The Lets Read Podcast - 171: I SURVIVED BY PLAYING ALONG | 20 True Scary Stories | EP 159

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Kidnappers, California, & Home Invasions... HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?► www.Reddit.com/r/LetsReadOfficial FOLLOW ME ON - ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsReadCreepy ♫ Background Music & Audio Remastering: INEKT https://www.instagram.com/_inekt/ PATREON for EARLY ACCESS!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead Update Description

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It was a tough job with meager pay, but it was a positively luxurious one compared to his previous employment. Because Julian was a Mexican migrant and he previously held a position as a police officer in Chiodad, Juarez. Even back in the 1950s and 60s, Juarez's proximity to the US border made it a strategically vital location for narco-traffickers and people smugglers. Police corruption and bribery were rampant, and officers were often the subject of targeted assassinations, making life for Juarez's law enforcement almost unbearable. It's more than likely that Julian saw some horrifying things during his time in uniform And this would certainly amount for his heavy drinking and violent outbursts Both hallmarks of complex PTSD And for his youngest son, Richie Domestic violence became a feature of his daily life from a very young age

With a young boy often resorting to sleeping in a local cemetery whenever his father's mood grew too volatile Around the age of 12, Richie began hanging out with his adult cousin, Mike. Mike was a decorated Vietnam veteran who'd served several tours with the Green Berets, but it would be foolish to assume that this made him a man of honor or service. Because in truth, Mike was a violent psychopath who had committed countless war crimes during his time in Vietnam. Not in truth, Mike was a violent psychopath who had committed countless war crimes during his time in Vietnam. Not only that, but Mike had taken numerous Polaroid photographs of his victims both before and after he'd assaulted and murdered them. Pictures of young Vietnamese women, tied to trees, weeping as they begged for their lives in a language their captors didn't

care to understand. Richard's horrific still-life progression of these poor young women from bound and terrified to lifeless and headless, with Mike often holding up their severed heads, a sick smile stretched across his lips. Mike was fond of sharing these pictures with young Richie, and it would be hard to understate the devastating effect these photos had on his young mind. Because Richie wasn't repulsed by the photographs, on the contrary. By his own admission, he was fascinated with them, and they seemed to have sparked a morbid obsession in Richie that would have a profound influence on his adult life. At 13, Richie's fixation with violent imagery grew even deeper when he witnessed Mike murder his wife, Jessie, by shooting her in the face during a domestic

dispute. But again, instead of terrifying and disgusting the young Richie, he discovered that witnessing death of Close actually excited him in the extreme. But the conundrum of how to come to terms with his newfound feeling caused Richie to become increasingly alienated from his family and friends. He ended up moving into his older sister's place, where he discovered that her husband was a frequent LSD user, as well as what's known as a peeping tom. This is when men would venture out into the night in the hopes of spying on women through their windows, a mostly defunct activity in the age of the internet, but one that thrilled young

Richie. It also seems to have had a profound influence on him because it seems this perverted nocturnal activity laid the groundwork for his horrific future crimes. because young Richie is perhaps better known as Richard Ramirez, or as the media would come to name him, the Night Stalker. By the age of 22, Richard had moved out to California and was living in an apartment building in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. Around 18 months into his stay there, a 9-year-old Chinese-American girl by the name of Mei Leong was playing around with her younger brother when she apparently lost a $1 bill somewhere in the building. Richard approached the girl and with a warm smile, told her he'd seen a loose $1 bill in the building's basement. Agreeing to show her where it was, Richard had the young girl follow him down the stairs into the dark, dingy basement.

She would never come out, alive. Ramirez beat her, choked her, then stabbed her to death with a switchblade. Once she had passed, he hung her body from a drainpipe then fled the area. Initially authorities didn't realize May's murder was the first of the Night Stalker killings, but a 2009 DNA match determined Ramirez was responsible, and it's now commonly accepted that she was the first of his victims, and she would be the first of many. 79-year-old Jeannie Vincao was found dead in her northeast Los Angeles apartment. She had multiple stab wounds to her head, neck, and chest, apparently inflicted while she was asleep in her bed. Forensic examiners would later discover that her throat had been slashed so deeply that she'd almost been completely beheaded.

It was a horrifying crime scene, but thankfully, police had a lead. A single fingerprint had been pulled from a mesh screen the killer had removed to gain access to the property. It given that this print failed to match any in their database, it seemed police would have to be patient in order to catch their man. But the killer was patient too, waiting almost an entire year before making his next move. On March 17th of 1985, 22-year-old Maria Hernandez was attacked outside her home in Rosemead. As she pulled into her driveway, a man had emerged from the shadows,

pulled a.22 caliber handgun from his pocket, and fired it at her face. The only thing that saved Maria's life was the fact that she'd raised her hands to her face in the blind panic, hands that just so happened to be holding her car keys. This meant the bullet that would have ripped through her skull was deflected away from her, causing only superficial cuts to her face. Maria was terrified, but she was smart enough to slump over in the driver's seat and play dead. She thought this would satisfy her attacker, prompting his escape but the shooter had only begun. He walked into the home that Maria shared with her roommate, 34-year-old Dale Yoshi Okazaki,

who having heard the gunfire was taking cover behind a counter. When Dale heard someone walking into the house, she peeked up from behind the counter, thinking it might have been Maria. But as she raised her head, all she saw was a stick-thin man with long curly brown hair, deep dark bulging eyes, and wide-spaced rotting teeth. He was pointing a pistol right at her and would be the last image she'd ever see. Within an hour of the Rosemead attack, 30-year-old Chua Lian Yu was dragged from her car in Monterey Park. Then, he shot her twice with a.22 caliber handgun. She was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital, with witnesses describing an attacker who looked an awful lot like the Rosemead murderer. The murders obviously attracted a great deal of media attention, but no one could have possibly as describing an attacker who looked an awful lot like the Rosemead murderer.

The murders obviously attracted a great deal of media attention, but no one could have possibly guessed just how many people would fall victim to one of the evilest men ever to walk the streets of California. Just ten days later, in the wee small hours of March 27th, 64-year-old Vincent Zazara and his wife Maxine were asleep at their house in Whittier. At around 2am, Maxine was suddenly awakened by a loud crack and sat up in bed to find her husband bleeding from a gunshot wound to his head. A man stood by her bed, his pistol aimed squarely at her head. Don't move, he hissed, and after approaching cautiously, he bound Maxine's wrists. While the home invader ransacked the home for valuables, Maxine slowly worked over the bonds

on her wrists, suddenly freeing herself while her captor was still distracted. She silently slipped from the bed, reaching under it to where her husband kept a 12-gauge shotgun for home defense. When her captor re-entered the bedroom, Maxine aimed the shotgun at his chest and pulled the trigger. Nothing. To her absolute horror, he'd forgotten to load the shells, and as she frantically pulled the trigger, the only sound to be heard was a faint, dull click.

Maxine's captor flew into a rage, pulling out the same.22 he'd used to kill her husband, and shot Maxine three times in the chest. As she lay dying, he began to mutilate her with a kitchen knife, carving her eyes out before delicately positioning them in a nearby jewelry box, which he kept as a souvenir. Upon the body's discovery, and the empty. 22 bullet casings the killer had left behind, it became evident that a spree killer was quickly evolving into a serial killer, one with a distinct and terrifying modus operandi. Two months later in May of 1985, 66-year-old Bill Doy woke up in the middle of the night next to his wife Lillian.

Bill heard someone breaking in and rushed to get his home defense weapon when the home invader rushed to cut him off, shooting him in the head with what had become a signature.22 caliber pistol. The invader then entered the Doy's bedroom, where he found Bill's disabled wife Lillian cowering under the covers. Much like his other victims, he beat her, tied her up, then ransacked their home of valuables after he assaulted her. Lillian would survive the attack, but her husband later died of his injuries in the hospital. 83-year-old Mabel Bell would share his fate, dying in a hospital as a result of her injuries. But in the same incident, the nightalker would assault the woman's sister, drawing a lipstick pentagram on her thigh before he fled the scene.

This was the first time the Night Stalker had made an effort to distinguish himself and his actions as satanic, but it would not be the last. July of 1985 would see two more attacks in which overtly unholy imagery and language were used, but it seems the Night Stalker not only used satanic tropes to terrify both his victims and the wider community, he seems he sincerely believed in them. 63-year-old Joyce Nelson was one of the Night Stalker's next victims, and there's a good chance her life was saved by her willingness to swear on Satan. Ramirez forced her to swear on the dark deity that she revealed the location of all her valuables, and when she did, Ramirez seemed satisfied enough to leave her alive. A second incident took place when the Night Stalker tried to strangle one of his victims with a piece of

electrical cord. The cord was apparently plugged into a wall socket at the time, and when it began to snap as a result of the excessive force applied to it, Richard saw a flash of light before the girl was suddenly able to breathe again. Yet, instead of simply finding another means to execute his victim, Ramirez fled the house in terror, later claiming that divine intervention had saved the girl's life. However, it's also clear that the night stalker closely followed the media coverage of his crimes

and it's a distinct possibility that he acted in certain ways as to generate as much outrage and controversy as possible. The same interest in his own media coverage also prompted Ramirez to flee Los Angeles when law enforcement's net began to close around him. He fled to his old haunt of San Francisco, murdering Peter and Barbara Pan on the night of August 18th. But it's here that he made his first serious mistake. Ramirez left a size 11.5 shoe print at the scene that detectives matched to a specific pair of rare Avia brand shoes. The case's two lead detectives then contacted the manufacturers, discovering that only six of them existed in the size 11.5. Five of them were shipped

to locations in Arizona and one shipped to a shoe store in Los Angeles, making them the only pair of avias in the state of California. Yet, in an error of catastrophic proportions, San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein leaked this information in a televised press conference. Ramirez promptly dropped his size 11.5 avias over the side of the Golden Gate Bridge, and it's clear the error allowed him to kill additional victims. But Richard's days of killing unhindered were over, and as each day went by, detectives were closer and closer to catching him. The night of August 24th of 1985 would mark the Night Stalker's final home invasion. Ramirez broke into the house of 30-year-old Bill Carnes and his 29-year-old fiancée Inez Erickson before he shot Bill three times in the head.

Ramirez then turned his attention to Inez, telling her that he was the Night Stalker. She must have been well aware of who that was and must have been terrified as he beat her and forced her to swear that she loved Satan. Before leaving the home, Ramirez told Inez, tell them the Night Stalker was here. Of all those who survived the Night Stalker, perhaps no one gave a better description of her assailant than Inez Erickson. This was then corroborated with a fingerprint taken from a car theft in LA's Koreatown Which was in turn matched with Homicide Detective's only confirmed Night Stalker print And the match was made

The Night Stalker finally had a name and a face And at a hastily convened press conference Law enforcement addressed him personally saying We know who you are And soon everyone else will There will be no place you can hide. This seems to be the one time that Ramirez neglected to follow his own story, as on August 30th, he boarded a bus to Arizona, having intended to visit his brother. Yet little did he know,

he was the lead story in almost every major media outlet in the country. It's not clear why, but Ramirez failed to meet his brother in Tucson and returned to Los Angeles the following morning. Upon his return, he walked into an East LA convenience store but was stunned into a terrified silence when he heard a group of elderly women refer to him as El Matador, Spanish for the killer. It was only then that he regarded the stack of newspapers, seeing his own face on the cover, after which he fled the store in fright. In order to facilitate his escape, Richard attempted a carjacking, but the woman in the

driver's seat recognized him instantly and began to alert bystanders, who in turn chased Richard, struck him over the head with a fence post, and held him down until the police could take him into custody. At his first court appearance in late July of 1988, Richard stunned those in attendance when he raised a pentagram-adorned hand and yelled, Hail Satan. He also claimed that he had an extensive network of Satan-worshipping supporters and that they'd help him smuggle in a pistol that he'd use to shoot the lead prosecutor. It was a total bluff, but the public was so terrified of Ramirez that metal detectors were installed at the courthouse at considerable cost to the California's taxpayer.

During his trial, the prosecution called psychiatrist Michael Stone as a witness. On the stand, Stone described Ramirez as a maid psychopath, as opposed to a born psychopath, and that his personality disorders contributed to his indifference to the suffering of his victims. Ramirez's defense attorney backed Stone's assessment, but offered a rather different slant on it, stating that his aggressiveness was the result of being knocked unconscious several times during his childhood, constituting significant damage to his brain's developing frontal lobe. Then on August 14th, one of the trial's jurors failed to show up to the courtroom. Later that day, Phyllis Singletary, the missing juror, was found dead in her apartment. Someone had

broken in and shot her. The nation's media went into a frenzy of speculation, purporting that the Night Stalker had the support of a vast network of murderous underground Satanists. It was later confirmed that Singletary was shot and killed by her boyfriend, who later took his own life with the same weapon in a hotel. But that didn't seem to ease any of the jury's fears, with some of them reportedly too scared to return to their homes at night. Finally, on September 20th of 1989, Richard Ramirez was found guilty of all 13 counts of murder and was sentenced to die in California's gas chamber. In response to his sentencing, the Night Stalker

released a statement to the media via his attorney. It read, Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland. Due to California's lengthy appeals process when it comes to executions, Ramirez would ultimately avoid the gas chamber, instead dying on June 7th, 2013, as the result of complications resulting from lymph node cancer. It was the end of a man who'd taken much more from the world than he'd given back, a man who seemed to be chronically and pathologically fascinated with the macabre. But it seems society's fascination with the man they named the Night Stalker had only just begun. Since his imprisonment and eventual death, Richard Ramirez had been the subject of three major motion pictures and two highly popular television series.

Considering he was a man who relished media attention, it seems we, as a society, have played right into his hands. The Night Stalker craved immortality, and we've given him exactly what he wanted. To be continued... those that aren't will definitely be familiar with those who took part. Hippies, flower children, beatniks, all jamming out to the likes of Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, or Captain Beefheart and his magic band. Well, at the risk of becoming a walking cliche, I was there, man. I was at the very center of the hippie movement when it was at its absolute zenith and I was there when it all came crashing down too. For me it all started with this festival in San Francisco called Human Be In that took place in early 67. I was living with my parents back in Ohio at the time and I remember hearing about the event on the radio one night, tuning in just in time to hear Tim Leary saying, turn on, tune in, drop out. I didn't understand exactly what he meant by that at the time, but

the attitude behind his words was dead clear. All out cultural rebellion. A kind of tension had been brewing in America for maybe 10 years prior to that point. Everyone could feel it, and for a plethora of different reasons, everyone felt that if it was going to erupt anywhere, it would be in San Francisco. That kind of momentum kept building and building until I think May of 67, when the mamas and the papas released the song

San Francisco, Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair. I think a lot of people still know the song, but I think the cause and effect have been completely forgotten. See, it wasn't just some jingly little pop song. It was like a rallying cry. A call to all the disenfranchised to descend on San Francisco. And you can bet your bottom dollar they wore flowers in their hair too. They say as many as 100,000 hippies arrived in San Francisco

that summer and like I said, I was one of them and boy was it an adventure. But there was a darker side to the summer of love, one that I don't hear people talking about a lot. This dark underbelly might best be encapsulated with the story of the Manson family. But take it from me, Charlie Manson wasn't the only person who took advantage of the hippie movement and all the vulnerable young souls that moved with it. When I first landed in Frisco, I had about $6 to my name, one change of clothes, and I desperately needed a place to stay. Another hippie told me to head over to the neighborhood called Haight-Ashbury because that was where all the local hippies had converged to open up hedge shops and the like. So, I headed up there, got talking to some folks from Kentucky,

and that's how I managed to find a place to stay for the first few days. After we got kicked out of that place, no one was paying any rent to the owner. We all went our separate ways, and for a few hours before sunset, it was looking like I was going to have to the owner, we all went our separate ways and for a few hours before sunset it was looking like I was going to have to spend the night outdoors. And that's when I meet this girl who called herself Bluebell. Bluebell was definitely on something when I first met her because she kept singing this dumb repetitive song that went, Bluebells are bluebells cause bluebells are blue. I told her about my lack of accommodation and she told me I was more than welcome to stay with her and her friends at a derelict house they'd fixed up together.

They didn't have any power but they did have running water and a few spare mattresses, but that was more than good enough for me. The only price was that everyone had to contribute at least one item to every evening meal. That sounded easy enough, so I accepted her invitation, then asked why she'd picked the name Bluebell. She tells me she didn't pick it, that Zero had given it to her. Then when I asked her who Zero is, she just laughed and tells me, you're about to find out. After about ten minutes of walking, we ended up outside this nice looking townhouse, but the neat middle class exterior bellied the chaos inside. It had been well and truly occupied by Bluebell's hippie cohort. Every single room apart from the kitchen

and the bathroom had been converted into these multifunctional living spaces. There had to be at least 15 to 20 young folk from all over the US, all packed into a house that should have catered to no more than 5. But like I said, I needed a place to stay, and although those guys seemed crazy, they welcomed me with open arms, especially their leader, a guy named Zero. He lived up in the attic of the building and right away you could tell he was this total sort of messiah figure to them. Long dark hair, scraggly beard, he looked every part the hippie Jesus figure the others made him out to be. I thought it was kind of creepy that most of the girls stayed up in the attic with him, but

at the time I figured he's a popular guy. Makes sense, right? Anyways, the first few days were just peachy. Since I was new in town, I wasn't expected to contribute too much and I pulled my weight by performing a few odd jobs around the house. It wasn't until I was expected to contribute to the group's food supply that I noticed that something was off. When asked to contribute, I offered to get a part-time job someplace, maybe cut a few square folks' lawns for a few bucks here and there. But my new friends explained to me, no man, you got it all wrong. We just take what we need, but no more than that, so it's cool. By take, they meant steal. But it wasn't even like they were stealing from Ralph's

or whatever. It was like mom and pop stores. Then when I asked how they could justify that, they gave me some nonsense about how capitalism was evil and that it wouldn't matter soon because the revolution was coming and we'd all soon be liberated from it. At the time, I just soaked up their excuses, nodded along, and did as I was told. Besides, I didn't have too much time to think about it, because, my god, did the acid flow like water. Anytime anything good happened, we dosed. Anytime anything bad happened, we dosed. We dosed in the morning, we dosed after dinner. Are you beginning to see a pattern here. But the time you could always expect to dose was if you questioned the group,

and especially if you questioned Zero. I was just so naive. I didn't understand what he was doing at the time, but he was basically using LSD as a brainwashing drug. He'd dose you, then just talk you around to his way of thinking until you could barely even remember what the problem was to begin with. That's how he convinced us to lie, how he convinced us to steal, and how he convinced us to do much, much worse things too. About six weeks into my stay at Zero's place, a girl named Angela arrived. She was a super Christian girl who'd become interested in the hippie movement due to her anti-war stance. She'd lost a brother in Vietnam and her entire family were heartbroken.

She just didn't want anyone else to go through what her family had suffered. She was sweet like that, a genuine heart of gold. She was pretty too, real pretty, and Zero took a liking to her straight away. So much so that he basically demoted one of the girls who slept up in the attic with him. And let me tell you, she wasn't pleased about that at all. But as it usually goes, she got a dose and a talking to, then everything was miraculously smoothed over. And that brings me to the subject of Angela and drugs. Because she was so hardcore Christian, she didn't want to do any of the trippy stuff we did. Most people respected that, but two people were very,

very insistent on getting her to try LSD for the first time. The first was the girl she replaced in Zero's room and the second was Zero himself. She was steadfast, at first anyway, and told them she didn't need those things to love and appreciate. But over the course of a few weeks, Zero wore her down. Seeing what they did to that girl was the beginning of my disillusionment and by the time it ended, I wanted out. Because one night, Zero wanted to be alone up in his room with Angela. We all figured he was going to, you know, but we figured it'd all be safe and consensual. Free love was big at the time and we figured it was only a matter of time before Angela got on board with the love train. Their little date went on late into the night and the whole time I had a bad feeling.

It was rare for anyone to be alone for that amount of time, even Zero and one of his girls. I was wide awake when Zero and one of his closest male followers were walking around the house. I didn't know what they were doing but it didn't sound like they were up to anything good. The whole time I'm still kind of worried but also assuming that Angela is safe up in the attic. The next day she was nowhere to be seen. I asked around and no one had spoken to her and when I asked Zero where she was he called a house meeting. I'm pretty sure you can guess what he did at the start of this house meeting. Yeah, we dosed.

So Zero talks about this and for a while, waiting for the acid to kick in, and only when it does is the conversation about Angela started. What happened was a long, complicated talk, and my memory of it is definitely patchy, so here's the summation. Zero basically told us that Angela didn't exist, or rather, that a girl named Angela had stayed for a few nights during the previous month but had moved on shortly after. After all, all our interactions had been, how do I put this, echoes of her spirit, because she'd brought us so much love to the group, love that had like, stuck to us after she departed.

That's definitely some bad paraphrasing on my part, but you get the gist. It was horrifying. The group just ate it up, and I knew something terrible had happened to Angela, something he was trying to hide. To this day I don't know what happened to Angela, and I don't know if the cops had showed up to look around for her, or if they indicated something truly sinister happened, or if she'd run away from home when her parents had called the police for that specific reason. Though I do know that they were very interested in talking to Zero. I don't know if they ever caught up with him, as I moved out of that place long after Angela disappeared.

But I did end up catching up with one of the old roommates shortly before I left San Francisco. When I asked them how he was doing, their answer was the final nail in the hippie coffin for me. Who? They asked. I reiterated, unable to believe they didn't know who I was talking about. Then when the penny dropped, they just laughed and said, Dude, Zero doesn't exist. He never existed. We'll be right back. TreadExperts. Conquer rugged terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo TreadExperts dealer near you at TreadExperts.ca slash locations.

From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca For almost three years, I was homeless in my native state of California, and they were without a doubt the three most soul-crushing years of my life. It all started with a high school basketball injury that got me hooked on oxys. After that, it was just a matter of time before I tried something harder and before long I started snorting and smoking smack while telling myself I was just a weekend warrior and not a full-time addict. As you can probably tell from how this story opened, that didn't go so well. Heroin took over my life and I ended up on the streets.

But you know the worst thing even when i was at rock bottom even when i was facing my first night on the streets because socal is just so warm and pretty much all year round i told myself i'm doing all right needless to say i was not the first really horrible thing i heard about was when a bunch of my junkie buddies drowned in a flash flood. They all used to stay in this concrete drainage ditch and sometimes I'd sleep down there too whenever we were using together. But then one night this freak rainstorm dropped so much water on Southern California that a flash flood took them before they even knew what hit them. Five out of the six guys down there drowned, all because they were high at the time of the flood. It should have been my wake up call,

but heroin always has a way of convincing you otherwise. Then there was a homeless shelter I stayed in for a time, one with a segregated men's side and a woman's side. It turned out like two-thirds of the men there were convicted offenders or were suspected of similar crimes, some of which had been committed against women who were actually in the same facility. Half the reason we were even kept apart in the first place was because of the danger some of those guys posed. But the truly horrifying thing, assaults happened on site way more than anyone wanted to admit, and the victims were actively discouraged from telling anyone, especially the cops, what had happened.

If they filed a report with the police, they were permanently barred from the shelter, and some had their records disposed of, anything to keep the reputation of the shelter from falling into disrepute. At one point, I had tried getting some money together to get a train up to NorCal, but the end of my heroin cravings had been sated and I only had enough money for bus fare to Fresno. I tried hitchhiking, hoping someone might look past my raggedy appearance, but no, and by the time the sun went down, I'd have decided to try my luck at sleeping in a nearby barn, and I woke up to a shotgun in my face. I must have left the barn door slightly ajar or whatever because the farmer saw,

came out with a shotgun, and threatened to blow my head off unless I showed him my hands. Once I explained what the situation was, the guy actually lowered the shotgun, invited me inside, cooked me breakfast and let me use the shower. That was one of the worst things to be honest, not knowing if his stranger was going to be a total jerk or the kindest person on earth. That attitude stuck with me for a long time after and I can safely say that that kind of attitude completely fried my nerves. Another time I made friends with this homeless couple and stuck with them for a while. They seemed really loving and chill but they both had real bad meth problems

and I was about to get a serious lesson in just how volatile meth heads could be. I'm lying in my sleeping bag in early December and it's the middle of the night when I wake up to the feeling of someone sitting down on the end of my sleeping bag. I only had it half on me, as you always gotta be ready to throw it off to either run or fight, so the male half of the couple just plants himself on the empty half and just seems to sit there. I'm like, yo dude, what's up, trying to sleep here? And in response, he just gurgles. It's only then that I sit up to see him holding onto his neck, and there's all this blood just pumping between his fingers. There was a payphone nearby, so I just jump out of my bag,

telling him I'm going to call 911, but he actually grabs my coat and tries to stop me. He can barely talk because his freaking throat had been cut, but he's telling me to not, coughing up blood between every word. I just ignored him, thinking he was just worried about the cops finding his stash or something, but I wasn't able to let this guy bleed out of my sleeping bag just because he had some dust and a baggie on him. EMTs come and take him away, and that's all I hear about for a few days, and a baggie on him. EMTs come and take him away and that's all I hear about for a few days and the couple just totally dropped off the face of the earth. About a month later I run into the

couple while I'm hanging with another dude and he has this huge scar on his neck. We say hi, make some small talk and by that I mean swap dealer info, then go our separate ways. When they were out of earshot my new buddy asked me if I know how that guy got his throat cut. I tell him no, urging him to spit it out if he knew. It turns out the female half of the couple did it. She couldn't find her crystal one night, assumed the guy had smoked it up so she legitimately tried to kill him. Then, there they were, a month later, acting like nothing happened. Jesus, then there was this time I was totally out of luck and was going through withdrawals on a park bench down in Van Nuys. The horror of opiate withdrawal had been elaborated on in like

a hundred different movies and books, so I won't go into it, but let me just say that they are honestly every bit as horrendous as you can imagine. Now I'm right in the middle of the phase when you're just too sick to move and the only thing that was getting me through was being able to see this lit up window across the street. It was what looked like a new mom or a nanny with this tiny baby in her arms and they were like gently bouncing up and down. It looked like the most comfortable thing in the world and for a few short moments it made me forget how much I wanted to die. Then suddenly someone steps in front of the light, someone whose face I couldn't see, but I knew they were looking at me. I knew that for whatever

reason they just stopped to stare at me as I lay there shivering and wheezing. I was completely helpless, completely at the will of this anonymous stranger. They could have done anything that they wanted to me, anything, and I don't think I've been able to lift a single finger to stop them. I know that's not as graphic or overtly horrifying as a dude getting stabbed in the neck, but when I think of all the scariest moments from being homeless, that's in the top three every time. But thankfully in the end they just walked off. Didn't even ask if I needed medical attention, but honestly, I'm not resentful they didn't ask. I'm just more glad they didn't make the situation worse. Okay, so remember I told you I lived in that messed up shelter for a while?

Well, it was in a really, really sketchy part of Stockton, and the place had a curfew of 10pm, so either you were back by then, or you were locked out for the night. So this one night, I'm like power walking back to the shelter when I see that some total jerk has set a rug on fire down in an alleyway, presumably to like dispose of it or something. So my eyes are glued to this thing thinking, who in God's name would do something like that? When the rug sits up and screams. From what I heard later, someone had gotten so sick of this guy getting drunk and passing

out behind their house that they went out and just set the guy on fire, and I'm the unfortunate SOB to come walking up on it just seconds after it happened. I scream at the guy to roll, roll, roll, until we finally got the message. He managed to get the fire out, but I'm pretty sure he died before the EMTs could get him to the hospital. I still can't watch movies where people get set on fire. Just bring those memories back fresh in my mind. Another time, we heard this one crazy cook out in San Bernardino was giving away free samples. He'd come up with this new way of cooking meth but but he didn't know if it was safe or not,

so we all had to meet near this gas station. Before you call out the free sample thing, this cook was nuts, and he'd done it before, go figure. I didn't do any meth, but me and a buddy figured we could grab the free sample, then swap it for dope with someone back on skid row. Turned out the whole free sample thing was a trick, because this gas station happened to be right next to an overpass. Once enough tweakers had gathered, this cook dragged a 17-year-old girl up onto the overpass, and then threw her off, because she owed him money.

It was supposed to be like a message to the other tweakers. The girl died of her injuries, obviously. Finally, the thing that still sticks with me even today is how cruel kids and teenagers can be towards homeless folks. It's always boys, always, and it doesn't always get violent, but you see enough of it to actually fear these ache-stricken, five-foot-nothing jerks, not because they're big and strong, just because they're evil. Like I remember asking this kid, he couldn't have been older than maybe 16 if he had any spare change for me. He literally rattled all the change in his pocket, gave me this big poop-eating grin and said, sure, I got a whole bunch of change. I got so much I don't know what to do with it all.

Another kid, on a different occasion, actually got out his wallet, took out maybe two dollars in change, then just tossed it into a storm drain, way out of my reach. Most of that stuff just makes me angry, but the scary part is that I know well people don't really mature past a certain age. They tend to just get better at hiding what monsters they are. And to think these kids go on to take up positions of power or privilege is just, it's just terrifying to me. Anyway, after the incident with the tweaker girl I hit rock bottom and I almost overdosed after totally misjudging the strength of some new dealer's stash.

I woke up in the hospital, my mom and dad were there, and the conversation we had, once I was able to speak, ended up setting me up on the road to recovery. I don't think I'm all the way healed yet, like I said, movies with flaming bodies really bother me and I find myself almost totally unable to trust anyone outside of my immediate family, but I'm getting there. Every day I'm getting closer to being a complete person, but at the same time, I think there will always be a piece of me that I left out in the streets, and honestly, I'd like to keep it that way. Thanks for reading, and look after each other. I used to be a journalist over in California before I moved out here to Boca, and one of

the earliest cases I covered was actually one of the first crimes committed by the man that would go on to be named the Golden State Killer. Luckily for me, one of my first cases would probably be one of the most horrifying and just writing about it scarred me for life. So the victim had recently moved out to Rancho Cordova to live with her father but at the time of the attack, her father was away on vacation. The victim told police that just after her father departed, she began to feel like she was being watched.

At one point, she was walking in her neighborhood at night when an older dark medium-sized American car drove by, slowing as it passed her, and every time she looked to see who it was the driver would quickly turn his face away. Shortly after these creepy encounters began she started receiving phone calls late at night, but when she answered, there was only ever silence on the other end. Then, about four weeks into her father's absence, the person who had obviously been stalking the woman finally made their move. At approximately 5pm on June 17th, 1976, the woman stalker used the railroad tracks near the rear of her home to approach unseen.

He then cut the telephone line to the house, then backed off to wait until the sun had set. Once it was dark, and he was sure the woman was home, he crept back towards the house, then used a knife to chip away at the lock of the back door until he gained entry. It's understood he managed to do so almost completely silently because by the time the attack commenced, the stalker had masked up and had undressed completely. His victim was still asleep as he climbed the stairs, approaching the bedroom, and began tapping on the open door with the blade of his knife. The victim said he knew her name and called out to her softly to wake her up.

She said at first she thought it was her father having arrived home early from his trip, but when she sat up to see who it was, her stalker switched on the light and she let out a scream. She added that, as bizarre as it may seem, she tried to seek refuge from the stalker by pulling the covers over her head, just like a child might do to avoid monsters lurking under their beds. Only this monster was very real, and as he jumped under the bed, tore the covers off of her, and pressed his knife against her temple so hard it caused blood to trickle down her face, he said, You make one move. You make one sound, I'll stick this knife

in you. Once the victim was compliant, the stalker commanded her to roll over. When she obeyed, he used rope to tightly bind her arms behind her back. Then the assault began in earnest. That night, the man that would come to be known as the Golden State Killer committed unspeakable acts of violence and depravity on his victim, using items of her clothing to further restrain and humiliate her while he violated her over and over again. When he was done, he seemed to wander around the bedroom aimlessly, panting and breathless as he coldly observed the accoutrements of his victim's life, knickknacks, trinkets, and family photographs. Then suddenly, he moved to exit the room, telling her, don't make a move while I'm here, or I'll kill you. After he departed the room, it was a while before his victim dared to move.

She awaited her captor's return at any moment, terrified he'd opted to subject her to a more permanent end. But when minutes ticked by and there was still no sign of him, she began to slowly creep towards the bedroom door. Peeking outside, she saw the back door was open and, figuring the coast was clear, she hurtled towards her father's bedroom, kicked the phone off the nightstand, and dialed 911 with her toes. Deputies rushed to the scene of the crime, but the Golden State Killer was long gone. Naturally, the attack caused a huge amount of controversy in media attention, and in order to try and reassure the public, the Sacramento County Sheriff's Department held regular community meetings with concerned citizens. Generally, these meetings were used to ease their worries

and answer their questions, all the while assuring them that everything in their power was being done to catch the culprit. But as time went on, and police failed time and time again to protect the communities they pledged to serve, the local citizens grew more and more frustrated with law enforcement. Then, at one particularly heated meeting, a guy stands up to speak and starts absolutely eviscerating law enforcement, telling them how incompetent they are, how they should all be fired, and for the time being, he mostly has the people on his side. But then, in a bizarrely unfeeling display, the guy turns his fury on the husbands of the victims, asking why they didn't protect their loved ones and implying they were partially

to blame for what they had suffered through. Obviously, that didn't go down well with the local populace, who shouted the guy down before forbidding him from contributing again. A few months go by, and an assault very similar to that of the Golden State Killer occurs in the exact same community. And the victim? The wife of the guy who'd stood up to insult the husbands of the victims. I'm not much of a believer in coincidences. If you ask me, someone had deliberately targeted him as a result of what he'd said during the community meeting. Which either means that someone was so anger result of what he'd said during the community meeting, which either means that someone was so angered by what he'd said that he decided to let him know how it felt,

or the Golden State Killer had been sat in that very same community meeting, listening to every single thing that was being said about him, soaking it all up, figuring out how and when to make his next move. I was in the same room as that guy. I probably looked at him maybe even shook hands with him and that ladies and gentlemen is enough to make my skin want to crawl

right off my skeleton. A A few years back I was driving from 29 Palms, California to Albuquerque, New Mexico. 29 Palms is located in the desolate high desert east of Los Angeles, and except for passing through Amboy, the road between the two is a total wilderness. Amboy is pretty much a ghost town with a dormant volcano on one side and a salt flat on the other. It also happened to be a hotspot of Church of Satan activity back in the 1970s, but that's another story entirely. Anyway, I stopped in Amboy and snapped a picture of the city sign, just to prove that I was there to friends who dared me to take that route to I-40. Then I got back in my car and carried on with the journey. A few minutes later,

I'm driving through a grassy canyon when I see some stuff in the middle of the road. I slow down to see a red Pontiac Fiero stopped sideways across both lanes, an open suitcase with clothes scattered everywhere, two bodies lying face down in the road, a man and a woman. Immediately I stop my car and jump out of the driver's side with my phone in hand and start jogging over to the motionless couple while shouting, hey are you okay? I don't get a response so I unlock my phone and start dialing 911. Then just as I start telling the operator that there had been a car accident, I notice something weird about the unconscious guy. For someone who evidently had been thrown from a motor vehicle, he had very little damage to his

head. Sure, he was covered in blood, but I'd seen accidents where the bodies were a mess. These just looked too clean. I can picture the moment the man started to move like it was yesterday and the hope I felt that he was still alive. Only the thing was, he was still alive. Only that wasn't a good thing. Not for me anyway. Because out of nowhere as I'm talking to the 911 dispatcher, the guy just launches himself to his feet and begins to sprint directly at me. I just reacted, getting back into my car and zooming past him and his female partner who was also back on her feet and chasing me by the time I got out of there.

The whole thing had been an elaborate ambush. Two tweakers who'd decided to stage a car crash to trick drivers into stopping and getting out And the scary thing is, it almost worked Back when I was locked up, I read a pamphlet on creative writing. I remember how it said you have to create sympathy between the reader and the subject. If the reader doesn't somehow like the person they're reading about, if they can't find any redeemable qualities, they won't root for them to succeed. And here's where my story is going to fall down. You see, I am not a nice guy, at least I wasn't, because back in the day I was a career criminal, one who specialized in burglaries, armed robberies,

and most pertinent to this story, home invasions. Violent home invasions can be ridiculously profitable and compared to banks, offices, or warehouse spaces, security is minimal. What's more, me and my firm worked here in England so it's not like we had some pesky second amendment to deal with. Yeah, you still had to worry about have-a-go heroes with their baseball bats and kitchen knives and I can tell you from personal experience that bread knives leave horrific scars. But it's unless you were deft enough to target some rich farmer, you could be safe in the knowledge you wouldn't be bringing a knife to a gunfight. On top of that, we carved out a very specific niche when it came to who we targeted,

because the people we'd go for were either those with no legal recourse, drug dealers, loan sharks, dodgy builders firms, anyone who'd have a lot of dirty cash on hand or anything valuable they wouldn't be able to report stolen. But please, don't get into your heads that I was some weird Robin Hood vigilante robbing the filthy rich and giving it away. Yeah, we went after heroin and crack dealers, but we got them at home, where their families slept. We threatened their kids, little kids, man. We put knives to their arms and legs, told their dads we'd chop them up into little pieces if they didn't give up the cash, or the coke, or whatever we were after. Like I said, we were top scumbags, but here's where the incentive to read on comes in because I'm sure many of you will be pleased to hear that we got what was coming to us.

In fact, I might not live to see 2022 and to explain why, we have to go all the way back to around early April of 2015 when a very exciting bit of information made its way through the grapevine to us. So, our little firm had four blokes in it. Me, who did the lion's share of the planning. Kev, the driver. Sean, who was basically the muscle, but definitely had his head screwed on too. And Phil, who brought in the jobs, and who was the closest thing we had to a leader. Phil comes down to the pub one day and we can tell right away he's got something on his mind. He's all smiles, just orders a Red Bull and when he sits down in the

booth he's practically rubbing his hands with glee. He then tells us that he had a mate that drove minicabs for a living and over the previous month he'd gotten five different jobs driving these gorgeous young Eastern European girls out to this big house in Surrey. Clandon Park House, he said its name was, the kind of place you'd call a stately home if it was under the care of the National Trust. But this one wasn't. It was still very much under private ownership and whoever that owner was seemed to be in the business of bringing some very beautiful but very vulnerable young women there. Only, they never seemed to leave, as this minicab driver said he never once drove anyone back. He dropped them off, but no one, not from his cab firm anyway, went back to pick them up. This really made our ears perk up. Human trafficking rings don't normally keep a lot of cash on hand, as it's all digital these days,

but if one was based in some old big mansion type thing, there had to be some stuff in there with a very high resale value if you catch my drift. Phil then told us that he'd asked his mate to keep an ear on the ground, basically to make sure something dodgy wasn't going on before we hit the place, but otherwise told us to be on standby by what could be our biggest job yet. Maybe two or three weeks later, we get two more pieces of info down the tube. Whatever was going on at Clandon Park was definitely something dodgy. The minicab driver had made two more trips there over the past few weeks One of the girls he gave a lift to was definitely a working girl You'd think this would be the green light for us

If we hit the place around the same time as one of these little visits The bloke might think it was linked to the girl Maybe the gang running her, wanting more than they were owed And we'd potentially be off the hook But the second bit of info came with a warning. The minicab driver didn't think we should go ahead with the job and this is why. The second time he'd driven a girl up, she hadn't been nearly as excited as the rest of them. He'd said in the past the girls knew they were in for a payday, being driven out to a big posh

house in the middle of nowhere. Maybe she'd get a tidy tip or something, maybe pinch a set of diamond earrings, maybe a bit of both. But the last one seemed different. When she got into the minicab, she didn't seem happy or excited. She seemed very, very anxious. When the driver tried to make small talk, she wasn't having any of it. Then at one point, right as they're doing about 60 miles an hour on a busy motorway, she undoes her belt, opens the back door, and just throws herself out of the car. He phones the ambulance, then circles back around to meet them, and was there when they put her on the trolley and put her in the back, dead as a doornail. He said the whole thing scared the life out of him, said he couldn't stop thinking about what had that girl so scared over her little date up at Clandon.

If he had to guess, he'd say something nasty was going on up there, something that might make any potential jobs very, very messy. And we didn't do messy. We did fast, violent, in-and-out jobs. We should have just called the whole thing off, but Phil had his mind made up about the place, and since he told the other lads that we might be able to retire on the proceeds, their minds were made up too. Then, when we got the news of the vault, it was go time. It had looked like we were just going for the jewelry and the antiques, but when some electrician gave up some info in exchange for a few hundred quid, we had a definite target and it was all hands to the pump. I used to work as a handyman assistant and prepping for a home invasion was a lot like prepping for one of those jobs.

You assemble the tools you need, sort out a van, make sure everyone knows the job, then you drive out to the desired destination at the desired place and time. It's quiet too, not like when you're shopping around for a clean shooter, thinking every second person is an undercover copper. I can just pop into B&Q, pick up a sledgehammer and zip ties, and I'll even get a smile from the checkout girl on the way out. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. The job's on the other hand, not so simple. And the one at Clandon Park was the hardest of the lot. The next twist came from when we found out that we'd be going in

during the day. If you're thinking home invasion during daylight hours, you must be mad. I thought the exact same thing. I asked Phil if he'd banged his head or something because the idea of hitting the place at bloody lunchtime was just barmy. Phil told me to trust him, that he'd done the recce or the scouting and the place was heavy with security at night whereas during the day there was a changeover of guard shifts at exactly 3pm this was when the guards would be at their sloppiest which gave us our time to strike

Phil reckoned that we could get in have the lead fella open the vault for us then be out again in exactly 12 minutes with millions in cash, jewelry get in, have the lead fella open the vault for us, then be out again in exactly 12 minutes, with millions in cash, jewelry, and whatever else they had hidden in that thing. I'll have to admit, hearing about the vault turned me right back on to the job.

I'd been worried about the whole incident with that call girl in the car, but maybe that was just totally unrelated. Maybe the girl was as mad as a box of frogs and was always going to do something like that. Besides, it was all talk of one last job and we'll be set for life and any of those little doubts in the back of your mind just dematerialized. I suppose I've kept you in suspense long enough at this point. I suppose you all just want to know what happened, what went wrong, why I went to prison, and why my life is now in the toilet. Well, it started with the vault. Everything was going perfectly to plan. They obviously didn't expect anyone to actually try and rob the place during the daytime, and the fact that we rolled up right as some gardener bloke

turned up to trim the hedges made the help think that we were just part of his crew. She found out pretty quickly how that wasn't the case when Sean broke her collarbone with one swing of his hammer. We managed to grip the head security bloke who was right where we wanted him to be during the ship changeover and although he initially insisted that he couldn't get the vault open, threatening to scoop his eye out with the sharp end of a claw hammer soon had him remembering the code. We were expecting lock boxes full of priceless jewelry, maybe some gold bullion, painting, I don't know, rich people's stuff. What we found is something unbelievable. I use the word unbelievable because, out of all the people I've told, only one person has actually believed me to be telling the truth. But it is the truth, when I saw what it was when we opened that door.

What we found was a mix between a prison and a hospital. It was completely sterile, with gowned up and masked up nurses screaming when they saw us walk in with our balaclavas and weapons. There was one main room, what looked like a kind of lobby, and six smaller cells jutting off from it. We figured that there might be something valuable in the cells, so we went to see what was in there, and I still remember Kev gasping when he saw that it was women. They had a woman locked up in each of these little rooms and every single one of them was pregnant. The hospital staff or the wardens, whoever they were, they ran off into another part of the hospital and sealed

the door. I doubt we couldn't have gotten the door open but we weren't really in the mood to try at that point. We realized that there had been a horrible mistake. Yes, there was obviously something valuable in here, but it wasn't anything we could launder or resell. I don't know what exactly was going on, but you just got this sense that something terrible was happening, and this was confirmed when one of the girls got up out of bed, waddled towards the cell door, which was made of some kind of clear plastic and began banging on it. I haven't got a clue what language she was

speaking, it sounded Eastern European, but God knows which one. We didn't need a translator though, it was blindingly obvious that she wanted us to let her out, and it didn't take us long to find some way of letting her out, but it came with a price. To open up the cells, we had to set off the fire alarm, which meant we had to get out of there without grabbing so much as a Krugerrand. But not before Kev walked over to the room the nurses had locked themselves in. It had this little glass panel on it so you could see inside a bit, but not a lot. Right before we trip the fire alarm, Kev walks over just to see if there's anything in there worth taking, and all we hear is, Jesus Christ boys, what in God's name is all that?

I remember walking over and peering through the little glass panel. The first thing I saw was all those terrified nurses, but behind them, in all these little see-through plastic pouches, were babies. Not like actually full-grown kids, no. Some of them didn't look all the way grown yet, but you could tell what they were, there was no mistaking it. We then put two and two together, all silently coming to the same rough conclusion as to what was happening in there. And that's when Phil flew into a rage. I knew it was stupid of him to try and rescue that pregnant girl. We were the bad guys.

You don't do stuff like that when you're a bad guy. It gets you caught. It gets you killed. But what was I going to do? Make him leave her? Phil was about a foot taller than me so generally speaking whenever Phil wanted to do something it got done. On the way out to the van Sean stopped near these big long curtains. Phil just about tore his head off asking him what in God's name he was thinking but later when he saw him pulling out a lighter and set fire to a dusty pair of

drapes he said he just smiled in approval. We piled into the van just before four in the afternoon and I remember that clearly because of the little digi clock on the dashboard. As Kev turned the van around I saw smoke coming up from one of the windows and I remember hoping the place burned to the ground. We drove so fast that I think we were almost back in London before we saw a fire engine zooming past us going the other way and thankfully that was the only time we saw blue flashing lights behind us. The pregnant girl apparently didn't know a bit of English and was crying and saying thank you, thank you over and over again as we drove back. She didn't know much though, only enough to repeat the phrase, Totenham Court Road, when we asked her where she lived.

We dropped her off, all in our separate ways. Kev got rid of the van, and apparently, that was that. We never had a visit from the coppers with the big key. It took us ages for word of the fire to reach the airwaves And for all intent and purposes The raid never bloody happened in the first place Only we couldn't forget about it or rather Kev wouldn't let us

The prick wouldn't shut up about it Worrying about the girls Wanting to try to find the one we'd saved Or call in some anonymous tip to the police. And I'm perfectly sure he did too, call in a tip I mean. He never told us he did, but I know, because Kev was the first one to turn up dead. They said he topped himself, but anyone who knew Kev knew he wasn't like that. He didn't leave a note. Didn't tell anyone he was depressed or anything. Phil was next or rather if they did get him his body was never found.

Told me he was going to work in Birmingham with another crew or some job he'd heard about. And that was the last time I spoke to him. His phone was disconnected about a week or so after he got the train up there. I hope he's alright but part of me knows that he's gone now. I turned myself in to the police when they found Sean. Someone had broken into his flat and beat him to death. Sean. Big six foot something Sean. Amateur boxer Sean. They'd smashed him to the point where he was unrecognizable. If Sean wasn't safe, neither was I. When I first tried to confess to having started the fire, the police told me I had to have been mistaken. Clandon Park had told them that it was an electrical fault in the basement that started the fire, so they basically refused to arrest me for

it. I had to tell them almost everything to get them to believe me, even gave them a rough ID of the van's reg numbers so they could track it with motorway CCTV. Clannan Park didn't want to press charges apparently. Not until the police wanted to search the property then, all of a sudden, they were fine with me taking the blame for it. Funny that, isn't it? What I also find funny is how none of it ever appeared in the paper. In fact, on their website it still says that they had a fire in 2015 and that it was an electrical fault, not an arson attack. But I know what happened. No one believes me, but I know what happened.

I got nine years for arson, with a few other convictions tagged onto it, damaging a grade 2 listed building and whatnot. But there was a chance I'd be out in six. I know they tried to have me killed in jail, whoever they are. Some kid appeared on E-Wing around Easter of 2017. No one knew him. No one knew what he was in for. Couldn't have been any older than 18 or 19. Kid tried to shank me up with the sharpened end of a toothbrush. The screws couldn't figure out

why. I'd have told them if I thought that they'd have believed me. The kid was found dead in his cell not long after. Made a noose out of a jumper and just did himself in. After that I knew they wouldn't have another go until I was out and I just kept my head down and did my time. Now here I am. I've been out of the nick for a few months now, readying a bed sit and well, it'd be silly to give that away now, wouldn't it? I've been in touch with the journalist from the Guardian. I tried others but no one else believed me. If anything happens, this bloke has all the info and if they make a move on me, he'd promise to drop the lot of it onto his boss's desk. But all we can do now is wait. Yeah, we'll keep digging for info,

keep trying to prove the unprovable. But I know they're closing in on me. I know they can't allow me to live, because to whoever is responsible for the horror show on your Clandon Park house, a few more bodies are nothing to them. We'll be right back. or rugged terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumho RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumho TreadExperts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca I've only ever told two people this story.

Mainly because I'm scared to, but also because I'm sort of complicit in the whole thing. Sometimes I feel that if I wasn't so cowardly, I'd have just gone to the police and the whole ordeal would have been over in less than 24 hours. But that's obviously not what happened or I wouldn't even be writing this. By November of last year the whole lockdown thing had me pretty miserable. I hated being stuck in some crummy little apartment but after a while I realized this wasn't so much because I hated being stuck indoors, it was more that I just hated the apartment I was living in. So despite it being a terrible time to pack up and move apartments, I decided to look for a new

place. I found a place I liked surprisingly quickly and after a thorough virtual viewing that took place over FaceTime, I offered to put down a deposit. The landlady said I could move in on the first day of December, less than a week from the time I was calling her, and that they were just finishing off a few repairs. It sounded totally legitimate. The lady seemed cool, but when it came to me asking for the contact info of the former tenant just to get an idea of what I was in for, she told me she didn't have any contact details for him. I was like, huh, what? Well, how did you keep in touch with the guy?

She got all flustered and gave me some excuses about having a new phone which I stupidly swallowed whole because I wanted the apartment so badly. Then, like we agreed, I moved in on the 1st of December. Cut to the second week in the apartment. Everything is going awesomely, electric bills were kinda high but otherwise nothing to complain about. Then one night I'm literally just getting out of the shower when there's a knock at the door. I towel off a little, throw on a robe, walk to the door and take a look through the peephole. No one. I see absolutely no one at all. Stupidly I then

open the door and look out into the hallway and the next thing I know there's a gun in my face, and holding it is a dude in a covid mask. He and his buddies force me back into the apartment and the whole time I'm like just take what you want, no one has to get hurt here, I'm cool if you're cool. But the weirdest thing happens. While one of the dudes keeps his gun on me, another one of them walks straight into my bedroom, almost like he knew exactly what he was looking for. One of his buddies follows and I see this big old sledgehammer in his hand. I start asking what's going on but the guy with the gun cuts me off and tells me to shut up. So I did. The front door is shut at this point. No one can see what's going on. No one's coming to help me. So I'm

scared but I'm also pretty curious too. That's when I hear these banging sounds coming from the bedroom sounding exactly like one of them was demolishing some drywall and as it turns out that's exactly what they were doing. I hear a few more bangs before one of the guys shouts, yeah boy, there it is, just like you said. The next thing I know, the guys are reappearing with a dusty sports bag in their hands. He unzips it, and just sees rolls and rolls of dirty looking dollar bills, like there had to be at least half a mil there, at least. The guy takes one of the rolls out, drops it on the floor in front of me, then says something like, get your wall fixed up bruh, and keep the change, but don't tell

no one we've been here, otherwise we come back, you heard me? I just nod, then they walk out, still wearing their masks, looking as nonchalant as can be. I was shaking way, way harder than I'm comfortable admitting, let's just leave it at that. But when I picked up the roll of dirty hundreds and counted them out, there was $10,000 just staring me in the face. If you never had that kind of cash money on you, it makes you nervous, but I knew I'd be spending it pretty fast on getting my drywall fixed up as well as other home improvements, the first being a big deadbolt on my apartment door. In December of the year 2000, two brothers by the names of Reginald and Jonathan Carr

arrived in the largest city in the state of Kansas, Wichita. The pair hailed from Dodge City, over 150 miles to the west, and each had an extensive criminal record by the time they took their trip to Wichita. But their visit wasn't in good faith. It wasn't some road trip to sample the delights of another big city. Their reasons for being in Wichita were the very definition of malicious and predatory. And it wasn't long before they decided to commence their malevolent mission. On December 8th, Wichita State University baseball player Andrew Schreiber stopped at a convenience store to buy some skull-chewing tobacco.

Out of nowhere, the Carr brothers appeared behind him as he was returning to his car and forced him at gunpoint to withdraw money from ATMs until his car had refused more transactions. Schreiber was fortunate enough to escape the encounter with just shot-out tires, a few scrapes and bruises, and a depleted bank account, but others wouldn't be so lucky. Apart from a vague description of two male African Americans in their early to mid-twenties, police had nothing on which to base an investigation, and all was quiet for the few days that followed. Then, just three days later, on December 11th, they invaded the home of 55-year-old cellist and librarian Anne Walenta.

The brothers subjected her to much of the same treatment as Schreiber, beating her, robbing her, and taking their time while doing so. However, it appears the brothers underestimated Walenta, and she managed to escape from them, rushing to her car in an attempt to flee the scene. Tragically, one of the Carr brothers noticed her absence, following her outside before sending three bullets smashing through her windshield and into her torso. Knowing they were compromised, the Carrs took their turn to abscond from the house while Ann Valenta would pass away from her wounds in a Wichita hospital bed just three days later. The car's crime spree was already horrifying in both scope and scale, but it wasn't until December 14th that the brothers would escalate their frenzy from a series of bloody robberies to theatrical levels of pain and suffering.

On the night in question, the brothers pulled up outside a house at 12727 East Birchwood Drive in the Wichita suburb of Andover, which they later admitted to choosing at random. Inside were financial director Brad Haka, preschool teacher Heather Mueller, financial analyst turned priest Aaron Sander, local high school teacher Jason Beffert, and his girlfriend, a teacher known only in court documents as Holly G. The Carr brothers got out of their car, armed with golf clubs and pistols, and walked up to the front door of the home. One brother hid from view as the other knocked at the house, smiling and waving when he saw movement through a front-facing window. But when the door was open, the brother dropped his friendly facade, pointing his pistol in their victim's face before forcing his way inside.

Once all five of the home's occupants had been corralled into one of the home's back rooms, the Carr brothers began to pillage their belongings. At one point, one of the brothers opened up a popcorn tin, emptying its contents and observing a small jewelry box that fell out. When he opened it, he found a diamond engagement ring but instead of simply pocketing the ring and moving on, the brothers found the discovery to be highly amusing. They marched back into the room in which they detained the home's occupants and demanded to know who the ring belonged to. That's how Holly G found out that high school teacher Jason Befford was planning on proposing to her, not in a moment of joyous surprise, as it was intended to be, but in a moment of absolute dread and terror, as two strange men laughed in her face about it.

Even with the diamond ring and a variety of expensive electricals, the Carr brothers were unhappy with their haul. It was then the brothers decided to take three of their prisoners to a series of local ATM machines, forcing each of them in turn to max out their cash withdrawals. This bagged the brothers an additional $2,000, but still, they weren't satisfied. They drove their prisoners back home and then tied them up again, but instead of fleeing the scene with the cash and valuables they'd already collected, the Carr brothers decided to have a little fun. They began to torture the male prisoners from the group, beating them with their golf clubs along with a variety of household items.

According to court documents, it's then apparent that one of the Carr brothers remembered how one of their prisoners was engaged to another and decided on a horrifically cruel form of torture involving both of them. One of the brothers dragged Jason Beffert into a position where he could witness the violation of his fiancée. The other picked his own female victim and proceeded to do the same to her. This horrendous torture and abuse went on for more than an hour, with the brothers taking turns to beat and violate each one of their terrified prisoners. When they grew bored of the violence, they packed their prisoners into one of their own cars and drove them out to the

Stryker Soccer Complex on the outskirts of Wichita. As it was late at night, the complex was completely abandoned and there was no one to stop the brothers from forcing their prisoners from the vehicle and marching them out into one of the soccer fields. They were lined up, forced to kneel, then each of them was shot execution style right in the back of the head before one of the Carr brothers drove over them in the truck they'd been driving. It's chilling to note that this obviously wasn't to finish them off, so to speak. They'd already shot their victims in the head.

Running them over in a truck was evidently an attempt to mutilate the bodies as best they could before they fled the site of the murders. Yet amazingly, the Carr brothers didn't attempt to flee Wichita following such a shockingly violent crime. In fact, they didn't even leave the neighborhood. They drove straight back to the home of the victims they'd left lying in the snow and began to utterly destroy the place with their golf clubs. It was then that they found Holly's pet dog, Nicky, who had been so scared during the attack

that she'd ran and hid under a kitchen cabinet. One of the Carr brothers enticed the dog towards him with some cold cuts taken from the home's refrigerator. When approached, he smashed it to a pulp with the golf club he was holding. Only when the home had been utterly ransacked did the Carr brothers even think to depart, but they did so safe in the knowledge that any potential witnesses had been silenced and that in all likelihood they would never have to answer for their crimes. But they were wrong. Back at the Stryker soccer complex, blood-soaked, tire-tracked bodies lay

motionless in the snow. All except one. Holly G., though bruised and bloodied and battered, slowly began to open her eyes. She couldn't remember how she got into that snow-covered soccer field, nor did she recognize the bodies of the people lying next to her. All she knew was that she needed to find her boyfriend. She needed to find Jason. And that's how she ended up walking almost a mile in the freezing Wichita night, half naked, bleeding and terrified, but

still alive. Around a half hour later, a middle-aged couple were awakened by someone pounding at their door. It was 25-year-old Holly G., bleeding and half-frozen, and according to the homeowner, she apparently opened with, I need to tell you my story before I die. Miraculously, Holly G. survived the attack and would go on to positively identify both brothers using prior mugshots. Both were tracked down the day after the home invasion and were taken into custody following a long and volatile standoff with police. The local district attorney said that based on the evidence, the motive for the murders was robbery, yet he didn't seem to take into account that neither brothers seemed satisfied, even when they killed their victims. He failed to touch on how they returned to the house,

not to erase any potential evidence, but to continue to destroy all they found. Regardless, thanks to Holly G's testimony, both brothers were convicted of nearly all 113 counts against them, including kidnapping, robbery, four counts of capital murder, and one count of first-degree murder. They were each sentenced to death for the capital murders as well as life in prison, with decades to serve before eligible for parole. Following their imprisonment, sensationalized news coverage of the Carr brothers' vicious crime spree created widespread panic in the greater Wichita area, resulting in a huge spike in the sales of firearms instead of the art home security systems. The fact is, we live in a time when these kinds of

crimes are relatively rare. Over the past few decades, violent crime has actually decreased in the western world, whereas the reporting of it has increased in volume and intensity. It gives us the false impression that things are getting worse when in reality, data might suggest the very opposite. But it's also very true that we can never truly eliminate the dangers that lurk out there in the dark. There will always be monsters. There will always be evil. And sadly, there will always be innocent victims. I grew up in a single parent household. Just me, my sister and my mom. With my grandpa occasionally lending a hand with parenting duties.

And when I was about four or five years old, we were broken into. Twice. I didn't know all the details of the whole thing until years later. Like I have vague memories of moving apartments and some cops coming over to the house, but I was pretty much kept in the dark until I was old enough to handle what had gone down. For the first break-in, we were all out grocery shopping, so my mom didn't realize anything had happened until we got home. There was an open window, open drawers, the way

my grandpa tells it. It's like my mom interrupted them in the middle of doing something and they climbed out of a second floor window as soon as he'd heard us arrive. That or whoever it was just didn't care about people knowing he'd been there. The second break in happened three months later, only this time the guy broke in at night time while we were all asleep. I had to get all this from my grandpa because understandably my mom hates talking about it, but the way he tells it, she basically woke up in the middle of the night and sensed a presence in the room with her. Not like a spirit or anything dumb like that, like an actual person. Then when

she opened her eyes, there was someone standing next to her bed with something shiny in his hand. She told grandpa she was literally frozen with terror, couldn't move, couldn't talk, literally petrified in the very sense of the word. Apparently the guy was mumbling something, but mom couldn't remember exactly what. Then by the time she started begging him not to hurt her, she couldn't hear anything at all. My sister remembers walking into her room, thinking that she was having a nightmare. She asked mom if she was okay. Mom threw the covers from over her head, saw the guy was gone, then noticed the second floor window was open where the guy had used the same escape route as the first break-in.

She put my little sister back to bed. I obviously have no memory of this because I was asleep. She called 911, then she called my grandpa. Grandpa said the cops found faint, muddy footprints all over the house including in our bedrooms so he'd obviously taken his time exploring the place before he'd woken my mom up. Only, this guy hadn't just been exploring. He'd been very, very busy, and it actually took us a few days to uncover all the bizarre little things he'd done, things which spoke to just how insane this person really was.

The next day, when we noticed that the cat wouldn't touch her milk, mom poured it out into the sink sink thinking that it had gone sour, then got the distinct smell of bleach as she did so. She can't be certain, but she thinks the guy poured bleach into the cat's milk, wanting to kill it. Then there was the cracked empty eggs in the fridge. Not like cracked all the way,

just little holes in the top with all the yolk and egg white missing. It's possible he just poured them all the way, just little holes in the top with all the yolk and egg white missing It's possible he just poured them down the sink, but Grandpa thinks the guy might have been sucking them raw Not all that scary, I know, just freaky, you know Mom says some meat was missing from the fridge too, raw meat But I know Grandpa used to feed our cat from the fridge too so we can't rule that out. A few days later, grandpa came over in the evening for some dinner and offered to help prep for garbage day. He says one of the garbage cans spilled right as he got into the driveway,

complains to my mom about tin cans in the garbage or whatever, and then goes on a clean up and finds what spilled it. Someone, presumably the guy who broke in, had thrown a pair of scissors in the trash along with a clothing catalog he'd been cutting up. He cut the heads off almost every single model in that catalog and the little paper heads were nowhere to be found. My grandpa thinks the guy took them as some kind of trophy but who knows what he really did with them. Then there was the salt in my mom's work shoes, the knife missing from her knife block in the kitchen, obviously the shiny thing he'd been holding when she woke up to him in her room.

Anyways, the cops got plenty of fingerprints, but whoever it was didn't have a record, and other than the muddy boot prints they'd found, there was nothing much to go on. So to this day, no one's been arrested for it, but my grandpa thinks he knows who it was. Years later, after we'd moved apartments twice in a bid to avoid the guy, a friend of a distant relative ended up getting locked up in some kind of psychiatric hospital. The guy had become obsessed with Alice in Wonderland, had all the books, multiple copies of them too, and all he ever talked about was the looking glass or Wonderland and all this stuff. It might just be a complete coincidence, but the thing is, that's my mom's name, Alice.

She's over the whole thing now, it's been more than 20 years since all of that, but I know that if she doesn't like talking about it, even today, it had to have messed her up for a while. We'll be right back. You can get a pro at Tread Experts. Conquer rugged terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there at treadinx for the C.A. In the summer of 2007, the Petit family of Cheshire, Connecticut consisted of Dr. William Petit, his 48-year-old wife Jennifer, and their two daughters, 17-year-old Haley and 11-year-old Michaela. William Petit was an endocrinologist over in nearby Plainville, and he was also the

medical director of the Jocelyn Diabetes Center at Connecticut Central Hospital, while Jennifer was a nurse and co-director of the health center at Cheshire Academy, a private boarding school in their hometown of Cheshire. They had met at the Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh in the mid-80s while she was an oncology nurse and he was a third-year medical student and were married shortly after. The petite's elder daughter Haley was born just four years later and would grow up to study medicine at Dartmouth College. During her teenage years, Haley had been an active fundraiser for multiple sclerosis research, following her mother's own MS diagnosis. Little sister Michaela was born in 1995,

and was said to have enjoyed cooking for her family when she wasn't studying at the Chase Collegiate School. The Petites were the very picture of a happy, hard-working, upper-middle-class family who had everything to look forward to. But July of that same year, two men would have an irreparable impact on their lives and turn just one or two pre-dawn hours into a waking nightmare. On the evening of Sunday, July 22nd, 2007, Jennifer and young Michaela drove down to a local stop and shop to pick up some groceries for that evening's dinner. It was during this grocery run Jennifer noticed that she and her daughter had drawn the attention of a man in his late twenties, one with dark eyes, dark hair, and patchy facial hair. The man appeared to have followed them through the aisles for a while, keeping his distance but maintaining his presence. Jennifer Petit grew anxious, throwing a few items into her cart and then heading for the cashier as quickly as she could. The feeling of anxiety

only abated when she and her daughter were safely back in their car, but although she couldn't see it, Jennifer was being followed. She believed she'd be safe once she was back at home, but in reality, her nightmare would only just be beginning. The man who'd followed her home was 27-year-old Joshua Komazarzewski. And when he slowed to a stop outside the Petit family home, he pulled out his phone and began to text a friend. I'm chomping at the bit to get started, he wrote. We still on? His friend, 44-year-old Steve Hayes replied. Yes, soon. Hold your horses, Josh wrote back. Dude, Steve replied. The horses want to get loose. After the next few hours, the petite family went about their evening as planned.

Michaela helped her mom cook up a delicious wholesome dinner. The family convened to eat, then each went their separate ways for the evening, entertaining themselves until bedtime. However, William Petit, the family patriarch, was something of a weekend night owl, and often stayed up late watching TV until he fell asleep on the couch downstairs. This is exactly what he did on the night of July 22nd too, which meant that when Joshua Komizarzewski and Steve Hayes broke into the ground floor of the Petit family home, Williams was the first sleeping body they came across. Josh immediately attacked him on sight,

striking him four or five times with a baseball bat before binding his wrists and ankles with zip ties and rope. William later stated that he remembered one of the men telling the others, if he moves, put two bullets in him. Josh and Steve then moved from room to room, rounding up Jennifer, Haley and Michaela before binding them in turn. Then each had a pillowcase placed over their head in order to obscure their vision. After the Petites were properly restrained, Josh and tying him to a support pole,

Josh and Steve continued to violently toss the family home in the hopes of finding additional jewelry or cash, and it quickly became obvious to the family that neither man was satisfied with their loot. They'd apparently stolen $15,000 worth of goods, but they knew the Petites could get them more. It was all a matter of patience and careful planning. At this point, we know that Steve Hayes left the house, leaving the family under the guard of Josh Komisarzewski. He drove to a nearby gas station, purchased $10 worth of gasoline, and drove back to the Petit house, where he then forced Jennifer to accompany him to a local bank. This is how the two criminals got their 15 grand, but not before Jennifer subtly alerted the bank teller to her terrifying predicament. This bank teller then contacted the Cheshire Police Department,

who had officers setting up a silent perimeter around the house before she and Hayes had even arrived home again. Yet when they did, Steve Hayes realized he should have never have left his partner alone with the girls. After once again restraining Jennifer, Steve Hayes walked into the upstairs bedroom to find 17-year-old Haley Petit in floods of tears while 11-year-old Michaela lay catatonic on the floor nearby. When he asked Josh what he'd done, he unapologetically admitted to having assaulted her, all in the presence of a restrained older sister.

Even for a hardened criminal, Hayes later admitted to being horrified by what his partner had done. But in reality, it was more of an inconvenience. Hayes grabbed a bottle of bleach, angrily commanding Josh to get rid of any biological evidence he may have left behind. But while he continued to berate his partner, Josh turned around and accused him of being a homosexual. Hayes denied it, arguing that Josh had simply overcomplicated the situation, but Josh insisted, repeatedly accusing Hayes of being

attracted to men. So then, in order to prove his partner wrong, Hayes of being attracted to men. So then, in order to prove his partner wrong, Hayes dragged Jennifer Petit into another room and assaulted her. All just to prove a point. Jennifer screamed a blood-curdling scream as she tried and failed to fight her attacker off. Her husband William tried to shout up some encouragement from downstairs, willing her to hang on just a little bit longer. That's when he heard one of the invaders say, don't worry, it's all going to be over in a couple of minutes.

William later said he realized that this indicated that they were going to be executed, that he experienced a jolt of adrenaline that enabled him to escape his bindings and flee the house. It later told a courtroom that, I thought, it's now or never because in my mind at that moment, I thought they were going to shoot all of us. Hayes was still assaulting Jennifer Petit when Josh walked in to tell him that William had somehow escaped. Hayes was furious, immediately murdering Jennifer by strangulation, before rushing out to his truck to retrieve the gasoline he'd purchased. Haley and Michaela were still upstairs, both tied to a king-size bed in the master bedroom,

and we can only imagine their horror when they realized that Steve Hayes was dousing their entire family home in gasoline. Maybe they smelled the distinct petroleum smell before he ever appeared. But Hayes burst into the bedroom and began to pour that very same gasoline onto their clothing, their skin, and their hair. I can't imagine that there were words to even describe that level of fear, dread, and horror. When he was done saturating the house with callous indifference in his heart, Steve Hayes struck a match and then set the home ablaze. As the home burned around her, 17-year-old Haley managed to break out of her restraints and run out into an upstairs hallway.

However, she was almost immediately overcome by smoke, collapsing and dying in the hallway. Michaela's body was still tied to the bed and an autopsy indicated that her burns may have started while she was still alive. As we mentioned, their father was about to escape the house and he limped over to a neighbor's yard for help. His injuries were so grievous that despite living next to him for years, his neighbor didn't recognize William at first and had to wait for a verbal confirmation before he ran to call the cops. Meanwhile, as the house burned, Josh and Steve escaped in the petite family car, but crashed shortly afterward, allowing the police to catch and arrest them. In the police interviews that followed, both Josh and Steve confessed to the murders.

Detectives noted that Hayes reeked of gasoline during his interview and tried to pin almost everything on Josh, clearly still angry that his negligence had allowed William Petit to escape. Josh, on the other hand, openly called William a coward and told detectives that he could have saved his family if he wanted to. But who exactly were these pair of remorseless psychopaths who seemed to have no problem escalating a simple robbery into an assault and live cremation? Steven J. Hayes, born May 30th of 1963 in Homestead, Florida, received his first adult

conviction at age 16. Between then and the time of his arrest in 2007, Hayes was arrested over 30 times, mostly for small-time robberies such as smashing a car window to steal a lady's purse. It's clear that he was a career criminal and that he committed some horrendous crimes during his tenure, but compared to his partner, Steve Hayes was a veritable boy scout. Born on August 10th of 1980, Joshua A. Komazarzewski was born to a teen mother who was unable to care for him. After being placed in an adoption center, Joshua was taken into the care of Benedict Komazarzewski, the son of theatrical director Theodore Komazarzewski and dancer Ernestine Staudel. He was a mostly quiet and well-behaved child, but by age 12,

Josh began to display the rather horrifying symptoms of a dark and destructive mental illness, best illustrated in an instance in which Joshua's sister accused him of touching her. At the penalty phase of his trial, Josh's adopter's father would publicly admit that this was true and that Josh had been struggling with predatory inclinations from a very young age. Josh committed his first burglary when he was just 14 years old and by 2002 he was arrested for almost 20 separate home invasions. It was around this time that Josh told his defense attorney that after robbing the house, he would go to the rooms where the occupants were sleeping and listen to them breathe,

adding that he did so because he enjoyed the feeling of invading people's homes and violating their security. He spent five years in prison for his crimes, eventually being paroled in April of 2007, just a few weeks from the Petit Home invasion. After being paroled, Komizarzewski stayed at what was known as the Silliman Halfway House, and this is where he and Steve Hayes first met. Following their trials in 2010 and 2011 respectively, both Josh and Steve were sentenced to death for their crimes. Both sentences would eventually be reduced to life terms after some unconnected political wrangling, but even so, both men sought ways to make their punishments easier to bear. On August 18th of 2016, after being transferred to another prison for his safety, Josh Komizarzewski attempted to hang himself in the prison transport vehicle.

He was unsuccessful and has since been placed on an almost permanent watch by the state correctional institution he currently resides at. Steve Hayes, on the other hand, declared himself to be a transgender woman on October of 2019. He is currently undergoing hormone therapy as part of his transition into a woman and it has been strongly suggested by correctional staff that he will seek to be transferred to a female correctional facility once that transition has been completed. It's clear that while one man sought to end his own life, the other wishes to begin a new one. Perhaps Steve Hayes really does just wish to be a new person, one unburdened by the sin of his assault and murder. He'll get a second karmic roll of the dice, a new shot at life, but that's far more than

we can say for the Petit family and its sole survivor, William. For William has always been haunted by what happened that night, and by his own admission, has never been able to get over it. Yet as he languishes in the eternal agony of pointless and violent loss, the men who killed his family simply carry on trying to forget, trying to move on. But there will always be blood on their hands. In 2014, I moved to England from Canada to gain work and travel experience, and also to find myself. I ended up living in Essex with three other roommates.

They were all women, all a bit older than I was. I was 24 at the time, Megan was 31, Cherry was 34, and Cassie was 38. Megan was from New York, Cherry from New Jersey, and Cassie from Poland. All four of us shared this three-story flat. The back of our home was the living room and kitchen. The back wall was complete glass that looked out into the garden. The garden was completely fenced in. The house had an interesting dynamic to say the least. Tons of stories from that time in my life. I adored all of my roommates except for Cherry. After living with Cherry for seven months, I was over her antics. One day I come home from work, I lock the door, make myself something to eat and go up to bed. I brought some work home with me so I am in my

nightie with all of these papers around me and my headphones on jamming out. I had headphones on because Cherry was out to dinner with work friends. That meant booze and then soon after that a tantrum was surely to come. I just didn't want to have to listen to her crazy scream crying anymore. I'm working away completely focused until I feel something. I look up to see a man standing over me. I don't register it right away and passively say, Cherry's room is on the second floor and continue to work. Cherry regularly brought home strange men.

He doesn't leave. Again, Cherry's room is downstairs, you- He then interrupts me. I'm not here for Cherry. A cold chill iced my veins. My fight or flight kicked in just then. I started surveying the situation.

I look him up and down. He has a bottle of Prosecco in one hand and a knife in the other. He's about 5'10", wild muddy brown hair and black eyes. He has a light blue polo shirt on and one side of his collar has popped up and a distinct Manchester accent. Once I focused in, I realized his eyes were black because his pupils were completely dilated. I was in trouble. I needed an escape plan. Unfortunately, this man was standing in between me and my bedroom door.

I needed to get downstairs, but I needed for him to think it was his idea. I decided to play along. Just then, he uses his knife to pop the cork. Presco starts flowing onto my carpet I said Oh no, let's clean that up I prefer to drink out of a proper flute anyways He nodded replying Yeah, you're a proper classy bird

Let's go I try to act as natural as possible I try not to show that I'm shaking all over and try to gain control over my breathing. We take the long journey down to the main floor of my flat, all three floors. He has the back of my nightie bunched up in one hand and I could feel the point of the knife graze my back with his other. I was trying to playfully speak with him as we walked down the stairs. I couldn't tell you what I was saying. I was most likely rambling.

I couldn't hear anything over my heart beating in my ears. We got to the bottom of the stairs and there is a hallway to my left that leads to the front door. On my right, which is much closer to us, is the kitchen and living room. We make our way into the kitchen. I point to the cabinets that had the wine glasses. He said he knew where they were and starts towards them. I now had the kitchen table in between us. It was time to run. I burst into a sprint down the hallway towards the door. My hands fumble over the locks,

shaking and sweating. I swing open the door and see two men walking across the street. They must have been walking home from the train. There was a big train station in front of our home. I call out to them for help and suddenly I'm flung onto the ground. Little pebbles piercing my skin sent sharp pains where they jabbed. The intruder pushed me out of the way to run and escape. One of the men chased after the intruder while the other said for me to go inside while he surveyed my home to call the police. I locked the doors and I called the police. While I'm on the phone with dispatch I manically run around the house to double check all the windows and doors. Suddenly I hear a loud bang on my door. I inform the dispatch of the banging and she informs me that police weren't there yet.

I thought it might be one of the gentlemen who helped me. I go to look out the eye hole and it's him, the intruder. He came back. He's banging on my door screaming that I had his glasses and he was not done with me. I absolutely freak out. The dispatcher attempts to calm me down but I'm losing my ever-loving mind. She then said, they're pulling onto your street now, you should hear their sirens. I did, thank god. The intruder then blasts off and one officer jumps out of the passenger side while the car

is still moving and chases after him. The second officer comes into my home, interviews me and the two gentlemen, collects evidence and takes photos. After some time of him being there, Cherry comes home and freaks out. Once the situation was explained to her, she said, Oh my god, that could have been me. Yeah, thanks Cherry, it's all about you. The next morning, I am called to identify a man that they had in custody. I pointed him out. I go into a little room and the officer pulls out an evidence bag.

He asked me if the items were mine. They were. They were my underwear and photos taken from my home. The officer informed me that the intruder had been stalking me for some time now and he estimated three months. He had made a nest outside our home on top of a hill that overlooked into our living room and kitchen. He was a known offender and drug dealer. He then told me how lucky I was to get out practically unharmed, as others weren't so lucky. This happened when I was in high school, a long time ago. My mom just recently found the paperwork about it when she cleaned out her office upon retiring from the police department. I remember being upset and scared when it happened, but reading the details as an adult, it sounded even worse than I remembered.

I was 17 years old, I'm a female, working at a flower and gift shop. It's night time and a man comes in. He's short, overweight, balding, 40s, just generally creepy. He tells me how he needs an apology gift for his girlfriend. So I offer a bouquet, obviously it's a flower shop, what am I supposed to say? He says she doesn't like flowers because they die. This was the first weird thing as he came into a flower shop. Then he goes into detail about how he hit her and asked me if I think he was right to do so. This was a long time ago so I don't exactly remember what I said,

but it was something along the lines of not if you want her to continue being your girlfriend. He then tells me what a great job I'm doing and asks when I get off of work. I dodge answering and he just leaves. Now, nothing for six months. Then right before Valentine's Day, he walks in the door one minute before close. It was dark and from the outside it looked like I was working alone as my co-worker, about a 40 year old female, was in the bathroom. Instinctively it felt like a predator had just entered the room. You know when something isn't

right and everything felt not right? I then noticed that he had a tarnished revolver tucked in the front of his windbreaker which is halfway unzipped. It was obvious he wanted it seen. I quickly scribbled a note to my co-worker that said he has a gun and handed it to her when she came out of the bathroom. She calmly walked to the phone and looked at me, wordlessly asking if she should call the cops. I shook my head no as I felt like it would escalate the situation. God forbid he heard the police coming and took us hostage or something. I was just going to try and act as calm and normal as possible and hopefully not tip the

situation to something more dangerous. He spends 15 minutes wandering around what was a fairly small shop. In retrospect, he was probably waiting to see if my co-worker would leave as it was now well past closing. Finally, he places an order for pickup on Valentine's Day, which gives me his name and info to put in the police report that I sure as heck was about to file. He buys a card and pulls out a wad of $100 bills, which he slowly thumbs through as though looking for the right one with which to pay for his $40 order. I ask him if he wants a bag as it wouldn't be very inconspicuous if he just showed up at home with a valentine's card. He replies, nah, I didn't feel like being inconspicuous

tonight. Which seemed like an obvious reference to the gun hanging out of his coat. He leaves. We quickly lock the door and watch him sit in his truck outside. We're not about to exit the shop until he was gone. Finally, he pulls out of his parking spot and moves to another spot further away and continues to just sit there. I don't know how long we waited, but he finally left. I called my mom crying. She called the police who came to the shop the next day to take a report.

I told my best friend at the time what happened. She told her mother. Her mother happened to work with the man and informed security at her job. She said he was very weird, creepy and liked to talk about weapons a lot. Security at his job, it's a large company with government contracts and things having to deal with tech and security, pulled him into the office and questioned him about it. He claimed it was a glove in his pocket, not a revolver. The police were livid that his company made contact with him about it before they did

and he successfully dodged the cops' multiple calls and visits to his apartment. My mom, much to my teen fury at the time, made me quit my job, which was devastating as I loved it there. In retrospect, it was totally the right call. Dude came in on Valentine's Day and picked up his order and I never saw him again. Legit, only three people know this story The End I got super depressed and stressed out near my junior year. I was always super into school and just started slipping near the end of my college term so it threw me off bad. Never experiencing failing a subject before and it threw me into ridiculous stress. I graduated and figured everything would just go away with it. But I found myself feeling very mentally foggy. My sister knew how bad off I was from the last few years of school, so she hatched a plan to surprise me. I always wanted to go to Miami growing up. I know how

lame that sounds, but being a girl who grew up in the Midwest and even went to college there, it was always super exciting looking to me. Up to this point I traveled, but never went anywhere as lively or as big as Miami always seemed. My sister planned a five night vacation with me as a way to get me out of this mental fog and also to celebrate in our own way of me graduating college. I was super excited. The few months passed and it was time for the trip. We get there and the first few nights were incredible. We hit up the restaurants, I had on my little list of places to try and spent many hours by the ocean. I was never a big party girl. Up to this point in my life I was drunk maybe twice. My sister was the opposite who was at every party that happened in

her hometown. She got bored of going back to the room so early every night and convinced me to go to a nightclub with her for the first time. I fought it a bit but let my guard down because I was feeling great for the first time in a long time and was ready to try new things. It was a Saturday night downtown in the middle of summer. We get to this nightclub and the line is legitimately wrapped around the building. It was massive. We waited in line for what felt like forever and

were let in finally. I walked in the door and felt like I got shot because of the loudness. My sister dragged me to the bar and ordered some shots of some drink with a funny name. Again, I decided to just let my guard down and try new things. As more shots went down, I decided that would be the theme of the night, try new stuff out. I was aware how boring I was and was, in my opinion, in the most exciting place in the world. Around 45 minutes into dancing and drinking, I became very drunk, borderline blackout. I was very sloppy drunk and I was aware of it. I found myself laying on a couch thing in the upstairs area, overlooking the dance floor as my sister was dancing with some guys.

As I stayed there trying to consciously sober myself up, I realized how badly I had to pee. So I brought myself up to a sitting position on the couch to stand up and walk to the nearby bathroom. As I sat up, a massive man quickly sat so close to me I could feel his leather pants pressed to my leg. He was huge, absolutely over six foot tall and looked like some sort of bodybuilder. Admittedly he was very good looking but I was so drunk that I wasn't even trying to flirt and just get up to find the bathroom. He smiled at me and yelled over the music something like, leaving so soon. I remember nervously laughing and attempted to get up but he grabbed on my

dress and pulled me back down to a sitting position next to him. His smile went away and he said in a very deep tone, I don't remember telling you that you were allowed to leave. Even though I was very drunk leading up to this I felt like I sobered up within seconds. I never had anything like that happen before, but I wasn't going to just allow this guy, no matter how much bigger he is than me, to do that to me. I attempted to stand up again and he did the exact same thing, but much more overly aggressive. I thought it was insanely rude, but I wasn't afraid because of many people were around me. He tapped my heels with his big yellow leather boots and said, I couldn't help but notice how much I wanted to have my way with your feet.

At that moment my fight or flight kicked in. I slapped him in the face and stood up to walk away. I was very uncomfortable, but I still wasn't afraid just because of the amount of people around. As I was walking away I heard him laughing and he yelled, I'm trying to decide if I want to keep your feet after I cut the rest of your body up into little pieces. I still hear it in my mind play out clear as day. I walked away very quickly as I attempted to search for my sister on the dance floor from above. I couldn't find her, so I decided to take my phone out to text her just to see if I had a

missed call from her. I was out of eye shot from this dude and cut away into the bathroom so I could call her back. It was still pretty loud in there, but it wasn't loud enough to where she couldn't hear me on the phone. I went into a stall and called her. As I was in the stall, I hear the bathroom door open and someone went into the one directly next to me. I was waiting for her to pick up when I looked down underneath the stall and saw the same guy's very distinct yellow leather boots. He was just standing there and I felt like I was about to die. I know he knew I was in there and I held my breath and hung up the phone just staring at his shoes. Not moving a single bit from where he shut the door. I heard the main bathroom door open again and I immediately

ran out of the stall, out the door and straight to the outside of the club without slowing down once. I was terrified. It just so happens my sister was close to where I came out trying to call me to ask if I was ready to leave. I told her we needed to get back as soon as possible. We got back to the room safely and I told her everything that transpired. She suggested calling the police but I was just ready to drop it. We changed our flight and the next night flew back home. I searched for years pretty actively online for an arrest in the area to see if he would ever come up And he never did

After a few years I moved on mentally and got over it for the most part It's definitely hands down the scariest moment of my life And I don't know who this guy was And if he was just saying these things to scare me or if maybe he was serious But dude from the club Let's not meet. We'll be right back. Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo TreadExperts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there, but let's say mid-1990s, I worked as a woodland firefighter while in the army reserves. I worked as a spotter. Basically, I was stationed in a giant fire tower in the

middle of a national park. My job was just as it sounds. I would use binoculars and look out for fire, smoke, other telltale signs of fire. My nearest compadre was five miles or so from me. My days consisted of working my shift, taking long walks around the fire tower, and being on the lookout for anyone who might be having illegal fires. I'd be looking out for wildlife and staying afoot of bears and wolves. The way our shifts worked back then was one week on, one week off. So we slept in the towers, cooked our food, etc. There were nearby toilets and

showers for our hygienic needs. One day I come across an illegal bear trap. I had several ranger friends and I safely set off the trap then picked it up to take it to the ranger station on one of my treks out for food in my jeep. Poaching is illegal in the park and carried a big fine even back then and some jail time but it didn't stop the poachers from trying. I heard rifle shots and headed back for my fire tower. We have a rifle in the tower to be used in cases of emergency. Just a few months back a fellow spotter had been mauled to death by a grizzly so each tower had been outfitted with a rifle. I looked with my binoculars but didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I radioed my co-worker Ben, an older guy in the adjacent

tower. He hadn't heard anything today but had come across a few traps himself. That night after a dinner of frank and beans and toast, I was writing to my future wife when I heard the rumbling of a truck. Thinking it may be Ben, occasionally he made the trek over, we would crack open a soda and chew the fat for a bit. Instead, I saw four men with rifles get out of the truck. One looked around and leaned up against the truck while the other three grabbed traps and began to set them up.

I grabbed the rifle and my lantern and headed down the stairs. I was only 21, a farmer's son from a rural Virginia farming town and even with one deployment behind me, I was naive. I should have called it in to the rangers but instead I thought I could talk some sense into four dangerous men. I barely got a, hey what are you doing, out of my mouth before I was roughly shoved by rough hands. My lantern fell and I heard it crack. The rifle was kicked away from me and I felt the breath leave my chest when I was finally kicked in the stomach. I barely had caught my breath when I was grabbed by the two of the men and was shoved forward into the woods. It seemed like we walked for miles but in reality it was probably only about a mile. However, I noticed that there were no sounds.

In the forest, it is rarely silent. It's a cacophony of sounds, even at night. Owls, the wolves, crickets. But on this night, nothing. Suddenly I was shoved onto my knees and I felt hot tears well up. I thought of my parents, my little sister and brother and my fiancé who were back home in Virginia. I heard the rack of a gun and I shut my eyes and prayed. And suddenly, the night erupted. However, it was the sounds of sirens. Those of the four strangers and behind them in his pickup. Ben, who had tried to radio me that

he heard a car's engine and came to my tower when I didn't reply. Those poachers were arrested. Ben drove me back to the tower and I was still shaking. He didn't lay into me for not following procedure just said, that was close kid. I ended up leaving the job months later to take a job closer to home but I never ran into any more poachers during the rest of my time. I kept in contact with Ben for a while, sent him a wedding invite and then a photo of my first born son in 1997. However, as time usually does, we lost track of one another and a few years back I googled him and he would have been 75 or so to discover that he passed away a few years back I googled him, and he would have been 75 or so to discover that

he passed away a few years back. I don't know what ever came of those poachers, but I know I never want to meet them again. A few years ago, I entered the University of Lausanne to start my medical studies. I had just arrived in the city and even in the country. I was very excited to start my year to discover the university and to meet new people. Everything was going great until the end of the third week. Friday night around 9pm I leave the library, say goodbye to my friends, and start to go home. The pace of work was already very intense, so we had been working all day and I was in a rush to get home. It was my favorite part of the day because I got to put on music, take the subway, then the train, and it

gives me a chance to rest mentally. Anyway, that night it was cold, so there was no one left outside. It takes me about seven minutes to walk from the library to the subway. I'm walking quietly with my music in my ears when all of a sudden I get a shiver that runs through my body from head to toe. I start to feel uncomfortable as if someone was watching me. And at that point I pause my music and decide not to turn around to check in case the person is trying to be really inconspicuous and if I notice them something might happen. I don't want to run either because I'm not sure if I can run faster and I don't know where to go. At this point we pass a glass building so I decide to look inside and pretend I'm fixing my hair. I quickly glance in the corner of my eye and my blood runs

cold. There is definitely someone walking a few feet behind me in a hoodie. I try to reassure myself that he's just finished work and then he's going home, that he's cold and that's why he's wearing his hoodie. But I didn't see a backpack and there are no houses for any other civilians around. I decide to send a message to my mother saying, come and get me in front of, insert the name of the building, please, I just really don't feel it. It's important to know that the university is 30 minutes by car from my house. At this moment I don't find any other solution and I decide to take refuge in a building while waiting for my mother to come and get me. As I was about to go

back I opened the door and took off my helmet and went down the stairs to find a hiding place. We entered by the third floor. I thought I was out of trouble when suddenly I hear the door that I came in through open. This time I am sure that he's after me. But since I'm new I don't know this building and where it leads. I run downstairs at full speed and I hear behind me the footsteps of this guy running down the stairs at full speed. I run without looking back, being sure that he's running faster than me and that he'll catch up with me at any time. I don't even know where I'm going but I pray that I don't fall into a dead end. Now looking back, I even think that it was really

like The Shining with the labyrinth scene. I didn't know how far ahead of him I was so I opened a window in the hallway to make it look like I was out of there and opened a door a little further. It was a huge auditorium in the dark. I went down the stairs and hid under a desk in the middle right and put my phone on silent. My mom had been texting me a lot asking me what was going on and saying she was on her way with my dad. I texted her I'm in insert name of building and he's looking for me please come quickly. I hid under that desk thinking I'm screwed. My hiding place sucked and he was going to find me any second Then I heard a loud thud and a huge scream And I don't think I've ever been so scared in my life as when I heard that scream

15 minutes later my mother was sending me messages telling me to hang on And at the end of those 15 long minutes waiting for him to find me I finally got the message from my mom where she says she's with the police They're going to enter the building and they need to know where I am I finally got the message from my mom where she says she's with the police. They're going to enter the building and they need to know where I am. I just tell them I'm on the second floor because I had no idea what room I was in or which way I was going. After two minutes I hear the door of the auditorium and it was the police that came to get me. Once I got out, they took my statement and said that they would check with the university management. The next day they contacted us and said that they saw on the surveillance cameras that there was indeed someone who had followed me when I entered the building, but there were no cameras inside.

You can't see the guy's face and therefore you don't know who it is. They just said that security was going to do patrols at night and advised me to have someone with me when I went out at that time. We never heard about it again and in my mind, that's good. To be continued... my experience with the big killer clown panic of 2016. I think about it all the time and wonder what would have happened if I reacted differently and wasn't on my guard. I, a 6'2 male, was 16. I had just bought my own car for $1000 from a buddy and took any chance I had to drive it literally anywhere. So one weekend I have a couple of days off from work in a row. I decide I'm going to go drive an hour to the small town I used to live in and see some of my old friends that still live there. It's about maybe 6pm by the time I get into town and I start calling some of the friends.

No one is really answering yet so I just go to my grandparents house and say hi just to kill some time. Well I'm there for a while and not a single one of my friends is free tonight. I'm kind of bummed. My family is just talking about how everyone is freaking out about the killer clown sightings and whether it's real or not and I'm over it so I just decide to leave. Now it's about 8pm, just starting to get dark and I stop at the only liquor slash convenience store in town to get some cigarettes. I looked old and never got carded in this tiny town. Except the door is locked, and I don't see anyone or any lights when I peek in the door.

That sucks, but whatever, I don't need cigs anyway. I do think it's weird though, as I've never seen that store closed once. As I'm walking back to my car, I it's weirdly quiet even for this town. It was kind of foggy so I can't see too far ahead of me and of course I have killer clowns on the brain so I get a little spooked. Then out of nowhere I see a woman come into view near where the road meets the liquor store lot. She's walking towards my car, the only car in sight and shouts to me. I can't tell what she's saying at first, but she gets closer and I make out bits and pieces. She's petrified by the rumors of killer clowns.

She tells me that two kids were just murdered down the street at the high school by one of them, literally half a mile from us. I don't believe her, but I did keep listening. She asks first if I can give her a ride to her house. Instantly I say no way. I know this town really loves drugs of all kind and just don't trust it. She keeps asking and won't leave so I say how about this. I'll drive on the shoulder behind or next to you as we walk home so if if anything happens, I'll be there, in my car. She says fine and we start going. She's going super slow. I have my hazards on driving half on the shoulder down the country road as she walks beside my open passenger side window. A couple of times she

says something like, come on, can't I just get in? I'm super scared. And I tell her there are no killer clowns, there's no need to be scared, and I'm not going to risk my safety. And she shuts up. After maybe ten minutes we turn down a dirt road that ends at a clearing and I stop the car. She says okay, I see my house from here and I say cool, see you later. She freaks out and says no, you have to walk me to my house. She points to a big old farmhouse about 150 feet in front of us through the clearing. I say no, I'm done. I told you I'd help you get home and we're here. We can see her home right

in front of us and it just feels so off. At this point she gets super weird. She starts rubbing her body up and down as if to be alluring and keeps asking please and implies that she'll do something for me in exchange. I put in reverse, start backing up and she literally puts her arms and ducks her head in my driver window and asks slash demands I give her any money I have. I don't have any so I just shove some change from the pocket in my door into her hand and peel out. As I'm backing up to the main road, the whole time she's just staring at me, not walking toward her house. I drove an hour home and have been thinking about it since. I've always felt like if I walked up to her home, there would have been more people

waiting to do whatever they wanted with me. Thankfully, I feel like I made the right choice and made it out with just a spooky story. I'm a 22 year old female a shipped shopper and mostly work nights because that's when most orders are available and I generally only accept orders in the zone closest to my home. One night I decided I wanted to do one last order with a delivery window between 10 and 11pm, but there weren't any available in my usual zone so I figured I'd just pick one up on the other side of town to close out my day. During my shop there were lots of things on this customer's list that were out of stock and he had specified on his account that he'd like to be contacted in that situation. I was shopping for him for about 30-40 minutes and sent him probably 10 different texts about things that needed substitutes and he didn't receive an answer until I was ready to check out and had reached out to him one last time, letting him know that that's what was happening. He finally told me to just use my

best judgment, to which I replied no problem. Fast forward to having his items bagged and in my car. I sent him a text letting him know that I'm heading his way and that I'd be there in about 15 minutes, as I do for all my customers. I get to his street and it already isn't the best part of town, which I didn't know before I accepted the order because I hadn't been over that way since I've lived where I do now. And I'm thinking, okay, no problem. Just make it a quick drop off and get back home. When I get to the house, the driveway is completely on the left side of the house and there's a porch only on the right corner that leads to the front door. So I can't see the door from the driveway and nobody could see that I was in the driveway if they were at the door.

I can see that there are multiple porch lights as well as lights around the house leading up to the door, but none of them are turned on. Now mind you, I have told this person I was on my way, gave him my estimated timeline, and pressed a button in the shipped app to notify him that I had arrived. At this point, I'm feeling a knot in my stomach and my head is standing up a little bit. Before I got out of my car, I sent a text to my boyfriend, whom I live with, telling him that I was feeling uncomfortable about the situation and the house was creeping me out. And if he didn't hear from me telling him I was on my way home, then something is wrong.

This person ordered a lot of stuff and it was just me doing the delivery so it took me three separate trips to the porch and back to my car to get everything out. I grabbed as much as I could for the first trip, went to the porch to set the groceries by the door and went back to my car for the next load without knocking and making minimal noise. When I got to the porch to drop off my second load, I got up to the second step before looking up to make sure I could see where I was going in the dark and realized the front door is now open and there is a man standing there staring at me. He also didn't turn any lights on at his house aside from what looked like a single light fixture three rooms away. So there was just a faint back glow behind him and I could only see his silhouette, none of his face or even what he was wearing. Shocked, I just blurted out,

hello, how are you? And he stood there and said nothing, didn't reach for the bags, just looked at me. I dropped his bags off, went back to my car to get the last of the groceries and didn't even make it up all the porch steps before dropping his groceries and turning around to run back to my car because Mans was still just standing in the doorway looking at me. I didn't get tipped on that order but I'd like to consider the fact that I made it home that night my tip. Needless to say, I haven't stopped in that area again since. To be continued... services and a woman came in with school supplies to return. She looked to be in her 40s and wore a scarf that covered her face and head in compliance with the mask order at the time. She said the school supplies were a gift for the school but she couldn't use them so she was

returning them. I had trouble finding the items in her system and unfortunately for me this gave her plenty of time to talk. At first she was just texting with someone using speech to text, someone who seemed to be checking up on her, asking where she was, what she was doing, and what she was thinking about God. She replied, I'm at the store. I've been learning to ask God for things the way I would ask a husband. It gave me bad vibes but I reminded myself it wasn't my business. Then the woman started talking to me again. She seemed dazed. Her speech was slow and odd as if she didn't quite remember how to string words together but not slurred or drunken.

She went on for a while about how she suffered financial losses during the pandemic but found a new church and having faith was everything to her now. Really, it is a blessing. Being deprived of things, even food, that's how you find God. She started getting a bit pushy. Forcing a connection like she wanted to convert me. But I tried to be polite and ignore my hangups. A lot of customers needed emotional support at that time and it wasn't the first conversation I'd had that was a little too personal. I said things like, It's a dark time right now, it's important to have someone to

help you get through. All the time thinking, who's checking up on her? Did someone deliberately deprive her of food? Is that why she's so out of it? Is she in a cult? She kept staring at me the whole time I was wrestling with the return and eventually noticed my scars. My daughter self-harms, she said out of the blue. She tears chunks out of her face. And I asked her, why do you do that? She told me, I just get so frustrated. So I told her that it's the devil making her do that.

I didn't know what to say at that point, so I just kept updating her on the return. Then she started reading my name off my name tag over and over again. Jesse, Jesse, Jesse. Slowly and strangely. It made me wish I hadn't worn my name tag that day. I didn't like her knowing my name. I didn't want her to know anything about me. I finished the return as quickly as I could and pushed the items I couldn't return back at her. Sorry, but they're no longer in our system. I hope you can find use for them. Thank you. And Jesse? Yes? Here's my face. She pulled down the green scarf and flashed a huge grin at me.

Okay, I said blankly and she finally left. I signed out of the register and went to take five in the back room. I've had some bad interactions at work before but this was by far the creepiest. I still wonder about this woman and her daughter. Did I meet a cult member? Was cult abuse leading her daughter to self-harm or was I just jumping to conclusions based on my own bad experiences and too much true crime shows? I hope they got away from any bad influences in their lives and are doing better but also I hope this woman stays away from me. I'm a very tall 45 year old guy on medical disability due to renal failure, weak bones, etc. I wanted to make lunch rather than be lazy and order a pizza and despite the pain caused by walking, I decided to walk the 30 minute round trip as part of my mandated exercise. I get to the local small store, masked up and go grab some

basics to make a quick meal. While I'm in there I feel a sharp plane fly up my back then my left leg and I start limping. Knowing that when this happens I have about 20 minutes tops before the pain gets too much and I go and get my stuff paid for. I leave and cross over the street and sit on a public bench and let my pains fade. Once the pain faded I started walking again only for two young guys in suits to come up to me wearing badges identifying them as members of the Church of England. Asked me if I was okay and that letting God into my life would stop the pain. I politely told them I'm fine, I just needed to get home before it

flares up again and, big mistake, told them I'm not religious. Believe in what you like, but I don't anymore. Get told that it's their job to save me in the word of God. I start to walk off but my leg flares up again and I start limping. These two guys follow me and keep trying to stop me despite me saying to leave me alone, telling me they need to help me. I get to my house, open the door, then they try to push into my house. I stand in the doorway, now in agony, freaking out and anxiety takes over. My retired neighbor sees them and comes over just as I lose it. I tell them,

This is private property. You're trespassing and making me feel unsafe. Buzz off. They look offended but my neighbor tells them to leave me alone. They storm off, grumbling. My neighbor helps me sit and makes my meal, stays with me till I calm down. I call the Church of England and complain about my interaction. I get an apology and told that the two workers will be retrained and kept out of my area.

Not seen them since. There were two different ones who asked how I was and thankfully they've left me alone otherwise. If it's a flat or a squeal, a wobble or peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel, wherever you go, you can get it from Tread Experts. Conquer rugged terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo Tread Experts dealer near near you at TreadExperts.ca. This happened in the winter when I was 10.

I was walking to the bus, stopped by myself, and out of nowhere this red car drove past me and stopped. I walked by it and a man yelled, hey kid. I turned and saw the guy and he was in his early 20s. He motioned for me to come but I stood still. He then said, I saw you coming out of 355 Terrace Road. Was that man your dad? I had no idea how this person knew where I lived and I got so creeped out that I ran. I glanced back and was surprised to see that he wasn't following me. That night I was finishing up some homework where I had to track the phases of the moon.

I went to my window and was shocked to see that that same red car had parked across the street. I quickly ran to my parents sobbing and explained everything to them. I didn't say anything earlier in fear of getting in trouble. My dad called the cops and they arrested the man on the spot. My parents went outside to see what in God's name was going on and the dumbstruck cop explained the bizarre story the man had told them. The guy was a rookie PI or private investigator that was hired by a wife who suspected her husband was having an affair whenever he visited the city we lived in. The husband gave his wife our address

and told her he was staying with a friend. When the police showed my parents the picture of the husband, they both laughed. The man didn't even look remotely like my dad. The only thing they had in common was their dark hair and light skin. This private investigator was sobbing in the cop car and my dad didn't press charges because he felt bad. Hey friends, thanks for listening. Click that notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations. I release new videos every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7pm EST. If you get a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, r slash letsreadofficial, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video.

And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for And maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon. And maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. And check out the Let's Read podcast, where you can hear all of these stories in big compilations and save huge on data. Located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the description below thanks so much friends and i'll see you again soon