well, that was it. We just freaked out. One lad wanted to just leg it and if I'm honest, part of me wanted to just get out of there too, but for some reason, we couldn't. We knew something horrible was happening and

the alternative to actually confronting it seemed even worse. So we agreed that on the count of three we were just going to run through the bushes and stop whatever grimness was going on. And we did. We counted the three, then ran into the bushes to see some fella pinning this girl down by the wrists. We started giving him a proper kicking, telling him to get lost, that we're calling the police, all this billy big bollocks talk as he gets up looking terrified and then legs himself. But dear god, I swear, we were so not ready for what we saw. The girl was all bloody around the face and there was a hammer laying next to her among the dirt and fallen leaves.

She still had a jacket on, but she had no bottom on at all. The fella had obviously pulled them off, and they were lying in a heap just next to her. She was an absolute mess. No fault of her own, obviously, and I don't want to go into too much detail as it makes me sick just thinking about it, but it wasn't just her face that was covered in blood. She seemed completely stunned at first, like she didn't even know where she was, but I suppose if I'd just been smashed in the face with a hammer that I wouldn't know where I was either. She couldn't talk and by the time she regained her senses a bit All she could do was cry And it was only then that we really noticed how young she was

I mean she was really young Maybe only year 7 like ages 12 or 13 And maybe she was a bit older but she was definitely just a girl We got addressed and phoned an ambulance But it was the police that arrived first for some reason. I suppose they were just in the area and got patched into the 999 call or something. After she got into the ambulance we never saw her again. Now I'm not too keen on telling you that we all had a bit of a cry after that. Not there and then

but I've spoken about it a little bit with the lads and we're all really messed up by it. I'd never seen anything so disgustingly horrifying in my entire life. None of us had. And the more it sunk in, what was happening, the more it got to us. We all had to give statements to the police and some of us even took time off of sixth form to just recover from what we'd seen. And we tried not to talk or think about it really.

I suppose that's just what boys are like. Writing it out now I actually do wish it had just been a freaking ghost or something like that. Sometimes I think that'd be easier to deal with. At least we'd be able to explain it away or pretend like we just had a collective hallucination. And I really hope that this doesn't bring back the nightmares because I'm not messing about when I say it really did haunt me for a while. Way more than any ghost could.

There's worse things to be haunted by than a freaking ghost. Real life. A few summers ago, me and a few friends were really into Pokemon Go. It was honestly a really cool way to get out and get some exercise while doing something we enjoyed, and we ended up exploring all over the city we lived in, finding all kinds of places that we'd never had ended up seeing otherwise. So at one point, my friend heard of a Facebook group made up of local Pokemon Go players,

who would organize meet and greets at a local park. My friend had been to one before and she said that she met this really cute guy there and that would be awesome if we came too to maybe meet some people and we could make friends with and battle against. Obviously we agreed and we joined the Facebook group to find out when the next meet would be. So one Saturday, we took a stroll down to the local park and met up with this group of people. They were all really, really nice, all like-minded people, so it was little wonder that we all got on so very well. And after about a half hour just milling around and chatting, we set off on our little Pokemon hunt. We walked all around the park, quite quickly actually, catching all the

Pokemon we could find, but we soon found ourselves having to leave the relatively small piece of parkland and head out around the local neighborhoods to carry on catching them. Like it was only supposed to go on for like an hour or so, but we were all just having so much fun together that we didn't want it to end. So we're heading over to this other park we all knew of where we knew that there would be a lot more Pokemon for us to catch as well as a Pokemon center and a gym for actual battles. Most of us have just got our phones away at this point to save battery and stuff but one or two who had been smart enough to bring along power banks with them

are still using them to keep an eye out for rare Pokemon. At one point we're standing at the side of the road at a zebra crossing, waiting for the lights to turn green so we can cross, when this one guy walks out into the road like he's safe to cross. I suppose he was for a moment, there weren't any cars coming at that particular moment, but the lights were still on red for us. Then this car comes tearing around the corner at about 40. Some proper little boy racer in his VW Golf just slams into this guy with his eyes glued on his phone screen. I mean it happened in a matter of seconds and I only knew it had happened because of his dump noise and the people around us start screaming and shouting. The boy racer backs up, turns around

and just speeds off to escape the scene. But oh my god, the guy he hit was in terrible, terrible shape. The people who actually saw it were traumatized and said the guy hit him so hard that he actually did like a sort of somersault in the air before landing in a crumpled heap in the middle of the road. There was blood pouring from his mouth and nose as one of us called an ambulance while begging them to be as quick as they possibly could. Thank God one of the group we were with knew a bit of basic first aid and she put the guy in the recovery position to clear his airway so he didn't end up choking on his own blood. I mean, I thought the guy was dead there and then, though. All that blood, and his leg was at the most horrible angle where it had obviously been broken. I couldn't see how anyone could survive a hit like that, and yeah, I didn't see it, but oh my god, the way people were crying and stuff, I thought he'd had it. People were still

crying and stuff when the ambulance finally turned up it. People were still crying and stuff when the ambulance finally turned up to put the guy on a stretcher and over the next hour or so, people's parents showed up to pick them up and get them home from what had turned into an absolutely horrific afternoon. We kept in touch through the Facebook group for ages, keeping up to date with the guy's progress. Turns out his name was Ryan and that he did actually survive the accident but had indeed broken his leg really badly, had a few teeth knocked out and had broken his cheekbone and nose from the way he landed on the road. Some of us actually ended up going to visit him in the hospital bringing him a few Pokemon related

gifts as a get well soon present which he really, really appreciated. Anyway, we ended up keeping in touch and now a chunk of the group that went out that day are all really good friends who keep in touch online and meet up from time to time, sometimes for even non-Pokemon related things. But please, if you ever go out and about playing Pokemon Go, for the love of God, keep your eyes on the road and your surroundings in general. Safety first, every time. So back when Pokemon Go came out, I was spending the summer with my mom at the trailer park she lives in in Wyoming. It was a really, really messy time in my life. Mom and dad hadn't been divorced all that long, and they were totally at each other's throats over custody and possessions and stuff. Dad had found a girlfriend which I suppose was good for him but I was 19 at the time

and I just didn't want to hear about any of it. Anyway, he wanted to go on vacation with his new girlfriend and he had general custody of me so he and my mom arranged for me to stay with her for two weeks during the summer. I love my mom, I really do, but it sucked being around her when she was so sad. When she was feeling happy, it was just like old times. We were having a girl's vacation, basically, but when the thought of the divorce got to her and she'd retreat into her bedroom to cry, it was honestly one of the most emotionally painful times of my life. That's why Pokemon Go became such a welcome distraction I suppose. It gave me something else to focus on, something to take my mind off the

whole thing and that is something I really, really needed. So one day I get a notification from the game telling me that if I needed to find water type Pokemon that I'd have to find a water source nearby. Some of the water types are so, so cute too and I really wanted to catch a couple of them to add to my Pokedex. Then I saw that there was a river nearby not too far from the trailer park so I told my mom that I was headed out for a walk along with where she'd be able to find me in an emergency then headed out into the bright sunshine to catch myself some pokemon it was only a short walk towards the river and honestly it was such a lovely day for it i

could have spent hours and hours just walking up and down the shoreline catching all the adorable little water types and giving them cute names but my sunny afternoon was cut short by the sight of something floating in the river. At first, I only saw it through my phone camera as I was catching a polywhirl, something that looked an awful lot like a clump of garbage floating on the surface of the water. It was under this big highway bridge, so between the bright summer sun and the shade it was in, I just couldn't make out exactly what it was initially. I thought it was a real shame that someone would just dump a bunch of clothes in the river or something, as I could tell that a lot of it was made up of cloth.

I still remember how slow I was to realize what I was looking at. God, it makes me feel so dumb. All like, why would someone throw old clothes away? What are they attached to? Until I actually was like, oh my god, oh no, out loud as the super obvious shape of a body could be seen, floating on the surface of the water. It was just so surreal, like it seemed like something out of a movie. I wasn't sure it was even real or maybe just didn't make it out to be real. But as I got closer the smell hit me.

The sickly sweet rotten smell that made me gag and retch and stumble away so I could call 911 without puking. I was in floods of tears by the time the cops showed up and the officers were really nice to me, calming me down and asking me a few questions until a forensics team showed up in their van to check the scene out. Then a few days later, the local sheriff's department released a statement saying that they were pretty sure it was just an accidental death and that there was nothing really suspicious about it. But it still really messed me up for a while and I ended up having a few bad dreams about seeing the same floating body in various places. It also really really put me off of playing Pokemon Go for a long while, which was a real shame because it really is such a fun game. Okay, so this big Pokemon Go update reminds me of one of the scariest things that ever happened to me.

So the game came out in like 2016 I think, but it wasn't until the following year and the summer break before my senior year that a buddy of mine got crazy into it. It started as kind of a joke at first, like we'd smoke up then go for walks looking for Pokemon, and then crack up when he would see one in his phone's camera. Some of those things looked so weird and goofy just sat there in an Arby's parking lot and my buddy Sean used to totally play it up freaking out like screeching over the drive-thru staff. Yo you got a Butterfree up here in your parking lot homie. Man I used to die laughing from that stuff. But anyway, so this one time, a few of our friends dug a barbecue pit out in the woods a few miles from our house, then talked their older cousin into buying them some vodka from a local liquor store. It was a real good time. We had drinks, tunes, and the vodka even enticed a bunch of girls into

coming along too, which at 17 was kind of a rarity and like the coolest thing ever. We ate our body weight in grilled meat and corn cobs, got drunk, smoked up, danced around to cheesy music like all afternoon. It was dope. Things only really went wrong when Sean and I started to head home. We were walking back through the woods, pretty blazed, and Sean was doing his usual thing of looking for Pokemon the whole time. I don't know if we just headed off in the wrong direction

or ended up getting turned around because we were so out of it, but after a while it dawned on us that we were hopelessly lost. Not that it bothered us too much, I mean, the woods weren't huge or anything. If we just kept walking, we'd be alright eventually, right? Wrong. We start seeing this old shack-looking thing through the trees, along with this old car that was basically just scrap metal by this point. The place looked totally abandoned. We figured that there was no way anyone could actually be living there.

But oh how we were wrong. Some guy just appears from nowhere, some old hillbilly looking guy with a shotgun in his hand. I mean, he looked like a cartoon redneck, dungarees, barely fastened boots, some mullet kind of hairstyle that looked like he cut it himself. Like I actually kind of giggled when I saw him for the first time. We turned and said hi to the dude but he doesn't look pleased to see us at all, he just points the shotgun at us and tells us to stay where we are.

We're telling the chill that there's no need to point a freaking gun at us, how we'll just leave without making trouble and stuff. But he's demanding to know why we're there and unfortunately for me, Sean decides to actually be as honest as possible. Yo, we're just looking for Pokemon dude, chill. And this dude literally says, what's a Pokemon? And then decides we're either like lying or making fun of him and starts getting madder and madder. He starts ranting about how he knows we're here to rob him, how he might look dumb but he isn't. Apparently local kids have been coming around and trying to wreck his little homestead out there and he was pretty much convinced that it was us. He walked up to Sean and points his shotgun right in his face before racking his shell with that shh-shh sound.

I'd never heard that sound up close before and it was horrifying. I was about to watch my friend get his head blown off right in front of me, but I was so scared that I could barely make a sound, just weakly pleading with the guy not to do it, how it wasn't worth it, all this other stuff. Then the guy pulled up the trigger, but instead of the huge bang that sent my friend's brains flying all over the woods, there was just this dull click. Then another, as the guy tried over and over to actually straight up murder one of my best friends. I don't know a lot about guns, but I do know that this guy's shotgun had misfired for whatever friends. I don't know a lot about guns, but I do know that this guy's

shotgun had misfired for whatever reason, I don't know. But from the looks of things, it didn't look like he cleaned the shotgun very often. And he starts cursing and growling, trying to fix whatever the issue was. And it was at that moment that I started screaming at Sean to just run so we could get out of there. We just bolted and managed to get enough distance between us and the shotgun guy so that when he did actually fire we were too far away from him to get an accurate shot on us. Once we were out there and certain that the guy wasn't following us we agreed to meet up the next day once we were sober to go report the whole thing to the cops. We filed a report

and then the cops asked us if we could retrace our steps into the woods to find where this guy's shack was. I wasn't sure we could quite remember where it was since we were so messed up, but it turns out the adrenaline shock had subverted us up quite quickly and it was way easier to find our way

back to where we almost got shot. But a few minutes before we found the spot, we smelled this burning smell, like there wasn't much in the way of smoke but we weren't all that surprised when we saw the smoldering remnants of this guy's shack in that little clearing. Whether or not he burned that thing down himself to stop the cops getting any evidence, or that some kids really had been targeting him, I don't know. But what I do know is that the cops never got a hold of the guy, despite us giving a pretty detailed description. Point being, be really really careful when you're playing Pokemon Go, or just go exploring places like that in general. There are some real psychos out there, and I don't even want to think about what life would be like now if that shotgun had actually gone off, but I do think I probably wouldn't

be able to sit here and type this up. 21-year-old Kayla Campos was an avid Pokemon Go player. During the day, she was employed as a dental assistant at Parkway Dental in Albuquerque and fostered dreams of going to college in order to become an oral surgeon. But after work, her and her boyfriend would spend most of their evenings relaxing by catching Pokemon, driving around Beyond Keti Park near their apartment, catching their beloved pocket monsters and bonding as they increased their vast collections. Most young adults their age might be out clubbing or engaging in considerably less wholesome activities, but Kayla and her boyfriend were considerably cleaner cut and innocent, much more inclined towards cozy nights in than wild nights out.

Yet one Friday night, Kayla and her boyfriend were driving around Granite Avenue in Albuquerque, New Mexico when they saw something deeply concerning. As they hunted for rare and powerful Pokemon, they witnessed a struggle occurring over in a nearby Ford Mustang, with a silver four-door sedan parked close by. They slowed their speed, trying to discern exactly what was going on as to determine if the people involved might need police assistance. But as they got closer, Kayla saw a pair of men terrorizing a young couple in a violent armed robbery. One of the robbers looked up and saw Kayla staring back at him, a potential witness to the crime. Kayla revved her engine and tried to speed away safely before informing the police, but as she did so, shots rang out from behind them.

The bullets tore through Kayla's vehicle, hitting her in the torso and neck before her vehicle smashed into the exterior of a nearby residence. Kayla's boyfriend rushed to call emergency medical assistance, but it was no good. She was announced dead on arrival at a nearby hospital. Her family was devastated, calling her a bright shining light in the interview with the press following her tragic death. Appeals were made for the victims of the robbery to come forward in hopes that they might be able to identify Kayla's killers but no one came forward and so no one was arrested or charged.

So as far as we know, the people who took that young woman's life are still out there, somewhere, having completely gotten away with a heinous, needless and brutal crime, inflicted on an innocent young woman whose only intentions that evening was to have fun and help her fellow man. This is the story of the very last time I, a 19 year old female, ever played Pokemon Go. I wasn't really a fan of Pokemon at all. I only downloaded the app because I was bored one day and all my friends were into it. But after I caught a few Pokemon and got into the whole thing of naming and raising them, I was pretty much hooked. This was a few summers ago and there was a few days where all my friends were vacationing with their families so I was pretty much alone without anyone to hang out with. Which is how I ended up walking around a park one day just sort of minding my own business and catching Pokemon.

So at one point I'm just wandering around and staring at my phone screen when I hear this voice asking me if I'm lost. I look up and see this older guy, maybe only a few years older, is the one who's asking. I tell him no, that I'm all good and he explains that he's asking because I'm looking at my phone like I'm on Google Maps or something. I politely thank him but tell him no, I'm not lost, I'm just playing Pokemon Go. Then he asks me what that is. I was pretty taken aback I was under the impression that pretty much everyone knew what Pokemon Go was or what Pokemon was at least so I actually took a minute to explain what the deal is showing him on my phone that they're like virtual animals around and the app lets you catch them. I give him a little

demonstration kind of grateful for the company at first, then the conversation kind of runs dry before I tell him bye and start to walk off. But he doesn't seem to take the hint. He starts following me and asking me all these questions about Pokemon, but like, in a way where I can tell he's not really all that interested in it and how he's only really interested in me. I was like 16 going on 17 at the time and this guy had to be in his early 20s. I was super shy around boys, still am I suppose, so I didn't really know how to talk to him and it didn't take all that long before the interaction went from a little awkward to downright creepy. He asks if I have a boyfriend and foolishly I answer him honestly and

tell him no I don't. God the look in his eyes when I said no. Like they lit up in the most predatory way and I felt even more uncomfortable as he gets overtly flirty verging on sleazy. He starts asking me all these personal questions like if I live close by, what school I go to, and I try and answer them as vaguely as possible in some cases. I sort of outright lie to him also. Eventually, I did actually pluck up the courage to say, hey, I'm headed home now. Nice talking to you, but I gotta go. I wanted to tell him to get lost, honestly, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little scared about what kind of reaction he'd have. He was older, bigger, looked infinitely stronger, and the more he talked, the more he took on this distinctly creepy air, like he didn't seem to have that much in the way of social skills, but he seemed to be able to fake like he did.

And for some reason, that really, really creeped me out. He seemed kind of disappointed, but was like, alright, maybe I'll see you later, and I turn and walk away. A few minutes later, I'm headed out of the park, when I happen to look over my shoulder just to make sure he hadn't followed me. I'm not going to pretend I had this uneasy feeling or gave that whole I felt the eyes on me kind of thing because I really didn't expect this guy to follow me but he was. He was trailing me maybe like 50 meters behind. I stopped turned around and asked him if he was following me. Dumb question I know but I think I was wishfully thinking he was going to say like, Oh no, I just live this way. Don't flatter yourself. But he responds like,

I just want to make sure you're going to make it home safe. I got the impression that no matter what I said, he'd keep following me anyway. And the last thing I wanted to do was to lead him back to my actual house. So as much as it terrified the little introverted me, I walked a couple of blocks and ended up knocking on a total stranger's door. An older woman answered, immediately looking me up and down like, who are you? But before she had a chance to give the game away, I was like, hi Aunt Jean, can I come inside? It's real hot out and I need a glass of water. I was so, so worried she'd be like,

get out of here. But she looks over my shoulder where I'm guessing she sees the guy in the street behind me, then looks back and sees what was obviously the super nervous look on my face. Then she actually plays along, saying like, sure dear, come on inside, it's been a while. She was an absolute angel. She seemed to know exactly what was happening from the get-go and explained I'd done the right thing to get inside away from the guy if he was following me around like that. She let me call my dad from her house while she gave me a glass of homemade lemonade that she'd made, which was a little on the bitter side and I wasn't about to complain, and I waited in her kitchen while she calmed me down and gave me a talk on

how I really shouldn't be out on my own like that. It wasn't a straight up lecture and I knew she was right. All I did was thank her over and over again while I sipped on that lemonade. She walks out of the kitchen while I get a text from my dad saying he was on the way, and I'll never forget the tone of her voice when she calls out to me from her TV room. Your stalker's still outside, honey. You sure you can get your dad to give you a ride? That's when I knew this guy really wasn't just some innocent admirer. Like maybe I was just second-guessing myself, but I actually thought like, maybe I was just second guessing myself but I actually thought like maybe I'm just overreacting a few times. But again, that was pure wishful thinking on my part.

This guy was not about to give up, way past the point that any reasonable individual would have just given up and walked away. But I assured her that yeah, my dad was on his way and I apologized for being such a burden. She said it was okay and all and that's not really what worried me. I thought that if that guy got it into his head that I actually lived here, that he'd be back to like break in or case the place or something. I don't know what exactly I was running all these scenarios through my head. Anyway, my dad does actually turn up after a while and I was way more nervous than I should have been about walking out of that place to my dad's car. I told the woman, her name was Maria, that I was honestly really scared and I'm not ashamed to say I got a little choked up when she told me this in this really motherly way

that if the guy laid a hand on me they'd have to peel him off the freaking sidewalk. So after that she opens the front door and I walk really quickly over to my dad's car while the guy starts asking where I'm going, if we can hang out again soon, stuff like that. I just ignore him, looking back at Maria briefly to see that she's giving this guy a real death stare and quickly get into my dad's car. He starts asking me who the boy is, all this accusatory stuff before I explain that I literally managed to get myself a stalker while walking around the park playing Pokemon Go.

He flips his lid at first but calms down before telling me that I wasn't to be just walking around on my own like that that it wasn't safe and all this other stuff my own like that, that it wasn't safe and all this other stuff. To be fair, he was totally right about it, but by the time I explained that I'd knocked on Maria's door to get somewhere safe, he tells me he's proud of me of doing the right thing, but that knocking on a stranger's door was still a pretty unsafe thing to do. So a few days later, I get the idea to bring Maria a gift as a way of saying thank you for being so nice. Dad agrees that it would be a sweet idea and drives me to the store

one day to pick up some flowers and stuff. Then we drive around to Maria's place and luckily she's home so we don't have to leave them on the front step in the sun where no doubt they would have wilted and the chocolates we also got for her would have melted too. Dad says thank you to her too and was real sweet before we leave to drive home again. But before we do, Maria asks if she can have a little talk with me in private. Dad agrees before getting in the car to turn it around before we depart. That's when Maria tells me that the day after I'd paid my little visit to her That she'd found a caged rat on her doorstep in the morning as she'd left for grocery shopping Not the pet store kind either

This thing was mangy and big She asked me if I could think of any reason why the stalker guy might do that Since at first he wasn't sure it was him that did it at all I had to explain about the game that I was playing and that it was all about catching these fictional animals and that given the nature of the game, it almost definitely was my stalker that had done it. I was so creeped out, but I thanked her again before I jumped back in the car and we drove home. I still think about Maria often, but I worry the guy might bother her again, this time in a worse way

I really don't hope she comes to regret inviting me inside that day and I really really hope I don't run into that guy around town again because if I do, he might actually follow me home to where I actually live and if he's the kind of person to catch a sewer rat, there's no telling what he'll do next. And I get the horrible feeling it'll just be a matter of time before I see him on the news or something having committed some horrible crime on some other poor, unsuspecting young woman. And like I said, I never played Pokemon Go ever again. Hey friends, thanks for listening. Click that notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations.

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