The Lets Read Podcast - 15: Episode 015 | Sign From Above & Crazy Neighbor Stories | 34 True Scary Horror Stories

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

Welcome to the fifteenth episode of The Lets Read Podcast! This podcast includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Signs From Above, Losing A Best Friend, & Crazy Neighbors.  HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?► www.Reddit.com/r/LetsReadOfficial FOLLOW ME ON- ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsReadCreepy ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ♫ Background Music: Iron Cthulhu Apocalypse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFvrqVSJE8E PATREON for EARLY ACCESS!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead

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We have never experienced anything paranormal, and I was a huge skeptic prior to these events. So the weird stuff started about two weeks ago. The very first thing that started happening was something weird with our hangers. We have a room connected to the bedroom that serves as a walk-in closet and laundry room. We noticed sounds in there when we were in other parts of the apartment. We started finding metal hangers snapped from the top with the clothes we hung up on the other side of the apartment. We started finding metal hangers snapped from the top with the clothes we hung up on the other side of the room. I just assumed that they were cheap or that we were hanging clothes that were too heavy. The laundry room door had been shutting on its own but I assumed it was

from the air pressure or something similar. Then the next thing was the lights. At first it was subtle and I thought my eye was twitching or something. About a week ago it was so bad some nights we would be in the dark for a second or two before they came back on. I asked my property manager about it and they said that they would check into it. They called me at work to tell me that everything seemed to be okay with the light fixtures and wiring. Then the really weird stuff started happening. Last week we started hearing louder noises. We were in the shower together and heard loud banging from the bedroom. There is a door that leads to a back deck on the second story so I immediately got out soaking wet and grabbed my gun. I went everywhere around the home and went outside and saw nothing. I got back in the shower

with my gun in the bathroom and we heard it again but a little quieter. We quickly finished washing and just ignored it for the rest of the night. That night we started hearing sounds when we were in the bedroom. We had been so paranoid we keep all the doors locked and locked the bedroom door before going to sleep. We heard sounds coming from the living room and from the laundry room but I just kept telling myself it must be my neighbors. I believed that until one day we were in the living room and heard yet another sound from the laundry room. We went to look and a pair of pants my fiance had been missing for around a week was sitting on the floor away from the closet area.

I tossed them against the wall and they were laying again while my fiance was in the living room and she said that was the exact sound she heard. That made me rethink things a bit because I had just finished cleaning and I remember sweeping that exact spot where the pants ended up. That night we kept hearing more and more noises and finally started thinking it might be something more than just coincidences and loud neighbors. At around 2am we went into the bedroom and I jokingly said out loud, if there's a spirit in here give me a sign. Then I said, I don't care if you're a little punk. At the time I was pretty confident that it was no big deal and I was trying to calm my fiance down.

After that we noticed parts of the apartment were starting to get really cold. My fiance and I both kept getting goosebumps for no apparent reason and she said that she felt a feeling of dread. She was so scared so we decided to take a drive around the lake near us to calm down and maybe grab some food and everything changed after that. When we left I felt so drained and I was really tired so I pulled over to let her drive my car. We were going down a road in Carter County, Tennessee for reference. My fiance lived down that road for a while and knows the area well. She has driven the road hundreds of times with no incident. We were pretty calmed down at this point and we were having a nice talk when the main

reason for this post happened. I saw something I can only describe as a white and gray shape with two distinct short legs and something flowing between them coming flying out of the woods on the driver's side towards us. I yelled, stop, please stop, because I thought we were about to run an animal or something over. Even though I was looking at it I couldn't make out any details like a face or head but when it got close to the car I noticed it was much bigger than I originally thought. I drive a sedan and when it made it to the driver's side window it was slightly taller than the car. I noticed its feet were always straight up and down like it wasn't using them to move. I was bracing for impact but it never happened. I turned around and the thing

was gone. I really believed that I would have seen it after we passed it because even though it was dark, the thing seemed to kind of glow. It was very white when I first saw it but kind of grey when it got to the car. My fiance and I sat in silence for a second before I said something like, please tell me you just saw that. My fiance said she did and wanted to wait to talk about it because she had a really bad feeling. We went down the road a bit before she told me her point of view. She said she was driving and just felt an awful feeling of terror and got goosebumps

before it happened. She said she never saw it coming out of the woods but she mentioned that she felt that she couldn't look at it. She said she never looked directly at it but when it was about to hit the driver's side window, it was that fast coming out of the woods from beside us, it took up the entire window with the grayish white color. She said she heard a faint growl and a high-pitched screaming sound at the same time. She said it got to the window for a brief moment, stopped and stared into the car. I did not hear anything but I was a little further away than her. The thing never hit our car and I turned around but literally as soon as I repositioned my body it was gone. I thought for sure we were going to wreck because the thing was so big. I looked right

at the thing but it was so fast and so strange that I still have no idea what I saw. We checked the time after we made it to the main road and it was 3.20am so it was probably around 3.10-3.15am when it happened. We turned around and went back down that road four times in a row hoping to see a big white dog or really anything that it could have been. We saw nothing at all. We noticed that it was near an abandoned trailer and that the bank that the thing would have come down was really steep so we dismissed the idea that it was a person in some sort of a costume. When we got home that night we just had a terrible feeling of anxiety that night.

We heard noises but we tried to play music to cover up the sounds and we waited until daylight broke to go to bed. We were woken up again around 7am from banging right above us even though we were on the top floor. My fiance has been very upset and says she feels watched when she is alone at home but now she feels it when I am home as well. I don't know where to go from here but I wanted to stop. Any advice on what is going on or how to stop this would be greatly appreciated. In a previous thread I just posted, I discussed a very strange happening at my parents' house around 10 years ago. This instance is from around 2 years ago in mid-2016. I started working as a civilian in the MOD, which meant I spent six months living on an RAF base, Odeham to Chinooks. For around a week, I woke up every single morning at the same time.

I can't remember which hour it was, but it was on the hour either between 1am or 3am dead on. I know because I would text my girlfriend daily as it happened, complaining that I was woken up again at the exact same time. And I remember by the end of it, there was a sort of running joke. Yep, right on schedule, 3am wide awake. This happened for two weeks. I sometimes would hear a noise in my room from the cupboard. The sink started dripping one day. This was a very old building, World War I era, 1925 built and is used to film scenes of Downton Abbey, etc. On the final day this happened, my TV turned on to a terrestrial TV channel.

I had no aerial in it. There was no aerial around. It was literally a shell that I plugged my memory stick into to play whatever films I downloaded onto it. There was 100% no way that any sort of TV signal could be getting into this old style flat screen that required an aerial. I got up groggily and turned it off. I went back to bed, shut my eyes and the sound of static started coming out of the TV, getting louder and louder as if the volume was being increased. The TV screen was off. I literally ran up and ripped the plug from the socket and it stopped. As I got into bed though and turned my light off, I noticed the red on and off LED at the bottom of the set flicking.

I texted my girlfriend and told her what was going on and laughed to myself when I noticed the red on and off LED at the bottom of the set flicking. I texted my girlfriend and told her what was going on and laughed to myself when I noticed the timing. 3 AM, as I went back to sleep. As my time on that base went on, I got more and more edgier and nervous around the wardrobe. I don't know why. Nothing happened to it, but I remember constantly having to check that nobody was in there. Like the longer my stay on the base went, the more paranoid I got that somebody was in there. I've always suffered from nightmares but never really had any issues with sleepwalking. However, since around two to three years ago I have been having close to home nightmares in which the only way I can describe it

is an out-of-body experience similar to that of the terrible film Insidious. While sleeping in my nightmare I would feel myself wake up and move out of bed in a very floating feeling. I would move around my house. Suddenly they started to include beings, manifestations, things, darkness. It was almost as if these things that felt pure malevolent were sensing a human in their plane and were attracted to me. I have never been able to look in a mirror when in this nightmare strangely enough as if a strong magnet is repelling me but the end is always the same in the nightmare I escape from these things and I feel like a vacuum force sucking me into my body and I open my eyes and I'm stood outside where I escaped to this started to happen in my parents house which is featured in a previous post one that sticks in my mind and still haunts me I wake up in my parents house which is featured in a previous post, one

that sticks in my mind and still haunts me. I wake up in my bed to go downstairs and the house is exactly how it was, physically, same lighting and the lighting was in the same place as it always is. I moved downstairs and saw my parents were still in the lounge watching TV. I went into the kitchen when I felt the whole room go cold enough to see your breath and the lights in this place were dimmed a lot. Then I saw down the hallway three dark shadowy manifestations that had a white wispy glow behind where a face would be, about one foot off the floor floating through the room towards me. They felt pure natural evil, like the lion naturally

being drawn to the gazelle as prey. Everything felt slowed down as they were just sucking out my life force, no other way to describe it, and I was feeling groggy. I remember trying to snap myself out of this and made a slow and stumbling attempt to get out of the house. I got outside into the garden and woke up physically in the garden. Since then, I have lived in a few different houses. I consistently have these out-of-body experience dreams where I wake up and there is a presence in my room or at my window attached to me and drawn to whatever part of me is out of the body. I moved into a new flat last month with my girlfriend. First week we stayed there at her parents whilst I decorated with my brother.

I had an experience. I was walking around my flat, asleep, and it was chilly and my brother was on his phone in a spare bed, unaware I was there. I was trying to turn the lights on, but I was physically unable and then I heard a female disembodied voice shout whispering, Hello? As I know someone is there can hear me. Then my brother looked up and got out of bed and checked who was there out of the door where I was. I woke up in my own bed and my brother asked if I had heard it too.

He had heard footsteps and whispering which stopped outside his door and didn't go anywhere. I was ten and my sister three and being we were in a two bedroom home and girls we shared a room. Now my sister and I slept on a bunk bed and my sister had issues sleeping alone so she always wanted me to sleep with her on the lower bunk. Now the bunk beds didn't have side railings and my mom not wanting us to fall out of bed she bought side railings and put them on our beds. So one night here I am sleeping on the bottom bunk with sis who was snuggled close to me but by the railing and put them on our beds. So one night here I am sleeping on the bottom bunk with sis who was snuggled close to me but by the railing and I am up against the wall. I was sleeping

facing the wall and my sister behind me and for some odd reason I felt like I had to turn over and look behind me. When I did close to the railing I saw my mom staring at us with this big smile on her lips. I didn't think anything of it. I mean my mom always checked in on me and specifically my little sister at night so I simply say oh hey mom and I roll back over to go back to sleep. Not even one second from seeing her I remember I had to tell my mom something I'd forgotten to tell her I needed for school. So I roll back over knowing I'm going to see my mom there and she's gone. So I think, oh I guess I'll catch her down the hall. So I get out of bed and head to my door and down the hall. Mom's not there. I comically thought, wow she's fast, she must be in her room, which was right beside mine. So I go into the room and my mother and father are dead asleep snoring away.

Then it dawns on me, wait, mom couldn't have been that fast and already been dead asleep like that. The hair stands up on the back of my neck and I back out of my parents' room and go to my sister, whom by the way I am very protective of and crawl into bed, push her to the wall and I back out of my parents room and go to my sister whom by the way I am very protective of and crawl into bed push her to the wall and I sleep where she was because in my mind I am rethinking of what just happened and I don't want my sister near the railing now as I go over the image of my mother or what I thought was my mom nothing was off It was my mom except one thing. That smile of hers was wide, very wide. It was as if though it started from her right ear and went all the way to her left ear. It was unnatural and then I thought of how fast she had disappeared. I looked to my sister who

was sound asleep. I knew that wasn't my mom I just saw on my stomach turned. I think for what seemed like an hour I just stared over the railing watching in case I was going to see it again. Thankfully I didn't. I bundled my sister up with her favorite blankets she slept with and snuggled with her, put my big blankets over her heads like you do as a kid to feel safe from what goes bump in the night and with some time went back to sleep. Next morning I didn't tell my parents anything as again figured they just think I dreamt it. I promise you I didn't and so I kept this to myself for a very long time. I didn't tell my mom this story until I was in my late 20s and apparently she wasn't shocked and had her own stories to tell. I wasn't alone like I had thought I was.

I would like to think of myself as a little grounded when it comes to paranormal things. I don't just jump to the conclusion that what went bump under my radar was something unworldly. So I have to say I have gone over and over in my head with the details of the story I'm about to share, and I can promise you, the conclusion I came up with did in fact happen. A little backstory. Where this story takes place in a rural place in the outer banks of North Carolina, it is a place that is one-sided suburban and the other is lots of trees, wildlife and marshy area, moon and the stars. It is really pretty at night because you're able to see the stars clearly as long as you don't mind battling mosquitoes. It was summer and I was seven. It was eight o'clock in my bedtime. It was also a school night so off

to bed I went, of course after the ritual of brushing my teeth and hair and so on. Now I remember staring at my large bay windows from my bed that only had pink sheer curtains and noted how bright the moon was and how it made the tree's shadows seem eerie but I was used to it and I went to sleep. Now time passed I honestly don't know what time it was but I found myself slowly waking up to what was maybe the middle of the night with this uneasy feeling like I just couldn't get comfortable and that feeling that I was being watched. I didn't understand why I was feeling this at first and it didn't help that I was a little groggy. I don't know what made me look up from my bed into the window but I did

and why I was feeling the way I was was frighteningly answered. I saw through my window an imposing figure in a black silhouette. It had to be tall as my window was high up on the wall, broad shoulders and glowing eyes. Now the moon was full and bright that night so this thing's eyes could have been glowing because of the light of the moon but its eyes were red. I also noticed what looked to be pointed ears on its head but as a child I was frozen in fear thinking, my god, some person is outside staring at me and I should scream for my mom. But it was as though my vocal cords in my brain were a couple who had their first fight and just weren't talking to each other. All I could do is grab my covers and pull them as far

as I could up over my nose and only my eyes could be seen. I mean, after all, covers are more powerful things for kids and they save you from the boogeyman, right? So, at this point, I am a bundle of emotions and trying not to wet myself. Another thought comes to my mind. My window is a good maybe ten or feet so off the ground and this person is standing full form. I can see its waist all the way to the top of the bed. Then as this realization hits and the question is, is this a person, was answered. This thing turns its head to show a long snout, sort of like a wolf but not quite. That's when my bladder decided to say,

I'm out. All yours, buddy. I won't lie, it took a lot not to wet the bed even though my bladder was very willing to do so. It felt like an eternity as this thing just stared at me through the window and the fear I was going to be eaten like Red Riding Hood. Finally, my brain and vocal cords seemed to make up and right as I'm about to scream for my mom the thing backs up and runs off. It didn't make a noise or anything it was just gone. I laid there in shock thinking did this happen? Did I just see what I saw? I really need to use the bathroom but I'm not getting up. Like I said lots of stuff went through my head and as weird as it was I didn't call my mom or dad out of fear that they wouldn't believe me. I didn't

sleep well that night and what I did was with the covers over my head. I don't know what I saw but I thought maybe I dreamed it until I decided the next morning before school. I checked my window and the grass my father hadn't weed whacked yet was crushed by something very large and heavy. I would love to hear from anyone else who may have had similar stories like this as I'm not quite sure what this thing was but no it was something I'll never forget. So the four people in question are my big brother Max, my little brother Ron, my husband Brian, and me. The pharmacy in question is very small, maybe 500 square feet, with a couple aisles that are short enough to see over, and an open pharmacy area next to the only cash register. The front is made up completely of windows and the shop is in the middle of a plaza. Everything can be seen outside and there is nowhere to immediately turn or hide.

There is only one door to enter and exit from. I am the only one of this group who knew about the theory of dimensional jumping. Although I have talked to Brian about it, he had never taken it very seriously. Something he'll joke that we must have slipped dimensions when we remembered a conversation differently. Ron and Max have never heard of the phenomena and are classic skeptics regarding anything of that nature. I myself have never experienced anything to this degree. All that said, here's what went down. Ron, Brian, and I walk into this pharmacy and wait by the computer. No one sees Max come in. After a minute or so, all three of us see Max

outside the window, about 15 feet away. He's knocking on the glass, dramatically waving his arms in a what are you doing type of way and anxiously waving us towards him. We're confused but I offer to see what he wants and exit the store. Despite seeing him peripherally standing outside the windows the entire time, the second I walk out the only door I find that he's suddenly not there. No one else outside the shop or the neighboring shop stall. I yell out Max, Max a few times but no response. My little sister and her boyfriend come out of the shop and walk toward me. I ask if they've seen Max but they haven't. I don't leave the front of the shop at all during this time. I decide that he must have been impatient and ran off somewhere, willfully ignoring how impossibly fast he would have had to have been running,

so I went back into the pharmacy. As I walk in, I am baffled to find Max walking towards Ron and Brian. I walk up to him and ask, What did you need? Also ignoring the fact that there was no way he could have came inside without passing me. Max looks at me quizzically and asks me what I'm talking about. Ron and Brian and I spend the next couple of minutes explaining what happened, but Max insists that he was inside with us the entire time.

At this point, we're all suspicious of each other pulling some sort of stupid prank, but no one buckles. Max in particular loves messing with people, but could not keep a straight face to save his life. And as we talked and thought about it, we all realized that, prank or no, we simply could not explain how Max could have disappeared and snuck inside so instantaneously. We also considered the fact that it might have been someone else at the window, that we were the only ones in the shop. But the possibility of another six foot tall flamboyantly gay man with a pompadour, purple short shorts, and a bright blue tank top waving

directly at us seems really very slim. All three of us saw him and identified him as Max without question. This happened about a week ago now and I'm still wondering and hoping that other Max is doing okay. So to start off I need to give a little backstory. Growing up I lived in the country and we had this old couple who lived next to us that were in their 80s. When I was 21 my neighbor's wife had passed away in the house one night. They had no children and no one to really help take care of the old man after his wife passed away. So family friends of my neighbors came to me and asked if I would stay at the old man's house at night just to make sure he got to bed okay and to keep an eye on the place. This came at the perfect time because I had just gotten into the nursing program and they were offering me a pretty good amount of money just to sleep at his house.

I decided to take the job. I remember my first couple of nights were pretty creepy. I had to walk through the woods about a half mile to get to my neighbors and then walk into his pitch black house and find my way around using the light of my phone. After a while I got used to it and it was a pretty easy job. A few creepy things did happen in the house. My neighbors were in his 90s now and would wander the house at night and talk to his wife. Sometimes I would wake up and he would be standing next to my bed whispering things and it would freak me out but I would just walk him back to bed and remind myself I was making easy money. I would always sleep with the TV on because I like the background noise and I started having really weird dreams. The TV helped me to know it was only a dream. A few times I would have like an out-of-body

experience where I was dreaming but in the dream I was watching myself sleep in the room and I could see and hear the TV on. Those were the weirdest ones but I could just shrug it off because I needed the money and it worked out so good for school. One of the scariest nights I had I was up late studying for a test I had the next day and I kept hearing weird noises like someone was walking in the hallway. I got up a couple of times to check it out and nothing was there so I just shrugged it off of me just hearing things. The hallway was very noisy when you walked down it so that freaked me out a little that I heard the noise but no one was there. Also if you would stand at a certain spot in the doorway the table next to the bedroom would shake.

Well sure enough I woke up to the bedside table shaking like someone was walking into the room. At first I figured it was the old man standing next to my bed again but when I looked no one was there. It kept happening every few minutes and I was starting to get mad because I had a big test the next day. So I got up out of bed and yelled as loud as I could as if they were going to do something then to do it because I needed to get some rest. Nothing else happened the rest of the night and that was one of the last times anything creepy happened to me while I was there. I never had a feeling of being in danger or anything like that. I think it was probably his wife's spirit that was just there waiting for her husband to pass.

This is a really weird experience I had this past week. My boyfriend and I go to the movie theater at least twice a month and we've been so stoked to see The Nun. So we go on Saturday at 6.30pm showing and then grab dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings after. Sunday morning as we were getting breakfast, I mentioned a part of the movie. He asked me if I went to see the movie with my mom. I was so confused but I thought he was messing with me so I just looked at him and kind of laughed it off. He looked at me strange and asked how was it? I started getting freaked out and couldn't get words out of my mouth. I told him, you saw it with me, we ate wings after. So confused. Then he said, no, I worked last night, it was my weekend. Now we were both confused.

He showed me a text from his boss that was from 937 asking if he could stay until midnight. He worked second shift, which he replied that he could. I thought at first maybe I was dreaming that we saw the movie but I remember every part of it so obviously I did see it. He asked if I saw it with someone else and just for some reason my memory of it with him since we both wanted to see it so bad but I remembered I took a video and posted my snapchat while we were sitting in the theater waiting for the movie to start. It was no longer on my story but the video is in my Snapchat memories. It even shows that it was taken on the date at 6.23pm.

I showed him and now we're both confused. I'm trying to get a grasp on how this is possible or what could have happened. If anyone has any idea, please help me out. This is my first time experiencing something this weird. I'm not sure if this qualifies as a glitch or as some sort of intuition, and I'm sorry if it's in the wrong place, but my experience made me think of stories I've read here. Today something very strange happened to me and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I feel guilty and so unconfused. During my daily drive to grab coffee my navigation in my car kept sending me to random places. No matter

how many times I corrected it, it would change the destination the moment I would resume driving, so I just drove my normal route and muted the voice. I know it's weird to use the navigation for a drive that I make so frequently, but it's a comfort thing I guess. I was nearing my destination when I was suddenly overcome with anxiety and fear. I slowed down to 30 miles per hour in a 45 zone and was overcome with the need to call my partner. I told him about how I felt unsafe and scared and that I wanted to turn around and come home. I asked him to stay on the phone with me just in case something bad happened. He tried to comfort me but that gut feeling wouldn't abate. The driver behind me understandably

became frustrated that I was driving so slowly and went around me and shortly after we stopped at a red light. I had the worst feeling and my whole body started to hurt. I felt like I'd been hit by a bus or something. It was the most odd sensation. It felt like such a long red light and as it turned green I hesitated a moment. Everything else happened so fast. A truck sped through the red light and as it turned green I hesitated a moment. Everything else happened so fast. A truck sped through the red light and demolished the driver's side of the car in front of me. I knew it was going to happen somehow and it would have been me if I hadn't slowed down prior to getting to the light. I felt so guilty. So many people were getting out of their cars

running to help but I couldn't. I just pulled into a parking lot and sat there for a while. And then I somehow got home. I'm a 20 year old female. I live in California with my boyfriend and our German shepherd. I'm a big believer in the paranormal now, but I didn't used to be. My experience in life, however, have forced me to think differently. The story I'm going to recount takes place when I was 18. I was living with my mom in a small apartment in one of the shadier neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

I was working the dinner shift at a 24-hour McDonald's. The child support check stopped a month prior, so I was trying to help my mom make ends meet. The night before the events took place I was at a friend's house. So after work I came home with my overnight bag. I opened the front door of my apartment and set my bags down and say hi to my mom who is in the kitchen washing dishes. She doesn't respond so I greet her a little louder. Still no answer. I shrugged it off and walked into the hallway towards my room. My bedroom is across

from my mom's room so when you are standing in one you can see the other. When I walked past her room I froze. My mom was sitting on her bed reading, wearing something different than she had been minutes before. My mom looks up and asks what's the matter and I asked her how she was there and she was washing dishes not one minute before. She looks at me puzzled. I wasn't washing dishes I've been reading for two hours. I tell her that I saw her in the kitchen wearing something different and she laughs and asks what she was wearing. A blank tank top and blue shorts. She stops laughing. And you said I was doing dishes? She asks. I nodded and ask if she had did them or not. I did, she says. Yesterday. She said she had also been wearing the clothes I described the day

before. I had no way of knowing this and I hadn't been home at all the night before. I think about this a lot even today. I'll never know what really happened that day. Something strange happened last night that I cannot logically explain. I'll start by saying that while I am fascinated by the supernatural, I am also a hardened skeptic. This happened while my wife and I were walking home from our friend's house two city blocks away. The street we live on has a large park that stretches four or five blocks across from many rows of dutch brownstone townhouses. Each building has a stair stoop that reaches into the sidewalk.

So my wife and I are walking along the building's side of the street, chatting a little but mostly focusing on getting home because we both had to pee really bad. At one point she turns to me and says, everything keeps resetting. I laugh and assume she was referring to the fact that the apartments on the left all look very similar. So I make a joke, this must be what eternal torture looks like. Bladder's about to burst but no matter how fast you walk you'll never reach the bathroom. She laughs in a way that I can tell she is humoring me but the look on her face is concerned. I focus in a little more on our surroundings and that's when I notice that she wasn't kidding.

No matter how far we walked we didn't seem to be getting anywhere. Even describing this is difficult because I'm still not entirely sure what was happening. It felt like we were lagging in a video game. I can remember everything exactly as it was. Trash piled around a tree to the right, an orange traffic cone next to a set of white and brown stairs, a white car parked off to the right side. At first I didn't believe it and I assumed that it was indeed some trick of the eye illusion created by the similarities of the buildings on the left. I continued to make light of the situation, making jokes about how we were stuck in this

moment forever. That all of the memories weren't real and that the future would never come true. This is actually a joke I make often but even saying it aloud I started to feel like maybe it was the truth. My wife was trying to stay light hearted as well but I could tell she was freaked out. I decided I would try to stop walking entirely in hopes of breaking the loop but found that I couldn't seem to control my legs. After all, we still had to pee and that was quite the motivation to continue on. It felt like I had no control over the situation. And finally, after what felt like at least a half an hour or more, we began to break out of the cycle. Even then it still

felt like we would walk past three houses and then jump back to one. I remember we could finally see our building and despite having increased to a jog it still took another five or so minutes to reach the stairs. The entire experience felt so surreal and no matter how many times I ran through it in my head it only makes less and less sense. The walk should have only taken five minutes max and less because of how quickly we were moving. I've read about time discrepancies before, but I've always been skeptical. Now I don't know what to believe. I didn't leave the house at all yesterday, but today I went back to where the stoop started once again and discovered that we'd only been a 30 second walk from home the entire time. It was there but just

out of reach. It was so strange. I was around the age of 15 when the story took place and yes, as I stated before, these are true events that happened throughout my life. A little backstory, my mother and father at this time had been divorced for a good four or five years now, so she was a single mother raising three kids on her own as my father was never really in the picture. She had no easy job to say the least. My mother after my siblings and I went to bed and she was off work decided to take an hour or so to herself to get on the computer. She of course liked the time and the late 90s internet and chat rooms were a big thing and well my mom enjoyed talking and sharing her thoughts with those who seemed to be like-minded people. Fast forward a year, I'm 15 and my mother had many friends and one of the lucky few my mother

actually talked to on a personal level was named John. Actually a quick small note, his name wasn't John but I feel a bit weird using his real name and it's more so out of respect for him and you'll see why. John you see was dying and he was in a wheelchair. He had terminal cancer that spread throughout his body. He only was using 10% of his lungs. He had lost his legs to this terrible illness and being online was his way of being social as he couldn't get out much. He also kept his illness to himself only to confide in a few like my mother and a few others. So my mom and friend John would talk about things and when he had a bad day or my mom had a bad day they would try to cheer each other up by virtual dancing in chat rooms to the WAV sounds they played. Yes, I know it was weird.

Oh and did I mention that every time John would send an instant message hello he would send her this image. It was almost as if though he would type out the emoji of a rose. He also would tell my mother no matter where he was, he would always watch over my mom and her angels. Two days passed and my mother hadn't heard from her friend. She was concerned but not too concerned as again her friend probably was busy with other matters. On the third day one of his relatives instant messaged her and told her the sad news that John had passed away due to complications of his illness. He also wanted his relative to give her this and he typed out that rose,

which by the way he still found a way to give her a rose even in his passing. Now of course mom wasn't quick to believe so she did some investigating and yes in fact she found John's obituary and in that fact my mom cried. Another small note, one of my mom's hobbies is painting and she had shared many of her paintings with him through email. John loved them. This is where things get weird. Three days later I am sitting on the couch watching TV in the living room. My sister and brother are in bed and my mom is on the computer in the living room off on the other side of the room. It's quiet and then in the front room of our home that my mother called her studio we hear a loud thud. Now we both stop what we were doing

and look at each other with that did you hear what I heard look? I just slowly nod. We were in the country in the outer banks of North Carolina. I don't know what my mom was thinking but I was afraid that someone was in the house. Then I found myself saying to my mom, maybe it's a mouse. I probably did this to help my mom feel better and at the same time trying to calm myself down. I knew though that for a mouse to make that big of a thud, it had to be one of those rats from the movie or book The Princess Bride. You know, R-O-U-S. Mom gets up from the computer, walks over to the closet and grabs one of my old metal softball bats that she named Bubba and head towards her studio. I follow. When stuff like this happens, I tend to make jokes, call it a coping mechanism. So I

comically pictured someone watching this scene on TV throwing popcorn at the screen, shouting not to open the door and calling us dumb. So, yes, dumb as we were, my mom opens the door, quickly flips on the light, bat held high, and ready to swing whomever was in her studio. I watched as she lowered the bat as there was no one there. It was a small studio so you could clearly see everything in the room. Window, etc. was locked. Nothing. I watched my mother look around and then her eyes stopped on something, and the look on her face was easily described as pure confusion. I followed her gaze to a painting face down on the floor halfway across the room.

Her eyes then moved to look behind her to see her easel which had that painting on it before. I only know that the painting was on it because out of my mother's mouth was, I left my painting on the easel before I made dinner. How did it get over here? She looks at me for answers as we stare back at the painting across the room. Right, weird. I had no words and I watched as my mother moved over to her painting, picked it up, inspected it for damage damage seeing none and just put it back on the easel. We don't say any more about it that night and I go to bed and she does too. So on to the next day my mom and I say nothing about what happened last night and we go on about our days.

Again that night my mom's on the computer and I'm in my room. I hear a loud thud coming from the living room where my mom was. This time my siblings and I run to see if my mom was okay, afraid she might have fallen or something. We found mom staring down in a painting that had been on the wall for years now on the floor. Her face said it all. While she was busy doing her thing on the computer, the painting somehow just fell off the wall. I again, to make people feel better, say, Mom, it was bound to happen. The nail probably just moved or something. Nothing to worry about. Relief filled my mother's face as she agreed. My siblings went to bed and my mother of course asked me to put the painting back up on the wall, which I said I would do and, well, won't lie. I forgot about it that night and left it on the floor. My mother that night before bed

decided to leave it on the floor to teach me a lesson and see if I would remember to put it back up on the wall the next day. To my mother's delight, the painting was back up on the wall the very next morning and she was proud of herself and her painting skills as her plan worked. Her darling daughter actually put the painting back on the wall like she had asked. So she found me in the room and said, honey I want to thank you for putting that painting back up on the wall. I looked at her and my face looked odd as I said, mom I didn't put the painting on the wall. I forgot about it. Mom laughs a little. Stop joking like that.

I'm not joking mom. I didn't put the painting back on the wall. I reply and now I'm just as confused as she is. The only other person who would be able to put that heavy picture back on the wall was my sister because my brother was too little at the time. So my mom goes to my sister's in the living room and asks her, Hey dear, did you get on a chair to put the painting back up on the wall? My sister looked at her and shook her head. No mom. Now my mom is thinking us kids got together to play a horrible joke on her, which we assure her we didn't.

We were ourselves starting to feel that this was getting a bit creepy. As if a lightbulb went off on my mom's brain, she looks around the room and just shouts, alright John, I know you're here. Thanks for letting me know you're okay, but you're scaring the kids and me. You don't have to watch over us anymore. Go into the light. Yeah, we thought mom had lost it. I just stared at her and so did my siblings. Funny thing though, after she said that,

nothing like that happened again. Who knows if it was John or maybe something else. I just know, it was really weird. The holidays are just around the corner. How's your holiday shopping going? Personally, I've been struggling to find the perfect gift for loved ones. I really wanted to buy my parents something that has meaning.

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That's right. To get $10 off your purchase of a Skylight Frame, just go to skylightframe.com and enter code READ. That's S-K-Y-L-I-G-H-T-F-R-A-M-E dot com promo code READ. First, some background information on myself.

I am Dee, a female in her 30s. This story started when I was only around 19 and a newly minted college freshman. I am the stereotypical sickly introvert who grew up in a small town preferring her colored pencils and music to socializing. As a result of chronic illness and being shy, I had very few real friends and was very behind on social skills by the time I entered college. This means that I often overlooked what are now obviously red flags and got myself into stressful situations that I shouldn't have been in.

This carries relevance to the story later. It was about two months into my first college semester. I had made a few friends on a surface level and was making an effort to socialize more to make up for lost time. I was friendly with everyone and tried to find other people to sit with in the cafeteria so that I didn't have to eat alone. One day my usual plan of chatting a few people up failed and I ended up at a table by myself. Just as I took an enormous bite of cheeseburger, a tiny child-sized woman comes up to me carrying her own dinner tray. Mind if I sit here? She asks in a loud shrill voice that is enough to make me jump. I nod, mouth still full. She introduces herself, I'll call her M in this story.

I can already tell that I'm not going to get a word in edgewives, so I continue to eat while M talks and talks. At first, I never mind this because all I have to do is listen. We find some common ground. She liked photography and scrapbooking, whereas I am a drawer and painter. We visit each other's dorm rooms and give decorating tips. We eventually become inseparable, like sisters, and start making a lot of bigger projects together. It becomes the sisterhood friendship of movies. We tell each other about our guy problems. I had never dated in high school and she was married but having trouble in that area.

We were taking the same major, psychology, so we did homework and studied for tests together. She invited me to her church, even though I was a Wiccan at the time. Eventually I said yes out of curiosity. Months later, she came to my baptism. We'd bring each other medicine when one of us would get sick and just generally helped each other out a lot. This went on for the first two years. However, all good things must come to an end. About halfway through college, Em starts to change and not in a good way. She becomes

emotionally unstable and clingy. She wants to be with me all the time. Not knowing how to politely set boundaries, I start ducking her constant phone calls. She begins to message me on Facebook when she can't get me on the phone. Not long after, she comes looking for me in my room since we lived in the same dorm hall. She starts to hate my other friends and becomes resentful if I spend time with them and I don't invite her, something that was getting more common after a while. I thought she was just stressed out because she wasn't doing well in class and her marriage had hit a few bumps. She and her husband were fighting quite a lot. I tried to be sympathetic but you burn out after this goes on for so long. She does attend

counseling but it doesn't seem to help her. She starts bursting into tears in the middle of class, once when she found out she had failed a test. I tried to hide mine because I got nay and didn't want her to feel bad. Instead of going to take a hot bath, a nap, or a TV marathon like most people do to recoup, she called me again when she couldn't find me. I was doing all of the aforementioned things myself, and continued to cry about that test, for four hours. I know, part of that was my fault.

The worst part, however, was yet to come. My senior year, I started dating a guy. He's the first boyfriend I've ever had and, again, I didn't recognize some serious red flags. He didn't drink or do drugs or hit me, nothing like that, but he did use me academically a lot and exploit my feelings in order to get away with things he shouldn't have. A good friend would warn you about this but realize that you have to make your own decisions and sometimes learn the hard way. She hated my ex. She said if I didn't break up with him that she would have me taken out of class and dragged up to the counselor's office. Incredulously, I said, good luck finding me. I skipped class and my boyfriend and I went out to breakfast. She was furious and actually called my parents to tell on me. They said they knew about my boyfriend that it was none of their business who I dated. It was only the first of

many phone calls that she made to them. Mind you, they live in a whole different state at this point and wouldn't have been able to do anything about it anyways. I started really distancing myself from Em because she and my boyfriend hated each other and can't even be in the same room without it being weird. I was still hanging out with Em but much less frequently. She started to tell me things that I had no business of knowing like intimate things that should have just been between her and her husband. She'd ask me about me and my boyfriend. I was appalled and chose not to answer. Graduation comes and I move out of the dorms and into my own apartment. Em begins to show up there without any warning or invitation and just expects me to let her in. I politely tell

her to stop. She gets mad, cries, wails like a toddler and makes a general scene. She can't drive so her husband has to drop her off and pick her up and that's what makes this unsettling. The first straw comes one hot summer day. Em shows up uninvited again after I'd messaged her to try to explain why I was not avoiding her and that I just needed some time to my own. I was still de-stressing from college and getting my things arranged in the apartment. I also hadn't been feeling well and wasn't up for company. She knocks loudly on the door, then starts yelling at me to let her in. This escalates to her pounding with all her strength on the door,

then on the windows. Then I hear something hard hit the glass as if she's actually trying to break them. If I had to do it over, I'd have just called the cops, but I was so freaked out that I couldn't think. My chest starts to hurt from stress and I hide in the closet so as not to make any detectable noises. My mother calls while I'm in there and warns me that M is demanding to know where I am. She's apparently telling my parents everything I'm doing wrong, even stupid things like apparently eating too fast. I also find out that she's been talking to all of our mutual friends behind my back. I message her after she had left and I've calmed down enough to type without shaking.

I tell her that our friendship is over and that I can't take this anymore and that I've tried to talk to her nicely and she kept ignoring me. She then runs out of the house and her husband calls me to chew me out. I ignore the call. My parents call saying that he has called them too, saying that she's run out of the house into the woods and it's all my fault if something happens to her. I see now how much he has truly been enabling her and decided that he has to go too. I block them both on Facebook, erase their numbers from my phone and decide that enough's enough. It's not enough for them though. M's husband continues to drop her off at my apartment.

I either hide or leave with my boyfriend if I get a warning that she's coming. Once I saw their car pulling into the parking lot as my boyfriend and I were leaving. M then tells every single one of her friends that I'm being horrible to her so they harass me with the good intentions of trying to help fix it. I tell them quietly that there is no fixing it and I just want to go on from this. I never say anything bad about her and begins lying to all of us then. She first says she's having seizures, then says she's pregnant, then says she might end her own life and is doing things and writing things without remembering that she's done them.

I feel bad but I stand my ground because my health suffers tremendously at this point. She still shows up where I am and I have no idea how she knows I'm going to the store at a certain time or a certain restaurant. It occurs to me now that she and her husband have been following me. I threaten to get a restraining order because I can't look over my shoulder now without seeing them. They relent but she continues to stalk me through social media and writes weird comments on all my friends posted photos of me. I say I no longer care as long as I don't have to see it. I start to believe this is the end. Two years pass, I get into a new relationship, get married, take a second bachelor's degree.

Em still writes on all of my husband's posts about me and I mean all of them. At one point, I was scared she'd show up to our wedding and put me on the spot. Thankfully, she was too far away when that happened. She still sent messages through our mutual friends. I brush it off and go back to celebrating though I feel queasy inside. My husband asked me if I'd be more comfortable if he blocked her on Facebook. At first I shrug and say only if she gets carried away. As her statuses gradually melt into weird incoherent rants he still gives her the benefit of the doubt. However she begins to harass him too and she never stopped with my parents until they had

her number and social media blocked from theirs. My husband is a forgiving guy and will put up with a lot, but at this point he sees that our friendship can never be salvaged and that M has degenerated from a mentally ill person to a dangerous and stressful one. There are rumors that she may be moving back to our town or a neighboring one. All I can hope is that her husband got tired of driving her around for nothing and that she doesn't end up back on our doorstep. After all, I still have the same apartment. This happened a few months ago. It was the middle of the summer and I live in Tennessee. This means the temperature can be either tolerable or just plain unbearable depending on the season. Summers here tend to be the worst in my opinion because of how bad the humidity and heat can be when the conditions are met. So when it's too much for me to handle and I need to go to bed, I just go

downstairs from my bedroom to the TV room and sleep on the couch because it's cooler. Before going into the story, let me describe the layout of our house that's relevant. The staircase going upstairs is in the kitchen, which is also where my back door is. The back door is in horrible condition and the cats have found out how to open it themselves. Going downstairs, the room to the right is what we call the TV room, which has exactly what you'd expect for a room called the TV room. A television, some consoles, movies, anything in the entertainment category. To the left of the staircase is the dining room, living room, my dad's office, and the front door, all in that order. If you seat yourself just right in the living room, you can

see into both the dining room and kitchen with the back door visible. Now that that's out of the way, on with the story. It was going on midnight and it just rained. So right then the humidity was doing its work and making it hotter than it really was. I went downstairs and was about to get on the couch in the living room when my dad asked what I was doing up. I explained that it was just too hot upstairs but he wouldn't hear it. Because he was working late he didn't want anyone downstairs to interrupt his work. I was too tired to try to convince him that he should let me sleep down there so I decided I'll just wait until he goes to bed in the living room before sneaking down into the teething room to cool off. I was really tempted to just sleep there anyway but I didn't want to test my dad's patience. About an hour later I figured that he was done after not hearing anything from downstairs but right as I was going

to sneak down there I heard the floors creaking downstairs. We live in a very old house, so it was easy for the house to make sounds from even the lightest footsteps. Because of this, I figured that my dad was still working and he was walking around to get something. He pulled an all-nighter one time, so him being up this late wasn't surprising. So I just plugged in my desk fan and let it blow in my face since it was obvious that I wasn't sleeping downstairs. The next morning, I woke up to my parents on the phone sounding pretty distraught. It only took me eavesdropping to realize what had happened. My dad decided to go to bed a few minutes after he sent me back upstairs and went to sleep on the living room sofa. When he did, one of my door

opening cats pushed open the back door for whatever reason. The creaks I had heard were people walking into the house through the now open back door and stealing the TV, Xbox, some purses, and anything else that had value in the kitchen and TV room. It was later found that they had even found the key to my mom's old jeep and stole that too. It's been at least three months and I'm still thinking about what would have happened if I went downstairs when I did. Would I have seen who robbed us? Were they armed? What would have happened if my dad woke up and saw them from his spot in the living room? These days we're making sure to lock the doors at night,

and we're even disciplining our cat to make sure he stops opening doors. We made sure to fix up the front door, but we still have the back door to do. Money's tight, so we'll have to deal with that. Yes, we did call the cops, but my parents didn't want to go through the drama of dusting for fingerprints. The best we can do now is carry on and count our lucky stars that none of us were hurt. My mother, now 70 years of age, grew up in the rural countryside of Thailand. Her village did not have any electricity, indoor plumbing or running water.

Everyone in her village literally lived in huts that are set about 20 feet away from a river that everyone bathes in. My mother told me that in her adolescent years, she developed quicker compared to the other girls in her village. This resulted in some catcalls and unwanted attention to her that made her uncomfortable, especially when it came time for bathing in the river. The bathing situation was co-ed. Everyone bathed with everyone else, men, women, and children. As a result of the unwanted attention, my mother would wait until nightfall before bathing.

Keep in mind, she did this all with just the glow of one candle. The river was pitch black and under the glow of the moonlight, she could only see just about two arm lengths away. One night, as she was bathing in the river, she caught something bobbing in the water out of the corner of her eye. Thinking it was some idiot male or someone trying to take a peek or play a prank, she turned her full attention to it and stepped towards her candle for better lighting. It was under the candlelight that she could make out something round, just bobbing on the surface of the water.

Initially, she thought it was just a coconut that had fallen from the other side of the river, so she continued to bathe, albeit at a quicker pace. All of the sudden, she swore the round bobbing coconut stopped right in front of her just a couple of feet away. With her bathing in the river, the water was not stagnant. She had caused some rippling effects and the coconut should not have been able to stop just in front of her for a good few seconds. As she was staring it down, unsure of what to do, she swore the whole round thing started to bob its way towards her. That was when she hightailed out of the river and ran back into her hut. From then on, she never bathed alone again. So a little bit of background, I'm 23 and female. About four years ago I used to work at a mom and pop sushi restaurant part-time and was attending a small community college full-time.

So indubitably I was a typical broke college student. Bear with me, this all ties together. In class, I mentioned to one of my classmates that I worked at the small restaurant and wanted to bring him one of our specialty roles. We were working on a project, so after work, I was going to stop by and pick up some supplies from his home. As I was backing out of the sushi parking lot, I crashed into my manager's Ford Explorer. Great. I looked over at her SUV and not a dent was made, but to my surprise, I dented my blue Hyundai Accent rear bumper and smashed my taillight. As I told my manager what happened, and was surprised they didn't fire me on the spot, they referred me to a small body

shop down where I lived. They said I was able to afford the cost so I drove down the following day. Surprising enough, I was able to afford the cost and the work would be completed within a week. Since the shop was about three miles away from my home, I asked one of the guys from the shop when was the next bus stop, but the owner told me that one of his boys would be able to drop me off. I hesitated, and after I did my research on the bus stop times, which was 30 minutes for the next stop, I agreed. I was greeted with a guy named Juan. He looked like he was in his late 20s, early 30s, and he spoke only Spanish. Coming from a Mexican home, I also knew Spanish, so chatting to him was fairly easy. He asked me if I was a student,

what was my major, and asked me what happened to my car. I told him about my dilemma and began to laugh. As we were approaching my neighborhood, he then asked, so how old are you? I replied, I'm 19 going to be 20 this June. The atmosphere changed and then he asked me in a hushed tone if I had a husband, which by now red flags were ringing in my head because I was too young to be even considering marriage. I lied and told him yes. I was well aware he was taking me directly home, currently in his car, and my gut was telling me to get out. The next thing he says to me still gives me creeps to this day. Wow, what a shame that a beautiful girl like you is taken. Why don't I take you somewhere nice and show you what it's like to be with a real man? I almost threw up in my mouth. I needed to think fast because I needed to find a safe

location so he won't figure out where I live. So I told him to drop me off in front of this nearby church. As I was getting out of his car, I immediately said in Spanish, how gross, and I ran inside the church. A week passes by. I told my dad if he can pick up my car from the shop and thought I permanently closed a creepy guy chapter for my life up until recently. I now work at a popular dealership and I work as a cashier. A guy says, excuse me, in Spanish. I look up and notice it was him. He then says, we meet again, beautiful. For reference, I am a 25 year old female and this happened last year around December. I work for a janitorial company and work night shifts, currently at a really nice account that I've been working at since this January. Before I was put at this account though, I was shuffled around the city from one 2-3 hour

account to another for a few weeks, which was tiring and stressful as I was not very familiar with the city and it was putting a lot of miles on my 21 year old car. One of the accounts I was scheduled at was a funeral home in a pretty rough part of that town. That one time, many decades ago, was once a fairly nice neighborhood. My schedule there ran from 9pm to 11pm every Tuesday and Thursday, and I hated every minute of it. It was a very old building, over a hundred years of history, and I had to be there all by myself the entire shift. There were 8 entrances to the building including the garage door where the bodies were delivered. The main entrance was

a large, ornate, beautiful pair of glass doors that led out onto the street. Many of the other doors didn't open anymore. It was a very spooky place and I made sure that every light in the three story building was on and I had Disney music playing on my phone before I started cleaning. It was around 10 30 p.m. on one of the nights I was working there. I was on the first floor vacuuming the carpet of the large main chapel with the doors open which gave me a view of the glass doors to the funeral home. Out of nowhere through the music blaring in my headphones and the vacuum running, I heard a very loud banging. Already on edge from being alone in that large creepy building,

I yelled and felt my heart instantly start pounding as I quickly shut off my vacuum, paused my music, and scanned every one of the eight open archways leading into the chapel. Silence. No movement. I was frozen. All I heard was my heartbeat ringing in my ears. Suddenly I heard something else, even louder. A doorbell. Strangely enough, my very first thought was, why does a funeral home need a doorbell? But my second thought was, someone's at the door. I thought maybe it was my supervisor coming to check up on me, but then I remembered that they told me we only had the key to one of the doors to the funeral home, but it was the employee entrance, so there would be no reason for them to come to the front door. And even then, I made sure they knew to call me before just stopping by as they'd spooked me before. Knowing that whoever was out there had probably already seen me in here, I turned around to see who was

there. It wasn't my supervisor. It was a man wearing all black, a black scarf around his head and an oversized black jacket. I was instantly nervous but giving him the quick benefit of the doubt, thinking that maybe he needed directions or had an emergency. I walked up to the glass doors, I stood a good five feet from them and did not even consider reaching for the door handle, my hand close to the pocket knife I had in my pants pocket. Now able to get a better look at him, I saw that he wasn't very tall and all of his clothes were too large for him, but he didn't look dirty or ragged. He also had tools hanging all over his body, screwdrivers, hammers, a tire iron, and other various metal things that I didn't have much of a chance to notice without seeming awkward. However, I did notice his left hand wrapped in black cloth and giant padlock hanging

from his grasp. I quickly looked up at his face. He didn't smile or show any emotion at all. Can I help you? I asked. Is this place open? He asked. Do you work here? I shook my head. No, I remind you, this is a funeral home and it's after 10.30 at night in the middle of winter. I knew that he knew it wasn't open, even if a lot of the lights were on. No, it's closed. I'm just the janitor. I told him, not knowing what else to say. Is there anyone else here? He asked. There was really no way for him to know if I was alone or not and I know I should have lied and said yes but being in the heat of the moment, nervous and honest to a fault, I said no. He just nodded, staring at me, still not

showing much emotion. I didn't know what else to say and he had gone silent so I just said I was sorry and I couldn't help him with anything and walked back towards the chapel. I could feel his eyes on me the whole time I walked until I finally turned a corner and went out of his sight. Once I was in the hallway I ran to the closest door that I could find that I knew would lock and shut myself in. It was the reception office for the body deliveries and it reeked of formaldehyde but I hardly noticed. I was shaking. I pulled out my phone and called my supervisor as fast as I could, knowing he was still outside and could already be using that pad lock to break through the glass doors or into my car that was parked right outside the employee

entrance on the side of the building. I told my supervisor everything but she being the helpful one simply told me, don't let him in. Yeah, thanks. After hanging up with her I called my fiance, now husband, and told him what was going on. As expected, he was far more upset that my supervisor had been and told me he was already getting in his car to make the 15 minute drive from his workplace to the funeral home. I stayed in the office until we got there then quickly let him inside. He didn't see the guy anywhere but he stayed with me to help shut off all the lights and put everything away, holding a long plastic ice scraper in his hand all the while in case the guy showed up. Luckily he never did and I never had any other instances like that for the remaining few weeks

I worked there. Even so my fiance insisted I carry his pistol to work with me from then on. All I can think about is how uncaring my supervisor seemed about the situation but how lucky I am the guy never actually used that padlock to smash through those glass doors, as I'm sure had been his intentions had I not been there. As a college student, I barely get any sleep, but this time around it changed. It was about 7.51pm when I went to bed. My room was filled with a cold, harsh breeze of air. That's when I noticed I was dreaming.

I was no longer in my apartment in North Florida. I was in a colder state where it snows. No sound could be heard in my dream but it was a lot of movement. I was a part of a group of students. We entered this room that had an air vent up above. A horrible smell came from the vent and the police were called in. After minutes went by in my dream something was pushing me to go closer to the vent. I didn't want to personally but it was something familiar about it. It was like the vent was calling me to come home. As I slowly approached the vent, my dream became darker.

White walls slowly turned black. That's where you've been this whole time. You were killed and placed into a vent. You had several deep cuts into your skin. Your hair covered up your face and bruises. I couldn't look at your rotten flesh, but I was sorry for you. I didn't know you died, but you wanted me to see you. I don't know where to begin, but I just knew you died and your body laid cut up and motionless in this vent.

As I turned away, you wanted me to watch you being pulled out. I felt pressure tighten up in my chest, but it was only because you wanted me to know you died. That's when I woke up. 2.47am, the room is still cold, but not warming back up. You're leaving me now, but I hope that I don't have to see you every night. And honestly, I'm deeply worried for you. This happened several years ago when I was a naive 19 year old college student. A bus company had just returned from being on strike and as a special promotion were letting people ride free for two weeks. I saw myself as adventurous and took this as an invitation to go

randomly riding all over the city. One of my little adventures was a bit scary. I was at a bus stop in some random unfamiliar part of the city. A man was next to me. We were the only ones there. I like to be nice to strangers and so engage in conversation. Things escalated quickly. The man started telling me that he was some sort of crime boss and that he was aiming to kill a certain person. He said something along the lines of I don't like when I have to do it but sometimes they cause me trouble and I gotta do what I gotta do.

I was afraid that he would hurt me if I upset him so I politely nodded along as though what he was saying was completely ordinary. Luckily for me his bus soon arrived. He got on route 2 to a place called Pleasantville. I don't remember what part of the city I met him in to this day. I don't know if it was a legitimate gang member or just delusional nor do I know if he actually got to his target or anybody else but I avoid route to to Pleasantville this is an insane part of my childhood that I'll never forget I have to take

you back pretty far so you understand how my neighbor's mental and physical state deteriorated in front of us. When we moved into our house back in 2003, our neighbor, Ann, for the sake of privacy, immediately made us feel unwelcome by being rude to our dogs. We had a beagle at the time. If you own a beagle, then you understand that they don't bark, they bay. It's not a bark, it's a bark and a howl mixed together. It's very loud and very annoying. It made no sense to me as a kid because she had dogs too and they barked just as much as ours. I should point out that we were next door neighbors so she easily had access to our backyard. As the months followed of trying to ignore this crazy woman we barely knew, it got to

the point where we couldn't ignore it any longer. The breaking point was watching her grown son, who is now a cop, throw his brand new shoes at our 12 year old beagle. My mom practically exploded out of the house and went nuts. I can't remember the argument they had as I was only seven. A few short months later our beagle had a stroke and we put him down. Anne, being insane, decided to call a truce and give us cookies as she could tell we had put him down since he wasn't out baying anymore. She apologized and for a few years everything was great. My mom and her would talk for hours on end. We'd mow her lawn, snowblow her driveway.

Then suddenly in 2013 she was diagnosed with cancer. I forgot to mention that she was a smoker, a very avid smoker. Anytime she was outside smoking she would say to us kids, please never smoke, it's not good for you. I can say that I saw first hand what an addiction to cigarettes can do to a person. Now I can say that she saw firsthand what an addiction to cigarettes can do to a person. Now I can say that she flipped a switch because she got sick. Her actions still aren't justified, but I understood. When something that you have chosen to do is now killing you, you'd be bitter about it too. We had a cat that we would let outside. He'd go out in the morning and come back at night. He was the

sweetest cat you'd ever meet and I don't even like cats for the record. For some reason, Anne didn't like that he would get out. She bought an animal trap and put cat food in it, hoping to catch him and put him into the pound. When we found out what her intentions were, we stopped letting him go out. We got him tagged and just kept trying to keep him inside. Also, while this was happening, she took a weed whacker to divide our front yards as the yards just ran together. I'd like to say that the cops were absolutely useless. The Lincoln, Nebraska police department is useless. They did nothing to help us, even though what she did was clearly illegal. One day, our cat got out. My little sister had a dance

recital and my parents were gone. It was just me and my little brother home. I walked out to grab something out of my car and saw him in the trap. I immediately called my dad. She's got tinker, I'm crying. We knew that I couldn't go over and get him or she'd call the cops for trespassing and most likely assault me. So I stood by our fence that was the official divider of our properties. I called his name and told him that things were going to be okay but I noticed that he wasn't okay. He was a vocal cat and you could almost have a conversation with him. But at that moment he wasn't responding to me and his head kept dropping. I could tell he was struggling to stay awake.

I called my dad again. There's something wrong with him. He's not talking back to me. He looks drugged. My parents, being stuck at the recital, called animal control, also useless. I decided to go get something out of my car when I turned around and went to walk back over to him. The cage was gone and as I reached the edge of the fence, she pulled out of her driveway. This woman had trapped our cat, drug him and took him away. He has never come back so we assume the worst. If you're wondering if she

was punished or at least ticketed in any way, she wasn't. The LPD is a waste of taxpayer money here. As the months went by her health got worse. She still came outside to let her dogs out and smoke. In 2014 she passed away. She had literally smoked herself to death. She didn't get to live to see her son and his wife have a baby. Her dogs were too old to be placed with anyone so they were put down. I believe in heaven and hell and I can tell you confidently that she's in hell. On a happier note, the cat she killed has a sister who is still with us. She's vocal just like him and she's the fattest cat you've ever seen. This happened a few years ago when I was about 23. I live in walking distance of the mall and don't drive so I walk to and from the mall a lot. One night I left the mall and right outside was a man who had just been in a fight.

He was yelling at someone and said that he was going to get his son to end the man. I'm pretty sure he was very drunk and not the fun kind of drunk. The I better not upset him or probably hurt me kind of drunk. He approached me and continued talking about how he was going to get his son to hurt the man that he was fighting with. He followed me down the street while telling me delusional stories about how he was the richest man in the world. I am not convinced the son he spoke of exists. When we got to his house, he invited me in for a beer. I probably should have said no, but I feared he would have kept following me. I wanted to be rid of him, so I figured if I just had one beer and went on, he might leave me alone. So, in what probably was against all better judgment, I went inside his

house. The inside of his house was very sketchy. There was a mattress in the middle of the living room floor and there was a coffee table with a dozen empty beer bottles and some other paraphernalia on it. I'm pretty sure the man was completely out of his mind and mentally ill. I watched him open a beer for me so I'm fairly certain it wasn't poisoned. He also offered me some smokes but I declined since I never really smoke and don't know how it would affect me. Beer I figured was safe enough considering I normally drink vodka. My plan was to finish one beer and get out of there. The man asked me if I had a boyfriend. I truthfully said no but immediately realized the smart thing would have been me if I had a boyfriend. I truthfully said no but immediately realized the

smart thing would have been to pretend I had a tough and very jealous boyfriend. I came to my senses and made up that I had a protective brother waiting for me at home. The man offered to be my boyfriend. I declined, claiming something about how my brother wouldn't like that. At one point the man said he was going upstairs to get something and for me to wait. At that point I was certain I was about to die. I didn't finish my beer. I laid it down and insisted I had to leave immediately before my brother got worried. I got out as fast as I could, ran home, and thank god I live in a building with a door that locks automatically. I never interacted with that man again. I'm not entirely

sure which house he lived in. I sometimes see him walking down the street talking to himself. At one point he came close and I got scared but he didn't seem to notice me and went on talking to himself. Now when walking home at night I talk to my mom on the phone so that it's clear that someone knows where I am. I was raised in a family where a lot of us are spiritually sensitive. My mother has vivid nightmares about the deaths of people she doesn't know. My younger brother has been able to see spirits since he was a child, and he has since gravitated to the practice of Reiki, as he began to fine-tune his ability to perceive people's energies, living and otherwise. To my family, the paranormal was a very real and accepted part of our natural world. Despite my family background and my brother's experiences,

I never had any paranormal experiences of my own growing up. I was frustrated by this, determined to answer the question of what is left of us when our bodies and consciousness are no longer connected. Determined to answer this question, I built my own spiritual sensitivity from the ground up. I used oracles, such as the Ouija board, consulted with psychics, and used my own common sense. Surprisingly, my efforts paid off, and when I knew I had a presence willing to communicate, I was able to piece together the words and feelings it wished to convey. Now, if my newfound spiritual sensitivities seem vague and akin to a lazily written superpower, you're not wrong. I began to doubt myself and the validity of what little contact I was able to make,

leading me to abandon the search for spiritual contact entirely. Little did I know that was about to change. I was a junior or senior in high school, and it had been at least a year or so since I last worked seriously with the paranormal. As suggested by my parents, I joined a Taekwondo school a couple of years after we moved to the area so I could socialize and learn something new. It was hard at first, but it quickly turned out to be one of the healthiest decisions of my life. In the midst of my stress and loneliness, I found structure and a welcoming community in my dojang, which is like a dojo for taekwondo. My master, a young Korean man who was ex-military and spoke broken English, was like a second

father to me. He, the other instructors, and the school administrator became fast friends with me and my family. I was thrown in with other students of all ages and skills but we all treated each other with respect and as equals. I'm no stranger to athletics and was in decent shape after doing track in middle school and high school so I mastered the techniques quickly and ended up earning my black belt before graduating and moving to college.

Because of the speed at which I learned I was often called upon by my master to mentor the less experienced students when we were short on instructors for the day. This is how I met a student who stood out to me in particular. It sounds pathetic, but I don't even remember his name, so we'll call him Steven. Steven looked to be about 14 or 15. He was pale, lanky, and wore glasses. He definitely gave off the impression that he could use some self-defense training. Shortly after joining our dojang, my master instructed me to spend part of the class teaching him the basics one-on-one. To put it bluntly, this kid was a handful. He would never sit still and every time I looked in his direction,

he would be copying whatever I did. Not only while we were doing the exercises, but also if I was standing a certain way or held my arms at a certain angle during breaks. He did all of this with a big smirk on his face, saying nothing. Needless to say, this got tiring very fast. I would snap at him, telling him to focus and to cut it out. This was a place of respect and I felt disrespected. After a bit of cajoling and a couple stern words from my master, he settled down and would do as I said. After some time, we came to an unspoken agreement. If he toned his energy down a couple of notches and listened to my instructions, I would give him the time of day, so to speak. He didn't need to try so hard to get my attention. Something I learned

later was his goal all along. I was his teacher and he was my pupil, and I took my role seriously, brief and infrequent as it was. I learned after speaking to the parents and my instructors after class that he was bullied a lot and had a level of social awkwardness that probably put him somewhere on the autism spectrum. He had trouble making friends and didn't take it lightly that I took the time to train him one on one. He looked up to me and at the time, almost no one looked up to me or even knew I existed. It filled me with pride to think that I could be to him even a fraction of what my master was to me. My relationship with Stephen stayed professional, and I didn't see him often, but I still cared for him and formed a bond with him that other students in my dojang hadn't.

It had been maybe a month or so after I first met Stephen, and we had just finished practice for the night and I was sitting with my mother in the front office as she gossiped with the superintendent of the school. This was a regular occurrence and since it was often the last class of the day, the staff and students often stood around in the lobby before departing for the night, either to wait for their families to pick them up or just to chat. I had been half listening to my mom complain about work to my superintendent as I doodled on a piece of printer paper. My art skills were half decent but for me it was more of a fun little distraction than anything else. I eventually finished the drawing and my mom must have sensed

my impatience because she began to bid my superintendent goodbye and we both stood to leave. On our way out I ran into Stephen and muttered a quick goodbye before realizing that I was still holding the picture I drew. I was just going to throw it away when I got home, so without thinking much of it, I slid the paper into his hands and told him it was his to keep. He beamed and I couldn't help but smile back. This next part is sort of fuzzy, so bear with me. Since the encounter listed above, it has been a while since I had seen Steven. I hadn't been back to taekwondo class for a week or so, whether because I became busy with school or simply because I didn't feel like going. It was

past midnight, maybe around 2am, when I found myself sitting at my desk trying to finish a school project that was due the morning of. Typical teenage procrastination. I had not touched a Ouija board or even thought about ghosts for a year now. If I felt anything prior to this moment, it was probably frustration as I was mentally kicking myself for not finishing this project earlier. Then I felt it. I became aware of it instantly. Something or someone was standing behind my chair. How I feel and react next is a little difficult to explain but I will do my best. Whatever it was, I knew it was a spirit. It's like the feeling you get when you're in a stranger's personal space, that uncomfortable vibration you get that radiates off their body. It was behind me now. I was familiar with those disembodied

feelings, but they were almost never this strong, and they never occurred in my own bedroom. Even my spiritually sensitive family agreed that my room was like a safe space where unwanted or restless energy dared not enter. Soon after it appeared, the energy I felt standing behind me seemed to lean over, as if to put its hands on my shoulders. I don't know why this is the mental image that I envisioned, but I was certain that whatever was standing behind me was changing posture. I felt my body stiffen and I was afraid to turn around, despite knowing I would see nothing behind me. I felt myself in this stalemate with this entity for several minutes. I sensed that the entity was

almost grinning as my body flashed hot and cold. Finally, I had had enough. My next actions are measured and calculated. I'd like to start off by saying that spirits can read your mind. It makes sense. Why wouldn't they be able to hear your thoughts if they can already feed off your energy? I have tested this by thinking of a question but not saying it out loud while playing with a Ouija board with my friend. The planchette would move to answer the question intelligently despite me not moving it and my friend not knowing I had asked a question in the first place. I didn't bother questioning the intent of the spirit. At best, it was only trying to scare me, but I was going to scare it back tenfold. With a small snarl, I shouted a command in my head. Leave me alone.

The pressure of the spirit was exerting on me lightened up, I felt the emotion it was giving off shift from something intimidating to something like shame, embarrassment even. This caught me slightly off guard so I opened myself up slightly to see what it might have to say, sort of like turning on and turning into a radio. Hi. It was faint, like the voices I receive so often are. Despite my usual curiosity, I hold towards spirits willing to communicate. I still felt threatened and wanted it gone. I told it again to go away and finally began to feel its presence fade. I picked up on a hint that it was still trying to communicate and listened one last time. Sorry.

And then it was gone. I don't remember if I ever finished that school project that night. The next day my parents told me that my grandfather, who I believed to be an especially strong psychic, but he won't admit it, called them in the middle of the night from across the state saying that he thought someone had broken into our house. He never stated why, just that it was a gut feeling he had. My parents checked the house and found no one. Note that my grandfather never calls late at night. He's barely awake past 9pm and this call came around 2am. Within the week I returned to Taekwondo class and didn't see Steven there. I didn't think much of it cause he didn't come in everyday and with

the area I lived in being a military area, people moved away at a moment's notice all the time. After class, I was loitering around while talking to my instructors like I usually did when I asked about Steven and whether he had been to class lately. It was then that my instructor informed me that Steven had died from a brain aneurysm in his sleep. My heart skipped a beat. And just like that, he was gone from my life. I wasn't sure what to think or what to feel, or what people expected me to think or feel.

In the back of my mind, I knew it didn't matter cause there was literally nothing I could do. Nothing I could have done to prevent his death, nor anything I could do to bring him back. However, even deeper down I was questioning if I had been a good enough person to him while he was alive. Whether I was a good mentor, whether I had done enough. When I got home from class I realized that what I had experienced that night must have been him visiting me. Needless to say, this hit me like a ton of bricks. He had passed the same night I had the encounter with the spiritual entity. I remember because it was the night before the date my project was due. I could easily imagine him clapping his hands on my shoulders to give me a

bit of a scare, something he would have definitely done in life, just to get my attention like he always did. It could all be a coincidence or a different spirit or maybe it's all in my head but it wasn't a dream. All the evidence I have for this encounter stems from my intuition alone. Paranormal or otherwise the fact is that Steven, someone I once knew and cared about, died that night. He probably went to visit a lot of people before moving on and I was probably the only person who noticed him. So Steven, if you're listening somehow, I'm sorry if I couldn't be a friend to you. I'm sorry I've wiped your very name from my memory. I hope you are in a better place, or at least having better luck in the next life.

This story is not necessarily mine, as it happened to my old roommate, but it still gives me chills whenever I think about it. These events took place about two years ago and will be told in the point of view of my roommate. I began moving into my new one bedroom apartment with my boyfriend the day after my roommate and I's lease ended. The apartment was small in size and on the bottom floor. There was a window in the bedroom that faced the outside walkway and the front door to the apartment. Our bed was placed underneath this window so we could see who was at the front door from our bedroom. From our window you can see the top of the third floor stairs and part of the second floor stairs. This will all be important information later. My boyfriends and I had spent the whole day carrying boxes from our truck from the parking lot to the apartment. Hours had passed

and I noticed a dirty looking man in a rusty beat up red Toyota staring at us while we were moving each box. He looked about 40, had round glasses with a very thin frame. His hair was stringy and thinning at the top and looked as if though it had once been white but yellow due to lack of cleanliness. I wouldn't have given it much thought except he had been sitting in his car for nearly two hours at this point. It seemed as if though he wasn't waiting for anyone, just staring at my boyfriend and I, moving his head to keep his gaze as we would move from the truck to our building.

I mentioned this to my boyfriend and he just shrugged it off, telling me that maybe he was just a neighbor trying to see who moved in. We ignored the man and finished unloading boxes and furniture before settling in for the night. Fast forward to the next night. My boyfriend and I had unpacked most of the kitchen, so we were having a late dinner and drinking some wine, celebrating the smooth move in and the cozy new place. After a few drinks we decided we wanted to lay in bed and watch some TV since it was the first thing we hooked up. It was about 12.30am when we heard a slight tap on the window, not as if someone were to knock on it, but more like as if those someone or something had accidentally hit it. I peeked through the blinds to find nothing but darkness

outside. Without giving it a second thought, I turned out the lights and went to bed. I awoke at around 2am to a soft knock on the window. My boyfriend, very tired and very irritated, got up from the bed to go check the people to see who could possibly be trying to bother them at such an hour. He looked through the peephole to find a man standing outside the door, staring directly into the peephole. Terrified, he slightly checked the locks on the door and ran back to our room completely out of breath. It took him a minute to calm down and explain what he saw.

All he could do was point to the window and tell me to be quiet and not say anything. I peeped through the blinds to see a figure at our front door. The apartment complex had lights lit up everywhere so I was able to see this person and guess who it was. It was the really dirty old man I had seen that day before, staring at us as we moved in. He was just standing at our front door in a robe staring into the peephole. Then, he put his ear to the door and listened. He stood there, his ear pressed to the door for about 15 minutes. He suddenly stood up straight, staring into the peephole one more time

before eventually shuffling back upstairs to the third floor. The next night, we were rather shaken of the events that had transpired the night before. We hadn't been making any noise, especially nothing loud enough to reach someone on the third floor. We were confused and slightly uncomfortable, and had called the front desk to complain. They took note of it, but sounded as if though they didn't really care, so we wrote it off on just a weird experience altogether and just tried not to think about it or make any noise after 11pm. That night I woke up at around 3am to a weird feeling I was being watched. Our blinds must have been slightly open because there was a rectangle of moonlight across our bed

so I lifted my head ever so slightly to the window frame only to see a wrinkly white hand pressed against the glass. Paralyzed in fear, I began to squeeze my boyfriend's arm, attempting to slightly wake him without alarming whoever was outside. He finally awoke and was very groggy and didn't understand what I was trying to say so he looks out the blinds to see the same man listening to our door again. He was there for about 5 minutes before going upstairs. We sat there in our bed, facing the window wondering what this person could possibly be doing. It has been maybe 20-30 minutes since he left and suddenly, we see him walking from a door on the top floor and then head directly straight down the stairs to our door and immediately press

his ear to our door and try to turn the knob. My boyfriend jumped up and told me to call 911 while he went to the other room. Terrified this person might hear or see me, I ran to the other room to see my boyfriend pulling out a gun out of one of our packed boxes. He ran up to the door and screamed that he would be calling the police if he didn't leave immediately. We saw him run off through the peephole, but he didn't go back up to the floor he came down from. The next day we filed another complaint with our landlord and we were taken a bit more seriously this time. Apparently we weren't the only one complaining about this weird homeless looking person that was lurking around at night and they were working hard to catch him. As it turns out he was a tenant at that complex. He didn't live on the third floor above us so what was he doing up there both those nights I have no idea. About a month and a half into our

lease he was evicted for having too many complaints on attempted break-ins and for just being a plain weirdo I guess. My lease was only eight months and ended a while ago and I couldn't be happier to be out of that place. I'm a 14 year old male who lives near a suburban city called Newcastle in Australia. We have just gotten back from a two week holiday and today was my first day back to school. I did what most people do when they get back to school, catch up with friends, school work and other stuff. At the end of school my mom was picking me up that afternoon and as I was waiting for her, she pulls up in her red Toyota Yaris and let me get in the car.

As I enter the car, all is normal. My brother is in the back sleeping and mom is listening to the radio. We start having a conversation about how school was and etc and then all of a sudden, she turns off the radio, setting the atmosphere really serious. She starts talking and says that she saw something really creepy so I replied, what did you see? She said she was going along the expressway towards my school when she noticed a man that looked like he was helping a woman into his or her car. As my mom got closer, she noticed he was forcing her to get in the car, likely against her will as she was trying to break away from his grasp. He finally succeeded into putting her into the car but as he got in the car the woman had escaped through one of the two front windows of the car. Then when she got out, a car had pulled up over to the side of the road where the car was and the driver got out with the

intentions of helping the woman get out of that situation. My mom said she would have helped out but she had my baby brother and she didn't want to put him in any type of danger. As my mom finished the experience she just had a chill ran up and down my spine as I imagined how this played out. If anyone knows who Jake and Bacon is then you probably saw a video of him streaming in Japan when he records a video of the guys putting a girl in their car so I was basically imagining that. The fact that this man did this in broad daylight shows me how desperate this guy was to basically kidnap this woman. I hope that she's okay and that the man that tried to kidnap her gets a lengthy time behind bars. This happened to us two years ago.

We, myself, my daughter and her father lived in a double, a shared house. This incident took place over a span of a month. One day we decided to walk to the store as it was close to the house and a nice day. When we came back we noticed someone had tried to pry off our locks off the door. There were obvious dents, blue marks, and a whole big boot print on our door, front and back. Someone wanted in bad. I have no idea why. We have nothing of major value and live in the neighborhood. We were gone for less than 20 minutes, so we're on edge. The person could still be around. After that, there are so many bizarre things that were happening. I'm trying my best to explain this in a way that is easy to follow and keep it short.

If I described each thing I noticed in my house, I'd be typing for days. I found things out of place where I know I didn't put them. I noticed the locks on my old windows are broken. I noticed my dish liquid bottle was broken. There is a weird oily substance on random stuff. On my curling iron in the bedroom, on my daughter's toys. So, later on I take the trash out to the dumpster in the alley. When I lift the lid I see some type of homemade tool. It was a short metal rod with a washcloth tied around the end, with a blue doctor's type glove

on the end. I realize this is what the person used on my door to try and pry the lock. This is where the blue markings came from. What else is out here in the trash? I look into my neighbor's dumpster just because. What I found made my heart sink. In their trash bag was my belongings. The most random. My title to my old car, which was in a duffel bag in the top of my closet.

Some of my clothes, makeup, household items. At this time the woman who lives next to me sees me discovering this. The man and her who live there start arguing loudly. She walks out and across the street. He is standing in his doorway giving me a death look. I was so angry and scared coming to the realizations these people had been in my house. I look up at him and say, I know you guys have been in my house now. And his response, I didn't steal anything. With a smirk. A quick description, a shirtless, fat, redneck, old white guy. I'm losing it. The words slipped right out of my mouth.

I'm gonna burn your house down. My mind is racing, thinking of all the times things were out of place. My dish liquid bottle was broken because it sits on the sink below a window. They broke it coming through my window. They had been in here multiple times. Cutting to the chase, I called the cops. They came out, talked to the chase, I called the cops. They came out, talked to the neighbors and left. After they leave, the man is out by my back door on the

phone with someone smiling. Not ten minutes later, about five cars pull up, full of people. A big truck pulls up behind my truck and blocks it in. A white guy with a tank top on and gold chains around his neck gets out. I see he has a gun. I shoved a chair up against my back door and see these people heading for it. I screamed for my boyfriend, grabbed my daughter, and ran as fast as I could out the front door. At this time, there are also people coming around the side of the house. I hear a big pop. They shot.

I'm almost off my porch. All I could do was yell, please no, and we are running down the house. I hear a big pop. They shot. I'm almost off my porch. All I could do was yell, please no. We are running down the street. I'm holding my daughter who is cracking up laughing, she's two, because I'm running with her and she has no idea what's going on. I know I'm about to get shot. I know I'm going to get gunned down on the street. Somehow we make it around the corner and didn't die. Called the cops again, they searched and found no bullets. Took statements from neighbors. I asked them to stay for a moment while I went into the house to grab some clothes and we sure enough aren't staying here tonight. When I grab the clothes and diapers I see an empty gallon of weed killer in my daughter's room.

This is the oily substance I've been coming across. In the time it took us to run, wait on the cops, and come back, they had re-entered my house again. Poured the weed killer all over my clothes, my daughter's clothes, all her diapers. I gathered up all I could and left. Nothing ever came of it. No arrests. The last time I went back was to get the rest of my belongings and never look back. There's no answers to all my questions, and I still have nightmares about it. No closure. I've always had this feeling that someone was watching me ever since I moved into my family's house eight years ago. At first I thought I just watched too much ID investigation and I was just

being paranoid, but I could not help looking over my shoulder when I would walk to school or to my bus stop. When I would walk to school I was always scared in the mornings when it would be dark during the winter or fall because where I live is just vast country lands. I live in Canada and although not much crime happens in my neighborhood I never could rid myself of this eerie feeling. Even when I would come home from school being home alone did not help. I would triple check my windows and locks to make sure everything was locked. However, in my basement our garage door was never fully locked since the door hinge was broken and detached from the door. Therefore, it would never properly close. I always told my dad

to fix this door but because he would always go away for work, he never found the time to do so. Stupidly, I thought nothing bad would happen since my garage needed a four-digit passcode to get in. On a side note, I just want to let everyone know that never under any circumstances put your birthday as your passcode for anything. Even if you switch up the dates so that the day is first and then the month is second, do not do it because it will be obvious. Now my theory is that he knew the passcode in my house, therefore he had free reign for several years to go through my things. At first I thought I was being forgetful, maybe I was the one who misplaced my underwear

somewhere, maybe I was the one who misplaced my favorite top or maybe my dad accidentally donated it, but I should have known better. During my four years in high school he never really contacted me. It was when I went to university that things started to change. Since I lived in the countryside I decided to go to a university an hour away. My dad did not want me to live on residence because he didn't want to leave the house unattended for long periods of time. So we came to the conclusion that it would be best if I drive to and from school. Now I would leave for university very early in the morning around 6am and come back around 6pm at night. I stopped being aware of my surroundings at this time because I would be tired from my 12

hour days and now that I wasn't walking alone everything would be fine. When I would come home from university I would find certain things moved in my house. Now I am a neat freak and I might have mild OCD so I like things a particular way in my house. When little things like my makeup or candies would be moved I thought it was odd and would frequently bring it up to my dad but he would just say that it must have been me who was doing it but it wasn't me. During my second and third year in university I started getting weird notes in my mailbox. The writing on these notes looked almost childlike and would always be written in blue ink. I have those country style mailboxes at the end of my driveway where the little red flags go up whenever we get mail.

From my way back from university I would always check the mail and sometimes I would find these letters. The letters would never be long. In fact they would only be one to three sentences that would contain odd questions like, Where are you? I wonder what you do while you're away from home. How do you find university? It must be tiring driving that long. Did you make new friends? Do you still hang out with your best friend? You dress differently now, why is that? I miss the scarves you used to wear. You don't close your curtains as much anymore. Why don't you look for me? These letters would always come once a month at the beginning of the

month. I would show my dad and at first he would say well maybe your cousins are just pranking you or could it probably be your friends maybe. But every time I would ask my friends or cousins they would give me this confused response saying that they never sent me any letters. Now that I am in my fourth year at university the letters do not come as frequently but two weeks ago something happened that makes me think things are escalating. I came back home from university at 7 45 p.m and it was fairly dark outside. I saw that my mailbox flag was up so I checked the mail and it was just bills. At this point I haven't gotten a note for a little over three months,

so now I'm thinking maybe the notes will not come anymore. As I settle in for bed, I change into my PJs and check the locks as usual. As I checked my front door lock, I looked out the glass panel of my door and saw that the red flag in my mailbox is up. It's 10. 30 at night, no way the mail could have gotten dropped off and plus I just checked the mail. I called my dad and tell him about it and he said not to freak out and that maybe one of our neighbors accidentally got our mail and just dropped it off since this happens frequently. I stay on the phone with my

dad as I quickly run down my driveway to check my mail As I open the mailbox, I feel my heart drop because it's an unmarked manila envelope I quickly run back inside and open the manila envelope and although there is no written note. I find something more disturbing It is a pair of my old blue panties that I haven't seen in years At this point I scream and my dad tells me to hang up and call my aunt who is a police officer. My aunt comes over and checks the inside and outside of my house but she can't find anything. She tries to jog my memory and asks if I know anyone who could be doing this but I honestly have no clue. My aunt told me to keep all the letters I get

and she has been staying with me for the days my dad is out for work. My dad is thinking about installing security cameras and hopefully we can catch whoever it is that way. But what else can I do? I'm so paranoid and scared because I don't know who this person is but I know he has been stalking me for a while. That underwear he sent me were ones I had while I was in high school, and I lost that pair when I was in grade 10. The fear of the unknown is getting me so much that my anxiety is not letting me function normally. I just don't know what to do. A few years ago I got my tonsils out and I should mention that I am well into my 30s.

I thought it would be a fairly simple recovery given that every time I've heard about someone getting their tonsils out, that someone was a child. Blending what I learned from television, my friends and the internet, it seemed like it would be a child. Blending what I learned from television, my friends, and the internet, it seemed like it would be a breeze. I'd just live on ice cream and mashed potatoes, watch lots of Netflix, and sleep. Spoiler alert, it was not a breeze. I found myself in the emergency room at three in the morning, seven days after my surgery, with blood in my throat and the worst pain I could ever even imagine. It was a really bad night, made just a little bit worse with the fact that I was alone. I was being really tough about it though and after I'd been triaged and admitted to a room I tried to make myself comfortable and turn on the TV. The room was fairly large for an ER room. I searched through the channels and found something I wanted to watch and decided

to text my boss to let him know I probably wouldn't be in the next day. I dug for my phone in my purse, found it, and when I looked up, I realized that there was a man in my room. I knew immediately that this man was not in his right mind. He was young-ish, wearing a dirty t-shirt and khaki shorts, and stared at me, unblinking. Hi, can I help you? I asked. The man continued staring at me and said nothing. I don't think you're supposed to be in here, I said, trying to be polite. He said nothing but began advancing toward my bed slowly. My heart was racing and I was thinking, leave it to me to be taken out in an emergency room of all places.

I don't remember what I said next, only it was some sort of panic version of you're not supposed to be in here, please leave. But he kept lumbering forward, advancing ever more so. He was steps away from my bed when three cops rushed into the room. The three of them put their hands in front of them defensively but used very polite and soothing tones. They said things like, Hey, wrong room buddy. Let's go this way. But they never touched him. Somehow they were able to coax him out the door and down the hall, closing the door behind them. It was surreal. I almost could have thought I imagined the whole thing except a few minutes later, the doctor came in to see me and immediately addressed it and

apologized for my surprise visitor. Yeah, we got an off his med situation, he said, as though that explained everything. Being in a hospital is truly where we are most vulnerable and I hadn't until then realized how completely mashed together and exposed we can be. Nothing dangerous happened, but it totally could have gone downhill in those few minutes we were alone together. I'm a female and I drive for Lyft at night. I'm on the shorter side of 5'4 and have been driving for nearly 6 months. I tend to drive downtown Denver, especially on weekends when there is the most money to make. In this time, I've only had a couple of true scary encounters and I drive seven nights a week, at least a couple of hours a night. The first scary ones started out normally enough for that late at night.

I had just dropped off a passenger in Aurora and was making my way back towards Market Street since the bars hadn't closed yet. I get a pickup that's on the way. It's a nice enough area that I don't feel uncomfortable but anyone who knows Aurora, Colorado knows it's not really the best area even with the few nice areas. A couple of guys hop in, one in the front, one in the back and both have hoodies on and are carrying backpacks but this is Colorado and almost 1.30 in the morning so not that odd. Where it gets odd is after they get in. I give my normal greeting but they completely ignore me, shove their backpacks onto the floor and pull their hoods up while shielding their faces from

the windows with their hands. I was instantly uncomfortable and I could feel something was off. It was only a 10 minute drive and we were in a secluded area so I decided the safest thing I could do was complete the ride. I could feel my fight or flight instinct kicking in. Within about a minute I had decided if they tried anything I was going to crash my car. Neither one had put a seatbelt on so I figured that would be my best chance. Once we arrived at the location they wanted to be dropped off at, I could tell it was not a good area. Bars on all the windows, trash everywhere and cars in disrepair. They get out but don't shut my doors and start whispering

to each other while glancing at me. One of them has his hand in his pocket fidgeting with something, I have no idea what. At this point I've had enough and step on the gas, driving off with the doors open. I drove a couple of miles until I got to a gas station with lights and people before I stopped to properly close both doors. I called it a night and headed home to cuddle my toddler and my husband before having a good cry in the safety of my own bed. I have no idea what they

were planning to do but I do know I was terrified from the moment they pulled their hoods up to the moment I drove off with my doors open. The second story takes place a couple of weeks after the first. I had sworn off all pickups in Aurora and the shady parts along Colfax at night. I would still drop people off there but I would also turn my app off and leave the area when I was done. I was downtown as usual for a Saturday night and the bars were closing. I get a shared ride, which can be very good at bar closing. Now, the thing to know about shared rides is you can't request more than two seats, leaving room for two more people. I have on multiple

occasions had a full car with these types of rides. I get to the person and unlock my doors as normal and in gets three people. Okay, small problem. I'm polite and tell them I can't give them a ride with three people so they will have to order a different lift. This is where this one turns. I don't want to pay more. I'm sorry but either one of you has to get out or all of you do and you need to order a different ride. This is a shared ride and that means I could get two more passengers and they need seats. With shared rides you're only allowed to book two seats for two passengers. I'm not paying more so you can ignore other rides and take us home At this point he became aggressive and was putting his finger in my face Maybe I should have been more scared only this is Market Street at bar close and it's packed

There are drunk people everywhere and where there are drunk people there are cops I roll down my window as he continues to tell me what I'm going to do And starts threatening to put me in my place if I don't start driving right now. I didn't catch the whole thing since I had made eye contact with a cop and was focusing on getting his attention. Okay, now you have a new choice. You can all get out or I can get that cop right there to get you out. Said cop was making his way over seeing something was wrong. They all jumped out, the guy flipping me off and they disappeared into the crowd still looking for rides. The cop stopped to ask if I was okay and I gave him a short rundown of what

happened and thanked him for coming over. I headed off to my next ride who was a very polite gentleman. In both cases I reported them to Lyft so I wouldn't get paired with either again. I also carry a foam pepper spray for defense and have a dash cam that records the interior of my car now. Since that last one I haven't had any issues so there's that. This happened quite a few years ago when I was a relatively young and sheltered high school student, probably 15 years old. Some of my close girlfriends and I decided to go to the drive-in movie theater one night, where they show two movies in a row row and the whole shebang ends pretty late at night, probably around 1am or so. The five of us all drive in my friend Aaron's car and as we're putting the seats down and setting the back of the car up with blankets and pillows, Aaron recognizes a guy, David, that she had met a few times because he worked at her gym. He was at the drive-in alone,

not necessarily weird, just not something many people did in my town, and came over to our car to chit-chat. Immediately one of my other friends, Corrine, took a liking to this guy and began flirting up a storm. It wasn't soon until Corrine invited him to watch the movie with us inside of Aaron's car. It also wasn't soon until this David guy offered us 15-17 year old girls alcohol which we accepted. Looking back now, what a red flag. I was wary of this David character as he appeared a lot older than us, maybe in his mid-twenties, and gave us somewhat of a weird vibe. But since Aaron seemed to know him and my friends weren't acting alarmed I didn't give it too much thought. We were not even 15 minutes into the movie and I am just too uncomfortable to be enjoying myself. Six people crammed into the back of one car and Corrine and David cuddling and flirting

who knows what underneath the blankets made me want to get out of there ASAP. So when David suggested that me and my three remaining friends could watch the movie in his car while he stayed in Aaron's car and canoodled I jumped to take him up on the offer. David's car was a small sedan with little room so we had to sit in the seats normally as if we were about to ride in the car. Although I was a little uncomfortable sitting in the driver's seat with the steering wheel between me and the screen I was glad to finally have some personal space. That all changed when I dropped my phone and it landed somewhere underneath the driver's seat. While blindly reaching underneath to find my phone, I grabbed onto a hard object that I realized was a lot heavier than my iPhone when I began to lift

it up. To my complete and utter surprise, I realized it's a gun. I had never seen a real life gun before at that point in my life, so it could have been a fake or a BB gun or whatever else, but it looked real and felt real and was hidden underneath the driver's seat for easy access. It freaked me out because even if it was a fake gun, what could he be intending to use it for besides intimidation? For whatever reason, my friends didn't find this as startling as I did and they managed to calm me down and concluded the best thing to do was to just put it back underneath the seat where I found it. That was fine to me as I didn't plan on never being in this car again once the movie was over and definitely didn't plan on being in the car when David was in it, ever. The rest of the two movies went by fine. We're drinking the beer that David's character so kindly provided to us and having a fun time. It's late by the time

the second movie ends and I'm ready to get back to our friend Erica's house where we were sleeping for the evening. I hop out of David's car, ready to get back into Aaron's car when I see Aaron's car already driving away. Corrine pops up and cheerfully announces, David has offered to drive us home. How nice of him, right? Having no other way to get home, being slightly intoxicated, and watching the rest of my friends pile into the car, I followed suit, even though I had my hesitations. David sat in the driver's seat, I sat behind David and Corrine sat shotgun, beginning to play her signature Justin Bieber playlist through the speakers.

The car ride started out as normal enough, with Erica giving directions to her house, Corrine not paying attention to anything but her Bieber, and me feeling uneasy and hyper aware of the situation. As we are approaching Erica's house, David asks us if we have time to take a quick drive up to the reservoir, which was located on the outskirts of town, very isolated and surrounded by heavily wooded area. It probably was close to 2am at this point, the only person who even slightly knew this random man has left us and I know there is a very real looking gun underneath the seat of this guy's car

that he doesn't know I know about. So of course I say no. David just says, We're going up to the reservoir. Confused and alarmed, I start politely protesting, saying we really don't have time, we're being expected at home, yada yada. But with every word I say, David turns the volume of the music up louder and louder, drowning out my voice and obviously ignoring me as he starts to head up to the long dark road that leads to the reservoir. I go into panic mode, annoyed that none

of my friends are doing anything. Especially Corrine who is still singing along to Bieber. I start to freak out. I decide that he can't take us up to the reservoir, he just can't. What if the gun is real and he threatens us with it or worse? What if the gun isn't real but he still uses it to threaten us to do something? A million thoughts race through my head. I won't let him take us up into a secluded area where any number of things could happen and no one could hear us. I decide if he is going to do something to us, I would rather risk it being there in town,

on a more populated road where our chances of survival or whatever were better. So I literally freak out. All sense of politeness I felt I needed to have is gone. I start kicking the back of his chair with both my feet, screaming at the top of my lungs that he needs to take us back now. I roll down the window and start shouting, trying to cause a scene, doing anything I can to try and stop this man from driving us up to the middle of nowhere. I don't stop kicking and screaming until he relents, almost scoffs and says fine, as if I was some crazy lady completely overreacting to the situation. I don't care what he thinks, I'm just relieved he has turned the car around

and is actually taking us back to Erica's house. Once we get there and run out of the car we wake up Erica's parents to let them know what happened since this guy now has one of our addresses. I didn't sleep that whole night and my friendship with Corrine was irreparably damaged from her putting me in such a terrifying situation. Just cause she had the hots for this guy. The Let's Read podcast is brought to you by Robinhood. Robinhood is an investing app that lets you buy and sell stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptos, all commission-free. They strive to make financial services work for everyone, not just the wealthy.

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Just yesterday I collected my son from school. While driving back, there was a white health services van reversing quite fast on the road. I came to stop as this driver didn't seem to care about oncoming traffic. I couldn't move my car as there were cars behind me and cars moving towards me. Plus I was irritated that this driver had such a careless attitude so I gave a gentle friendly beep. Such a friendly beep that another parent who was walking her daughter thought that I was giving her a beep so she gave me a friendly wave. The driver in the van stopped as I beeped and I proceeded to drive on. As I did the van followed after. I thought nothing of it and continued on

to the main road. Traffic was quite heavy due to the school collections so I decided to take a detour through a housing estate to make my journey home a little quicker. The van decided to follow. I noticed the van was coming up quite fast behind me. I remained calm but my son who kept looking out the back window commented, mommy that van is following us. He looks angry. I assured him that he was just going the same way but I was finding it very strange. The detour through the neighborhood that I took was not a place I was very familiar with so I started driving aimlessly trying to find the roads that I recognized. All the while the van was still driving behind me picking up speed. I eventually came back to the main road by

my house but I was afraid to go directly to my house because I was very aware this man was following me. I indicated right but quickly changed my mind indicating left and the driver in the van did the same. My heart was pounding. I decided I would drive to my local petrol station and stay there. As I drove towards the petrol station and as I indicated right to turn in, the van sped up beside me, almost forcing my small car off the road. I pulled in and gasped a breath. The van drove on breaking many red lights. I was so scared, especially considering I had a six-year-old in the back. When I was around 16 or 17, I worked at a local Tim Horton store for some extra cash.

Nothing too unordinary, just a lot of old folks coming to get their coffee in morning office runs. It wasn't until I started covering midnights for people on the weekends is when a strange man started appearing randomly. It started with him picking up money from the drive-thru lane, which is by law illegal. He was talked to and stopped picking up the change, but at night in the drive-thru cameras there were always two pinpricks of whitish-greenish lights coming from the garden, and whispers in our headsets that none of us would admit to. I always thought it was my co-workers playing tricks on me. I mean, we had a lot of jokesters. The whispers would say things like, How's those skin your bones?

And, You enjoy your last bagel. I always got a bagel on break. It made me shiver at the thoughts someone was always watching but again, it was most likely my co-workers. The man became bolder. He started ordering weird things like a biscuit, not toasted with butter, but then he wanted it toasted and soaked in coffee. One night he came in with blood on his shirt and when we asked him if he needed first aid or an ambulance, he just said he needed to pee and that he was fine. My supervisor called the police right away as she came in from changing the outside garbages and was bawling her eyes out. She asked me as the phone rang if anyone had come inside and I said,

yes, a man, he went to the washroom but I think he's hurt. She screamed as she realized it wasn't his blood. She told the operator, I was changing the outside garbages when I saw a man lying on the sidewalk. He was caked in blood and not breathing. I think the killer's in the bathroom. The police department was no longer than five minutes away and they dragged the man out of the washroom. He was completely naked and

trying to touch himself with the blood of the man he killed. I threw up when he started to get very aroused. The store was closed after that and from what I know, it wasn't an aggravated situation and even worse, I don't think it hit the news. I'm not sure why these things never hit mainstream media, but I feel like it's the company covering something up. So last night I was at a classmate's house working on a group project we have due tomorrow. I live in an apartment in the town where our university is located and my classmate lives at his parents house which is in the foothills just outside of town. In order to get to the house you have to drive along a relatively secluded and narrow two lane road for about 5-6 miles.

We started working on the project at about 6 p.m. and I ended up hanging around for a while after we had finished our working. So I left this house pretty late at about 11 and started down the road back towards town. I didn't realize how tough it would be to navigate the road at night. There were no signs of street lights and the road was unkempt and riddled with potholes. On top of this, I had no cell service so I had to drive very slowly to make sure I didn't blow out one of my tires since I had used my spare a couple of weeks back. I figured I was about three miles from the house when I rounded a tight corner and saw a pickup truck with a camper shell parked

diagonally across the road. The manner in which it was parked completely impeded my path and I couldn't drive around it because there was a gully on both sides of the road. The only way for me to go at this point was backward where there was a pull-off that I could use to turn my car around. At first I couldn't see inside the cab but when I turned on my high beams I saw that there was a man slouched over in the driver's seat, his head resting against the steering wheel as if though he had been knocked out after a bad accident. I immediately sensed something was wrong. The way his car had just coincidentally come to a rest in a position that totally blocked the road was a big red flag for me. I had heard stories of people playing dead in the road as a way to lure unsuspecting people out of their cars so they could rob them. I decided forget this and elected to go back to my classmate's house and explain what was going on.

I threw the car into reverse and kept my eyes darting back and forth between my rear view and the truck. I looked and saw that I was almost a pull-off where I could turn around. When I looked back, my heart skipped about five beats. The man who'd been slouched over in the driver's seat was now walking at my car at a hurried pace while a few other men jumped out of the camper shell and started moving towards me as well. I panicked and accelerated backwards into the pool off, which messed up the undercarriage of my car pretty bad. As I put it into drive, the guy was already at my passenger side door tugging on the handle which, thank the lord, was locked. I only got a

brief glimpse of him but his face appeared to be scabbed and leathery, definitely a meth head or some sort of drug abuser. I sped away and didn't slow down at all until I reached the house, constantly checking my rear view to see if they were following. Thankfully they didn't tail me, and when I reached the house I explained what had happened to my classmate and we called the cops. I was grateful that my buddy's parents were kind enough to let me stay the night. They didn't find anyone on the road matching the description, but I filed an incident report and they told me they would be on the lookout for similar vehicles and suspicious activity. But my god, I'm still so shook up over it. I keep getting the same adrenaline rush I got when I saw the guys charging me whenever I think about it.

Please share similar experiences you've had as I would appreciate a good read or a good discussion to help clear my headspace. It was 2002 when I was still using AIM as my main way to chat with people. That said, my AIM username wasn't published anywhere tied to my actual name. Now in college, we get a lookbook with pics and short summaries of everyone in our year. It shows proposed major, hometown, and dorm extension phone number. It does not give your AIM or where you live. Well, I'm a lesbian freshman from Texas at a small liberal arts Ivy college, so I'm far from home but

nestled in a pretty tight-knit supportive community. Boy, did that come around to bite me quickly. So before college, I came out on a show. Back then way less gays or something I don't know, and anyway I was getting recognized. So one day on AIM I get a chat request from a user I don't know. That wasn't odd because it just happened sometimes and it could have been a new friend or something. But no one at my college had my username. I had just started and was always kind of a loner. This person claimed to be a friend

of a friend of a friend from home and a fan of the show and I thought it was weird. She found my AIM but didn't look much into it. She basically started out friendly and even seemingly into me. I wasn't into her. I didn't know this random person and I had a girlfriend. I tried to let her down gently but every time I did she would go off on religious rants about how she isn't gay and I'm going to hell for being gay and she wants to save me. She would go off on these crazy rants, delete her username and come back with a new one. Try to be sweet and the psycho would start all over. This happened a few times. I thought she was a sad, bored, closeted troll so at this point I'm basically ignoring her random usernames and incoming messages that are sometimes several a day.

She was cycling on her own now, being sweet with kissy faces, angered at no reply, ranting about me burning in hell, then suddenly a new screen name. I just ignored them when they popped up. She finally got sick of being ignored and one day she tells me, I know XYZ. What I wore that day, the way I walk, all of these obsessive little details and judgments about myself. Where I eat, my routine, the classes I'm taking. She then drops the bombshell that she actually is a student at my school, on my campus, my year. We had the same admissions counselor, same advisor.

She told me her name and I ran to the lookbook to see who this psycho was. I was terrified when I saw her photo. Not to judge a book by its cover but she looked like the lady that killed Selena. Suddenly I couldn't block or ignore her, not fully. She was literally in my circle, by no choice of my own. After she revealed who she truly was, her rants got a little less crazy, way less burning and hell talk thankfully, but now I'd meet people and they'd go, oh, and mention her name, was talking about you. Man, she's a great person. You guys are close.

I'm so glad. Always them saying how amazing she was and how lucky I am to have found such a cool friend. Always. I didn't know how to react. I wanted people to like me and to go around screaming week three of college that Selina killer is crazy and she's stalking me

just makes me sound crazy, especially since there's this weird false comfort of being in a predetermined or preselected group. It's this idea that people have been vetted or something, I don't know, it's hard to explain. Suffice to say, me calling her out about this to our peers wouldn't have exactly pegged me as someone who fostered a sense of community. I asked her how she got my username, why she was watching me, etc. She told me she got it from the flipbook. Not possible. And that she wasn't watching. It's just a small school. It's not that small. And that I surely think highly of myself. So now I'm thinking maybe I am just being arrogant and paranoid and I have no idea.

One day at 2am my phone rings. It doesn't stop. Dorm phone so no answering machine. I finally answer annoyed and it's the girl. I'm freaking out and she so casually says, hey I'm on my way. What? 420 right? That's your dorm room right? I flip. I yell do not come here. I hang up the phone. It continues to ring and I freak out so much I unplug it from the wall. I think she got my dorm from stalking me but how she got my AIM I still don't know. No one had it on campus at that point and I searched everywhere for any connection of my name to my username and found nothing and I don't know when she saw me and put me together with the show and exactly when or how her obsession started. She continued to be a psycho for all four years. I mean maybe I overreacted but I was far from home and only in my first couple of weeks at school. First time adulthood all that and suddenly I was always looking over my shoulder.

She did eventually come out her sophomore year. Shocker. She then dated my very best friend who wasn't even gay before. And she called me up one day saying they both wanted to take a little road trip to my hometown in Texas while I was visiting my family. I got so creeped out because the creepy idiot just wants to get off on seeing my family and where I live. I strongly suggest to my best friend who knows the history and how afraid I am of her that I'm not comfortable with it. She assured me it's totally fine and that this girl isn't a creep. I tried to cancel several different ways but it wasn't happening. At one

point they said that if they couldn't crash at my family's house or if I wasn't there they were going to make the 11 hour each way drive there anyway just to you know do a road trip and to see the town I grew up in. My hometown is terrible mind you Well, this creep has always stayed at my home. My dad BBQ'd for her. She had such a smug look of satisfaction on her face. I then realized she stopped being obsessed with me long ago and now just enjoyed making me uneasy and rubbing our connections in my face. This has been happening over the course of the last few days. Sorry if it's a bit confusing to read, I've been a little shaken up by it. A bit of backstory, I just moved and left everyone behind in Florida and I'm about

1600 miles away so I'm living alone with just my dog. I've been working at this place for two months now and at my old store I never had this problem. I work at a popular restaurant and fast food chain and there's this guy who comes in every day. As per new company rules now, we have to be overly nice to customers and they want us to be on first name basis with our regulars. Whatever, I can do that. I'm actually really good with customer service. So we introduce ourselves the other day. He's a really nice guy, easily 37 of 42 years old. Found out last night he's actually 47. I came in the

other day to work and I patted him on the arm as I walked by and said hi because I'm a nice person. Well this past Thursday on October 11th he comes in and instead of sitting in his usual spot with his co-workers they all sit next to our takeout window which is where I was working. This guy gives me his business card, tells me to text him later, winks and sits down and proceeds to casually look over at me and watch me occasionally. I told a few of my managers and everyone laughed at me. I was so uncomfortable until he left. I went home and started to think I may have overreacted to the situation and tried brushing it off. I mean the guy just assumed I was interested in him because I was being nice.

Fast forward to yesterday, October 13th, the creepy guy got worse. He came in and I was being nice. Fast forward to yesterday, October 13th, creepy guy got worse. He came in and I was on the cast register so I had to interact. First thing he said to me was, I'm sorry if I was too forward the other day. I said it was fine and started ringing out the next person. He left. I went to our takeout site again and lo and behold, he's sitting there. Great. I try avoiding him at all costs but he's full on staring. He waves at me and asks why I never texted him. I showed him my hand with a fake engagement ring on it. My mom, boyfriend and I all agreed this would be the easiest way to stop this. This is why me being alone is important. They're both back in Florida and can't help me much. And he said oh and left me alone. Then he came up asking for more ice and someone

else got it because we knew he just wanted me to get it. He asked me directly so he could talk to me. Then he came back and asked for toothpicks. Asked me directly again. Again, someone else got them. Then he left. Coworkers are starting to understand why I'm freaking out in the back trying to avoid him. Fast forward to 3.15. Mind you, I'm off at 4 and freaking out at this point.

And he comes back for a bag of chips. Alone. He sat in the corner where I couldn't see him then he moved to the takeout window again then moved back to his hiding spot. Then he came up to the window while I was there. I said hi, he didn't answer, just stared at me for a solid 30 seconds then walked away.

Then I saw him leave at like 3.45. I was relieved but had to have someone walk me to my car and then I went to buy pepper spray. All the while my general manager was making fun of the situation the whole time and another manager that didn't witness his crazy said, I don't believe that, he's a nice guy. My co-worker went off on him. Thanks Jenny. The one most messed up part of all is my manager refused to ban him from the store

after admitting that what he was doing was creepy. I talked to my old manager back in Florida about it and he said after the first incident he'd have banned the guy. So now I'm still forced to interact with him. Hey friends, thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe... Fuck. Hey friends, thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe... Hey friends, thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe and click that notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations. If you got a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, rletsreadofficial,

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