The Lets Read Podcast - 148: KIDNAPPED IN A FOREIGN LAND | 24 True Scary Horror Stories | EP 136

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Detectives, Birthdays and Kidnapping... HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?► www.Reddit.com/r/LetsReadOfficial FOLLOW ME ON - ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsReadCreepy ♫ 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 a Toyo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca To be continued... On July 27th of 2015, Russian homicide detectives arrested a murder suspect thought to have killed more than 13 innocent people over the course of a decade. The full and frank account of the slayings were truly horrifying, and the Russian people were appalled by what the media told them. However, it wasn't just the grisly details of the crimes that people found so shocking, nor was it the fact that the suspect was deemed such a danger to society that they were interred in a specialist institution for the criminally insane.

It was more the fact that their suspect was a grandmother in her late 60s, standing a little more than 5 feet tall. But what on earth could such an unassuming little babushka have done to be deemed such a threat to those around her? This is the story of the St. Petersburg Baba Yaga. Tamara Samsonova was born in 1947 in the city of Uzhhor, a central Russian city of around 16,000, just a few hundred miles from the Mongolian border. After finishing high school, Tamara moved to the Russian capital of Moscow, enrolling in the city's state linguistics university to study English and German. After her graduation, she was assigned a position at the state-run Interest Travel Agency in St. Petersburg

and worked at the Grand Hotel Europe for more than 15 years. It was during her employment that she met her future husband, Alexei Samsonova, with a freshly married couple moving into a newly built panel house at No. 4 Dimitrov Street in 1971. To all outside observers, the couple appeared to be leading perfectly happy lives, and if there was any marital discord, they certainly did a good job of hiding it. So, when Tamara's husband mysteriously disappeared in the year 2000, she was the last person that the police considered to be a suspect. Despite law enforcement launching an extensive search for him, no trace of her husband was ever

found, but Tamara didn't give up hope. She returned to the missing persons department of the St. Petersburg police many times over the years, pleading with them to find her beloved Alexei. Her efforts culminated with a visit to the investigative unit of the Frusensky district police, who promised that they would reopen her husband's case and work to give her the answers she'd waited more than a decade and a half for. But as they'd come to find out, Tamara was hardly the poor, innocent victim she made herself out to be, and it wasn't long before her horrendous criminal history would come to light. For several days at the end of July, a large makeshift package sat near to a pond set in a small peace parkland right on Dimitrov Street where Tamara lived. The package was noticed by several of the local residents, but illegal dumping proved to be a constant problem in the area, and it seemed everyone was too proud to clean up another's trash. So, for almost a week, whatever was wrapped in what appeared to be an opaque shower curtain

remained untouched. But when a disgusting smell started to emanate from the package, someone finally decided to investigate. We often imagine Russia as being a nation gripped by permafrost, a Siberian wasteland where the citizens treat vodka like human antifreeze. But during the summer, temperatures in St. Petersburg have been known to climb as high as 100 degrees, and July of 2015 proved to be a typically sweltering summer. So, we can only imagine how well and truly gag-worthy that package must have smelled in the oppressive heat and humidity, especially when it was unwrapped to reveal a terribly decomposed set of human remains. They were so butchered and rotten that the only way possible they could identify who they belonged to was to survey the local residents to discover

who was missing. But when officers knocked on the apartment door of 79-year-old Valentina Olanova, they found she wasn't home. Instead, Tamara Samsonova was living there. As it turned out, a mutual friend had asked Valentina for a small favor. Tamara was due to have work done on her home and needed a place to stay for a few weeks. Valentina was reluctant at first, but found Tamara to be a pleasant house guest who had no problem helping with housework and after a while, Tamara became something of a nascent friend. Tamara lived in the apartment for several months, but only on the condition that she find somewhere else to stay after three or four months. However, when it came

time for Tamara to find alternate lodgings, she found she had grown fond of the apartment and essentially refused to leave. Time and time again, Valentina implored Tamara to stick to her end of the bargain and leave the apartment before the relationship soured. Yet Tamara, who had been good as gold for the first three months, was somehow prepared to go to war with Valentina over her own apartment. And it wasn't long before the pair were fighting like cats and dogs in the small, cramped living space. After one particularly vicious argument, Tamara took a trip to a small town known as Pushkin, located on the banks of the River Neva. It was here that she purchased one of Valentina's favorite dishes, an Olivier salad, a tradition of Russian cuisine that contains boiled potatoes,

vegetables, eggs, and various meats in a mayonnaise dressing. One could be mistaken for thinking that this was a gift, a token of reconciliation intended to repair Tamara's broken relationship with Valentina. But the gift would prove to be anything but an olive branch, as on the very same trip, Tamara visited a small pharmacist with a very unusual request. Although she didn't have a prescription, Tamara asked the pharmacist for a packet of finazepam pills. Developed in the Soviet Union during the mid-1970s, finazopam is used in the treatment of various mental disorders such as psychiatric schizophrenia and anxiety. It provides a sedative effect, relieving tension and anxiety, and making the user feel calm and relaxed. It can

also cause a loss of coordination, dizziness, and drowsiness. Big doses can make a user forgetful, send them to sleep, or even put them into a coma. Obviously, it's quite a powerful drug, and so at first, the pharmacist flat out refused to sell the pills to Tamara without the proper prescription. This prompted the elderly woman to beg the pharmacist, insisting that unless she received a dose soon, she would begin to suffer symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, making her a danger to herself, as well as to those around her. This put the pharmacist in quite the predicament. Give her the pills and risk losing his job and potentially jail time, or continue to refuse her and face the dangerous consequences of her apparent condition.

And so, the pharmacist gave Tamara the pills, thinking he was doing the right thing, but... how wrong he was. When she returned to St. Petersburg just a few hours later, Tamara snuck into the kitchen of Valentina's apartment and began to prepare the Olivier salad. We can only imagine the scene that played out afterward. A heartfelt apology, the offer of a gift, the facade of reconciliation that played out just as Tamara intended. Valentina must have dug into the salad having no idea that it was laced with obscenely high amounts of finazepam. And as the drug began to take effect, Valentina

drifted off into sleep that she would never awaken from. It was on the night of July 23rd, 2015, when Tamara found Valentina's unconscious body lying on the kitchen floor of her apartment. In a stand-up fight with her erstwhile flatmate, there was no guaranteeing that Tamara would win. But with her out for the count, there was nothing to stop Tamara from enacting her evil plans. She gathered up a number of household items, including steak knives, pliers, and a hacksaw, and began to brutally dismember her former housemate. It took the elderly woman a long, long time to do it, but eventually, she managed to completely saw off Valentina's head. But once she was finished,

she began the arduous task of sawing off her arms and legs. This is thought to have taken the elderly Tamara days to fully complete, in that she was forced to use smaller lives to shear off pieces of Valentina's flesh so that her remains would fit into a series of small plastic bags. There were so many of these bags that it took several trips to the dumpsters before Tamara put a serious dent into the disposal of her former roommate's body, the torso being so heavy that she was forced to simply wrap it in a shower curtain and dump it in the local pond. The job was so complex and labor-intensive that Tamara actually forgot that she'd left

several pieces of Valentina's body just lying around the apartment. And as much as she tried to clean up the mess that she'd made, the sheer amount of gore splattered around the place was just too much work to stay on top of. Which is why, when police paid Valentina's apartment a visit in the wake of her disappearance, they found tons of evidence of her grisly handiwork. Not only did they find bloodstains in the apartment's bathroom, but the fact that the shower curtain had been torn off showed it was her who had been responsible for the torso dumped by the pod. Tamara was immediately arrested on suspicion of murder, then taken to the Fruenza District Police Station for detention. Four months later, in November of 2015, the results of a psychiatric

test that Tamara had been subjected to determined that she was a dangerously insane individual. Throughout numerous interviews that sometimes lasted hours at a time, Tamara hinted at up to 13 other murders that coincided with as many unsolved missing person cases. It was even speculated that she murdered her own husband, and that her attempts to seek justice for him were little more than a bizarre form of gloating. How even when she presented herself to the authorities, they were almost incapable of considering her a suspect. Tamara had even killed the tenant she rented a room to in the wake of her husband's death. According to investigators, on September 6th of 2003, she killed her 44-year-old tenant from Norilsk after an intense argument over rent payments. She then dismembered his corpse and disposed of it on the very same street she dumped

Valentina's remains. According to Russian newspapers, police found a journal on Tamara's apartment which detailed some of the murders. One entry translated from Russian to English that read, I killed my tenant, Velodya, cut him into pieces in the bathroom with a knife, and put the pieces of his body in plastic bags and threw them away into different parts of the Frusensky district. With this in mind, it's little wonder that Tamara felt comfortable enough to simply allow police officers into Valentina's apartment, the apartment that still bore so much evidence of her butchery. She must have felt invulnerable, having murdered in plain sight for years without being discovered. But perhaps most disturbing of all, in the process of recovering her victim's remains,

Felice noticed that numerous internal organs had been removed from each of the bodies, the most common being the lungs. When confronted with this, Tamara made a shocking confession. She had taken to cutting out the lungs, liver, and kidneys of her victims, then strewing or frying them to be served as traditional Russian dishes. Tamara supposedly said it was delicious and a nutritious way to save money. What's more, Tamara's neighbor of 15 years, Marina Krivenko, said that Tamara was obsessed with black magic and very interested in the maniac Chikatilo, a reference to the infamous Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. Chikatilo was the USSR's most prolific serial killer, one that was said not to exist because there couldn't possibly be murder in the worker's paradise that was the Soviet Union.

The self-described vampire indecently assaulted, murdered, and cannibalized up to 52 people in the space of a decade, and reportedly enjoyed chopping out his victims' tongues, bursting their eardrums and gouging out their eyes. These details awakened a morbid fascination in Tamara, apparently inspiring her to commit similar acts of terror. Tamara's story is yet another case of a killer hiding in plain sight, taunting authorities with hints of their own guilt. We could even speculate that Tamara actually wanted to be caught, how only one last thing separated her from her beloved Andrei Chikatilo, the pure infamy of being known as one of Russia's vilest, most prolific serial killers. The The

The The The On February 8th of 1983, a Dino Rod employee named Michael Catran paid a visit to Cranley Gardens in London. Several complaints had been made by the tenants of an apartment block that their plumbing wasn't functioning correctly, and it was Catran's job to identify the source of the problem before unblocking the relevant pipes. When he opened a drain cover at the side of the house, Catran discovered the drain was packed with a flesh-like substance and numerous small bones that could have easily come from a chicken. It looks to me like someone had been

flushing down their Kentucky Fried Chicken, Catran told his supervisor, who agreed to join him on a visit to the property the following morning to discuss how to unclog such a serious blockage. Yet the next morning, the two men found the drain had been completely cleared. It had been a hefty job and it was unlikely one that could have been completed overnight, given the amount of noise and work required. The suspicion of both men was immediately aroused and they completely took apart the exterior drainage pipe to make sure none of the strange substance remained. Katran discovered some scraps of flesh and four bones in a pipe leading from the drain which linked to the top flat of the house, and to their horror, both Catran and Wheeler observed

that the bones looked like those found in human fingers. They immediately contacted the police who, upon further inspection, discovered further small bones and scraps of what looked to the naked eye like either human or animal flesh in the same pipe. These remains were taken to a coroner, who deduced that the remains were human. Homicide detectives then staked out the apartment from which the fleshy remains were coming from, approaching a man when he returned home and attempted to enter. Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay introduced himself and his colleagues, explaining they had come to inquire about the blockage in the drains from his flat. Nilsen asked why police were interested in his drains and also whether the two officers present with Jay were health inspectors.

In response, Jay informed Nilsen that the other two were also police officers and requested access to his flat to discuss the matter further. Upon entry, the three detectives were almost overwhelmed by the overpowering odor of rotting flesh. When informed of the situation, the tenant appeared to be shocked and confused, stating, good grief, how awful. But the police weren't fooled by the man's attempt at a ruse, and demanded he tell them why human flesh had been found in his drainage pipe. Nilsen went on to calmly admit that the remainder of his victims could be found in two plastic bags in a nearby wardrobe. When asked if there were any other victims, the man responded, It's a long story. It goes back a long time.

I'll tell you everything. I want to get it off my chest. Not here, at the police station. He was then arrested on suspicion of murder before being taken to Hornsey Police Station. As he was escorted to the police station, Nilsen was asked whether the remains in his flat belonged to one person or two. Staring out of the window of the police car, he replied, 15 or 16, since 1978. That evening, Detective Chief Inspector Jay led a forensic team to Cranley Gardens, where the plastic bags were removed from the wardrobe and taken to Hornsey Mortuary. One bag was found to contain two dissected torsos, one of which had been vertically dissected, and a shopping bag containing various internal organs. The second bag contained a human skull almost completely devoid of flesh, a severed head, and a torso with arms attached but hands missing.

Both of the heads were found to have deliberately been subjected to moist heat and were horribly decomposed as a result. In an interview conducted shortly after their arrest, the suspect confessed there were further human remains stowed in a tea chest in his living room, with other remains inside an upturned drawer in his bathroom. They confessed to dozens of other murders, attempted murders and assaults, and responded to one particular question with an answer that chilled the investigating detectives to the bone When asked why he had killed and so much, the man responded, I was hoping you could tell me that The man was Dennis Nilsen, one of the most prolific and sadistic serial killers in British history. Dennis Nilsen was born on November 23, 1945, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Dennis was a quiet but

adventurous child. Some of his earliest childhood memories were of family picnics in the Scottish countryside with his mother and siblings, and of his grandparents' strict religious lifestyle. In what Nilsen later described as his most vivid childhood recollection, his weeping mother asked him whether he wanted to see his grandfather. He was then taken into the room where his grandfather lay dead in an open coffin. As Nilsen gazed upon the body, his mother told him his grandfather was sleeping and that he'd gone to a better place. In the years following the death of his grandfather, Nilsen became quieter and more withdrawn, often standing alone at the harbor watching the herring boats.

At home, he rarely took part in family activities and shunned any attempts by adult family members to show him any affection. By late 1978, Nelson had moved to London and was living a solitary existence. He had three failed relationships under his belt, and his self-esteem was in the toilet. Throughout that year, he became something of a workaholic and spent most of his spare time alone, either drinking or listening to music. Then on December 30th of 1978, Dennis was in a Cricklewood Arms pub when he observed a rather youthful looking gentleman attempting to purchase alcohol. The bartender instantly recognized his potential patron as being underage and told him to bugger off. But on his way out of the door, the 14-year-old felt someone tapping on his shoulder. It was Dennis, and he presented the young man with a promising offer. He could drink all the

beer and vodka he wanted, but he had to spend the night with him. The young man obliged, and the two drank late into the night before passing out, fully clothed, I might add, on Dennis' bed. Dennis later said that the next morning he was afraid to wake his sleeping companion in case he became embarrassed and left. After caressing the sleeping youth, Nilsen decided the young man was to stay with him over the new year whether he wanted to or not. He retrieved a necktie from his closet, wrapped it around the young man's neck, and strangled him into unconsciousness. Once he was incapacitated, Dennis finished him off by drowning him in a bucket filled with water. Once the job was done, Dennis washed the body in his bathtub before placing the boy on his bed.

What he did next is better left unsaid, but the boy's corpse remained beneath the floorboards for almost eight months before Dennis built a bonfire in the garden behind his flat and burned the body in the summer of the following year. Dennis later said, I eased him into his new bed, but about a week later, I wondered whether his body had changed at all or had started to decompose. I disinterred him and pulled the dirt-stained youth up onto the floor. His skin was very dirty. I stripped myself naked and carried him into the bedroom and washed the body. There was practically no discoloration and his skin was pale white. His limbs were more relaxed than when I had put him down there.

I caused dreams, which caused death. This is my crime. I had started down the avenue of death in possession of a new kind of flatmate. Almost a year later, on December 3rd of 1979, Nilsen met a 23-year-old Canadian student named Kenneth Ockenden, who had been on a tour of England visiting relatives. Dennis bumped into the young Kenneth in a West End pub. Upon learning he was a tourist, Dennis offered to take him sightseeing, an offer which Kenneth warmly accepted. Dennis then invited the young man to his home on the promise of some food and more alcohol. Dennis showed Kenneth his

record player and the expensive surround sound headphones he used to listen to music. Kenneth gave them a try and, with his senses muffled by the drink and the loud music, Dennis ambushed him by wrapping the headphone wire around his neck before he began to strangle him. Dennis recalled dragging the youth across his floor with the wire wrapped around his neck as he strangled him, before pouring himself half a glass of rum and continuing to listen to music. The next day, Dennis purchased a Polaroid camera and photographed Kenneth's body in various erotic positions. He then laid his victim's corpse on top of himself while lying on his bed,

keeping it there as he watched television for several hours, before wrapping the body in plastic bags and stowing the corpse beneath the floorboards. On approximately four occasions over the few weeks that followed, Dennis removed Kenneth's body from beneath his floorboards and seated the body upon his armchair alongside him as he watched his favorite TV shows and drank rum or beer. Nilsen continued to kill over the years and with some highly disturbing results. After murdering another unidentified victim, Nilsen had a fit of remorse and unsuccessfully attempted to revive the victim before sinking to his knees and sobbing. He then stood up,

looked at himself in the mirror and began cursing himself out, spitting in his own image while he scolded himself for lacking self-control. He then said he picked up the dead body and lain alongside it in the bed as he listened to a piece of classical music called Fanfare for the Common Man. As the piece of music climaxed, Dennis burst into tears and caressed the corpse's face as if in apology, before he stowed the corpse beneath the floorboards. Eventually, there were so many corpses interred beneath Dennis's floorboards that he began to attract insects and let off a truly eye-watering, awful stench. On occasions when Nilsen disinterred

victims from beneath the floorboards, he noticed that the bodies were covered with pupae and infested with maggots. Some victims' heads had maggots crawling out of eye sockets and mouths. He placed deodorants beneath the floorboards and sprayed insecticide about the flat twice daily, but the odor of decay and the presence of flies remained. Nilsen was brought to trial in October of 1983, charged with six counts of murder and two of attempted murder. The prosecution called a psychiatrist who testified that, through a lack of emotional development, Nilsen experienced difficulty expressing any emotion other than anger, and had a tendency to treat other human beings as components of his fantasies. The psychiatrist also described Nilsen's association between unconscious bodies and arousal, stating that Nilsen possessed narcissistic traits, an impaired sense of

identity, and was able to depersonalize other people. His conclusion was that Nilsen displayed many signs of maladaptive behavior, a truly lethal combination in his opinion. As a result of the grisly evidence presented, a jury unanimously convicted Dennis on six counts of murder, with the judge sentencing him to life imprisonment with the recommendation that he serve a minimum of 25 years. His imprisonment would end years of manipulation, slaughter, and shame from a man who was simply unequipped to deal with his unconventional desires. And although Dennis was safely away from the public he preyed upon, the legacy of his horrifying works would live on for years to come. We'll be right back. to wager Ontario only, please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge.

BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. In December of 1927, detectives of the Los Angeles Police Department received a missing persons report for 12-year-old Marion Parker. She had vanished from the Mount Vernon Junior High School in the Lafayette Square section of L.A. after being excused from class, with her teachers saying that a co-worker of Marion's father had arrived to collect her. According to him, Perry Parker had been involved in a car accident and had summoned his family from his hospital bed, fearing it might be his last opportunity to see them. Naturally, Marion's teacher understood the severity of such a grim situation and immediately excused her from class. This teacher,

Mary Holt, later claimed that she never would have let Marion go but for the apparent sincerity and disarming manner of the man. Yet there's one little detail that this teacher appears to have overlooked, and that's how Marion had a twin sister in the same school, one that her father's co-workers seem to have completely ignored. The very next day, her family filed a missing persons report, with her father claiming no knowledge of a car accident or his mysterious co-worker. The day after Marion's disappearance, a telegram was delivered to the Parker family home. The letter stated that Marion had been kidnapped and would only be returned unharmed if a ransom of $1,500 was paid using a series of $20 gold certificates. As proof of life, they included what was quite clearly Marion's handwriting, with the additional message of,

Do positively nothing till you receive special delivery letter. In those days, there was a small section of the telegram that stated who had sent it, and in this case, the author had signed their name as simply Death. Missing persons detectives got to work trying to pin down where the telegram had been sent from, while Perry Parker began putting together the ransom. But as they busied themselves with the task of saving Marion's life, another telegram was delivered, apparently having been sent from nearby Pasadena. Marion is secure. Use good judgment. Interference with my plans is dangerous. This telegram was signed, The Fox, with the timing and content suggesting that Marion's

kidnapper was watching the parker's every move from somewhere uncomfortably close by. Later that day, the Parkers received yet another telegram, warning that no one will ever see the girl again except the angels in heaven. This one was signed with the word, fate. The obvious warning set Perry Parker into overdrive, and by that evening, he had not only collected the full ransom amount, he had also managed to arrange a time and location for an exchange. However, it seems that his daughter's kidnapper was well aware of his attempt to coordinate with police, and recognized the supposed exchange as the trap that it was. Perry waited at the arranged location for several hours,

with missing persons detectives observing from a concealed vantage point nearby. But the kidnapper didn't show. The next morning, the Parkers received a telegram in which the kidnapper's tone had radically shifted. They had signed the note with the word Thanatos, which one investigator recognized as the Greek word for death. The attached message was from a furious kidnapper, outraged that Perry had not only been in contact with the national press, but had also tried to snare him in what was quite obviously a sting operation. According to the kidnapper, it was their final day to exchange

the gold certificates for their daughter. Failure to do so would result in her execution. The telegram also included a handwritten note, clearly written by the terrified young Marion, in which she begged her father to give in to the kidnapper's demands and to eschew any further police involvement. An enjoying message from the kidnapper told Perry, recover your senses. I want your money rather than to kill your child. But so far you have given me no other alternative. Fox is my name. Very sly, you know. Set no traps. I'll watch for them. Get this straight. Remember that life hangs by a thread. I have a Gillette ready and am able to handle the situation. After an emotionally tumultuous meeting with the presiding missing persons detectives,

Perry Parker was given permission to meet with the kidnapper alone, without a contingent of police, so that he might try one last time to save his daughter's life. That evening, Perry Parker was contacted by the kidnapper via telephone, and the pair arranged a new meeting place with an assurance that no police officers would be in attendance. They agreed on the location being the corner of West 5th Street and South Manhattan Place in central Los Angeles. Then, around 7.15 in the evening, the kidnapper gave Perry the signal to drive out to the corner, telling him they knew which car he would be driving and which direction he would be approaching from,

further evidence that he was being closely observed and possibly by more than one kidnapper. Forty-five minutes later, Perry arrived at the prearranged meeting place and was almost immediately accosted by a masked man armed with a sawed-off shotgun. Driving a Chrysler coupe, the masked man revealed himself as the kidnapper and pointed to Marion in the backseat before demanding Perry hand over the ransom money. The girl's father could see her in the backseat. Her eyes were wide open, but she wasn't moving. He called out to her, but she didn't respond. She just stared straight ahead, her mouth slightly agape, with a hauntingly peculiar expression on her face.

The kidnapper assured Perry that his daughter had been drugged, lest she cause a scene, but was otherwise unharmed. When he handed over the package containing the ransom money, the kidnapper shoved Marion's body out of the car as he remarked, There's your daughter. Then he cranked the vehicle into gear, put his foot down, and raced away from the scene. It should have been a relatively happy occasion, at least one in which a degree of relief was experienced. But there was something about the way his daughter's body had slumped out of the passenger seat,

something about the way she lay motionless on the road in front of him. When he kneeled down to take her hand, Perry found Marion's flesh was stone cold. But that wasn't all. Her eyes were being held open with piano wire, the sleeves of her blouse were empty as her arms and legs had been cut off, and after being disemboweled, whoever killed her had stuffed her abdominal cavity with a shirt and a towel. It was a living nightmare. No parent should have to see the lifeless corpse of their own child, but the horror of seeing it so horrifically mutilated is almost too much to comprehend.

At 9pm that night, Marion's body was taken for an autopsy. A coroner determined that she had been dead for around 12 hours, and that her killer had simply kept up the pretense of the kidnapping so he could get the ransom money too. Yet given the brutal nature of her killing, there's every chance that murdering her was the primary intention of her kidnapping, and that the ransom was just a depraved method of taunting her surviving family members. The following morning, a gentleman on a morning walk found a set of severed child's limbs in the Elysian Park. Each was wrapped in a piece of newspaper and appeared to have simply been

tossed around randomly in plain sight so that some unfortunate soul might stumble across them. The murder was huge news all over the country. People were outraged and rightly so. As a result, a huge manhunt for Marion's murderer commenced, involving over 20,000 police officers and local volunteers. Thanks to thousands of monetary contributions from the horrified general public, a reward of $100,000 was offered for information leading to the kidnapper's capture, the equivalent today of more than $1.4 million. Thanks to the massive search effort, investigators quickly found an abandoned getaway

vehicle used by Marion's killer, identifying it as one stolen from San Diego just a short while previously. Fingerprints were taken from the door handle of the vehicle, but they matched none in the existing database. Police considered several suspects at first, including the son of a local dentist, but were cleared of suspicion after Mary Holt, the teacher who had spoken with Marion's abductor, confirmed none were her kidnapper. Investigators then managed to trace a laundry mark on the towel found stuffed inside Marion's torso to the Bellevue Arms Apartments, where they interviewed a number of tenants. Then on December 20th, the fingerprints taken from the abandoned getaway vehicle were identified as belonging to William Edward Hickman, who was actually a former co-worker of Perry Parker. Both men were employed by the First National Bank of Los Angeles,

where Parker worked as an assistant cashier and Hickman as an officer. The previous year, Hickman had been arrested on a complaint made by Perry regarding stolen and forged checks totaling $400, and as a result, was convicted and sentenced to probation. Additional fingerprints lifted from the ransom letters were able to be positively identified as Hickman's. It was subsequently uncovered that Hickman had been a new resident of the Bellevue Arms, having moved into the building recently under the alias Donald Evans, after spending six months out in Kansas with family. It became horrifyingly clear that Hickman had left town after his conviction may well have been plotting his terrible revenge the whole time.

When detectives examined Hickman's apartment, evidence of his guilt was clear. Bloody fingerprints were found, along with partly burnt, handwritten drafts of ransom letters and newspaper clippings which detailed Marion's kidnapping. Just two days after the abandoned getaway car was found, an Oregon police officer recognized Hickman from a wanted poster, and after a brief but intense pursuit, Hickman was arrested in possession of around $1,400 worth of the gold ransom. At first, Hickman admitted involvement in the kidnapping, but claimed he was a small part of a larger team, and that someone else was responsible for murdering Marion. During an extensive interview with a journalist from the East Oregonian,

Hickman implicated two other men, Oliver and Frank Kramer, as the brothers who carried out the murder. However, an extensive investigation by homicide detectives had determined that this was impossible, as the Kramer brothers had been incarcerated for several months on other charges. Not only that, but given that Hickman had prior knowledge of the Kramer criminal history, it's safe to assume that blaming the two men was just another part of his intricate plan for revenge. Police told Hickman the game was up, they knew everything, and his only chance at avoiding the hangman's noose would be to make a full confession. At that, Hickman broke down, admitting to strangling Marion while

she was blindfolded and tied to a chair. He proceeded to hang Parker's body upside down in his bathtub, slicing her throat at the jugular vein to drain the body of blood. After disarticulating her arms and legs, he proceeded to disembowel her, during which he stated the body jerked with such force that it flew out of the tub, suggesting that she may have still been alive during the dismemberment. Hickman then wrapped Parker's limbs in newspaper before temporarily storing her torso in a suitcase. He then left the apartment, attempting to distract himself by watching a movie at the nearby Lowe's State Theater. But unsurprisingly,

he was unable to focus on anything but the atrocious act he'd just committed. And after bawling his eyes out in the dark movie theater, Hickman came up with a plan to, as he put it, make things right. He realized that Perry Parker would probably want to see his daughter one last time before she was gone forever. With that in mind, he set about the grim process of reconstructing her butchered body, pinning her eyes open with wire, and even applying makeup to her face. Reflecting on the entire ordeal, Hickman told police that Marion felt perfectly safe and the tragedy was so sudden and unexpected that I'm sure she never actually suffered through the whole affair, except for a little sobbing which she couldn't keep back for her father and

mother. We can only marvel at the twisted logic that Hickman employs here, believing having subjected a small child to the most terrifying ordeal of her short life, he claimed she didn't suffer. At his trial, Hickman tried to further distance himself from responsibility by claiming he was severely mentally ill. Hickman told his attorneys that he had killed Parker upon the direction of a supernatural deity he called Providence, a claim that was echoed by Hickman's defense attorney, openly labeled his client as criminally insane and not responsible for his own actions. The attorney explained that Hickman was mentally ill and deeply influenced by his religious zealot grandfather during his youth. He was said to have frequently been exposed to frenzied religious

exorcisms out of the limbo of his subconscious mind, subcharged with severe repressions of his awful childhood, homicide, and mutilation ideated. However, the jury saw through the elaborate charade and recognized Hickman as the vicious, vengeful, and evil man that he was. And after they found him guilty, Hickman was sentenced to death by hanging. During his final months, Hickman reportedly embraced Roman Catholicism and wrote letters of apology to his victim's family. But it's more than likely that this was just another attempt to aid his appeal, and that he was only truly sorry that he was condemned to die. On October 19th, 1928, William Edward Hickman was hanged on the gallows in the San Quentin prison.

Upon falling through the trapdoors of the gallows, Hickman struck his head and began violently twitching and jerking. According to witnesses, it took approximately two minutes for Hickman to die. An autopsy performed after his execution showed that Hickman's neck did not break during the hanging and that he had died from asphyxia. Some suggested divine intervention, pointing out the bittersweet irony of Hickman dying in the same way that Marion had. But this is merely a cold comfort. For as much as Hickman saw justice for his crimes, he was still able to wreak a terrible suffering in the years he was alive. And no amount of his suffering would ever bring Marion back to her family. On the morning of February 30th in the year 2000, neighbors of Australian miner John Price noticed that his car was still in the driveway.

This was highly unusual as John's shift began very early in the morning, and he only rarely took days off. His employer also noted how strange this was, and since he hadn't been in touch to inform them of his absence, his bosses were so concerned that they actually sent one of the miners over to John's house to check if he was okay. At first, this employee knocked on John's bedroom window, but after moving towards the front door, he noticed that there was blood on the handle. Shortly afterward, uniformed officers broke down

the door to John's home to find one of the most horrific crime scenes in Australian criminal history, and immediately called in homicide detectives to get to grips with the carnage. On arrival, detectives discovered that John had been stabbed almost 40 different times, with many of the wounds extending into vital organs. Whoever had killed John had then skinned him, then hung the skin from a meat hook near the TV lounge. His killer then took to butchering his corpse, chopping out sections of his thighs and lower back before apparently cooking up the meat with baked potato, pumpkin, beetroot, zucchini, cabbage, yellow squash, and gravy. John's head was found in a pot with vegetables that were actually still warm, indicating that the cooking had taken place

in the early morning. This meat was then served up as part of two different meals which sat on the dinner table nearby. This dinner table had been properly set, with each plate bearing the names of John's children, as if his killer had intended for his own kids to eat their father's remains. A third meal was thrown on the back lawn for unknown reasons, although it is speculated that his killer had tried and failed to eat it. His killer was discovered to be 45-year-old Catherine Mary Knight, John's romantic partner who was asleep in the house the time he was discovered. In the years prior to the murder, Catherine and John had argued over his refusal to marry her. In retaliation, she videotaped items he had allegedly stolen from work and sent the tape to his boss. Although the items were out-of-date medical kits

that he had scavenged from the company trash bin, Price was fired from the job he had held for 17 years. As a result of her betrayal, he kicked her out of his home, but a few months later, Price inexplicably restarted the relationship, although he now tried to re-establish some serious boundaries. Yet despite John's attempts at de-escalation, the fighting became even more frequent, and most of his friends would no longer have anything to do with him while they remained together. The relationship culminated in Catherine stabbing her lover while he slept. But despite entering a guilty plea at her trial, Catherine has always denied full responsibility for the murder, blaming mental illness and disassociation

for her ability to kill someone she claimed to love so much. But it seems the truth is far, far darker than that. Catherine Knight is a woman who decided that, if she couldn't have John Price to herself, she would wreak a terrible revenge on him and his family. It wasn't enough to simply murder her lover. She wanted his children to live with the knowledge that they ate the flesh of their own dead father. Father. On October 26th of 1965, police detectives arrived at 3850 East New York Street in Indianapolis after being summoned by the terrified homeowner. When they arrived, a woman named Gertrude Benajewski led the detectives into a bedroom

where on a filthy, stained mattress lay the half-starved, horribly beaten, and extensively mutilated body of 16-year-old Sylvia Marie Likens. Clinging to a copy of the Bible, Gertrude's sisters said something that made the detectives extremely suspicious. She pointed to Sylvia's body and said that her death was meant to happen, which might have seemed like a touch of religious fatalism but left a bad taste in the detectives' mouths as they tried to establish exactly what had happened. According to Gertrude, the teenage girl had left the house earlier that week, having tried to run away from home with a group of local boys,

but had returned earlier that day having been brutally assaulted and had passed away shortly afterward. When asked, Sylvia's sister confirmed the older woman's stories, stating that her sister had disappeared, then reappeared, bearing the horrendous wounds. However, when the young girl had a moment alone with detectives, she lowered a voice and whispered, Get me out of here. I'll tell you everything. Down at the precinct, young Jenny Likens told the story of how she and her sister live with their parents, but were forced to board with the Benijewski family whenever their carnival worker parents were on the road. They could sometimes be

on the road for months at a time, and so the girls' father, Lester, agreed to pay the Benajewskis a $20 per week boarding fee for looking after their daughters. Gertrude, in particular, assured him that the girls would be treated as if though they were her own, and that he hadn't anything to worry about. And for a while, this was true. Gertrude made the girls help out with household chores but was otherwise perfectly friendly to the two girls. However, after a few weeks, the $20 boarding fee began to arrive later and later. In response, Gertrude began taking out her frustration upon the sisters,

beating them with various instruments while making statements such as, well, I took care of you two little wenches for a week for nothing. By August of that year, Gertrude had begun to focus all of her abuse exclusively upon Sylvia, most likely being jealous of her physical appearance and potential in life. Such abuse included beatings and deliberate starvation, with Gertrude often forcing Sylvia to eat leftovers or spoiled food out of garbage cans. And in one incident of extreme gaslighting, Sylvia was accused of stealing candy she had actually purchased with her spending money. On another occasion, as the Benejevskys ate dinner,

they force-fed Sylvia a hot dog overloaded with condiments including mustard, ketchup, and spices. The food was so spicy and rich that she later vomited up the meal, only to have Gertrude force her to re-eat what she had thrown up. The Benejevskys turned their abuse of Sylvia into something of an enterprise and charged local children five cents apiece to humiliate, beat, and mutilate the poor girl. In one incident, a gang of paying teenagers helped Gertrude submerge Sylvia in a bath of boiling water before they rubbed salt into the burns. In another, a fourteen-year-old neighbor of the Benejevskys named Richard Dean Hobbs was allowed to tattoo the phrase, I am a prostitute and proud of it, onto Sylvia's stomach with a heated needle. The following day, Gertrude forced her to write a letter to her parents,

stating that the wounds she had received were not from the Benejevskys, but from a gang of local criminals who'd grabbed her after an escape attempt. Satisfied that she'd absolved herself of any guilt, Gertrude hatched a plan to leave Sylvia to die in some woods nearby, but before she could do so, Sylvia's condition began to rapidly deteriorate. By the morning of October 26th, Sylvia had been tortured so brutally and routinely that she was unable to walk or talk properly. She seemed brain dead, some of her sores were dangerously infected. Sylvia looked and acted more like an extra in a zombie movie than a 16-year-old girl. When Gertrude tried to feed her a donut and a glass of milk,

she found Sylvia was incapable of chewing or swallowing and dragging her back to the basement in frustration. It was then that Sylvia became delirious, moaning and mumbling, apparently in a world of her own. When Gertrude told her to snap out of it, slapping Sylvia across the face, the young girl responded by giggling and defecating on herself. The Benejevskys, beginning to worry that Sylvia was beyond repair, gathered in the basement to discuss what to do with her. To their horror, Sylvia began jerking her arms in their direction as if trying to point at them before saying things like, You're, Gert, you're, you're, Ricky.

The 16-year-old talked as if she were a child, suggesting severe brain damage had been inflicted during one of her beatings. Shut up. Shut up, Gertrude exploded in response. You know who I am. One of the family tried to feed Sylvia a rotten pear, only to find her teeth broke when she tried to bite into it. When the family turned to exit the basement, Sylvia weakly attempted to follow. Gertrude responded by shoving her to the floor and stamping on her head. The results of their prolonged torture broke some of the younger members of the Benijewski family, who despite being willing to subject the poor Sylvia to hellish levels of torment and abuse, were incapable of dealing with the results of their actions. Gertrude's daughter Stephanie assisted Richard

Hobbs in bathing and dressing what remained of young Sylvia and lay her on one of the comfortable upstairs beds. It's then that Sylvia uttered her final words, I wish daddy was here. When Stephanie realized that Sylvia was no longer breathing, she attempted CPR to revive her. Richard rushed to fetch Gertrude, telling her that Sylvia had died. But Gertrude barked out that her recently deceased charge was simply faking it, and beat Sylvia's corpse with a book, shouting, Faker! Faker! But when she too realized that Sylvia was dead. She panicked and ordered Richard Hobbs to call 911 while she prepared the scene. She wiped down Sylvia's corpse with rubbing alcohol, dressed and covered her wounds, and applied makeup to her face to conceal the heavy amount of bruising.

She stuffed Sylvia's lifeless hand with the letters she had been forced to write, assuming it would misdirect the investigating detectives than simply waited for them to arrive. By the time little Jenny Jenkins had finished telling the story of her sister's death, the detectives who questioned her were beyond horrified. They immediately drove back to the Benajewski's house, arresting Gertrude and several of her children, including the neighbor boy, Richard Hobbs. Faced with the severity of her crimes, Gertrude Benajewski failed to show an ounce of remorse and signed a statement admitting having repeatedly beaten Sylvia about the backside with her belt. She also admitted to once punching Sylvia so hard that she broke her own wrist. The official cause of Sylvia's death was listed as a

brain bleed resulting from severe blows to her right temple, which obviously implicated Gertrude as her murderer. Sylvia had received many wounds over the past few months, but one and one alone killed her, that sickening stamp to the head on the day she died. At her trial on May 19th, 1966, a jury found Gertrude Benajewski guilty of first-degree murder, with various children of hers being found guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter. Upon hearing the verdicts, Gertrude and her children burst into tears and attempted to console each other. Of all the horrendous details that are freely available to the public regarding the torture and murder of Sylvia Likens. This is perhaps one of the most disturbing. How in the world could such a family, who had literally subjected another human being to a living hell before stealing her life away,

possibly feel that they deserved any kind of leniency or forgiveness? They were monsters, truly evil. A family who were trusted to take care of Lester Lycan's most precious worldly possessions, his own flesh and blood, and chose to do the polar opposite. To be continued... Since my parents got divorced, my mom has lived in Honolulu, Hawaii, and for my 25th birthday, one of the presents she got me was a plane ticket to go visit her out there. My boyfriend who I lived with, Josh, who was much beloved by myself and my family, unfortunately couldn't get the time off of work, so he stayed behind in Maryland to look after the apartment. So on the day I left the airport, Josh gave me a big hug, wished me safe travels, and promised we'd call each other every day so we didn't miss each other too much. One day, all is well. I get a bunch of miss you texts from him and we talk like for an hour before he went to sleep.

Day two was more of the same. More wholesome texts and stuff and was even FaceTime with him and my mom so she could say hi too. But day three, I didn't hear a thing from Josh. I figured he was just busy with work or something so I didn't read too much into it. I sent him a quick text just to tell him that I loved him but instead of replying within a few minutes like usual, he left me on read. Josh never left me on read. Even if he had texted me back to let me know that he was busy, he'd never leave me on read. I think that was the first real clue that something was wrong but

I've never been a clingy, needy type so it's not like I was about to freak out just because he was a little busy. However, day four, the day of my actual birthday, and I still hadn't heard anything from him. I was kind of angry at first, like he'd never forgotten my birthday before. In fact, he'd never even ignored my messages before. And that's when it hit me. My mom had seemed pretty cagey when I asked her about Josh, which totally made sense because they were obviously planning some kind of surprise appearance from my beloved boyfriend. It had to be the reason he was so quiet.

He had been on a plane all the previous day. After that, I felt incredibly excited and when mom told me that she'd booked dinner to this fancy Korean BBQ place, I knew that that's when he would show up. But when the time came and I was all dolled up and ready to go, I say something in the lift to my mom, something like, oh we've booked a table huh? A for three, right? I have a huge smile on my face, expecting my mom to break and be like, alright, you got us. But she gives me this confused look like, no, why would I book a table for three? There's just two of us. My heart sank. I didn't want to drag the mood down, but I was this horrible mix of angry, worried and disappointed. About an hour later,

me and my mom are pigging out on Bokagi when my phone starts to ring. My initial hope that it was Josh calling was quashed when I saw it was a call from one of our apartment neighbors. I figured they're just calling to say happy birthday and I have to say, that did cheer me up a whole lot. At first anyway, because when I heard what they actually had to say, I was anything but cheerful. Our neighbor is freaking out, frantically asking me where I am. I tell him I'm in Hawaii. But I then start asking what's going on, thinking it might have been a home invasion or a fire or something. But no.

It was something much, much worse. To me, anyway. And from what I could gather, it involved Josh in some way. And then it all comes out. Just one day after I'd flown out to Hawaii, our neighbors had spotted Josh loading up my car with a bunch of our electrical equipment. They figured that we were having our apartment refurbished or something, maybe getting some newer model of a TV or sound system so it didn't arouse my suspicion in them. But I immediately start getting incredibly anxious because I had made Josh promise not to use my car since his license was expired. My head immediately starts spinning as

to what's going on as our neighbor continues telling me how Josh had been seen shirtless in the halls, apparently yelling at absolutely nothing while leaving all the apartment building doors open. When they'd gone down over to check on him, they could see the apartment was completely trash and he had yelled at them to never knock on the apartment again. By that point, I was sitting on the curb outside the restaurant with my mom with the neighbor on speakers so my mom could hear everything that was going on. Mom had already been trying to call Josh for like 5 minutes and when he finally picked up his phone, I told the neighbor I'd call them back after I confronted

him about what was going on. At first, Josh sounded totally normal. I apologized for not getting in touch and said that he had had problems with his cell phone and had literally just gotten a new one up and running. I mean, the most he sounded was a little hectic. I know his job could get real busy, but the questions about the car and the TV etc. remained. So I straight up ask him, did you use my car this week? He responds, no you asked me not to. It's literally sitting in the driveway right now untouched. It was a believable answer. He sounded confused more than anything. I then asked him about the smart TV and if there was any reason our neighbor saw him carrying it out of the house. He says yes,

that it was busted and he had taken it down to a repair place to get a part replacement. Slowly but surely he admits that he used the car but denies trashing the apartment, acting weird or any of that other stuff. I'm honestly devastated by that point. I had already established he'd lied about something, so in my mind, everything else he said was cast into doubt. When I tell him one of the neighbors told me everything, he somehow knows exactly who I'm talking about and his final words before he hangs up the phone are, I'm gonna give that liar what she deserves. I tried to call him back but he totally ignored my call and then I tried calling the neighbors again and they didn't answer either. I figured a whole big argument is unfolding back in our apartment and I can't even sum up with words how

bad that made me feel on my birthday of all days. The night ended with a few tearful glasses of wine back at my mom's place, trying and failing to reach either the neighbor and Josh, before I finally passed out on the couch just after 1am. I remember thinking that the day couldn't possibly get any worse at that point, but oh how wrong I was. Because at 4am, I get a call that turns out to be from a cop back in Maryland. Josh had been arrested on charges of attempted murder. The argument with our neighbor had somehow escalated into him busting into her apartment

and actually stabbing her a bunch of times. She was in a bad way too. The cops said if she didn't survive, the charges would be upgraded to second degree murder. And for the foreseeable future, the entire second floor of my apartment building was going to be a crime scene closed off to the public. They wanted to know if I had somewhere to stay for the time being, which I did. But I also asked them to keep me informed of the investigation and, if possible, to let me know exactly what happened with my boyfriend that he should have had what amounted to a complete mental breakdown in just a few days. Of course, it was drug-related. Josh had struggled with addiction during his

teenage years, but only having dabbled in oxys after a sports injury. But from what I could tell, the only thing really keeping a lid on his recovery was living with me. The day he stopped texting, the cops think that he had gotten some bad news from back in Baltimore. A death in the family or a call from dad, who he had a terrible relationship with. When he'd been arrested, cops had found a bunch of empty Tito's bottles in our apartment, but also a bunch of empty drug baggies, which I assumed that he had been using again. I don't know what exactly, but whatever it was, it had made him sell or smash almost everything we owned. The smashing coming from looking for cash, apparently, before almost murdering one of our neighbors.

I was dreading going back to Maryland. I'd be going back to a trashed apartment that might still have bloodstains or whatever on it, then have to explain to everyone when they asked where Josh was that he'd relapsed and tried to kill someone. I just couldn't face it. I couldn't go back. So I made a radical decision and I just didn't. I stayed in Honolulu and over the next few weeks dismantled my life in Maryland via emails and phone calls. I figured I might regret it given that seemed an awful lot like running away from a problem instead of dealing with it but I honestly think it was the best thing I could have done. I do plan on moving back to the east coast in the next few years but I suppose that all depends on when all this corona stuff ends.

But I'm definitely not moving back to Bethesda. I don't believe in ghosts but dear god if that place isn't haunted for me. On the morning of October 19th, 1971, Cheryl Spiegel woke up a very excited young lady. It was her 10th birthday, and although she was headed to school that morning, her family had promised her cake and presents on her return home. Obviously, she was very excited. It was her day, her special day. So, it was only natural that the birthday girl got a few extra minutes in bed, especially when her regular wake-up time was around 5.30 in the morning. Yet this meant that Cheryl didn't depart for the school bus with her brothers as

she normally did. Instead, she left the house at around 6.25am, headed out into the dark, foggy fall morning, all alone. It was a walk that should have just taken a few minutes tops, but Cheryl never made it to school that day. In fact, the morning of Cheryl's birthday would be the last time anyone would see her alive, and the mysteries surrounding her death would puzzle professional and amateur detectives alike for years to come. Following her missing persons report being filed, local police officers conducted interviews with classmates, neighbors, and members of the Spiegel family itself. But not a single person could provide any useful information. The streets had been all but deserted when Cheryl had disappeared.

When local newspapers began reporting sightings of Cheryl in the surrounding area, the police focused their investigation around the possibility of her running away from home. A dire mistake at a crucial time in the investigation, as it amounted to little more than wishful thinking. Because around two weeks later, a milk delivery driver was out on his usual morning rounds when he found he needed to take a leak. He pulled over to the side of an old, isolated country road, when he noticed an odd grouping of rocks in the creek bed below him. It appeared as if, though, they'd been deliberately stacked, almost like a pyramid shape. The driver's curiosity got the better of him, and he headed down the slope to further investigate the odd formation. But when he did so, he noticed a small,

child-sized arm visible in one of the small crevices. The flesh was hideously discolored, with its owner obviously deceased, so the horrified delivery driver rushed to call 911. Shortly afterwards, emergency services arrived at the scene, collecting the corpse which would soon be identified as the missing Cheryl Spiegel. The birthday girl had been stabbed a total of 26 times, with some of the stab wounds so deep that they ran through her completely. However, they didn't appear to have been the result of a knife. Rather, the wounds were small and puncture-like in nature, as if she had been stabbed with a needle-like instrument. She had also been stripped completely nude, but thankfully, there was little evidence of any kind of physical violation having occurred.

In a horrible twist of fate, it was her older brother's eleventh birthday when her father was summoned to identify her body, forcing him to bear witness to the savage, frenzied manner in which she had been killed. Cheryl was buried two days after her body was found on November 6th, 1971, her family holding a small ceremony for her at Highland Cemetery in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky. Yet the search for her killer continued, with the ever-pervading question, did her birthday play any significance in her abduction, or was it simply a horrible coincidence? Homicide detectives surveyed the surrounding area, but didn't find much of interest. The only pertinent location was a gas station, an ATM machine at a bank, and a McDonald's that stayed open until 5 a.m. Aside from those late-night businesses, there were no reason to be in the area at such a time.

But canvassing the area came up with four major persons of interest, all of which were spoken to by police. The first was a man who lived across the street from the Spiegel house. According to more than one witness statement, this man would sometimes sit on his porch or in his car and watch the children. Not in a wholesome way either. People said that there was something to this man's stare, something chilling. In the years following Cheryl's murder, his concerning behavior continued to make his neighbors uncomfortable, even if he was eventually cleared of suspicion. Although he refused to take a polygraph test, which was highly suspicious, it turned out that he had an airtight alibi, as he had been working as a day laborer for a company in nearby Cincinnati. The second person of interest was

another of Cheryl's neighbors, a drug-addicted member of a local car theft ring. He had served prison time, had a history of violence, and was known to be extremely volatile. His alibi for the morning of Cheryl's disappearance was flimsy at best, and he openly admitted to having seen her walking to the bus stop, making him the last person to see her alive. However, he was open to taking a polygraph test and he actually passed it, despite several people in the street saying they were terrified of him. The third person of interest was obviously the person who claimed to have found her body, the milk delivery driver. This man lived several counties away from the milk company, but he would end his route each

day on the road where Cheryl's body was discovered. This daily proximity to her and her family would have given him ample opportunity to plan a successful kidnapping. However, there was no other evidence of his guilt. The man passed a polygraph test and was said to be emotionally devastated by the accusation. Not long after, the police ruled him out. The fourth and final person of interest was a small business owner from the same town. This man was not initially on the police radar as being involved in Cheryl's murder, but several years after, he was charged with assaulting young girls, pleading guilty in a court of law. There was local talk about him bragging about having stabbed Cheryl and putting her in the creek, but the man flatly

denied those rumors as hearsay. Police did interview him and he agreed to take a polygraph test which he passed. Beyond him supposedly bragging about the murder, there was no forensic evidence to ever tie him to the crime. It should be made clear that Cheryl's dad and stepmother were never considered suspects and her biological mother was nowhere near Kentucky during the early 70s. However, a couple of interesting facts remain. Cheryl's father said he saw his daughter leave for the bus stop at 6.25am, yet no one else reported having seen Cheryl out on the street, which surely would have been busy with other kids and parents

out and about that morning. What's more, after Cheryl's body was found, no headstone was ever purchased for her by her immediate family, and the Spiegels left town entirely just two months later. Cheryl's brother later said that their father never talked about Cheryl or her murder ever again, but whether this was down to guilt or simply grief, it's impossible to know. So, what really happened to little Cheryl Spiegel? Was it some kind of horrible accident? Or was foul play to blame? And what exactly made all those tiny pinprick wounds that punctured the length and breadth of her tiny body? At best, some kind of vicious, predatory killer with an unusual weapon caused them. But at worst, someone, or something, is still out there there and it's hunting children. It's my 17th birthday, which just so happened to fall on a Saturday for like the first time I can remember.

I had the best time with my friends and family, catching a movie with my friend Alice in the early afternoon before heading out with my parents and little brother to my favorite vegan place. After that I went over to my boyfriend's and stayed until around 10 when my dad drove over to pick me up. When I got in the car, he hands me what felt like a book, what was wrapped in brown paper. I figured it's a birthday present, but my dad tells me it's not from him, or anyone else in our family for that matter. In fact, he just found it sitting on the porch when he'd set off to give me a ride home. At first, I'm practically buzzing with excitement and curiosity. The package had no tag on it, nothing to say who it was to or who it was from.

To me, it was a mysterious gift from a kindly stranger which was like, kind of the coolest thing ever, so I didn't waste any time to go about unwrapping it. Just like I expected, it was a book. Only it wasn't anything I'd heard before or anything I'd be normally interested in reading. It was called Inferno and I came to learn that it was written by some old Italian guy named Dante. The plot involves this guy Dante going down into hell and describing all the messed up stuff that he sees there. But that's neither here nor there I suppose. Either way I'm already confused why someone would give me a book like that when I see some of the pages had been marked with highlighter pen. So, not only is it some weird old religious book, it turns out it was second hand. I mean,

it looked new, but someone had defaced it and then passed it on to me. My dad has his eyes on the road so obviously he's not looking at the book. So when he asks what it is, I tell him I think there's been some kind of mistake. It seemed like some college student's book. I mean, dense and boring, highlighted sections. I bet most of you would have thought the same thing. Only once we get to a stoplight, I hold the book up for my dad to see and an actual letter falls out of one of the pages and somehow falls kind of behind the rear passenger seat. I try reaching for it but there's no way for me to grab it without breaking my arm or undoing my seatbelt and there's no way my dad was going to let me do that. Besides,

I wasn't even sure if the letter was for me, as when I retrieved it, I saw that much like the package, it had no name or address on it. I was almost certain that there had been some kind of mistake and therefore there was no reason for me to open the letter, but I think my curiosity just got the better of me and I justified it with the thought of maybe the letter gives me a clue on who the book is from so I can return it to them. So, with that Olympic level of mental gymnastics, I open up the letter and begin reading. Now I know some of you are going to leave comments here like, it's what you get for being a nosy bee and you know what, you'd be right. I shouldn't have opened that letter.

But the thing is, it was addressed to me and that was the problem. I didn't keep it around. I didn't even really read the whole thing before I ran to my dad in a flood of tears. On top of that, the last thing I want to do is try to remember all this stuff word for word but for the sake of the story I'll try to summarize here. The first word was just my name, not dear name or happy birthday name, just my name. It then said something about how the person wanted to get me a bible but they thought it would be lost on me. Instead they got me a book that would tell me exactly where I was headed if I didn't change my behavior. That was probably the most confusing part for me. Like, yeah, I wasn't hardly a Puritan, but there were girls in my high school that were much wilder, shall we say, than me.

Of all the people you'd think of as a sinner, I was definitely not the first person that sprang to mind. At least, I didn't think so. The letter went on to make out that whoever had written it had been watching me. But not like a stalker or whatever, deliberately following me. It seemed more like stuff they've observed in passing. More assumption-based stuff on loose familiarity as opposed to what color my PJs are or whatever. There were no threats of violence or anything either. The tone of the letter was just mean. It was the anonymity that scared me, especially since whoever wrote it used the word we a lot, like it was the entire town judging me

or something. A silly idea, I know, but it sure seemed like that to 17-year-old me. My dad read the letter and although it was late, he called 911 to file a police report. As you can guess, there wasn't much that they could do about it. If repeated letters were sent and they could pin down the guilty party, they could maybe get the person on a harassment charge, but other than that, best thing we could do was ignore it, according to them. The cops even suggested it was a mean prank by girls at school, but I don't know. Like my dad said, it seemed far too elaborate to be a teenage prank. A girl at school could just spread a mean rumor, not having to spend a bunch of money on a big old book.

We never found out who sent the letter and whoever it was didn't send another, so I suppose that's a good thing. But still, I think about it most birthdays, and maybe it even subconsciously influenced my decision to move all the way out to the east coast for college. Who knows? Either way, person who sent me that creepy Jesus freak letter. Let's never meet, please. To be continued... to remember. Firstly, it was the first birthday I celebrated with a knight on the town. From my 18th and 19th, me and my mates were all too broke to drop any serious cash anywhere, so we contented ourselves by getting sloshed in the park or in one of our bedrooms. But by the time I hit 20, we could actually afford a proper night out. Needless to say, it was one of the best nights of my life. I was always a bit nervous about clubbing. You hear some horror stories about people getting spiked or glassed or roughed up by bouncers.

But we ended up having a great night. A relatively tame one, I'm sure, but it was still one of the best nights of my life. Right up until it turned into one of the worst. Turns out we had such a good time that none of us remembered to keep any taxi fare in reserve. So, when the time came for the club lights to come on and the bouncers started kicking people out, we realized that if we wanted to get home, we were walking. It wasn't all that far, but given how drunk we were, an hour's walk would be more like an hour and a half,

maybe two. So we set off, causing chaos as we walked down the center of dead streets, stealing traffic cones as we went. There were five of us when we started the walk but gradually we were hitting people's houses on our route and the group got smaller and smaller until it was just me and my friend Chris. As I said, I know this was stupid, but since it was like half five in the morning and the roads were all but deserted, we were just stumbling around down the middle of the road. Which was why I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when, all of a sudden, we're blinded by some car's headlights as it comes speeding around a corner at us.

We tried our best to dodge it, and I'm pretty sure the driver swerved too, but the car ended up clipping my mate's hip, with the impact spinning him like a top right there in the road. The car screeches to a stop, I hear the driver's door open, and then the sound of my mate groaning from the impact. I look up and see the driver walking towards me and I'm already apologizing to him which strikes me as the most British thing ever now that I think about it. I got my phone out and I'm literally plugging 999 onto the touch screen so when I see the driver with his phone out I tell him like nah man I'm calling the ambo don't worry about it. But he didn't get his phone out to call the paramedics.

Because the next thing I know, he's pointing his phone at me before the flash suddenly blinds me. He'd taken a picture of me. Then he did the same with Chris. Angled his phone to get a good picture of his face, too. That's when I realized something was wrong. Well, more wrong than getting clipped by a car. Not only did the bloke take a picture of us, he didn't seem in the least bit concerned that he'd just hit one of us.

He just took his photos and started looking around like he was lost or something. I later realized that he was probably just looking for witnesses or cameras, but at the time, he looked completely mental, and given that he wasn't helping us, I started to get angry. Mate, what are you doing? Give me a hand here! I remember saying. I wanted him to help me move Chris out of the road, not knowing that's the opposite of what you're supposed to do.

But instead of even trying to help, he pulls his hood up, turns around to us, then starts showing us the pictures he'd taken of us on his phone. Not a word to anyone about this. We know what you look like, and we'll be coming for you if you talk. I remember thinking that he just didn't want to get into any trouble. Maybe he was a point or two away from a driving ban and two drunk lads walking in the middle of the road weren't going to be the thing that took him down. Shocked but not surprised, people could be mega scummy when they want to be.

But then something happened. I started realizing that the noise my mate was making sounded way more muffled than it should have been. And that in actuality, he hadn't been making any noise at all. He must have landed almost right on his chin because he was knocked out cold. So if it wasn't him that was making the noise, who was? And as the driver walked back to his car, that's when the penny dropped. The muffled groaning noises weren't coming from my mate. They were coming from the boot of this fella's car. Before the horror of what was happening could really sink in the wheels on the car screeched before it sped off up the road.

There were a few seconds where I think I was just in pure shock. It wasn't until I could hear the 999 operator talking on the phone that I came to and I just hung up. I was too afraid. And I thought blokes only locked people in car boots during cartoonish Guy Ritchie films. I didn't think it actually happened for real. And I'm incredibly claustrophobic too. The idea of being locked in a boot is an actual living nightmare for

me. I just stayed there, kneeling next to Chris until he suddenly came to. He had a few cuts and abrasions inside his mouth which looked a bit scary because of all the blood, but it turned out that he'd be fine. He had some horrible bruising on his hips the next day, probably a concussion, but he was good to walk home, even if it was pretty painful. Thank God for the booze, eh? Keeps you limber. And I don't think I'd have been able to get him home otherwise. He didn't remember what happened at all, I guess as a result of being KO'd and knocked that memory out real quick. But I promised to tell him when he was sober. The next day, I caught him as he was about to go into the local walk-in treatment center with his mom. It took some explaining, but once I made it very clear that some very, very bad things might happen to us

if we reported that what happened was a hit and run. He started to relent. It didn't matter if we were in the middle of the road. The car had hit him and then bailed, which was something the police would be very keen on investigating, and I needed him to admit those details. And if that was the case, some very bad man had actual pictures of us, stuff they could distribute if they really needed to. We'd never be safe. They could just put a price on our heads and someone desperate enough for the cash would just take us out. That's how it is around here. And that's how Chris ended up insisting to his mom that what had happened to him was just when he got a little too sloshed and took a tumble down

some steps. That's all they really needed to know, and they would just go from there and treat him as need be. But a few days of mild pain were considerably preferable to what I was fearful of, a permanent dirt nap. And so, just like we're told, we kept our gobs shut and kept our health. After all, I was worried that if we blabbed about what we'd seen, neither of us would be around buddy Ryan's 21st birthday. We were both enrolled in Notre Dame. That's the not-so-prestigious Maryland Notre Dame, not the Indiana one. It's where we met, and not long after, we were pretty much best friends.

We ended up moving into a small two-bedroom apartment together over near Fells Point, which fast became the headquarters of our social circle's weekly Friday night hell-raising. I say hell-raising, but we never got up to anything too crazy. Mostly just beers and smokes while we pumped house music or had smackdown two tournaments on the PlayStation. But as the years went by, we started upping the ante in various ways, be it experimenting with drugs, putting on low stakes poker games, generally just getting wild and wilder until Ryan's 21st which he decided he was going to make it a real party. I figured he meant that we'd be hitting the clubs or something, wilding out to some Tony B. But no, Ryan had something else on his mind.

It might have been summer and B-more, but all Ryan had in his mind was snow, snow, snow. You follow? Cocaine. That's what my man was hoping for, and I'm pretty sure his idea of coke was based on watching Scarface one too many times. The whole thing definitely wasn't the best idea he'd ever had, but it was his birthday, not mine, so it wasn't my call to make. The only real issue I had was where was he going to find someone to sell it to him, but I'll never forget his response. This is Balmore, bro. City of a thousand corner boys. Worst thing, he was 100% right. So, night of his birthday, we're all gearing up to

party when Ryan decides to head out and pick up his birthday special. His logic being, get it early and he wouldn't have to share so much Gotta love that selfish birthday boy mentality So he puts on a hoodie and his best mean white guy face And heads over to West Lexington to pick up his stuff Telling me he'd be an hour at most An hour comes and goes and there's a knock on our apartment door At first I just think Ryan forgot his keys or something, but it's one of our buddies who Ryan had texted on his way to the corner. I ask him if he talked

to Ryan. He says no, but it's no big deal, so he comes in, grabs a beer and we chill for a while. By the time Ryan had been gone for two whole hours, I decided to give him a call to find out what the deal was. Ryan's phone rings out, probably for the first time ever. He had this annoying custom ringtone and unless it was on vibrate, he'd normally answer his phone almost immediately. I think if that had happened on any other day, it wouldn't have been a thing. But considering where he was going and what he was doing, I started to get a little worried. I mean, Ryan could carry himself. But still, we ain't called Bodymore Murderland for no reason.

I tried calling back around 10 minutes later. He doesn't pick up. I try again. Still no answer. Cut to about 1 in the morning and me and our mutual friend are getting seriously worried about Ryan. We debated going out looking for him, but agreed that walking around West Lexington at that time of night and it'd be us that needed looking for. I still feel guilty about this, but in light of what he was looking to purchase, I hesitated on calling the cops.

The one thing I should have done like straight away, but I was too focused on our parents or how the college would react to it. Ryan didn't come back that night. He never came home at all. After a few days when his phone stopped ringing and finally went dead, I went to the cops to report him missing and told them absolutely everything about where he was going and what he was doing. The cop I followed the report with said that I'd probably hear from a detective soon after. Then, lo and behold, I get a call about a week later from a Detective Royo,

who wanted to stop by to talk. Since some of the corner boys on Lexington had vandalized a few of the city watch cameras, there was no footage of the actual exchange. But the detective had Ryan walking up Lexington, then walking back in the direction of our apartment. But then for some reason he walks back up Lexington at a much faster pace to where we think he bought the drugs, then he doesn't walk back again. The detective asked if Ryan owed money to any dealers or if he was involved in selling. That was a hard no on both counts, at least to my knowledge anyway, and since we lived together and stuff, I figured that I'd know if he was slinging or if he was in any sort of money trouble. I got asked a few more questions about Ryan's personal life, just

family stuff mostly. Then the cop left with a promise that he'd keep me updated. But he didn't. When I called to ask how the investigation was going, the case had been transferred to another detective. Then that guy tells me that after a few weeks of not checking in, Ryan was either dead or had left town, and if it was the second option, he definitely didn't want anyone to find him. He'd basically dropped off the face of the earth after walking back up West Lex. Months went by, and the investigation into Ryan's disappearance didn't seem to go anywhere. Although the cops couldn't confirm that he was dead, the lack of activity in his bank account led them to believe that he was no longer with us. His family didn't want to accept

it, no one wanted to accept it, but the very real possibility of Ryan being dead was something we were all forced to live with. It took just over a year and a half before I got a call from Ryan's mom and at first, I thought it was the news we'd all been waiting for. All I heard was, they found him, in between sobs, and I thought that might have been like, I don't know, happy tears. Happy because he'd been found alive and well after some weird blackout or something. Only they weren't.

The news that Ryan's mom received that morning hadn't been good. They'd found Ryan alright, and he was dead. Some city workers had been knocking down derelict housing on the west side when they began to smell something rotten. They figured it was a cat or raccoon that got trapped in the building and just carried on doing what they were doing. And that's when one of them found Ryan, half buried under some rubble, his remains so degraded that they were almost skeletal. In his jean pocket was a vial of white powder that the cops first thought would be the coke he was looking to buy that day. When they tested it, it turned out to be nothing but arm and hammer. They figured some corner boy had sold Ryan some fake drugs, which he tested out on his way back to the apartment. When he discovered it was fake, he marched back to the corner to confront whoever was selling,

which explains him marching back up West Lex like he meant business. Then, whatever happened next, whether he threw hands or, God forbid, threatened to call the cops, the corner boys managed to shoot him and move his body to a vacant with out so much of a shred of security footage or a single witness. They just disappeared him, didn't even leave his body somewhere people could find. That way, we'd have at least gotten some closure, a chance to give him a proper send-off before he, you know, wasn't himself anymore. I miss my college buddy every single day, and I wish that I had either gone with him or convinced him to stay home that day. If I'd managed to do that, he'd have been around to see his 22nd birthday, and hopefully for many more after that. Whenever a large group of people are asked, what are you most afraid of?

Invariably, somebody somewhere says, circus clowns. And sometimes, that person is me. Most people's coulrophobia, that's fear of clowns to the uninitiated, is down to those Stephen King's It adaptations. Shout out to Tim Curry's miniseries. You see those spiky yellow teeth when you're a kid, all like, hiya Georgie, and forget about it, traumatized for life. And I didn't see the miniseries until just before the movies came out a few years back, so I can't blame my fear. Some people just find them creepy in general, which again, I understand. But I'm pretty sure I was chill with clowns until my cousin's 7th birthday party when something happened that gave me a legit phobia that's lasted into my 30s.

So, I'm like 5 years old, it's my cousin's 7th birthday party and for some reason he's obsessed with old fashioned big top circuses. I think it was maybe from watching Dumbo so much but the point is, he's all about clowns, training lions, elephants, all that stuff. This gives his mom an idea to throw a circus-themed birthday party, which would include a visit from an actual real-life circus clown. From what I can remember, that party was awesome until the clown showed up. There was a bouncy house, snacks, party games, all that good stuff. Then after a while,

the clown shows up. My cousin Jay is ecstatic because his mom managed to keep the whole thing a complete surprise, so he's about foaming at the mouth with how happy he is. Clown guy does balloon animals, all the clown cliches, and then for whatever reason, he starts looking for two volunteers. He obviously picks the birthday boy on the guidance of his mom, so he just happens to pick me too. And that's when he starts tickling me. I hate being tickled. Always have, probably always will.

Not like most people who find it slightly unpleasant or god forbid those weird tickle fetishes who actually enjoy it. Nah, I legit hate being tickled, even back when I was five. So the fact this clown dude is tickling me is already putting me on edge, and I don't want to ruin the fun. So I remember just kind of playfully pushing him away, but he wouldn't take the hint. He keeps tickling me and singing this dumb song like tickle tickle tickle tickle. Then right as I lose my temper, I turn to be like, get off me clown dude. I just see blood pouring down his face from under his round red nose. His laughing in that super creepy high pitched way actually tickling me and there's blood running down his face. I scream like a little girl.

I bolted towards the house, screaming and crying, running full pelt at the glass patio doors, which just so happened to be shut. And boom, I'm out like a light. I woke up in the car on the way to the hospital. It felt like I was out for hours, but from what my dad told me it was more like a couple of minutes. Because I was zero to a hundred into those patio doors, I didn't remember getting knocked out, let alone how I'd been knocked out. All I knew

was that it was the worst pain I'd ever been in, from a severely broken nose, and there was blood all over me and my last clear memory of it being tickled by a bloody clown or, as I remembered it, a monster trying to eat me. So as I woke up, I was inconsolable and I don't think I calmed down until a nurse got some painkillers in me. Obviously, I didn't see the aftermath of getting knocked out, but apparently it was like a war zone. All the kids started screaming, some of them thinking the clown guy had somehow caused me to run into the glass doors. Spoilers, he had. Jay was angry that I'd ruined his birthday party but that's just something we laugh about now. I guess I see the

funny side myself these days but that doesn't change what the event did to my psyche. It ingrained in me a deep-seated fear of clowns that caused some awkward moments in the years that followed. I'm not proud of it, but not six months after it happened, I actually peed my pants in a shopping mall when I saw a guy dressed up as Ronald McDonald. Like, I'm serious. It messed me up for a long time, and even today the image of a circus clown provokes a pretty visceral reaction in me, even if I have learned to suppress it. I'm proud to say I managed to sit through the It movie, the first one anyway, after working up to it with the old Tim Curry series which I credit with actually helping me get on top of my phobia. But yeah, that's why I'm scared of clowns. I think I might be cheating with this one, because it's not even my story.

There are no ghosts in it, no one gets shot or creeped on, but it's still one of the realest, scariest things I've ever heard. So my brother is at this house slash birthday party where literally everyone is underage drinking. The party is on one of those cul-de-sac things, you know, like a dead-end street but pretty. And what's also pretty frightening is that a buttload of people actually drove to the party and were planning on driving home. The house they were at had a thin driveway so all the cars were packed into a bottleneck. The night wore on and around one in the morning someone decided that they wanted to go home. They found the girl who owned the car at the front of the bottleneck and asked her to move

her car so she could get out. She said she couldn't because she had a breathalyzer installed in her car and it wouldn't start until someone sober blew into it. They went around the party to try to find anyone who hadn't been drinking and couldn't find one. Another guy had the brilliant idea of asking the cool 20-something dude next door to do it. So an envoy of teens head over to the house next door and asked the dude living there if he could please blow into a breathalyzer so they could leave. The dude takes a minute to look the group over, takes a drag of his cigarette and says, you're gonna give me $25 for every person at that party or I'm calling the cops. The way my brother tells it, they actually thought the guy was joking

and a bunch of them just laugh it off before being like, no really, help us out with this. The guy was deadly serious and reappears at the door moments later with his cordless phone, showing that he's ready to call the cops if they don't cough up the money. That dude must have gouged hundreds of dollars from them that night as they were straight up terrified of getting caught drinking, especially the girl with the breathalyzer thing installed in the car. Like I get that he was doing something wrong, but the whole reaching out to a stranger for help and that's the way they act. Like he could have just told them to get lost and call the cops anyway, but his first thought is, how can I make this work for me? Probably the worst

birthday party my brother had ever been to. It seriously sucks that people like that exist. For many of us, birthdays are something that began as a source of joy, something we look forward to all year round. Yet as time goes on and we approach the big 3-0, some of us begin to dread the day on which our numerical age ticks over by that one faithful digit. But aside from the obvious dangers of excessive alcohol consumption and excessive hairspray use coupled with burning birthday candles, there seems to be an unspoken danger involved in celebrating one's birthday. Over the past 20 years or so, a group of British university researchers studied the lives and deaths of more than 2 million citizens before coming to a shocking discovery that we're more

likely to die on our own birthdays than any other day of the year. Published in a medical journal known as Annals of Epidemiology, the study found that those of us over 60 years of age were almost 15% more likely to die on our birthday than any other day, with the most common causes of death being heart attacks, which rose by just over 18% on an individual's birthday, and strokes, which were up by more than 20%. This is on top of the stat that shows that jumping to your own death increases by a whopping 35%, while death by falling by accident rose by almost 50%. One of the researchers was Professor Richard Wiseman, an apt name for a psychology professor, who says that there are two schools of thought concerning the so-called happy death day phenomenon. The first is that you simply eat too much, and in your advanced years this can raise the blood pressure to dangerously high levels.

This can cause heart attacks, among other things, but some feel that the whole thing is nothing more than a placebo effect. Like I've mentioned, advanced age means birthdays can generate the existential fear of death, but it also can remind a tired old deer that they've been clinging on for so long that it might just be okay to simply let go. As Professor Wiseman puts it, you think, that's it, I've had enough, I'm out of here. Just a handful of the prominent figures who've died on their birthdays include William Shakespeare and Ingrid Bergman, along with baseball players Bobby Byrne, Bucky Harris, Sol Carter, and Bob Moose. So, dear listeners,

if any of you have a birthday coming up, be sure not to eat too much or drink too much or celebrate said birthday on a rooftop bar or balcony setup. Better to be safe than sorry, or rather, better to be safe than a statistic, especially one that proves that perhaps the most significant day of the year for us can also be the deadliest. This story happened around four years ago, back when I was 18 and had just graduated high school. I decided to volunteer for a month in a southern Asian country before my university starts since volunteering was something I always wanted to do. I managed to find a place to volunteer at and was supposed to live for the first week with family friends, then I'd start living at my workplace. Thing is, my workplace couldn't house me due to construction and having another female volunteer coming soon,

so I had to find a hostel to stay at, and that was probably my biggest mistake. I went on the internet and started looking for a hostel. Sure enough, I found one in the center of the city in a relatively safe area. Also, the hostel had many great reviews from foreigners, so I thought it was safe. I visited the hostel and was greeted by Jin. He was the nephew of the owner and was responsible for greeting foreigners and showing them around. Jin was in his mid-twenties, an average looking dude, probably around 5'8". I'm 6'3", which will be important later.

After I make the arrangements for my stay there and agree to come the next day, he invites me to go with him on a walk to show me around the neighborhood, which I agree to. During our walk, he tells me about himself. He lived in the UK for a bit, tells me about his family, and asks me if I smoke. Back then, I was a cool kid fresh out of high school, so I ecstatically told him yes since I was actually trying to get some bud but didn't know how. He told me he can get it for me and when I come tomorrow he'll have some for me. The next day I go to the hostel and he tells me that he couldn't get it so I have to go with him to his friend's, George's, to get it and in hindsight, that was a big red flag but I was

a dumb kid who really wanted to smoke so of course I said yes. George almost looked like a cartoon villain. All his facial features were sharp and narrow and he had the little Van Dyke beard to go with it. We all get into the tuk-tuk and drove to the slums of the city to meet the dealer. I think the area was called Wanathamula, not sure. Anyways, we get the bud and they tell me we were making a stop at George's house and smoking there for a bit. Fine by me. I had no reason to suspect them since they were nice and polite to me. We reach his house, still within the slums area. It was a small room with a bed and three

chairs, nothing else. No tables or decor or anything. I sat on a chair, Jin sat on my right and George sat on the bed rolling out some joints for us. We start smoking and talking. They started asking me about why I'm here, how old I am and stuff like that. Suddenly it started becoming a little too personal, asking me what my parents'm here, how old I am and stuff like that. Suddenly it started becoming a little too personal, asking me what my parents do for a living, how much they make, and the one that really caught my attention, who are the people you live with, the family friends, and do they know where you are and are they going to worry about you if you don't call home soon, or something to that effect.

I was stoned by then, but the moment they said that I started sobering up quick and realizing that I'm in a messed up situation. I told them that I'm supposed to call in a few hours and that they knew which hostel I'm staying at. Suddenly another guy came and just stood at the doorway completely blocking it. He was about my height but much bigger in size than me. I was trapped between them and essentially had nowhere to go. Luckily they couldn't do anything to me yet since I told them I'm supposed to make a phone call to my family friends. Starting to get very nervous and anxious I tell them I'm too baked and can't even move or smoke so

kept passing up on my turn to smoke. I just lay there acting as if though I'm high out of my mind. They started speaking in their native language and it was clear to me that they were actually talking about me. Jin told them about all my electronics I had and that I had paid my full stay in cash. Now George, god bless his soul, thought I wasn't aware of my surroundings so in perfect English, Jin told me he doesn't speak English, he started mocking me, kept saying nice phone and asking me if I know how to swim. I just looked at him and smiled and told them it's time to go because I was starting to get tired. We walked out and I told them I needed to go to the market real fast and if they needed anything and they kept telling me that

they'll get me whatever I wanted themselves but I insisted that I wanted to go and that they should send one of them with me and they sent the big guy. Now the market was across the street from a bus station and the buses don't stop at the station. They just slow down and you hop in and hop out so now was my chance. I waited until I saw the bus approaching, sprinted like my life depended on it and it did and hopped in. They were screaming at me to come back and started running after the bus and at one point I even heard one of them scream, that you're lucky. The moment the bus reached the neighborhood of the family friends, I hopped out and walked around the neighborhood until morning came. In the morning I went to work and told them that a tuk-tuk had tried to kidnap me. So, they escorted me to the hostel where I took my belongings and work allowed me to stay with them,

thank god. When I told my family friends about what happened, they told me it's a common scam here and that they were planning to steal my belongings and dump me in the river when they left the house and that's why they asked if I knew how to swim and if someone was expecting me. For context, I'm a 4'11 girl with night blindness and this happened to me when I was 21. I am based in Singapore and whenever I think about this, it sends me into a spiral of depression because I could have done something. Anything to avoid the harrowing account. I have low self-esteem and would never get attention from men as I was and still am a heavyset girl. On top of that, I was very naive and assumed the best of people. The cherry on top is that I'm a pushover on the count of not believing in myself. My dislike of myself

stems from insecurities like my eye condition. I only learned how cruel the world could be to naive and downright idiots like me when this happened. And I also learned that red flags, stereotypes are there for a reason, and that reason is not for them to be ignored. I was tasked to run errands for my mom late in the night after work as she had leg pains and I was the only one able to do it. From my workplace, I had to take a train down to the east side of town and then go through a mall to get to a bus station. Then I would have to get on a specific bus to get to my desired location to pick up items from a shop. That day, my work extended till 8pm

as I had extra things to finish up at the office. I took the train headed to the shop and walked across the cabins to find a seat. All was good until I left the train to get to the bus station. My first interaction with this stranger was when he tapped my shoulder. I spun around and was met with a guy dressed in all black with tattoo sleeves. With broken English, he asked a seemingly innocent question. Sorry, I see you from the gym before? I was puzzled because, like I said, I'm a little hefty and I don't go to the gym. And I told him so and walked off. At this point he trailed behind me into the queue forming for the bus I needed to take. This made me feel a bit antsy as at the bus station there are literally about a hundred buses to take but coincidentally he was taking the same one as

me. Whatever. The bus came and the line boarded. He kept close to me and started talking to me and at this point in my head, I didn't want to be rude and ignore him. I mean, he might have just wanted to chat and get to know someone and who am I to judge? So I replied to his questions with basic answers. Where are you going? He asked. Then I answered to collect something. Where do you live? The north area and I kind of laughed. Do you have a boyfriend? The last question caught my attention and my anxiety started to grow. I decided then and there I was going to get off the wrong stop to see if he follows me. Of course, he did. I didn't know what to do. I checked my phone and it literally had no battery.

Just my luck. I was stuck with this dude in the night and I'm actually night blind. Great. Long story short, I still had to go to the stop and this dude followed me. He only left me alone after he badgered me for my number and unfortunately I gave in. I admit I was very dumb and a bit flattered I suppose. He texted me and was actually quite sweet on text. I should have ended it right there but again, he hadn't done anything to hurt me, albeit a bit weird. He asked me out on a date and I accepted thinking that he does seem quite interested in me. We met up and this is where it got horrible. He led me out of the mall and we were supposedly having a dinner date at as he had mentioned he had made a reservation at a surprise restaurant. I don't like discussing my eye condition with strangers so I kept that under wraps while walking the city

streets at night. This was quite romantic I thought, walking and talking. Until I realized that we were nowhere near the mall anymore and I couldn't hear the city buzz. I didn't know where we were. This was completely asinine to me. I got really scared as the street lights were getting sparse. He started putting his hands on me and I inched away every time and I think this made him more aggressive, knowing that I was afraid. I couldn't run. What if I ran into a ditch and died? I couldn't call my parents. If they knew I went out with a boy, they would kill me. I was hyperventilating and he said the words, okay, let's get to dinner reservations. And I was relieved. The thought of a lighted area

means that I could run. He ordered an Uber and refused to let me see the address. I just followed thanking God that that part of the night was over. I relaxed in the car, hoping to get at least a free meal after being bloody cornered like that. We get out of the car. I couldn't see where we were, so he guided me into the building and into a lift. Before I knew it, I registered that we were in a hotel when we were at the door of a dinky room. My heart sank. I think the rest is quite obvious. I felt alone and pressured. I was forced to do things I didn't want to do. It lasted for two hours and felt like an eternity and I couldn't fight back. I should have. Even with the risk of being beaten up, I should have stood up for myself. I waited for him to leave and found my way in the dark night alone to a random bus stop and I went home and cried.

I blocked the number, me being a pushover. Me being an empty shell when it comes to self-love led to this. If I loved myself enough I would have protected myself from being alone at night with a stranger and trying to impress him. But this wasn't the end. I downloaded Telegram a year later and he harassed me there, made fun of my body and how easy it was to control me and I blocked him again. Moral of the story, in my mind at least, love yourself, even with your weaknesses, because bad people can smell fear and weakness. And I'm still learning how to, today. This happened about five years ago when I was 13. I had just moved to Texas and I was having a blast meeting all of my cousins, aunts and uncles. At first everything was fine.

But slowly I realized that my family had a lot of dark secrets they would rather keep hidden. Some of these secrets were actually two of my cousins. The point is that they were trying to hide my cousins as much as possible, but since they were tornadoes in human form it didn't really work. I ignored it as best I could. I had my own problems and nothing was going great so I decided it was not worth it. Then I was introduced to my little cousin, Alan. Alan was only three when I met him and honestly he was so sweet albeit chaotic and messy. I saw him as my little brother, mostly because my relationship with my actual brother was horrible at the time.

I babysat him constantly and I had no idea the storm that was about to come. His dad was my cousin and he smoked a lot and that I had always known. But after Christmas of that year I noticed a severe lack of seeing him. I went from seeing him every week to seeing him once a month if I saw him at all. Only when Alan's foot got slashed with broken glass did I realize what was going on. They were neglecting him and my heart broke. I did as best as I could to take care of him from then on. Going to the park, feeding him sweets, playing with him all the time, etc. Then my cousin stopped letting me see him. It didn't hurt as much as I thought. I had seen this coming. Then to my absolute shock,

I found out my cousin and his wife, Alex and Maria, had been dabbling in hard drugs. I noticed of course how sunken their faces were but I just assumed that they weren't eating because they never could hold a job. I was 14 when I found this out and saying I was angry doesn't describe it. The closing incident for me was when Alex and Maria went to Alex's mother's home, my aunt, and demanded they be let inside. She allowed them, for the baby of course, and they fought all day every day for days on end. After two weeks my aunt subsequently threw them out and I was there when she did. She left to work without another word to them and my mom forced me to give Alan back to his dad. I didn't want to and I almost cried as I held his little hand down the stairs,

almost all of my family watching. The moment Alan realized what I was doing, he began to cry, clinging to me like he had never had before. His father scooped him up and smacked him, telling him to shut up. And that was it for me. I went up to Alex and asked him to give me the baby. I'm pretty sure I gave him some excuse, something like he needed his bottle or something, but he refused. I asked him again and that was about the time my mom realized what I was doing. And for the first time in my early life, she let me do what I did best. Start a fight. He started to get violent. Then Maria showed up and they started to fight. I was getting sick of this and the noise was starting to get into my head,

so I asked very loudly if I could just have Alan. Suddenly both of them were extremely mad at me, screaming and cussing at me. My aunt and mom got very defensive but they never came down. I tried my best to keep calm and asked for the kid one last time. Maria even swung at me, missing but almost catching me in the jaw. I punched her in the stomach once and knocked her off her feet as fast as I could. She was sick so beating her up was easy. Alex was a different story. Despite being more weak and fragile he still hit me with a lot more strength than I thought he could muster

and I stumbled around for a while before hitting him clean in the jaw. I grabbed the kid and ran up the stairs, giving him to my mom who was luckily recording this whole incident. I ran back down just in case, but they were done for by the time they hit the floor, and we had all the evidence that we needed to show to the police and the legal proceedings that followed. My aunt won the case. He's eight now, Alan, and he asks about this chaotic time of his life all the time, but no one will tell him, including myself. I just won't.

Maybe I'll wait till he's older. I just don't want him to remember who his parents used to be. To say the least, moving to a different college for the third time wasn't the best decision for my life. Unfortunately, I hadn't had any luck with any of the other colleges. I just decided that this school would be a better pick because it was far away from family drama and that would be a great way to start over. I was very wrong. Moving up there made me realize how lonely I was. I was desperate to look for a guy because I couldn't make friends due to COVID. Finally, my life would change in October of 2020. I made the decision to meet up with a 30-year-old guy. Should have been the first red flag, but

being the lonely 23-year-old girl that couldn't make friends, I didn't care. To say the least, the date went great. Too good to be true if I say so, but I had a really bad gut feeling at one point when I came to hug him. It was dreadful. Of course the gut feeling was ignored, and later that night, us being really high and drunk, he finally confessed that he had an ex that had died due to an overdose and a head trauma. Come to think about it, I don't know for sure if that was the case. Time went by and things were starting to turn pretty bad with him. He was constantly always talking about other girls and how when he was with them he had intimate videos of every girl he's been with. He was also moving out of his place and me being the nice person, I helped him move out and move into his new place.

I started to see his true colors though, yet I didn't leave. He forced me to like girls and let's just say it's explicit for what he did to me. The last few months of that relationship were just pure torture and a way for me to find an escape. There was a point where if I didn't talk to him in a sweet tone, it triggered him to pin me down and beat me with his knees. My face became unrecognizable. He then proceeded to pull out his rifle and his small gun different times and pointed it to his head, then at me, saying that he would kill both of us if the police would come. He would make death threats if I were to call the cops and get him arrested. I tried running away, but I was only about 5 foot and him being 6 foot 3 I didn't get anywhere.

I was trapped, and to make things worse it was now snowing in Texas and nobody was allowed to leave. I had to hide my face with makeup and he had to make sure it was on right before seeing his family. During the whole time it ends up that I was always in the wrong for having guy friends while he still had dating apps and was talking to other girls so we can have additional members to our relationship. Now I'm not hating towards relationships that have more than two people but that's just not my thing. He just kept gaslighting me into believing he wanted to marry me and that he only wanted me. In addition to these lies, he had me on drugs to get me addicted and have other reasons to stay.

Now, the end of the relationship was definitely a crazy story. I was forced to meet his 11-year-old daughter. Of course, he told me about her on the first date, but at the time, I was sick and honestly, I wanted to feel better before meeting her. I was forced to meet her. I drove 45 minutes with a fever to finally meet his daughter, but what she told me when he would walk out of the room is something I'll never forget. She just released hate towards her dad. She was convinced that he killed his ex and proceeded to tell me how abusive he is. I feel guilty about telling her the partial truth about what he has done.

He started getting aggressive every time his daughter would leave the room and he'd blame me for her distancing herself. I would tell her about it and I'm so thankful that she was on my side and to my surprise she even helped me to escape. However, it wasn't that simple. I decided to make a call to my mom and make her stay on the phone and thankfully he didn't speak Spanish so I told her that she needed to tell me I needed to go home. He had me mute the phone and just wanted his name tattooed where the sun doesn't shine and instigated and went through my bag and I just wanted to leave. Making the three hour drive back home at night was a nightmare. If I didn't reply to him within seconds on three different apps he would go nuts.

I couldn't handle it anymore and decided to tell my parents about the situation. We all came to the conclusion that I had to block him on everything and even change my phone number. My life felt so threatened that I couldn't even go to school and had to finish the semester online and got my school involved in my violent relationship. I'm just happy to be out of that situation and it made me more grateful to be alive and to love being with my family. To be continued... down in a career. I ended up taking a job as an English teacher in South Korea. I loved the adventure of being alone in an entirely different culture on the other side of the world. However, as a young blonde white woman, I received a lot of unwanted attention from the men there,

who tended to fetishize foreign women and disrespect boundaries. However, I was strong, trained in martial arts, and was pretty comfortable in my ability to defend myself, so I didn't let it get to me. One night, however, I had a close call. I was heading home from work after dark, walking the several blocks home to my apartment. This night, however, something was different. I soon became aware of footsteps behind me that followed me the entire way. It could just be a coincidence, I thought. There were always a lot of people on the sidewalks anyways, but this one just fell off.

I made it to my apartment, which was on the third floor of a small building above a Chinese restaurant. There were only about nine apartments total in the building, so the fact that the footsteps continued to follow me as I entered the building and climbed the stairs made it less likely that this was a coincidence. Whatever I thought, if this idiot wants trouble, he's gonna find it. I continued up to my apartment, unlocked it, and went in. I didn't bother locking it because, as I always did, I was only coming in to change into my tennis shoes and get my dog to take her out for a walk. My dog was a rather large Alaskan Malamute. Like me, she stood out like a sore thumb in this city because most everyone else only owned cute little toy breeds, usually Pekingese and Shih Tzus with their fur dyed bright colors. When I walked my Malamute,

people often let out a scream and ran to the other side of the street. But either way, upon entering my apartment, I removed my work shoes, got my dog, and went back to the door to put on my sneakers. As I bent down to pull them on, I leaned against the door for balance and fell through, as the man who had been following me was opening it. Not expecting me to stumble out with a monstrous dog, the man looked shocked and frightened. He grabbed his keys out of his pocket, went over to my neighbor's door and pretended to be fumbling with them to open it.

I gave him a look as if to say, yeah right, locked my door, and took my dog down the steps outside. Once I made it outside I crossed the street and hid behind a car. Sure enough, within seconds, the man, supposedly my neighbor, emerged from the building, looked around for a while, and then bolted. He had clearly spotted me walking home and saw his opportunity to follow me and break in and attack. Had I not leaned against the door

at that moment, he would have burst in and attempted to proceed with his plans. This incident shook me, but I never let it, or the others before or since then, stop me from doing what I want to do or go where I please. I just go prepared, ready to take action the next time a man makes a bad decision. This happened last fall. A friend of mine and myself went on a hike one day at a national park. We live by it so we hike the trails a lot and know the land pretty well so we adventure off the trails quite a bit. On this day it was kind of chilly, good to know for the story I suppose, but we went on a trail that starts at the end of the park and

circles back to the parking lot. But we have a spot we like to chill at that's about halfway down the trail and to get there you have to cross the river and continue walking down the river for a little while. There's only one spot that's good for crossing where the water is only about knee high. Everywhere else you pretty much have to swim. Well on our way to our spot, still on the main trail, we pass this man that's walking back towards the park. I immediately got weird vibes right off the bat. I'm a friendly person and I don't just ignore people when they walk past me on trails. I just say hi and comment on the beautiful day and what not. This man straight up stopped walking and was just trying to make a conversation. But his eyes kept looking me and my friend up and down and it was just an incredibly uncomfortable atmosphere.

I pretty much told him we better keep moving on because we had things to do after our hike and needed to get it done. Just so he'd get the idea we couldn't stand there talking to him. We get to the spot to cross and continue our adventure to our hangout spot. We're just sitting there smoking and relaxing then I see some movement down the river on the other side. It's the same guy and he looks like he's looking for us. I was sure of it. Now my friend is wearing some neon colored clothes so he spots us right away. He then starts to cross the river, and the deep side too. It's freezing cold and there would be no reason for him to cross other than to try to get to us. I told my friend to pack their stuff and let's haul it out

of there. I had never had a feeling like I had that day, like we were in danger and that action needed to be done immediately. I found this rock while I was getting our stuff to put in the bag, it was about the size of a softball. One end was blunt and rough where I could get a good grip on it. The sides came down to a point but not to a point, I guess the best way to describe it would be a tool that you would use to take the hide off an animal. Anyways, I was full and ready to do whatever I needed to do to save her and myself and that rock would do some serious damage if not kill this dude. I'm so happy it didn't come to that. But as we're breaking out of there I look back and see the guy struggling in the higher water as he's crossing.

It even seemed like he had been yelling something as the water came up to his face and he was struggling and attempting to wave us down to divert our attention to him. I wasn't sure if this was to lure us to him as if though he needed help, but I wasn't following for it. We lost him because we cut through the woods and ran as hard as we could to the conservation building up on the hill. We found some other men and told them about the man at the river. They gave us a ride back to the parking lot and waited there until we left. I don't know if they found that weird dude or what, but it was honestly one of the strangest and truly scariest moments of my life. To be continued... apartment in a big city. Where I come from it's pretty normal to just go to the college near your

house. This happened on a weekend when my family and I had planned a trip abroad but last minute I had an exam rescheduled for that Monday so I decided not to go. So it's Thursday and my parents and siblings are leaving for the airport and the guy that they usually hire is taking them to the airport. My mom tells me that my maid is staying with me for the weekend and that I should call her if I need anything. I say goodbye and go back to studying. So it's now Thursday at around 9pm and I'm studying in the living room with my boyfriend so the maid actually tells me it's getting late and she's going to bed so I tell her that I'm going to bed soon too. An hour later,

my boyfriend leaves. It's now around 10.30pm and I'm getting ready for bed. I grab my dog, a small Yorkie, and take her to my room to sleep with me. So it's about 11pm and I'm in bed looking at my notes when my dog starts growling at the door. But I tell her to shut up because Yorkies are very nervous and bark all the time, at least mine does. So after she's silent, I get this adrenaline rush and stay very still, and I hear steps in the corridor. The floor is made of wood so when I heard specific creaks, the sound of wood bending, I know the steps are getting near my room. So at first I think it's probably the maid

making sure my boyfriend didn't stay over. But when the footprints stopped at my door, I started to freak out. I was even compelled to say the maid's name, that he's not here, you can come in and check. But somehow I knew it wasn't her. So I call my boyfriend and tell him someone was in my house. He tells me to put on some shoes and check the other rooms. I really don't want to, but I'm not going to be able to sleep until I'm sure there's absolutely nobody. I find some courage and put on some shoes and start walking very slowly towards my sister's room, checking with my phone light to see if it's empty. The bathroom is empty, my parents' room is empty. By this time I'm getting more relaxed because I think I must have just imagined it.

Then I go to my parents' bathroom and it's also empty. I walk to their room closet and scan the room with my phone light when I shed light on a human figure. It was obviously not my maid, but I say her name and a tall muscular body answers, no, and says the name of the driver that took my parents to the airport. I freeze and try to act cool, but he invents some petty excuse that he was just checking that the windows were closed. I tell him it's late and he quickly leaves the house and I call my parents to verify his excuse. He was obviously lying and then he has the audacity to ask me via whatsapp if I want him to drive me to college tomorrow. Thankfully, my parents had a very stern talking

with him and I never saw him again. I'm a 29-year-old man and three times a year I head up to the Georgian mountains to camp, fish, and have a great time. But after last trip, I doubt I will ever go again. I had been super excited the week before I was about to head up to Georgia and when the day finally came, I could have died with happiness. I loaded up my dog buddy and all my gear and started the trip. About an hour into my trip, I saw a road that I had never been on before. I decided that it would take an hour to look around and go back to the main road. I lost track of time and before I knew it, the sun was setting. I grabbed my gear and dog and we hiked about 10 minutes before finding a nice clearing in the

forest. I set up camp and looked around my camp. I saw a small man-made trail leading into the dark trees and decided that me and the dog needed a walk. I grabbed my walking stick, his leash, and a headlamp and we headed onto the trail. I knew something was wrong when I couldn't hear a single insect or animal. Me and the dog stopped at a little creek when I saw something terrifying. Two eyes reflecting from my headlamp. This thing was incredibly tall, six or seven feet, and the eyes were too big to be human. My dog is usually very protective of me, but instead of barking or doing something,

he just whimpered and peed on my leg. I've never seen him act like this before. He's seen bears before and has scared mountain lions away, but he never peed like this. As he kept whimpering, I felt terrible, like this thing hated me and it could rip me to shreds if it wanted to. Then it made the scariest noise I'd ever heard. It almost sounded like a maniac screaming and laughing at the same time, and me and my dog bolted back to our camp. At our camp I could still hear the thing from a distance, and needless to say it sounded like it was staying there for good. So I packed up my camp as my dog stood watch and we ran to my truck and

got out of there. I went straight home and truly I didn't sleep that whole night. Later on I did some research on the internet of what could have made that noise and nothing came even close to it. I really don't know what that was but there truly is something weird in the woods of Georgia. To be continued... Looking back at the situation, I really think I should have seen the red flags about this guy. But since I was really young and stupid, I didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I just thought he was a kind guy. The whole thing happened in the mall, in plain sight in front of hundreds of people. I had gone with my mother shopping, girls day out, you get the gist. At some point, I get lost in the mall.

Typical, everyone has a story like that, right, as a kid? And so far no red flags at all. I remember seeing a guy with a very southeastern accent. He was dressed like a junkie but in my five-year-old mind I thought he looked fine. So since I was a lost five-year-old girl who didn't know any better, I walked up to him and asked him for directions, if he had seen my mother, etc. He ignored my questions and when he saw me, his eyes lit up. He immediately started showering me with compliments, some of them were even inappropriate to say to a five-year-old child. He gave me a pink and black bracelet and told me how well

it looked on me. Of course, I was oblivious to the situation and ignoring all the red flags, so at some point he offers to take me to his fake private jet and fly me to an exotic island to relax and play with the dolphins, basically made it sound like some type of child's paradise. All I had to do was get in his car. Of course, since it sounded like a dream come true, I trusted him and almost got in his car. I kid you not, at the exact moment I was about to leave the mall, some dude with a uniform stopped him dead in his tracks and asked him where he was going with a five-year-old girl. I guess he could easily tell that we weren't related, especially the way the guy was dressed. The guy responded with his raspy, southeastern accent. This is just my daughter's kid. I'm taking her home. We were clearly not related, and so the uniform guy asked me where

my mother was. I told him she was still in the mall, and from that point on, there was some arguing between the two gentlemen. I didn't get the most of it but I ended up with the well-dressed guy and the junkie cursed him out walking away. We went to the lobby of the mall and found my mother there, telling the worker behind the desk my description. She had clearly picked up by this point that I was gone. It turned out the guy in the uniform was a security guard at the mall and had picked up on this point that I was gone. It turned out the guy in the uniform was a security guard at the mall and had picked up on how wrong the situation seemed to him, a good intuition. When my mom saw me with this guy, she picked me up and hugged me as tight as she ever had. La Iglesia de Jesucristo de los Santos de los Últimos Días When I was 17, I hung out with some less than well-behaved people. Druggies, thieves, dropouts, etc.

Although I kept sketchy company, I was always a good person. So when it came to my friend needing help moving, I was there and ready. My friend's mother had to work so he asked me as well as a few others to help unload the truck. After we got everything unloaded, we all decided to go smoke a bowl of the green goods in the basement. While we were smoking though, nature called. I had to go number two. Luckily, the basement door led right into the bathroom, right? Well, while I was on the pot in the middle of my business, I heard movement in the living room. I thought it was strange, but mostly ignored it. Then, suddenly, the bathroom door began opening. Sitting there, ready to make a joke out of someone walking in on me, I casually waited for the person to show themselves. Except when they

did, it was a police officer. At this point, I don't know who was more surprised. The cop who was apparently responding to a home invasion call or me. The guy on the pot while his friends were just finishing up smoking the pot right on the other side of the door from us. It must have been this police officer's first week on the job because the first thing he decides to do when he sees a young man with his pants around his ankles is pull his gun. The look of fear on his face, his shaking hands, brow and sweat. I could see he was truly more scared than me. I had to talk this police officer down from pulling that trigger on me. He was breathing heavily with fear. No, and I am not being dramatic. I had to calm and negotiate

my way out of being shot for pooping in my friend's house. Luckily, he let me explain the situation to him and call my friend up from the basement to explain what was going on and why we were there. Luckily, the three cops that were there after hearing that we were not home invaders left feeling incredibly embarrassed to even notice that we were all high. Looking back on this from an adult perspective, I'm just thankful I'm around to tell it. Because even though my story is the sort of thing you see in comedies, it could have turned out much worse for me. To be continued... If you got a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit r slash let's read official and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video.

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