The Lets Read Podcast - 175: CHASED ON THE HIGHWAY! | 28 True Scary Stories | EP 163

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Highways, Winter & Journalists... 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

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Both worked for the Roanoke-based CBS affiliate WDBJ and had driven out to the plaza to record an interview segment with one Vicki Gardner regarding the 50th anniversary celebrations for Smith Mountain Lake, an artificial body of water created by the Smith Mountain Dam. Allison was decidedly nervous before the interview, as it was one of her first fully live broadcasts on the WDPJ morning show. Live TV can be a notoriously difficult form of media, and Allison knew that a solid performance would firmly set her on the path to promotion.

The interview commenced at around 6.44am with a bright and cheerful Allison greeting the station's viewers with her signature smile. She then launches into her question and answer session with Vicki Gardner and about halfway through the interview, everything seemed to be going swimmingly. But at exactly 6.46am, a figure wearing dark clothing emerges from the shadows behind Adam Ward. None of those present at the scene seemed to even notice the man at first. Adam Ward had his back to the man, so he was completely unaware of his presence. Vicky or Allison may have caught a glimpse of the man out of their peripheral vision, but each maintained their professionalism and push on with the interview. It appears that the man in the dark

clothing was making his own recording of the interview using a cell phone, and as he draws closer to the group, the man takes out a 9mm Glock handgun and records himself aiming it at Allison's chest. Unbelievably, no one seemed to notice the presence of a deadly weapon among them, and in a moment of confusion, the figure simply lowered the handgun and allowed the interview to continue. There's a chance the figure didn't know that the interview was being recorded live, and when it dawned on them that it was being broadcasted directly into the houses of thousands of Virginians, we can only imagine the sickening excitement they felt. Once again, they raised the pistol, only this time, they opened fire. A total of eight shots

were fired at Allison Parker, Adam Ward, and Vicki Gardner, with the attack happening so suddenly that the horrific scene was actually broadcast via the WDBJ morning show. The last thing viewers saw before the live feed cut was the sight of Adam Ward's camera falling to the ground before briefly capturing an image of its operator's murderer. When the live broadcast was cut, the feed switched back to WDBJ's studio, where news anchor Kimberly McBroom stated that she wasn't sure what just happened. Kimberly went on to state that the loud popping sounds that came from the feed could have been due to a car backfiring. But that was either wishful thinking or damage control on her part, because as the morning show continued,

Allison and Adam lay dying at the scene of what had undoubtedly been a shooting. Paramedics rushed to the scene but were unable to revive either Adam or Allison. Vicki Gardner was also wounded in the attack, but surgeons at the Caroline Roanoke Memorial Hospital managed to save her life. However, it was clear she was not the intended target of the attack. Gardner's wound appeared to be purely accidental, whereas both Allison and Adam died of execution-style shots to the head, where their attackers sought to immobilize them with torsion shots before delivering the finishing blow. Local law enforcement rushed into action,

reviewing the footage from Adam's camera when it was shared by WDBJ. When the image of the gunman flashed on screen, the police asked the station's general manager if he recognized the man. The manager simply replied with a horrified, yes. To him, the figure looked an awful lot like one of WDBJ's former employees, a man named Vester Flanagan. Vester Lee Flanagan, professionally known as Bryce Williams, was born into a family of Jehovah's Witnesses on October 8th of 1973 in Oakland, California. He went on to attend San Francisco State University, graduating in 1995 with a degree in radio and television. Then between March of 1999 and March of 2000,

while Vester was working as a reporter for the Florida-based WTWC-TV, he began to exhibit some rather concerning behavior. At one point, when two of his co-workers pointed out errors in his reporting, Vester complained to news director Don Schaefer that he was being victimized due to his orientation. However, the two co-workers then filed a counter-complaint claiming that Vester had exploded into a rage after they'd offered him constructive criticism. On top of that, several of the station's cameramen were said to routinely try to get out of working with Vester, with one describing his behavior as diva-like. As a result of such antisocial behavior, Vester was let go of from the Florida news station,

but he quickly filed a civil lawsuit against his former employer. But instead of reiterating that he had been discriminated against, he instead claimed his firing was down to racial discrimination, owing to the fact that he was African American. The lawsuit was actually settled in January of 2001, with WTWC's news operations ceasing shortly afterward, so there may well have been some actual weight to Vester's accusations. But what we know for certain is that in April of 2012, Vester was hired at Virginia's WDBJ, where he began working with Allison Parker and Adam Ward. The station's management had decided that Vester's impressive resume

made him the perfect fit for the station, and was totally unaware of any past controversies. However, they quickly noticed that Vester was argumentative and confrontational with his co-workers. Within just three months of him starting to work at WDBJ, Vester was the subject of three separate complaints, with co-workers stating that they were feeling threatened or uncomfortable while working with him. By February of 2013, Vester's luck had run out, and WDVJ fired him on the first of the month, citing volatile behavior. One former co-worker stated that upon discovering that he was fired, Vester began lashing out at the other newsroom staffers so violently that the cops had to be called. The station's CCTV cameras depict one instance in which Vester picks up a small wooden cross from someone's desk before flinging it at the station's manager while screaming, You need this.

His former co-workers were so frightened of some kind of reprisal that the TV station actually paid for private security to protect them, while insisting that law enforcement be contacted if Vester showed up at their studios. In the aftermath of his dismissal, much like the one in Florida, Vester filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which named Allison Parker as one of the main actors in an ongoing case of racial discrimination. However, after an intensive investigation, the EEOC decided that the complaint was totally invalid and that none of Vester's evidence or statements could be corroborated. Following this decision, we know Vester wrote a draft of a note saying that he was going to take his own life. One asserted that he'd been so filled

with rage after the incident that he'd killed both of his pet cats. Between the time that he was let go and the time of the shooting, Vester seemed to be completely unable to let go of his vengeful feeling. He continued to claim discrimination on his Facebook and Twitter accounts, repeatedly asserting that Allison Parker had made a coded racial comment to him during his employment. This all seems to have just bubbled up inside of him before the hateful sentiment erupted on live TV of August 25th of 2015. He also made sure that the police didn't have to arrest him to secure confession because, at exactly 8.26am, ABC News received a 23-page fax from Vester, one which was titled, Note for Friends and Family. The note articulated

Vester's anger over what he perceived to be racial discrimination and harassment in his workplace. He also referenced Dylann Roof and the Charleston church shooting that occurred two months prior, saying it was a tipping point in his steadily building anger. Vester went on to describe himself as a human powder keg just waiting to go boom, and was said to have professed admiration for mass murderers such as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebald, who perpetrated the 1999 Columbine High School Massacre, and Cho Sung-hui, the perpetrator of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting. Law enforcement found these final references to be extremely chilling, as it suggested that Vester planned to kill again.

Yet they were also faced with the almost impossible task of tracking him down when he was no doubt on the move. Yet Vester would give them a golden opportunity to do so when he called into WDBJ shortly after 10am to repeat some of the points in his fax. Although Vester abandoned his Ford Mustang at the Roanoke-Blaksburg Regional Airport, the authority's ability to track his cell phone negated any benefit of switching to a rented Chevrolet Sonic. An automated license plate reader in a Virginia State Trooper's car identified the rented Sonic at 11.20am, but when the trooper attempted to initiate a traffic stop, Vester put pedal to the metal and tried to flee. The State Trooper's vehicle was joined by several others, but the pursuit was short-lived. Vester ran his car off the road and struck an embankment near Markham after less than two miles of trying to outrun the cops.

State troopers surrounded the vehicle, but before they could advance to make an arrest, a single shot rang out from the front seats. Vester had used the same Glock 19 that he had used to take Adam and Allison's lives, to take his own. Vester was quickly airlifted to the Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, but he was declared dead on arrival at exactly 1.26pm. The episode sent shockwaves across media circles all over the world. It wasn't the first time a journalist had died live on TV, but a reporter being targeted by one of their own was a horrifying new phenomenon. We can only be thankful that Vester was tracked down before he had a chance to kill again. And no matter what his final statement said, we have to remind ourselves that this was a man who admired mass murderers. And instead of dealing with adversity with respect and dignity,

Vester Flanagan chose to take the lives of innocent people, reaping a terrible revenge over little more than a workplace rivalry. Born on New Year's Day of 1934, Alan Harrison Berg was born into a Jewish family in Chicago, Illinois. After graduating high school, Alan went on to attend the university in Denver, Colorado, and became the youngest person to ever pass the Illinois State Bar Exam at just 22 years old. While practicing law, Alan chose to open a clothing store in downtown Denver, which is where he met radio talk show host Lawrence Gross. Gross was impressed with how

passionate and articulate Alan was and invited him onto his show for what would be the first of many guest appearances. And when Gross moved on to San Diego after retrieving a lucrative job offer, he insisted that Allen be named his replacement. Allen then moved from radio job to radio job before finally settling at Denver's KOA, where he debuted on February 23rd of 1981. Allen's KOA show, which centered around politics, was broadcast in the 30 of America's 50 states, and would usually include some pretty fiery debates between Allen and Colin listeners. Allen was known for his passionate defense of liberal values, and would often arrange live debates with self-professed white supremacists, including the author of a book

entitled The Death of the White Race. These debates weren't exactly clinical and usually ended with a collar hanging up as Allen berated them for holding such abhorrent opinions. But the skewering of such hateful individuals proved extremely popular with those who chose to judge by character and not by skin color. Then, in March of 1982, Allen arranged an interview with a woman named Ellen Kaplan, who was a member of the radical left-wing LaRouche movement. Kaplan had been fundraising in Newark International Airport

when she had spotted none other than former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger walking through the airport with his wife Nancy. Kissinger was on the way to Boston to undergo heart surgery, and as Kaplan approached him, she yelled out, Do you sleep with young boys at the Carlisle Hotel? Nancy Kissinger flew into a rage, grabbed Kaplan by the throat and yelled, Do you want to get slugged? before having to be dragged away by her husband and his minders. In the aftermath, Kaplan publicly announced she was pressing charges,

promising to make Kissinger and Nancy into a laughingstock. However, a Newark municipal judge acquitted Mrs. Kissinger, proclaiming that her response was a reasonable, spontaneous, and somewhat human reaction, and that since no injury had been incurred, there was no case to be brought to trial. Naturally, Kaplan was furious with the result and was more than happy to go on Alan Berg's radio show to condemn the perceived injustice. However, when Kaplan called in, Alan pounced. Instead of letting her speak her piece, he attacked her as a vile human being and wished Nancy Kissinger had socked her one. Kaplan hung up after just a few short minutes, and Allen spent almost the entirety of that day's show giving her what he believed was a well-deserved dressing down.

His rants were so vitriolic and incessant that the station actually received complaints from self-proclaimed political neutrals. Allen took the feedback on the chin and began to tone down his style of debate until it was considerably more reasonable. But the vast publicity that the Kaplan call received drew the attention of more than just fans of intense political discord, and to some, it marked Allen as the mouthpiece for ideas they bitterly loathed, so much so that they were prepared to kill for it. Just after 9.30pm on June 18th of 1984, Alan returned to his Adams Street townhouse after having dinner with his estranged ex-wife. Berg parked his black Volkswagen Beetle, turned off the engine and stepped out into the warm Denver evening. But as he did so,

a burst of automatic gunfire sent 12 bullets tearing through his body. A few days after his death, Allen's former producer told police that he believed Allen was on what he called a kill list. Allen had received a number of death threats from people claiming to be white supremacists and neo-Nazis who were furious that he had challenged the beliefs of their movement on live radio. One such threat was from a thoroughly deranged person who believed that Jews are descended from Satan with the same note promising that Allen quote-unquote wasn't long for this world. Given that the murder was quite obviously the assassination of a prominent political media personality, the FBI chose to take over the investigation and promptly traced shell casings from the murder weapon to a compound controlled by a group known as The Order.

Founded in September of 1983, The Order was the brainchild of one Robert J. Matthews, with the first group's meetings taking place on his farm near Medellin, Washington. The group's primary goal was the overthrow of the United States federal government. It was named after a fictional terrorist group in William Luther Pierce's novel, The Turner Diaries. The Order's secondary goal included the establishment of a whites-only homeland in the northwest United States, but in order to achieve such a goal, they believed they needed to eliminate a number of influential political figures, which included Allen Berg. After raiding the order's compound, the FBI arrested a man named Bruce Pierce,

who was discovered to be the very same assassin who had been sent to kill Allen. After that, it was just a case of tracking down the group's leader, Robert J. Matthews, who was said to be personally involved in Allen's murder. Then, in December of 1984, the FBI were able to track down Matthews down to a house in Whidbey Island, out near Seattle's Puget Sound. After he refused to surrender, a shootout ensued, and in the chaos, Matthews' house was set alight by FBI incendiary flares. Yet instead of surrendering to save his life, Matthews refused to leave the burning building and was no doubt overcome by the black smoke which poured from the ruins of his final hideout. By the time it was over, a man who'd wished a fiery death on so many others over

nothing more than their heritage, was he himself a charred, barely recognizable husk. After Allen was buried at the Waldheim Jewish Center in Forest Park, Illinois, four leading members of the order were indicted on federal charges of racketeering, conspiracy, and violating Allen's civil rights. Two of these men, David Lane and Bruce Pierce, were determined to be the planners and executioners of Allen's assassination and were sentenced to serve 190 and 252 years respectively, meaning the only freedom either of them could look forward to was death. Alan, on the other hand, remained dearly loved by all those who had enjoyed his

radio show, and became a scion for those who remained fearless in the face of vicious political violence. Born on March 23rd of 1987 in Trelleborg, Sweden, Kim Isabel Wall dreamed of a career in journalism. Later in life that dream would be realized when she was accepted to study international relations at the London Schools of Economics, with her career prospects strengthened after she went on to study journalism and international relations at Columbia University in New York City. Kim returned to Denmark with one of the finest journalistic credentials in the world, settling in the capital of Copenhagen with her boyfriend, Ole Stobbe.

It was there that she began to write articles for some of the most popular news outlets in the world such as the guardian in the new york times vice and time magazine and went on to win the hansel meet prize for best digital reportage in march of 2016. she was a woman destined to reach the very top of the journalistic career ladder. But on August 10th of 2017, she received a text message that kicked off a chain of events that would ultimately end in her untimely death. The text was from Danish entrepreneur Peter Madsen, a man known for the manufacturing of submarines. Kim had requested an interview with Peter earlier that year, and the opening of the text was Madsen accepting this request. However, there was one special caveat. The interview would have to take place aboard his own personal midget submarine, the UC-3 Nautilus.

Kim agreed to his terms, arranging a two-hour interview beneath the Baltic Sea that would take place at around 7pm. Kim then met with Madsen at the arranged time. They boarded the Nautilus and then set off to conduct the interview. Madsen's staff expected his return at around 9.30pm that evening. Yet when the submarine failed to resurface when expected, both Madsen's staff and Kim's loved ones begged the local police to launch a rescue operation. Half a dozen search and rescue teams from a number of different services pooled their resources and shortly after 10.30am the following morning, the Nautilus was

sighted just southeast of the Drogden Lighthouse in Coug Bay. Peter Madsen was rescued and was found to be in fairly good health. Kim Wall, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found. When Peter was asked where Kim was, he was apparently devastated to inform them that she'd passed away from injuries resulting from a catastrophic mechanical failure. Danish police promptly arrested him on charges of negligent manslaughter and, during his interview, Madsen admitted that he'd found her death so distressing that he'd ejected her body from the submarine and that she was probably still floating in the Baltic Sea. At first, as tragic as it was, Madsen's story seemed to check out. But all that changed when a proper analysis of his submarine was conducted.

The mechanical engineers who sought to identify the reason behind the mechanical failure basically failed to find one. To them, not only could they not understand how someone had died from the existing damage, but it almost looked like someone had deliberately tried to sabotage the submarine, from the inside, whilst it was in the water. When this hypothesis was presented to Madsen, and despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he flatly denied having deliberately scuttled his own $200,000 submarine. And so, police were faced with two key questions. Why would a man destroy such an expensive piece of personal property? And where was Kim Wall's body?

In the end, the answer to both questions would wash up on the beach southwest of Ama, 11 days after she'd first disappeared. On the morning of August 21st, 2017, a passing cyclist was horrified to discover a dismembered human torso washed up on the beach. A post-mortem found 15 stab wounds, mostly in the region of the cadaver's groin, while a team of Swedish divers later recovered two plastic bags nearby, each containing a head, a pair of legs, some clothes, and a bloodstained knife.

A short time after that, a saw was found washed up on the same stretch of beach, only adding to the sinister implications. At first, the police didn't actually expect the body to be Kim's, since Madsen had already stated that he'd dropped her body into the water, untouched. But he'd completely failed to mention that he'd taken the time to the water, untouched, but he'd completely failed to mention that he'd taken the time to dismember her before tossing the pieces into the sea. At a September 5th court hearing, Madsen asserted that Kim had died after being struck on the head by a faulty hatch cover and that the whole thing was simply a horrible accident. Yet Madsen was

unaware that the Danish police had not only seized and assessed his personal computer, but they'd also been in touch with several former girlfriends, some of whom had incriminating testimonies to share with the court. Police stated that, while perusing the files and folders of Madsen's hard drive, they had found a number of disturbingly graphic snuff films, some of which included Death by Decapitation. His former lovers then testified that Madsen was extremely violent in the bedroom, and they had personally witnessed him gaining gratification from watching execution videos. But without a doubt, the worst piece of evidence presented was the fact that Kim Wall's underwear, the same she had been wearing the night she died, was found secretly among Madsen's possession.

Madsen had absolutely no explanation for why this was the case, and the case became destined to go to trial. Despite Madsen's claims that Kim had died as a result of massive brain trauma, the post-mortem performed on her severed head found no evidence of damage from a blunt object. Madsen then changed his story, admitting to having dismembered her, but only after she died as a result of a horrible accident. He went on to claim that she could have been poisoned by a poisonous gas leak, but again, the post-mortem found no traces of exhaust gases in her lungs. In early 2018, Madsen was officially charged with several offenses, including murder, indecent handling of a corpse, and assault. It was also implied that Madsen had extensively tortured Kim before he delivered the finishing blow, and there was a great deal of evidence to support this claim. So much so that on April 25th, Peter Madsen was convicted of all

three charges and sentenced to life imprisonment. Peter maintained his innocence until September of 2020, when a documentary was released in which he fully admitted to having murdered Kim Wall. But less than a month later, Madsen briefly escaped from prison by threatening a prison psychologist with a fake pistol and bomb belt. However, when the objects were determined to be a mere ruse, Madsen was surrounded and re-arrested just 500 meters from the prison walls. Friends and colleagues over the world were stunned to hear of Kim's horrific murder and, as the extent of Madsen's evil came and colleagues over the world were stunned to hear of Kim's horrific murder and, as the extent of Madsen's evil came to light, the world was disgusted by both his

deviancy and his attempts to escape justice. Following her death, Kim's friends and family started the Kim Wall Memorial Fund, a foundation designed to fund female reporters who cover stories of cultural value. And in October 2017, Kim was posthumously nominated for Pre-Europa's Outstanding Achievement Award. The journalist community felt it was the least they could do to honor a woman willing to take risks to get the truth, ensuring that long after her murderer was forgotten, Kim would be fondly remembered by those who wished to follow in her footsteps. Oh, excuse me. Why are you walking so close behind me? To be continued... $49 and, oh, you'll like this, one can be a pair of prescription sunglasses. Sounds great! Where's the nearest store? Not far. Come on. Let's hurry then! To my count.

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bound, tortured, and violated, but had only been dead for around two weeks, meaning she'd been kept prisoner somewhere and continually tortured for quite some time. Almost three years later, in November of 2007, 56-year-old Yubitsa Lukowska disappeared while walking almost the exact same route as the murdered Mitra. She too was found early the following year having received very similar treatment to Mitra. Then, in May of 2008, 65-year-old Zivana Temelkoska received a call saying that her son had been hospitalized. She disappeared on her way to the hospital and it was later revealed that her son was in picture-perfect health. Her body was found a few days later, and like the previous two victims, she had been bound with telephone cords before being tortured, violated, and strangled. Macedonian police were reportedly mystified by the murders. There was a complete lack of corroborative forensic evidence at the scene,

meaning the killer had no previous convictions and the only connections between the three women was that they were all employed as cleaners for a collection of different temp agencies. Aside from that, there was no motive, no evidence, and no way of knowing who the killer might be. It most certainly made for an interesting case, and as word spread among the people of Kichevo that they had a potential serial killer in their midst, panic began to set in. The murders had also gained the interest of a 56-year-old journalist named Vlado Tanesky, a veteran reporter who'd spent his career at two of Macedonia's most prestigious newspapers. Vlado began his own private investigation into the murders, detailing his work in a series of

articles that were published in the likes of Nova Macedonia and Jutrinzik Vesnik. The Macedonian public were gripped by the articles and for a while, it seemed as if Vlado might actually uncover the identity of the man they called the Kichevo Monster. To them, Vlado was a hero, with the articles turning him into a national sensation and reviving what had been a floundering career. But it was during a read-through of one of the articles that a Macedonian homicide detective noticed something strange. Indeed, the articles were superbly written and pinpoint accurate. Yet to the detective, they seemed a little too good. Vlada was privy to a level of detail that could only have come from actually reading the case files, and sharing such documents with a journalist constituted either gross incompetence

or possible corruption among the presiding officers. An extensive investigation was undertaken but the source of the leak couldn't be found. In fact, informational security surrounding the investigation was positively airtight. And that's when it occurred to one officer that there was a second explanation as to why Vlado Tanevky knew so much about the murders. One they had to explore, no matter how unthinkable it was. In June of 2008, Vlado received a visit from a pair of homicide detectives who wished to discuss his articles with him.

He was only too happy to answer their questions, believing his work was actually helping them catch the killer. And in a way, that's exactly what happened. Because when the police asked Vlado how he knew that the killer had used telephone cord to bind his victims, the journalist fell silent. It was explained to him that only the investigating detectives were aware of this piece of information, and unless he could point the finger at the collaborating officer, Vlado had some serious explaining to do. When he failed to account for where such knowledge had come from,

the police asked him to provide a DNA sample for use in the ongoing investigation. They assured Vlado that it would be used to rule him out of the investigation, and that if he had nothing to hide, he had nothing to worry about. But Vlado did have something to hide, because when law enforcement compared Vlado's DNA to a sample taken from the victim's corpses, it came back a match. The police had finally discovered the identity of the Kichevo monster and it was Vlado Tanesky himself. Following Vlado's arrest, the police built up a picture of a man whose sharp decline had driven him to violent insanity.

In the 18 months before the first murder took place, Vlado's father had taken his own life. His mother accidentally overdosed on prescription medication and he was laid off from his job. On top of that, he and his wife apparently separated when she moved to the Macedonian capital of Skopje. Police then moved to search the Taneski family's holiday home, a cottage in the countryside they often summered at. It was there the police uncovered a huge cache of adult material, ropes and cords which they used to tie the victims, and items belonging to discovered that Vlado's mother had been employed as a cleaner for most of her adult life, the same profession shared by his victims. This made for an extremely chilling addendum to the investigation,

opening up the possibility that Vlado had suffered a complete mental break and had targeted the women because they resembled, or even smelled, like his mother. This also suggested that he'd had a fraught relationship with her, something his wife and friends said they were almost totally unaware of. Macedonian police were also planning on questioning Vlado regarding the disappearance of 73-year-old retired cleaner Goroka Pavleski, which had occurred in May of 2003. But following his transfer to Titovo prison, Vlada was found dead in his prison cell on June 23rd. He had apparently drowned himself in a plastic bucket of water, his only means of taking his own life.

It was an anticlimactic end to a story that had rocked Macedonian society. The idea that a man was so desperate for the respect and admiration of his peers that he would literally kill for it. And that somehow, in the course of his violent campaign of murder and deception, he ended up targeting women that reminded him of his own mother. Born in Portuguese Angola on October 5th of 1945, a young Carlos Antonio Castro has a passion for poetry, and his love of written word evolved into a playful but intense interest in journalism. At just 15 years old, Carlos moved to the Angolan capital of Luanda to begin his career as a reporter, and his star gradually rose until he became one of the most high-profile TV personalities in the entire Portuguese-speaking world. Carlos worked in the media for 35 years, mostly covering light-hearted gossip and celebrity stories. Yet in early 2011, Carlos' rich and storied life would come to a dark and violent end,

shocking the wider journalistic community and breaking the hearts of tens of thousands of adoring fans. During his life, Carlos Castro broke many a big story on musicians, actors, and other celebrities. Perhaps his biggest story was his own. You see, back in 1990, Carlos was one of the first Portuguese-speaking celebrities to openly come out as gay, and was perhaps one of the first in the world to do so on live television. He later said that being free to, quote, reveal the feminine side of his personality was something that brought him a lot of joy. But given how overtly masculine Latin culture can be, he also found it extremely

difficult too. Thankfully, gay and lesbian acceptance rose phenomenally throughout the late 90s and early 2000s, and by 2011, the 65-year-old was quite publicly in a relationship with 21-year-old male model Renato Siabra, who had been a contestant on the Portuguese modeling-themed reality show In Search of the Dream. But all was not well with the fledgling relationship, as all were about to discover. Just after Christmas of 2010, Carlos and Renato decided to fly to New York City to see some Broadway shows and spend New Year's Eve in Times Square. To some outsiders, the couple seemed very much in love, but close friend and newspaper editor Luis Pires would later state that there had been some friction between the two men toward the end of the trip, but nothing to suggest that anything horrible was about to happen. On Friday, January 7th, Carlos and Renato had planned to catch a musical during the early evening before meeting up with Perez's ex-wife and daughter at the Intercontinental Hotel. The women waited quite a while in the hotel's lobby, long after the

couple were due to show, but instead of both men arriving, only Renato appeared in the lobby. According to the men, Renato approached them with a dazed look on his face and when asked where Carlos was, he replied, Carlos will never leave the hotel again. It was a chillingly cryptic thing to say and as Renato apparently disappeared from view, the two women rushed to inform hotel security. Just after 7pm that night, hotel security entered Carlos' hotel room and found nothing short of a horror show. Carlos had been beaten to death and it appeared someone had used a laptop computer and a wine bottle as the murder weapons.

But perhaps even more horrifying was the fact that someone had castrated him using the corkscrew of a bottle opener. The same corkscrew had also been used to gouge out one of Castro's eyes, but a medical examiner declared that his death was caused by blunt impact injuries to the head and neck compression, and that it wasn't possible to determine if he was mutilated before or after he died from his head injuries. Obviously, the NYPD was very focused on talking to Renato Siabra, but when they tracked him down, they discovered he was at the St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital Center after trying to slit his own wrists. After being taken into custody, he was given a psychiatric evaluation at Bellevue Hospital Center, but given that he was considered

a person of interest, this was all done under the watchful eye of law enforcement. When he was declared mentally sound enough to be questioned, Renato stunned the officers in attendance by actually confessing to Carlos' murder. He hadn't tried to take his own life out of grief, he'd tried to off himself to avoid having to pay for what he'd done. It would be easy to assume that what happened between Carlos and Renato was a lover's tiff, a passionate disagreement gone horribly wrong. But when asked why he'd killed his lover, Renato told the police that he'd murdered Carlos in a bid to, quote, get rid of his own homosexual demons.

During the remainder of the police interview, Renato appeared to be acting extremely erratically, almost as if he was working up to making an insanity defense. Yet after securing both men's cell phones, almost as if he was working up to making an insanity defense. Yet after securing both men's cell phones, it became apparent that the couple had been arguing over Carlos' seeming unwillingness to splash the cash on his much younger boyfriend. In light of that new evidence, police charged Renato with second-degree murder, and given that he'd already confessed, there was no trial.

Instead, the case was handed over to the New York County District Attorney, who recommended Renato receive the maximum sentence of 25 years to life. By January of 2013, Renato Ciabra was no longer Renato Ciabra. He was simply prisoner 13A0056 at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. In accordance with his last will and testament, Carlos Castro's sister would later spread his ashes in the subway tunnels that run under Broadway. It had seemed particularly haunting that, despite the fact that Carlos' trip to New York was a dream come true for him, it was one that neither he, nor Renato, would ever return home from. The End Born on October 5th of 1948 at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.,

John Clay Walker would grow up to enlist in the United States Marine Corps and was honorably discharged after being wounded twice in Vietnam, a sacrifice which resulted in him being awarded two Purple Hearts. John then took advantage of the GI Bill, earning a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota in 1976. Following his graduation, John spent most of the 70s and 80s working as a reporter and photographer for a variety of small newspapers in Minnesota and Iowa. But then in 1983, John and his family moved down to Mexico so that John could pursue a career as a full-time novelist. John had fallen in love with Mexican music, culture, and food, and on the night of

January 30th, 1985, John decided to take a friend of his out to dinner in downtown Guadalajara. The two men had enjoyed their fair share of tequila and heard the sound of lively music playing from one particularly inviting-looking venue. John and his friend Albert Radulat wandered in the building and began to search for the source of the music, but upon stumbling into a large private party in a back room of the building, they found the welcome to be anything but warm. You see, John and Albert hadn't walked into any old shindig, they walked into the private party of one Rafael Quero Quintero. At the time of the party, Rafael Quintero was one of the richest and most dangerous narco-traffickers in the entire world. He co-founded the Guadalajara Cartel and was the brother of Miguel Quero Quintero,

founder and former leader of the Sonora Cartel. Quintero was also a suspect in the kidnapping and murder of DEA agent Enrique Kiki Camerina, who had been murdered as revenge for authorities seizing around $160 million in marijuana from Quintero's cartel. John Clay Walker and his student Dennis companion had stumbled into Quintero at a time when he was at the height of his law enforcement paranoia. Their entry was like a record scratch moment, as all in attendance turned to look at them, some looking terrifying, others looking furious. Both men tried to excuse themselves, but it was too late. Quintero's paranoia couldn't allow him to let them go. John and Albert were dragged into a storeroom at the party's venue, where they were beaten, questioned, then tortured with a variety of kitchen utensils, including an ice pick and a

barbecue fork. Neither man confessed to being a DEA agent, but in the minds of their interrogators, John's Marine Corps dog tags was enough to mark him as an agent of the US. The cartel members then attempted to kill both men using blunt force trauma. In John's case, they were successful but in Albert's, they were not. And he was still alive when the men were wrapped in tablecloths and taken to the San Isidro Mazatepec Park, where it was believed that he was buried alive. Just a few months later, Quintero was arrested in a mansion in Costa Rica, then extradited to Mexico in connection with the murder of Kiki Camarena. A jury of his peers found him guilty, and he was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Following his imprisonment, Quintero's Guadalajara cartel fell apart in the early 1990s and its remaining leaders went on to establish their own drug trafficking organizations, including the Sinaloa cartel, which fell under the control of the infamous Joaquin El Chapo Guzman. Six months later and following the information gained from Quintero's arrest, the bodies of both Albert Radelat and John Clay Walker were recovered from the shallow grave out near San Isidro. It's not clear where Albert was interred, but John was buried at Fort Snelling National Cemetery in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in accordance with what his loved ones believed he'd have wanted. The End 51-year-old former police officer Wallace Souza was one of Brazil's most well-known public figures.

Having been born in Manos, Amazonas state on August 12th of 1958, he would grow up to earn degrees at both the São Luís Gonzaga College of Business and the Basílio Machado State College. Souza also attended the Center for Study of Human Behavior in University of Newtown Leans and enlisted as a police officer following his graduation in 1979. Wallace was fond of claiming that he had been an exemplary police officer, yet, in truth, he'd actually been fired less than 10 years into his service after being convicted of pension fraud and petrol theft. Yet this misbehavior didn't seem to bother the Brazilian

electorate, as Wallace was later elected member of the Legislative Assembly of Amazonas State, and had run for office after a stint presenting the highly popular but highly controversial TV show Canal Livre. Canal Livre detailed the murders of various criminal figures, and in a country with a murder rate as high as Brazil's, this provided rich pickings for Wallace and his mobile camera crew. The show became the most popular TV program in all of Manaus City, which also happened to be the location of Wallace's birth. They were extremely proud of their native son, who was essentially a mouthpiece for law and order

politics and a tougher approach on crime. At first, Wallace was a superb reporter, and supposedly his status as a former police officer allowed him access to information that other journalists could only dream of. But Wallace seemed to have a little too much access to information, and had a habit of arriving on crime scenes even before the police had. For example, one segment of Cano Livre features Wallace walking through a forest to examine a burning corpse. At one point, he turns to the camera and tells the viewers, It smells like a barbecue.

It is a man. It has the smell of burning meat. The impression is that it is in the early hours and that it's an execution. Certain police officers found this very suspicious, as the circumstances of the burned man's death still hadn't been confirmed. Then in 2009, Brazil was stunned when their beloved Wallace Sousa was accused of hiring hitmen to kill five people to increase his show's ratings. It was a shocking accusation and many simply refused to believe that such an arbiter

of justice could himself be facilitating murder. Naturally, Wallace denied the accusations but backed away from publicity after another former police officer, Monsir Jorge da Costa, actually admitted to having carried out one of the killings. Then, in another stunning revelation, Wallace's own son was arrested on charges of homicide, drug trafficking, and illegal gun possession, with the police asserting that he too had been part of the conspiracy to artificially boost his father's TV ratings. In October of that same year, a vast amount of incriminating evidence was found in Wallace's home, and he was eventually charged with murder, drug trafficking, intimidation of witnesses, illegal carrying of

arms, and formation of a criminal gang. Yet after a warrant for his arrest had been issued, Wallace went on the run, with a team of over 60 civil and federal police being tasked with his return. Although he gave himself up just a few days into his escape attempt, Wallace continued to insist on his innocence, perhaps knowing that he'd surely be murdered in a Brazilian prison, which are known to be some of the most dangerous and overcrowded in the world. Wallace's brother, Vice Mayor Carlos Sousa, begged the authorities that if Wallace was sent to prison,

he would have his own cell sequestered from his fellow inmates. During his trial, many of Wallace's former colleagues were implicated in the murders and even the former producer of Cano Livre was arrested on suspicion of having a hand in the conspiracy. More evidence was heard that Wallace had authorized witness intimidation and that those who could identify him as the ringleader of the conspiracy had been accosted, cajoled, and even assaulted. This was done on a partially volunteer basis too, as Wallace publicly stated that the reason he was being, as he put it, framed was because he had uncovered a large-scale child trafficking ring that had financial backing from some of the country's most prominent public

figures. Therefore, Wallace actually coerced his supporters into committing the crimes for him, and this would only become evidence used to convict him of the formation of a criminal gang charge. The stress of facing life imprisonment, cooped up with people who'd do almost anything to see him dead, proved far too much for Wallace Sosa. And in March of 2010, serious heart problems saw him interred in a specialist heart hospital in the city of Sao Paulo.

Doctors did everything they could for Wallace, but he simply could not cope with the horror he was faced with and died of a heart attack just a few months after entering the hospital. It was a pathetic end to a man who had profited from an untold number of murders and deaths, some of which he had orchestrated himself. And a man who had long proclaimed to be a staunch supporter of peace and justice would in death only be remembered as a thief and a murderer. In May of 2015, 67-year-old Ivani José Metzger traveled to the state of Minas Gerais in his native Brazil. Ivani worked as an investigative journalist for most of his life and ran a well-known blog known as Owl of the Valley. The name was supposed to invoke the image of a fearless and watchful sentinel, and unlike many of his journalistic peers, Ivani wasn't afraid to report on the wrongdoings of the powerful.

Ivani reported on all kinds of government mischief, from shady roadblock arrests to simple parking violations committed by government officials. He made many a political enemy in his time, but Ivani seemed to have been in no real danger until he began to investigate an extremely sinister new case. Ivani had long been aware of the drug trafficking which occurred in the Jequit-Gionia Valley region of Minas Gerais. But in early 2015, he learned of another, much more subtle, illicit trade that took place in the area, one that was even more harmful and dangerous than the narcotics trade, human trafficking, and particularly the trafficking and exploitation of children. Half the reason the phenomenon had gone unreported for so long was that journalists were said to be terrified of working in the region,

as the concepts of law and order were only loosely applied in rural Minas Gerais. And those shedding light on the things that others wanted kept secret could expect serious intimidation. Even the politicians tried their best to slow Ivani down, but their methods of retaliation had to stay somewhat above board. However, those who trafficked in misery and death had no qualms about using violence to silence their critics, and after Ivani disappeared shortly after opening his investigation, many of his colleagues feared the worst. Several days after his disappearance, police in the town of Padre Parrazzo received a call from an anonymous tipster who told them

where Ivani could be found. It seems to have been implied that Ivani was okay, and they had merely been kidnapped and slapped around by those who wanted him to cease his investigations into their illegal enterprises. Yet when the police tracked down the location they'd been given by the anonymous tip, they found a truly horrifying scene. Ivani had been beheaded while he was tied to a tree, his wrists secured by chicken wire that had been pulled so tight that it cut into his skin. There was evidence that he had been tortured extensively, with numerous bruises, abrasions, and burns all over his body. His severed head had been placed on the ground in front of his body, and although it was teeming with insects and fly larvae, it was quite obvious that he had been scalped too.

News of Ivani's murder rocked the Brazilian journalist community, but it was nothing new. Fourteen Brazilian journalists had been murdered since the beginning of 2011, and many had a good idea of why their colleague had been targeted. Given the barbarity of his murder, I think he had hit on something that was supposed to be kept secret, said Ivani's wife and fellow journalist Ilma Chavez Silva Borges, who was obviously grief-stricken but unreservedly defiant in the aftermath of her husband's murder. It's easy to understand why. Ivani died doing something incredibly noble, attempting to protect innocent children from those who would seek to exploit them. But what's particularly terrifying about this case is

the raw power that such exploiters seem to wield. Human traffickers were able to kidnap, torture, and murder a high-profile journalist, all while completely avoiding the detection of the local police. Local police have even suggested that Ivani's murder may well have been a crime of passion, quote unquote, and arose out of nothing more than a lover's quarrel or a disagreement among friends. I think that's strong evidence to suggest that the local police are on the traffickerickers payroll, as I haven't heard of many lovers tiffs that resulted in extended torture, beheading, and mutilation. The fact that even suggests that is highly disturbing, as it's quite obvious that it was Ivani's criminal investigations that resulted in his death, all in a place where the police are not only indifferent to the suffering of the innocent, but also actively participating

in their oppression. These days, I can do anything from my phone. Book a vacation, order a meal from a five-star restaurant, buy and trade stocks. But maybe the most amazing thing I can do is make my dirty laundry disappear and then reappear perfectly washed and folded. I have Rinse to thank for that. I just schedule a pickup in the Rinse app or at Rinse.com. A Rinse valet comes to get my clothes, and before I know it, they're back, crisply folded, and ready to wear. They even do dry cleaning, which is returned hanging in a nice Rinse garment bag. And with Rinse, my satisfaction is guaranteed.

If for any reason I'm not happy, they'll re-clean my clothes for free. Best of all, Rinse saves me tons of time each week. That's time I get to do something I love versus something I have to do. So if you want to save loads of time by not doing loads of laundry, remember, there's an app for that. Rinse. Sign up now and get $20 off your first order at Rinse.com. That's R-I-N-S-E dot com. A few weeks ago, myself and some childhood friends decided to meet up for the first time in literally years. We were all in our late 30s now, and we've been drifting apart for a few years thanks to increasing work commitments, as well as an increasing number of children.

We try to stay caught up, but last year the whole situation obviously ate up an opportunity that we'd had for a 2020 meetup. So, come the beginning of November this year, we were chomping at the bit to get out to the cabin for a few days. So, the cabin I'm referring to here is a little pet project of ours that dates back almost 10 years. We've always had quite an outdoor activity based friendship, only less hunting and more like s'mores around the campfire kind of guys. So we figured that instead of getting gouged to rent one twice or three times a year, we should probably just pool our money and buy one, with ownership being split four ways. So we found one, bought it, and spent one whole summer fixing the thing up. And boy was it a fixer-upper. I guess you get what you pay for because we didn't pay much, but getting to basically rebuild the thing ourselves generated this deep emotional

attachment to it. So as you can imagine, not getting to see the place for just over a year really sucked. Naturally, we were hooping and hollering when we arrived on Friday the 5th due to depart on Sunday the 7th. We had beers, burgers, and a lot of bourbon, and after more than a year of all the anxiety from 2020, it was great to get back up into the mountains again. At this point it's almost like I want to be able to tell you about some creepy phenomena that began with our arrival and steadily increased in intensity. Something. Anything to have given us an idea that something was wrong up there. But there was nothing.

No howling in the night or footsteps outside the cabin. We didn't spot anyone watching us through the trees or find weird footprints in the snow. Nothing to warn us of what was to come. fire, roasting wiener dogs, toasting marshmallows, and getting very, very drunk. Then the next morning, once the bacon, egg, and cheese had blown away the hangovers, we decided to give the cabin a quick fix up, while those less DIY skilled would go out to fetch firewood. Being fairly handy with a hammer and nail, I stayed around the cabin to replace some of the ceiling planks and after another round of bacon eggs and cheeses, we got back to work and getting all the chores out of the way so we could get back to relaxing. I was hauling firewood while two of the other guys, Paul and Jason, were out looking for dryish dead wood that we could use for kindling. The snow had been coming down pretty heavy up

here in Montana and almost everything was soggy and unusable, so gathering up firewood was probably the biggest task we were faced with. I had maybe three or four hunks of firewood in my arms, making what must have been my twentieth run while walking towards the little drying area we'd set up when I'd just hear something that makes my blood run cold. It was one of my buddies, and they were screaming for help. I didn't think, I just reacted, dropping the logs and sprinting through the forest in the direction of the scream. I called out for Paul and Jason, honing in on the sound of their reply. And suddenly, there they were. Paul was lying face up on the ground, totally unconscious,

with what I first thought was a gunshot wound to his chest. Jason had both his hands over it, keeping pressure on the wound, and I was pulling out my phone before he even suggested I call 911. When the dispatcher told me we might be waiting for up to 30 minutes for an air paramedic, I felt sick. I figured with where the wound was located, right near his heart, Paul would never last that long. But right after, the dispatcher basically tells us it's all down to us to stem the bleeding, so the victim would be alive when they arrived there. Talk about high pressure moments.

I mean the dispatcher phrased it in the nicest way possible, but that's basically what she said. Either we, his best friends, fight for his life to give him the best chance possible, or he was never going to survive in the first place. The dispatcher then asked how much blood was coming out of the wound and there was this sort of ray of hope when we realized that although there was some blood, the wound would have been gushing blood if it pierced Paul's heart or some other major blood vessel. That's when we realized he might actually be okay and the relief was so palpable that we really didn't consider much else in that moment.

For me personally, I was so stuck on the idea that he'd been shot that I didn't stop to think it could have been anything else. And I know what you're thinking, Mr. Gun Guy, if he had been shot there'd be an exit wound, a bunch more blood, blah blah blah. But consider this, Mr. Gun Guy, bullets can ricochet, they can also splinter, and considering some states enforce a hollow point only system, these bullet fragments could easily cause a smaller, less penetrative wound, right? But I'll get back to theories later. Paul woke up before the helicopter arrived and we were asking him, what happened? But he was in such

a bad way that he didn't even know where he was. He was just looking up all hazy eyed and asked, where am I? What's happening? We figured that was basically normal since he seemed to have been knocked unconscious during whatever attack had occurred. We didn't realize how hard this would make things later. Not long after, a park service vehicle showed up who in turn guided in the EMTs on the helicopter, and I swear, that's the closest I'll ever come to seeing angels descend on earth. It was magnificent. They were the most professional people I'd ever come across and I'll be grateful to them till the day I die. Paul was then taken to a hospital, so obviously our whole cabin trip

was completely called off and we spent the weekend in a motel in this small mountain town where the hospital was. It was more like a small clinic, but we didn't care if it was John Hopkins, they saved Paul's life. To us, the doctors and nurses, these were true heroes in my mind. But that was about the only good news we had for the rest of the weekend, as the remainder of that Saturday and Sunday were spent in pretty much a constant state of either anxiety or straight up terror. So like I said, we were convinced the whole thing was some kind of hunting accident. But after a series of examinations, the doctors tell us that there was no bullet fragments in Paul's chest, and that his injury

is more consistent with some kind of stab wound. Obviously, whoever had hurt him had done so face to face. We then ask Jason, the guy who was with him at the time, if he'd seen anything in the time before the attack. He said they lost sight of each other momentarily while out looking for firewood. Then the next thing he knew, he heard the faint sound of Paul's body hitting the ground. That's literally all he heard. No gunshot, no sound of any struggle, no scream, nothing. He didn't think anything was wrong at first so we just walked over to where we'd heard the sound and he's greeted with the sight of Paul lying face up

with blood on his jacket. Then right while we're all talking it out in the lobby of the clinic, trying to work out just what in God's name could have happened, the cops showed up. This didn't exactly make us nervous at first, and personally I was happy to see them. I mean, the cops are supposed to help, right? They're the good guys. You don't expect them to just stroll up and accuse a person of trying to murder their best friend. And yeah, that's exactly what they did. After an initial round of casual questioning, the cops asked us if we were going to hang around town until Paul was discharged. Obviously, that was the plan. We weren't going to leave

without him, but we got the impression that they didn't want us to leave town, and this hunch turned out to be correct. On the Sunday evening, the cops showed up at the clinic wanting to talk to Jason. We were out down at a bar at the time, but the clinic gave the deputies Jason's number and they called to say that they wanted to talk to him. He said he was headed back to the clinic after dinner, but the cops insisted they wanted to talk down at the station, which immediately sent alarm bells ringing for us. By his own admission, Jason had nothing to hide and I remember he shrugged off the suggestion that he might need to get an attorney. But in the end, he got one, mostly because he had to. The whole we need to talk thing was basically an ambush and it turned out the cops had him down as the prime suspect. They didn't believe a word of his story that

he hadn't heard or seen anything and they basically told them they were going to search his belongings until they found the weapon he'd used. And then this brings me to the weapon. The doctor said Paul had been stabbed by something long, sharp, and thin, most probably an ice pick. But not a single one of us had an ice pick in our possession and as much as the cops scoured the area around the cabin to find one, they failed to do so. But regardless, the way the cops saw it, there had been a fight amongst friends. Jason attacked Paul in a moment of rage, but then instantly regretted it.

I can understand why an outsider might come to a conclusion like that, I really can. But we knew Jason and Paul, I mean really knew them, and there's no way they'd have gotten into a fight or at least they'd have admitted it if they did. But Jason denied it and Paul has apparently no memory of the attack. One solitary thing he told the cops was that before his memory went dark, he had the vague sense of not being alone. But then Jason was like 50 yards away so why wouldn't he feel like that? In the end, they had nothing to charge Jason with so they let him go.

Paul was discharged on Wednesday the 10th, still in quite a lot of pain, but otherwise in no further danger. The cops actually asked him if he wanted to press charges against Jason after which we got to see him go through all the stages of confusion and fear that we had while he was being treated.

We're all back in Boise right now but the cops have our numbers and they might just get in touch again since it's an open investigation for attempted murder. But we literally have no idea what happened to Paul three weeks ago and there's just one little aspect of the incident that honestly scares the life out of me. So remember when I mentioned how the doctors

told the Coffs that it appeared as if Jason had instantly put pressure on the wound? Well, there's another explanation for why the blood loss wasn't as large as it could have been, and that was the wound in Paul's chest was less than a millimeter in diameter. You start to see why they figured the weapon was an ice pick or something, because nothing else can account for how minuscule the wound was. But actually, seeing the wound for myself, there was no way something as large as an ice pick had caused it. In fact, when Paul got a second opinion after having the wound examined back in Boise, the doctor there said it was almost like it had been caused by an

old-timey Pravis syringe, a kind from the 1850s that had a real thick needle. But who goes around looking to stab people in the middle of nowhere with a 170-year-old syringe? But again, the answer to that was a complete mystery, and is probably going to remain so for the foreseeable future. Then, there was the thing about the amount of blood on his jacket. A wound like Jason's would normally cause internal bleeding, and as his chest cavity filled with blood, it'd put pressure on his lungs and make it difficult to breathe. So the fact that there was a sizable amount of blood on his jacket from such a small wound was just odd. Man suggested that there'd been some kind of pressure imbalance, almost like whatever had been plunged into Paul's chest was designed to suck blood out of his chest cavity.

And then there's the location of the wound itself, almost directly over his heart. Look, I know what I'm about to ask sounds completely outlandish, and I still have no idea how to piece all these pieces together so that they make sense, but is it possible that someone stuck some oversized needle into Paul's chest with the intent of draining the blood from his heart? This all happened less than three weeks ago, so we're still searching for answers while the police continue their investigation. It's also looking a lot less likely that Jason is going to be charged with anything. The cops still seem

convinced he had something to do with the attack, but pinning it on him is going to be near impossible without any solid evidence. I for one don't believe he did it. Jason doesn't have a violent bone in his body and aside from some inexplicable psychotic break and a vanishing ice pick, the only real explanation is one that scares me even more. I try and take some degree of comfort in the idea that we'll get to the bottom of this whole thing in the coming months, but the way it's looking right now, it doesn't look like that's going to be the case. I just know that if we ever really do get answers on what happened that afternoon, I just know they're going to be

absolutely horrifying. Born on October 19th of 1965, Joyce Vincent was raised in the London suburb of Fulham. Her father, Lawrence, was an Afro-Caribbean carpenter while her mother, Liris, was of South Asian heritage. Both had emigrated from Granada to London before she was born. Yet sadly, Joyce's mother died of surgical complications when she was just 11 years old. Following their mother's passing, Joyce's four older sisters took over the child-rearing duties and essentially becoming Joyce's surrogate mothers until she was able to look after herself. Lyris's death had caused the girl's father to become incredibly emotionally withdrawn and this put such a strain on the family that

what should have been a network of support became something Joyce desperately wanted to escape. Although she left school with no qualifications to speak of, Joyce's charm, charisma, and natural intelligence meant she was able to secure herself a relatively well-paying position as a secretary. Her social skills also proved a boon in less professional circles too, and by the time she was just 25, she was getting backstage passes to some of the hottest events in London, including the Nelson Mandela International Tribute for a free South Africa concert that took place at Wembley Stadium in 1990. The height of Joyce's own career would come in March of 1997, when she began working for an accountancy firm, Ernst & Young. However, after four years working a lucrative job in the Treasury Department,

to all observers, Joyce's life was going fantastically well, and she had a bright future ahead of her. But unbeknownst to them, there was a darkness lurking beneath the surface. When Joyce abruptly resigned from her job in March of 2001, her colleagues were stunned. Instead of giving a two-weeks notice, she simply cleared out her desk one day and disappeared. Management had lined up an exit interview to figure out if there was something about the work environment that Joyce had found upsetting or distasteful. But for all intents and purposes, she flat out refused to give a reason. Obviously,

information on her life from that period is sparse, but there are two things we know for certain. Firstly, Joyce hadn't left her job at Ernst & Young for a better position elsewhere, rather for a cleaner's job in a budget hotel. She also moved into a different apartment at around the same time, one that was discovered to be a domestic abuse shelter. Friends said this decision confused them as Joyce didn't appear to be in a relationship at the time, and her career at Ernst & Young seemed to have been going well as it could be. But regardless, her relationship with her family and friends became more and more distant,

to the point that she became little more than a ghost to them. One friend later said, she detached herself from her family but there was no bust up. They are a really nice family, we didn't know at the time but we later found out that she was in a relationship and there was a history of domestic violence. She didn't talk about it though, not at all. It's like she was ashamed of it or maybe she just didn't want her abuser to find her. By the winter of early 2003, Joyce was still living in the domestic abuse shelter above the Wood Green shopping city in London. This apartment was owned by the Metropolitan

Housing Trust and was routinely used to house victims of domestic abuse until they could get their lives back on track. Only, right as things seemed to be picking up for Joyce, she suffered through a sudden medical emergency in which she vomited up blood and was rushed to the hospital as a precaution. Doctors discovered she had a peptic ulcer, a frightening but entirely curable condition, and after two days worth of treatment, she was released. Around the same time as her hospitalization, we know Joyce had been seeing someone of romantic interest. Some have insisted that this person was new in her life, but others

maintain that it was merely a cover for returning to her abusive ex, something which is depressingly common among victims of abuse. But what is clear is that shortly after she was released from the hospital, Joyce seemed to drop off the map entirely. When friends stopped hearing from her, they assumed she just wanted some space, and whatever family she had left were apparently too busy to check on her. Weeks turned into months, months turned into years, and still no one had heard from Joyce. It reached the point where some who'd known her believed she'd moved out of town, maybe even eloped with her new squeeze. Joyce's neighbors were just as disinterested.

They didn't question why the TV seemed to be constantly switched on in her apartment, even late at night, and they eventually assumed the bad smell seeping through the door was from the garbage cans at the bottom of the stairwell. It was only when someone's bottom line was affected that anyone bothered to check on Joyce, and in the end, the first people to knock on her door in literally years were a team of debt collectors. On January 25th, 2006, and whilst in possession of a set of the apartment's keys, the debt collectors entered Joyce's home. One described the aroma that struck them in that instant as the worst thing I'd ever experienced, and they knew instantly that something was horribly wrong. Joyce was discovered lying on her back next to a shopping bag surrounded by Christmas presents she had wrapped but never

delivered. Her remains were described as mostly skeletal and were so badly decomposed that Joyce had to be identified via her dental records. Since there was no real way of determining the cause of death, the police were forced to rule that Joyce's death was by natural causes and there was nothing to suggest any kind of foul play had occurred. Yet as one pathologist admitted after almost two years spent rotting in her apartment, the prospect of murder couldn't be 100% ruled out. Naturally, the first person the police wanted to talk to concerning Joyce's death was the mysterious boyfriend of Winter, 2003. But given that no one knew this man's

identity, there was no tracking him down. Police then attempted to track down Joyce's abusive ex, but he too seemed to have just dropped off the face of the earth. Joyce's sisters then hired a private detective to look for him and even begged the Salvation Army to help, but it seems for whatever reason, Joyce's ex did not want to be found. When asked why they neglected to check on her, one of Joyce's friends noted that she was someone who fled at signs of trouble, who walked out of jobs if she classed with a colleague, and who moved from one flat to the next all over London. She didn't answer the phone to her sister and didn't appear to have her own circle of friends, instead relying on the company of

relative strangers who came in the form of a new boyfriend, a colleague, or a flatmate. Maybe it was just them making excuses, or maybe Joyce really did want to be left alone. If that's the case, her self-isolation meant she lay alone and festering on the floor of a London apartment for almost three years. What if this abusive ex-boyfriend really had weaseled his way back into her life and she'd had the good sense to try and escape him again? If he knew how isolated she was, how no one would come to check on her, this might present someone with the perfect opportunity to kill without detection,

or at least to kill, and then be able to get as far away as possible without anyone suspecting anything. Yet at this point in the story, it's hard to know which is more frightening, the callous maliciousness it would take to murder a woman simply for wanting to be free, or the cold indifference of the people around her who didn't think to check on her until it was far, far too late. During the winter of 1989, I was a newly minted Marshall County Deputy Sheriff and I was just about as green as they come. I'd honestly expected rural policing to be something of an easy ride. I mean, all those fast-paced, gunshot, heavy cop shows were all set in Miami or New York or Los Angeles, not small

town Minnesota. But in reality, it was probably just as difficult. Just because they're stacked on top of each other down in Chicago, it doesn't mean they're any more or less evil than those who live on big old ranches out in the plains. And even though I didn't encounter street gangs or rioters or any curbside ladies of the night, I still have a few dark stories of my own. This is one of the darker ones, a story that we used to call the Grigla Snowman. It was late November when we got the call about a missing person over in Grigla. A small town of about 200 people out on Highway 89. I remember we drove out to a place called Evelyn Avenue.

Little more than a collection of small single story ranch houses that looked out over some open fields. Our missing person was a male in his late 40s. He had a young child, a stable background, no criminal record. By all counts, he was a happy person with everything to live for. But then one night, he goes out into the field out back, builds himself a snowman, and just walks off through the snow to God knows where. We asked his wife how she knew he'd built the snowman. She told us that, although she hadn't seen him building it with her own eyes, her young daughter had been pointing towards the snowman and exclaiming, Daddy, over and over again.

She figured her daughter had caught sight of her father working on it, possibly in the process of being put to bed. If that was true, the only real clue we had was the set of footprints leading back from the snowman towards Evelyn Avenue. After that, the prints disappeared. They hadn't disappeared because the dad had gotten into a car either. The truck was still parked up in the driveway and had been since he'd gone missing. So wherever he'd gone, it'd been on foot, in the middle of one been since he'd gone missing. So wherever he'd gone, it'd have been on foot, in the middle of one of the worst winters on record. Once we realized it was going to be a bigger operation than we figured, we asked the state

patrol to step in and thankfully, they proceeded to throw the kitchen sink at the entire investigation. We had people going over the missing guy's financials. We had people going door to door. The only thing we had to wait for was a dedicated search and rescue team that included sniffer dogs. Minnesota State Patrol had a chronically underfunded canine program at the time, so we were mostly reliant on the MSRDA, or the Minnesota Search and Rescue Dog Association, so much so that our investigation pretty much ground to a halt until we could get canine support. I'll never forget the day we all congregated at the end of Evelyn Avenue. There had to be a posse of at least 20 of us.

Local deputies, state patrol, volunteers with sniffer dogs. We had a good idea that the father had walked out into the field, then had walked back towards Evelyn, but after that, we had no idea where he'd gone. So you can imagine our surprise when the dogs let us off into the field, then just refused to move anywhere else. They just kept circling the snowman, barking and indicating at it, I guess. Looking back, I honestly can't believe we didn't consider it from the get-go. We were so focused on the tracks leading back out of the field and all the stuff about the guy having everything to live for and that we didn't stop to,

how should I put this, think of the unthinkable. So as we're all just standing around the snowman, waiting for the dogs to move off, there was this sort of penny drop moment, I guess. Well, one of us had the penny drop moment and it was one of the state patrol officers. All of a sudden I just hear him talking to one of the volunteers like, Hey, hey, get away from the snowman! The guys near it jump back all confused for a second but as the state patrol officer knelt down by the snowman and began delicately clawing at the frozen white mass, the rest of us realized what he was doing. There was this distinct no effing way

moment when the patrol officer's delicate digging suddenly revealed this black spot and kneeling down next to him, we all saw what was clearly the black tread of a boot. Within the hour, we had forensics out there, setting up a perimeter around the snowman before they cleared the rest of the snow away. The missing guy's body was curled up in the fetal position, the cause of death being blunt force trauma to the skull. Then, whoever had either knocked him out or killed him had just piled snow over his body. We never figured out if there was some greater significance to it or if the murderer had just taken the opportunity to hide the body in plain

sight, but either way, the cover actually worked for around 40 plus hours. Obviously the footprints leading away from the snowman belonged to the killer and not the victim. Something we really should have figured out earlier. But the thing that really sticks with me is how the guy's young daughter kept pointing at the snowman and saying, Daddy, did she actually see her father being interred, I guess you could say, in that temporary frozen tomb? He'd been known to build snowmen with her in the years prior, so it's possible that the snowman simply reminded her of her father. But I can't help but think that in years to come there might be some repressed memories just fighting to claw their way free of the mental fog of youth.

We never caught that killer, and that accounts for one of the few regrets I have about my time as a deputy. I remember we made an arrest at one point. State patrol brought a guy in for questioning because he had priors or something. But the county sheriff never liked the guy for it and was no surprise when the case against him quickly fell apart. After that, little by little, they kept reducing the number of officers on the case until one day, once the sheriff was sure the media wouldn't kick up a stink about it, the whole thing was just tossed into some filing cabinet with the rest of the cold cases. No justice, no closure, no answers.

Shortly after, the poor widow and their kid ended up moving out of town, probably to move in with relatives who could help raise their daughter. After that, people slowly stopped asking us about the case, and then after a while, it was as close to as forgotten about as possible. But it won't be truly forgotten until the guys that were there that day are all dead. You don't just forget about something like that. I know that kind of goes without saying, but even with all the messed up, horrifying horrifying or heartbreaking things you see in law enforcement,

it's incidents like the snowman that are the ones that really haunt you. And you spend way longer than you should trying to reconcile the creepy, cold lump smile on its face with the horror of what we found at its base. These days, I can do anything from my phone. Book a vacation, order a meal from a five-star restaurant, buy and trade stocks. But maybe the most amazing thing I can do is make my dirty laundry disappear and then reappear perfectly washed and folded. I have Rinse to thank for that. I just schedule a pickup in the Rinse app or at Rinse.com. A Rinse valet comes to get my clothes, and before I know it, they're back, crisply folded and ready to wear. They even do dry cleaning, which is returned hanging in a nice rinse garment bag.

And with rinse, my satisfaction is guaranteed. If for any reason I'm not happy, they'll re-clean my clothes for free. Best of all, rinse saves me tons of time each week. That's time I get to do something I love versus something I have to do. So if you want to save loads of time by not doing loads of laundry, remember, there's an app for that. Rinse. Sign up now and get $20 off your first order at rinse.com. That's R-I-N-S-E dot com. When the scariest moments of my life occurred during the winter of 1994, I grew up in this old mining town out in Colorado. The kind of place was just one of everything.

One grocery store, one church, one school. You get the idea. It's in a pretty remote area and it's one that's dotted with abandoned mine shafts of all different sizes. Obviously it's not exactly safe for kids to go out playing on the outskirts of town and the way I saw it, the need to keep kids away from the old shafts gave birth to rumors of what we called the pig man. The pig man was said to be almost nine feet tall, with hooves for hands and a pig's head instead of humans. It lived out in the mines, was the product of some unholy union of man and beast, and lived mostly on a diet of cute woodland creatures. But when the pig man couldn't get its hands on kid meat,

it ate that. It sounds like a bunch of nonsense, right? All just made up to keep kids away from dangerous places. I think I probably believed it when I was smaller, but by the time I was 13, and I'd actually been to a few of the old mine shafts, I knew it was just a made up story. But it wasn't a story, and I found that out quick. That was also the day that I found out how sometimes grown-ups tell kids stories for a reason not so much to baby us but to protect us. So like I said I was 13 and me and my friends

used to spend a lot of time out on our bikes. Because the old mine shafts had an allure of danger about them and we were in the habit of ghost hunting, they were too good to resist. We used to ride out to each one during the weekends of winter break, exploring as much as we dared before ticking it off our list of potential ghost hunts. And then came time to ride out the old McLennan mine, one of the largest in the area and maybe even the largest in the entire state. We were adventurous, but we weren't dumb, and we knew not to go too deep into the mines or anywhere that was cold, dark, and dangerous. But as it turned out, we didn't need to. The thing in that mine came to us. Because as we're exploring the first

hundred yards of the mineshaft, we start hearing something moving in the darkness ahead of us. It sounded like rocks crunching under the weight of something and since animals, sometimes bears, occasionally use the mineshafts as their dens for hibernation, we started to get a little nervous. We're shining our flashlights on a section of the tunnel that drops down out of sight, convinced we're about to come face to face with a black bear or something equally intimidating. We kept backing off towards the entrance to the mineshaft, but we were doing so painfully slowly, flashlights glued to our hand. We were scared, but this rabid curiosity seemed to be outweighing

the fear of it all. We hear a little more scuffling down below than something that sounded like a grunt, but by that time, we're basically convinced it was an animal, so we're even more or less keen on seeing what it was. Then, right as we hear some more scuffling, there's another grunting sound, only that time, it was quite clear that what was going on down there wasn't exactly an animal, or if it was, it was freaking huge. The fear ramps right back up again as we silently start moving back towards the entrance, then as we're almost near the entrance, I hear what sounded like a word being spoken behind us. I freeze, turn around, and shine my flashlight in that direction just in time to see something come into view. And literally the second I laid eyes on it, I just turned and screamed run. And I screamed run because I saw the pig man. I saw his snout, his molted skin,

I saw his bright red eyes and his hooves for hands. It was the single most terrifying moment of my life and as we rode back into town I swear we didn't stop for a second until we were back in our respective parents homes. Naturally I was in a real bad way by the time I got home and although I'm not too proud of it, I remember bursting into tears as soon as all the adrenaline started to taper off. They were ugly tears too. I'm talking like wailing, not just sobbing. Mom and dad rushed in my room almost right away, worried that I was hurt or something really terrible had happened to me. To me, what I saw was terrible. It was the scariest thing I'd ever seen in my life. Even today, I get the shivers just thinking about the face I saw.

But what messed me up was that I had literally no explanation for it. Well, outside of the terrifying tale of the pig man, of course. However, my parents, on the other hand, they did have an explanation for it. And since I was sort of old enough to handle the truth, they told me something that I found utterly depressing. So the pig man was real. Not just a made-up story to scare kids. Well, it was supposed to scare kids and keep them safe. It was just based on something very, very real. The pig man had been a miner, like so many others who used to live and work in our town,

and as it turned out, the old McLennan mine was shut down due to an accidental fire that caught in one of the tunnels. The company had managed to get most people out but one or two guys just couldn't get out in time. Pigman was one of them. He even so badly burned that his nose was almost completely gone. In fact he received life changing burns to almost his entire body. Then after that the battle with various insurance companies as well as the mining company himself just drove him completely insane. He'd lost almost everyone close to him in that fire. And here was some pencil pusher like,

I have a thousand questions and exams to put you through before you can get a cent from us. Then, once he was healthy enough, Pigman just walked out of town one day and didn't come back. People thought he'd gone for good, either moved on someplace else or like died or something. But no, Pigman just wanted to spend whatever time he had left in that place he'd lost so many of his friends and colleagues, the McLennan mine. I get why parents might feel the need to lie to their kids about it, or rather, why they might tell them half-truths to scare them away from something that'd haunt them if they came to understand it.

But the thing that gets me is that, the pig man, he's supposed to be the monster lurking out in the mines. But to the pig man or whatever his real name is, it's us who are the monsters. People who saw a man who'd lost almost everything, then treated him like a freak and an outcast when he couldn't just be normal again. For many of us, one of the only silver linings to a dark and frigid winter is the possibility of snowfall. Nothing makes holidays feel quite as festive as waking up Christmas morning and looking out of a window to see a blanket of fluffy, freshly fallen snow. As time, technology, and abundance have advanced in unison, snow has become something we hold a great deal of affection for, associating it with the wholesome fun of snowball fights,

while 50s crooners implore the clouds above to let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. We're quick to forget that, as time goes by, the sight of snowflakes falling from the sky was something humanity had learned to dread. Not just because snowfall promised biting cold and a dearth of sustenance, but because it could fall in apocalyptic amounts. In the winter of early 1972, the people of northwestern Iran were suffering terribly. It had proven to be one of the coldest winters in modern history, with supplies of food and medicine dwindling as temperatures plummeted to negative 13 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a whopping minus 25 degrees Celsius. What's worse, a flu epidemic had been ravaging the more isolated

and less prepared rural areas, making relief efforts even more difficult. Then, right when it seemed like things couldn't get any worse, a series of snowstorm clouds began to gather over the Azerbaijani border as if preparing for a full-scale meteorological invasion. This invasion commenced in earnest on February 3rd, with blizzards dumping a terrifying 7.9 meters of snow onto some rural regions. For scale, 7.9 meters is about the size of a two and a half story building. This gargantuan level of snow destroyed entire trees, took down power lines, and completely buried thousands of railroads, roads, and villages. Even some heavy-duty vehicles were crushed by the weight of the snowfalls which effectively buried entire regions,

completely isolating them from any potential aid. The situation remained that way for an entire week, with some officials estimating that the entirety of western Iran was completely covered in an 8-meter blanket of snow. Finally, on February 9th, there came a 24-hour lull in the blizzards and a rescue operation was immediately launched. Numerous helicopter-mounted search and rescue teams flew out to a number of afflicted villages, but when they arrived, what they found shook them to their cores. Entire villages, most of which were made up of single-story homes, were completely buried under the mammoth snow drifts. In some villages, such as southern central villages of Kakan and Kumar, there was not a single survivor. Literally hundreds of people were buried in their homes before

being either suffocated or frozen by the sheer magnitudes of the blizzards. In one village, rescue workers managed to recover 18 dead bodies, most of which were from the same family. Yet when the blizzards recommenced on February 11th, they were forced to abandon their efforts and surrender any progress that they had made to the snows. In another village, a place called Sheklob, Iranian army helicopters left behind a heap of provisions on the snowdrifts surrounding the village in the hopes that the survivors might be able to recover the food after digging their way out of their frozen grave. The helicopters returned a few days later, only to find the food completely untouched.

It was later discovered that every single one of Shekhlob's 100 residents had perished during the blizzard. By the time spring broke in the mountains of Iran, the government estimated that just over 4,000 people had lost their lives as a result of the snowstorms, making the Iranian blizzards of 1972 the deadliest in recorded history. So, this year, if heavy snowfalls make life a little inconvenient, or if you're forced to de-ice that windshield early in the morning, remember that you could be so much worse. And instead of a few inches or a few feet, Mother Nature has the capacity to bury you and everyone you know in little over 24 hours. My uncle died recently, passed away in early January after a freak car crash.

He hit a patch of ice, slid off the road and hit a tree. It was tragic, everyone was devastated. Deaths are all the harder when they come suddenly like that. But the more I think about the way he died, the more his death scares me. Like I said, my uncle slammed into a tree after hitting a patch of black ice. From what I heard, he was trying to keep his car on the road and while he was swerving from side to side, he just careened into this tree at the side of the road. The only tree for literally miles around. Where we live is mostly just corn and wheat fields,

flat as the eye can see and I guess whoever carved up the land and ran the highway through it decided to just leave this one tree there, I don't know, for decoration or whatever. If he'd have crashed into one of the fields he might have been just fine. Sure, if he rolled his car that's bad news, but just bouncing into a barren cornfield might only have resulted in cuts and bruises. My family and his friends put it down to bad luck. Just happened to skid at the wrong place at the wrong time, then boom, his life is over. But then, here's where things get weird. I thought I was going crazy for a while, like I was legit looking

at online therapy sessions. There are a ton, go figure. I thought I might have just been obsessing over minor details as a way of compartmentalizing my grief, which was obviously manifesting in a really unhealthy way. But then I started looking stuff up online and 26 people have all crashed into that lone tree since the end of World War II. And every single crash has been fatal. It always happens in the winter but I thought that was going to be a given. But then every incident I found was between Christmas Day and January 3rd which is exactly 10 days. And in each crash there was only ever one person in the car. I thought this was kind of freaky, but then I figured there might have been other crashes that weren't reported and it was a well-known so-called accident black spot.

But if that was the case, and the local highway patrol had known about this since the freaking 40s, just cut down the tree, right? How did whole different generations cart bodies away from that thing and still not think to cut it down? And how did 26 different cars smash into it without it coming down on its own? That's a lot of questions, right? But they were questions I wanted answered, and so I called the local sheriff, suggested he get rid of that lonely old tree.

Heck, I even offered to saw through that SOB myself. Bearing in mind this is the same sheriff who was uber supportive of our family after the crash, but he just changed his tone like, why would you want to go and do a thing like that? I thought he was kidding me. So I brought up the 26 fatalities, told him we might be able to save a few lives, and managed to stop myself from barking at him about how uncle would still be alive if the tree wasn't there. He said he'd get back to me.

Only he didn't. It's been months now and I still can't get him on the phone. It's getting to the point where I think something strange is going on with that tree. I'm going to drive out there to check it out and maybe edit this post later or post a new one reporting what I find. I'm not some kook who believes in orbs or ESP or anything like that, but that's what gives me the creeps about this. I think this is something that science might not be able to explain, not at the present anyway. And I can promise you, when I do drive out there,

it'll be smack bang in the middle of summer, on the warmest night of the year. Back when I was in 4th grade, we had this girl in our class called Sarah. Sarah was definitely a problem child and nowadays it was probably her parents that were to blame. But at the time, I hated her because she was just weird. Then one year, after winter break, Sarah wasn't in our class anymore. A bunch of rumors went around about what might have happened to her, but no one knew for sure. Not until someone spotted her in the next larger town over. The next thing I hear, Sarah's parents had cut all her fingers off. I was only nine years old at the time, but even then, I thought that sounded a little far-fetched.

My parents punished me for stuff too, but I got grounded or spanked or something like that. Same with all the other kids. Your mom and dad don't snip your fingers off no matter how bad you've been. We figured Sarah would be back at some point, so we'd get to ask her ourselves. I mean, she still needed to go to school, right? She wasn't dead. But when we asked our teachers,

they said that Sarah wasn't coming back to class and had gone to live with relatives out of state. So then it was like, oh my god, is she dead? It was only years later that I found out the truth and how the creepy finger cutting thing was actually kind of half true. Sarah had lost her fingers, but they hadn't been cut off. She'd run away from home because of something her parents did. We never found out what they did exactly, but it was bad enough that she'd want to run into the woods in the middle of a snowstorm. So bad that no matter how cold she got, she refused to go back to her

parents. Sarah got frostbite. She almost lost her nose and part of her cheeks, but doctors couldn't save six out of her ten fingers. She would have died if it wasn't for some stranger picking her up at the side of the road and rushing her to the emergency room. Then as for the whole thing about going to live with relatives out of state, none of that was true. Sarah didn't have any family that CPS knew of and her parents were such a risk to her that they placed her in a foster care in a whole other state. Definitely the most messed up memory I have of my childhood and sometimes I think about Sarah and I hope she grew up to be relatively happy and the care of people who actually cared about her. The scary side is wondering what her parents were doing to her that

would make her so scared. Like I get that she might have just gotten lost, then tried to get back home and just couldn't. But that just doesn't sit right with me. Like I said, we were fourth graders, but we weren't dumb. It would be pretty hard to get lost in the woods because you can basically still see our town through them. They're not that dense. So what did Sarah's parents do that she'd rather almost die than go back and get help? But honestly, at the end of the day, I think I'm better for a living. Not long haul semis or anything, but I'm still on the road a lot.

And up here in Massachusetts it gets wicked bad during the winter sometimes. I remember passing a semi on a snow covered two lane highway one time. My truck started sliding and I was basically sideways between the snow bank and semi doing like 55 miles per hour. Somehow we both came out okay and it was all because the semi-driver stayed cool as a cucumber. If he had braked or tried to turn I might not be around to be riding this, but he just sailed on through then slowed his truck down and got out to see if I was okay. Another time I ended up hitting a patch of black ice on a poorly lit highway.

I was doing 360s and the whole road was lined with trees on both sides, no ditch to slow me down, and I was just convinced that that was it for me. I didn't walk away from that one. I ended up upside down on the side of the road, and when I opened up my eyes, the Syracuse fire department was sawing off the door of my truck. It was like they just appeared out of nowhere the moment I crashed, and in reality, I've been out for like 40 minutes with a concussion after getting knocked out by my airbag. I never go out when it's like that anymore. Even if my wife let me, it's just not worth the risk. I work at a popular retail store in a mall close to my on-campus apartment. I was home for Christmas break and decided to work Christmas Eve since I was promised time and a half

and I could use the money to buy some extra Christmas presents. My childhood home is not very far from my apartment but it's about an hour drive from my work to my childhood home. Our holiday hours were extended this year and I was given a closing shift for Christmas Eve. The store closed at 10pm and the closing shift ended at 10.30, meaning I would be getting home at around midnight after swinging through a drive-thru to grab something to eat. The closing shift of the store usually had two employees and a manager working, but the other employee was supposed to close with me and they were out sick, so it was just me and the manager. While the manager emptied and counted the cash drawers and wrote the daily report, I gathered up all the trash and cardboard and

left it all by the back door in the stock room. I dusted and vacuumed until the manager was finished with the daily report and then he put in the combination to disable the alarm and held open the door for me to take out the trash and cardboard. This was the part that was usually the most helpful to have two employees instead of one because the dumpster was walled off and the manager had to wait by the door to make sure no one walked into the store. But the dumpster wasn't too far away and I wanted to get home as soon as possible so I carried all the trash out. Our store shared the dumpster with only three other stores,

all of which closed either before or after us so I wasn't expecting to see anyone at the dumpster. I was so startled that I dropped my bags when I saw someone digging through the trash. He looked up at me when he heard the bags fall. Oh, hi. I dropped my wallet in the trash. Could you help me grab it? He asked, and a thousand red flags went off in my brain and I immediately began to back away. I don't think I can. I need to take the trash and get back to my store. I said, trying to walk towards the store slowly. Which store do you work at? He asked. I'm not sure why I told him, but I told him the store that I worked at and he nodded.

Oh, nice store. You can just leave the bags here, I'll toss them when I'm done looking. I went back into the store at that point, a little creeped out but not suspecting really anything else. I told my boss what happened and he laughed a little and offered to walk me to my car as I was parked in the lot behind the store and he was parked in the parking garage attached to the main mall. I declined and walked to the nearly empty parking lot. There were only three cars in the parking lot including mine. One car was parked close to the back entrance of a neighboring restaurant and the other car was parked just a few spots away from mine. I couldn't see the person inside, but the car was on, and it looked like the person was trying to warm up the car from the inside

before scraping off the ice on the windshield. I glanced at the car a few times, just to mentally jot down the make and model of the car, a blue Honda Accord, before getting into my car and locking the doors. I called my parents to let them know that I was just now leaving and that I would be stopping to grab dinner on the way home so not to wait up. I kept my eyes peeled for the different fast food joints on the side of the highway

but the majority of them were closed as it was 11pm on Christmas Eve. I was getting hungrier and hungrier as I got closer and closer to the exit from my house. I decided to just scrounge up some leftovers at home as I drove through my town when I saw a subway with blinking lights that said open late. I peeled into the parking lot of the subway and saw the red LED sign indicating that it was open. I walked into the sandwich shop and took a look around as it looked pretty empty. I called out to the

empty store and was able to get the attention of the only person working in the store. Oh, I thought I locked that door. We just closed, he said. Oh, come on, man. I just got out of work and I just want to grab something to eat before I go to bed. I'll be really quick, I promise. I begged him. He sighed and agreed, probably taking pity on how exhausted I looked. We talked for a little bit about working the late shift on Christmas Eve as he made my sandwich before a group of teenage boys walked into the store. Hey, we're closed guys. I'm gonna lock the store after I'm done making the sandwich, he said. But I want a sandwich, wanted the boy wine. Ugh, fine, fine,

fine. The subway employee got out from behind the counter and locked the door so no one else would be able to get in and he could ensure that the teenagers would be his last customers of the night. He finished making my sandwich and left me to pick out my drink and chips at the soda fountain. Most of the boys only bought bags of chips or cookies so they were all finished before I finished filling up my soda and the subway employee disappeared into the back. I put the lid to my cup on and was looking for a straw when something caught my eye. The man from the dumpster was waiting in the parking lot next to my car. He was sitting on the hood of the car that was parked next to mine. It was the blue Honda Accord.

I really started to freak out at that point. There was no reason for this guy to be in my town an hour away from the mall at the exact place I decided to stop if he wasn't following me. And what was he doing on the hood of his car? It was like the day before Christmas, it was snowing and definitely below 30 degrees. Hey, um, can you guys walk me to my car? I asked the group of boys. Yeah, you alright? One of the boys asked. Um, I'm fine, I just don't want to slip on any ice.

I lied, I felt a little silly because they were probably a perfectly good reason for the man from the dumpster to be in the parking lot, something that didn't have anything to do with me, but I was still very nervous. The boys walked me to my car and waited until I drove off. The man didn't even look at me as I got into my car. I had about ten minutes until I got to my house and I tried to shake the feeling I got about the man in the dumpster. It took me a little while to notice but I realized that there was someone following me. It was hard to see because the car's lights were off but I noticed the car when I glanced in my rearview mirror as I drove under a street lamp. I started to get

nervous again and drove past my house and turned back onto the main road hoping I would lose this guy. This car stayed on my tail and I watched in my rearview mirror as I went under a streetlight again. It was a blue Honda Accord. I pulled out my phone and called 911 and explained the situation to the dispatcher. The dispatcher advised me to drive to the nearest police station and told me she would inform the police station of what was going on. I stayed on the line with the dispatcher until I pulled into the police station.

The Honda Accord drove past the station. There was a police car waiting outside the station that drove after the guy, but ultimately there was nothing that could be done besides give him a ticket for driving with his lights off. And my description of the man by the dumpster matched that of the driver of the Accord. I don't know what he had planned, but I haven't seen him since and told my boss about the incident so I won't have to take the trash out on my own anymore. So to the man who followed me for over an hour on Christmas Eve and before then, let's not meet again.

These days, I can do anything from my phone. Book a vacation, order a meal from a five-star restaurant, buy and trade stocks. But maybe the most amazing thing I can do is make my dirty laundry disappear and then reappear perfectly washed and folded. I have Rinse to thank for that. I just schedule a pickup in the Rinse app or at Rinse.com. A Rinse valet comes to get my clothes, and before I know it, they're back, crisply folded, and ready to wear. They even do dry cleaning, which is returned hanging in a nice Rinse garment bag. And with Rinse, my satisfaction is guaranteed. If for any reason I'm not happy, they'll re-clean my clothes for free. Best of all, Rinse saves me

tons of time each week. That's time I get to do something I love versus something I have to do. So if you want to save loads of time by not doing loads of laundry, remember, there's an app for that. Rinse. Sign up now and get $20 off your first order at rinse.com. That's R-I-N-S-E dot com. When I was 18 years old, I started my first job at Spirit Halloween, a seasonal Halloween store. It was my first job, so I was excited and eager to work, finally making my own money for college. Because it's a seasonal location, as you can imagine, management was

pretty disorganized. I didn't know half the staff, scheduling was a mess, and I pretty much just picked up shifts when I wanted to work and they always needed the help. One day, I'm in the break room about to head back on the sales floor when a manager I hadn't met yet came in. He started asking questions about my name, age, and what I was studying in school, and insisted that I stay on break a little longer and sit down to a drink of Red Bull with him. We sat down and he proceeded to brag to me about how when he was younger he used to work on movie sets and used to be in production. The entire conversation revolved around him trying to impress me with these stories.

I thought it was weird but I never had a job before so I thought he was making conversation with me. After our conversation we went back on the sales floor and I noticed that he would guide me over to a section to work on by touching the small of my back and making suggestive comments that slowly started to make me uncomfortable. Later that shift, I asked him for his email so that when the season ended and I needed to apply for other jobs, I could have his contact information. He told me to send him a text with my full name so he knew who it was. I texted him when we were still at the store and didn't think anything of it.

That night after work, I was up late doing homework when he texted me back. Throughout the night he kept texting me conversationally, unrelated to work. And at this point my alarms are going off that this seems highly inappropriate. My 45 year old manager is trying to talk to me at 1am outside of work. I stopped responding and left it at that. Later on I went on Facebook and realized that when he had me text him my full name, he used it to look me up and try to add me as a friend. The next time I went into work I planned to try to avoid him as much as possible. However, as soon as I got there he came up to me and started

asking me questions about whether I drank or smoked, stating that we should do it together sometime. This man literally told me I should come over to his house and I could teach him to roll up that we should smoke together on our break. Mind you, he's like 30 years older than me. At this point I knew that he knew what he was doing was inappropriate because he would only make this kind of conversation when we were alone. Anytime co-workers or other managers were around he would stop, so I tried my best to keep around my other co-workers. This shift though, he pulled me away from my normal section and told me he had a very special

task I had to help him with. He takes me to the back of the store where we keep inventory and had me help him start marking down some items. I was on very high alert because we were alone in the back of the store where there were no cameras. Again, he keeps making comments about how we should hang out and continues to tell me stories about old jobs he used to have in his youth to try and impress me or something. Eventually he tells me about all the cool Halloween decorations he set up in front of his house and he wanted to show me a photo of it. He pulls out his phone and opens his camera roll. As I'm looking at the phone waiting for him to find the photo, I notice something familiar in his camera roll. His most recent photo was a photo of me, staring back at me. He screenshot my Facebook profile photo and just had it sitting

there in his camera roll. I gasped at a reaction and tried to hide my surprise because at this point I was creeped out to the max. He made some weird comment about how I was just so beautiful he couldn't help himself and I just felt sick to my stomach. I didn't confront him about how off-putting that was because I was just in shock. I texted all my friends about what happened and they all agreed that that was horribly inappropriate. The remainder of working there that season consisted of him hitting on me and continuing to make me uncomfortable. Because it was a seasonal job, I didn't report him because it wasn't like we had an HR department and as it got closer to

Halloween I knew that they weren't going to fire him when we needed workers. I just tried to avoid him as much as possible but he continued to text me and try to talk to me every time I went in. Looking back, it makes me so sad that my first ever experience working at a job was spent trying to avoid advancements from a manager 30 years older than me. I'm just so grateful I trusted my gut about him. This happened in 2016 when I was a 17-year-old first-year college student in film school. I'm now 22 years old, a female. My name is Julia. I lived alone in my first ever apartment. It was really small, but I was really proud of my independence.

I never felt unsafe in this apartment for several reasons. There are multiple gates in the residence that needed to be opened through a code. Only the people who lived there knew. My door had three different locks and it was right next to the university, so most people who lived in the neighborhood were college students. Nothing bad had ever happened in the neighborhood before. I've always been very careful with locking the door when I leave my home. I always check twice since I have slight OCD.

But this one time I leave to go to class and lock my door but for some reason I couldn't get the key out of the lock. It was completely stuck so I went to get the caretaker of the building to help me but he wasn't there and I was starting to get late for class so I went to get the caretaker of the building to help me but he wasn't there and I was starting to get late for class so I went to class with the keys still in the lock. I took off the keychain first so it's not too noticeable. When I got home the caretaker was back so he came to help me and we couldn't get it out for 15 minutes until somehow he was able to. He told me the lock was damaged so that I didn't necessarily need to change it if I only locked it once instead of twice. I just said okay and that was the end of it. I really wasn't worried because of how safe I felt in this building.

Flash forward to two months later. I was taking out the trash one night at around 11pm while on the phone with my sister and I specifically remember telling her that I was taking out the trash one night at around 11pm while on the phone with my sister and I specifically remember telling her that I was taking out the trash and that I would have to take a shower afterwards before heading to a party. As I previously said, I always lock the door, even just to take out the trash because of my lock being damaged I only locked it once. When I got back to my apartment, I found the door unlocked, which immediately alarmed me. So I went into the apartment and locked the door immediately with

three different types of locks. When you walk into my apartment, which is just 215 square feet, you have the main room in front of you and the bathroom door immediately to your left. I had left the bathroom door slightly open, but enough so that I could see a man in my shower with his back turned to me. Naturally when I saw this I tried to open the door and leave as fast as possible, except my main lock was damaged from two months earlier and I couldn't open it no matter how hard I tried. In this moment all I could think of was the fact that I had to leave as fast as possible. I jumped out the window without really thinking. I figured it was the only

solution except I lived on the second floor so I completely smashed my ankles in the landing. I started running in whichever way I could and when I got a little bit further from the building I looked back and the man was there, at my window, just watching me as I run away. I thought of two possible outcomes, either the man was going to jump and chase me, except I wouldn't get far with my twisted ankles, or he would get scared of the height and be locked in that apartment, and thankfully he chose option two. I went to hide in the bush a little further and called the police, who arrived in just under ten minutes because I live close to the

station. They pushed my door open and the man was just there, sitting on my couch, holding a kitchen knife, waiting for me to come back. They arrested the guy and later told me that they had already arrested him for assault, attempted kidnapping, and attempted murder previously. They also told me how everything had happened. Like I said, it was a very friendly neighborhood with mostly college students so he got inside the building by other people holding the door for him. He then heard me telling my sister I was going to take a shower which was why he was waiting in the door for him. He then heard me telling my sister I was going to take a shower which was why he was waiting in the bathroom for me. He was able to pick the lock while I was out taking out the trash. He apparently noticed me on school campus

and followed me to my home several times before succeeding to actually come in. He stayed inside waiting for me because I had recently changed my phone and the previous one was still on the table so he thought I didn't have a phone with me to call the police. I don't live there anymore but after that, to get into the building we all needed identification proving we lived there. Building IDs were created and we had to scan them every time and it was the only way to go inside the building. Thankfully nothing bad happened in the neighborhood after that. It's back to being very peaceful and friendly. This happened to me a few years ago when I was 16.

I'm a petite person and have always looked younger than I actually am. Even as an adult, people think I'm a teenager. Anyways, when I was 16 years old, my mom and I traveled to my home country for the holidays. We were so happy because we were only able to afford a plane ticket only once every two years. So time goes by, and we miss stuff about our family life. And this time, my aunt, my mom's sister, Sylvia, was pregnant with her first child.

My mom and I didn't know Sylvia's new husband's family, so we were introduced to my aunt's husband, James, him being 38, and his brother, Michael, 44, and his wife who was 9 months pregnant. We quickly welcomed them into our family because they were so nice and friendly. We felt like we already knew them. One day, late after a party at my aunt's house, I was told someone would take me to a sleepover at my grandma's house. My grandma lives all the way across town and I'm the only one who is related to her. Anyway, people were drunk and sleepy and no one could give me a lift. So Michael, 44, offered to take me there on his motorcycle.

My aunt said something like, Thanks, you're a lifesaver. I didn't think anything of it. I probably told myself, Okay, well, I guess my new uncle is taking me there. I climbed onto the motorcycle since I was so small, and my aunt waved goodbye at the door. We left on his motorcycle. He asked me to put my arms around his waist so I wouldn't fall.

I remember it was a cold night. He said, if you're cold, you can hug me tight, which I thought was a bit weird. After about 15 minutes, I see he's taking a detour that goes in the opposite direction. I didn't say anything because I thought he had a reason. Then we get to a big park and that was very dark. There were only about four people I could see in the distance. We got under a tree so it was even darker but we didn't get off the motorcycle. He turned around and started putting his hand on my cheek and hair. At this point I was so confused and scared I felt almost paralyzed. I realize this man isn't actually family, this is just some strange grown up man. And he says, you're so pretty, I didn't think you were so pretty in

real life. I was so nervous, I think I started to smile out of anxiety and fear. I do that when I'm uncomfortable sometimes and I said, What? He leaned in and got close to my ear and said, You want to go to a hotel nearby? We don't have to spend the night. I'll take you home right after. The only thing I could think of was his nine-month pregnant wife.

I don't know why. I said no, I want to go to my grandma's house. And still with a smile, I didn't want to make him angry. He insisted so many times and I said no every time. He was so creepy and I got the feeling that he'd just ignore me. He finally gave up and took me to my grandmother's house. I immediately jumped off the motorcycle and ran to her house. He took off before grandma opened the door. I told my aunt. I don't know if she didn't believe me or just dismissed my story, so I never told anyone ever again.

Up until I was 18, he messaged me on Facebook from time to time saying how pretty I was that night. It was so weird because I could see him posting about his new daughter and his new wife. I can't help to think that he thought I was younger home after work with one of my co-workers after closing, so it was probably around 11.30pm to about midnight. Keep in mind we both live and work in the rural Midwest, so there isn't much in the way of lights or other infrastructure for some parts of the drive. Not that this has a huge effect on the story, it just explains how another car could just seemingly materialize

out of thin air on a dark road. Anyway, I turn onto a bridge when I saw a car sitting just off the road on the other side of it. Its engine was still on, but it wasn't moving, and I can't say I was really all that concerned about it to begin with because it's a common spot for cars to pull off even if it was kind of late. But as I passed the car I looked in my rear view mirror to see that they had pulled out behind me. Again I really didn't think anything of it, just like hmm weird. And then I watched as they gain on me, more and more until they basically began to tailgate me, but like real hard. I kept driving for a bit with this car right up on me which obviously had me incredibly nervous. I let off a few honks of my horn as if to say back off, but they just beeped right back and stayed as close as if to say no.

My heart is beginning to beat at 100 miles an hour as it was but then right as I'm starting to get seriously frightened, the headlights behind me suddenly just disappear. We're going at least 40 on a dark track and then the car behind me just suddenly appears next to me as it begins to pass me. It then slows, then jackknifes on the road and I see the doors opening on either side of the car. No, I didn't take any chances. I immediately swerved, almost smashing into one of the opening doors in the process of rounding the now completely stationary car, but I made it. I then put my foot down and pretty much kept it down until I was back onto the pavement.

I'll be honest, I was speeding the whole way home, just hoping a cop would actually pull me over. I was terrified that, like, if I tried to call while driving, I'd lose control of my truck, so I was pushing 70 the entire way home and that's where I called the cops. I then got my gun out and waited for them in the front room with the lights out, watching the street outside for any signs of the car that may have been tailing me. I only really started to calm down once the cops showed up but after telling them everything I could, I could tell they didn't quite buy my story. They asked me like three or four times if I was sure that I didn't know the person chasing me or if I could think of a reason why anyone might want to intimidate me. I get that it's crazy but I swear to god I have no idea who the driver or passengers might have been

or why anyone would have wanted to run me off the road like that. The worst thing is I didn't hear anything back or rather all the cops could do was advise me to get a permit to keep my gun in my glove box. Seriously, they were so stumped that they legitimately just told me to arm myself. Thankfully, there were no repeat incidents, but it definitely put me off driving at night for a while, or at least when I was forced to I went out of my way to stick to as many well-lit highways as possible. That put at least 90 minutes on my total commuting time, but the whole thing freaked me out so much that it seems so worth it not to have to go through that again. I'm sorry this story kind of fizzles out that it doesn't have some big conclusive ending, but I suppose it's not

even really a story, more like a warning, because take it from me, there are some bad people out there. I work at a little local business and we are known for being really friendly and chatty with customers. It's kind of expected of us. Ever since I was working there at 17, there was this guy who had to be in his late 20s to mid 30s who would come in and talk to me in particular for long amounts of time. He would wear shirts that said things like, bearded for her pleasure. But I mean, to each their own fashion sense I guess, but ew.

He added me on Facebook at some point and as a dumb teenager I accepted and would reply to his messages but not too often. I had the feeling he had a crush on me and didn't want to lead him on. He started coming in asking weirder things like, going out drinking this weekend? Going to any clubs with your friends. I didn't want to delete him off Facebook because I knew that I'd have to face him again at work. My coworker and boss noticed that he would linger sometimes for over an hour just to talk to me. If I was in the back, he would just stand around waiting for me to come up. About a year ago, he got me when I was alone at the front and the store wasn't busy, so he decided to vent to me about how he recently got kicked out of a comic convention for trying to talk to a girl who had accused him of stalking her.

He was convinced he did nothing wrong and was just trying to talk to her, but why would he get escorted out of a venue by security if it was a misunderstanding? I kind of forgot about this and he had come in a couple of more times since. I remember him casually asking me if I live on the corner of such and such a street and I said yeah, not thinking much of it. Maybe two days later I had the day off. I had a shower then changed to my room then did my makeup right at my window all with the blinds open. I'm two stories up and I assumed nobody would ever actually be looking up directly at it and I learned my lesson that day. I went downstairs and was shocked to see him taking photos of my apartment building window, like his phone angled upwards towards my window. I think he saw me walking out but I had sunglasses on and

walked away quick. I immediately deleted him off of Facebook and he noticed and messaged me within about two days after this happening. It's too coincidental not to be creepy, you know. My co-workers were so weirded out when I told them. I didn't see him for a couple of months then he came in one day when I was working and was so brief with me. If anything he seemed almost angry at me. There was enough tension coming from him that when he left my new co-worker who knew nothing about this was like, whoa, what was that about? He was acting as if he just broke up with him or something. I suppose this could have been worse though. Chances are he probably didn't get good photos from his photo camera with all the sunlight glares and such. And here's to hoping

that he never creeps around my window without me noticing again. I love reading posts on this sub, but I never thought I had anything to contribute. However, while listening to things on YouTube, I suddenly remembered this. So I lived alone in a bad neighborhood just outside the city. At this point, I'd been living there for maybe three years with no incident. Well, I mean, there were several shootings on my street, but no one shot at me, so no incident, I guess. Kind of a selfish thought but you know. I'm the kind of person who can't sit still for very long so I find myself standing or pacing a lot. On this particular night, maybe at 2am, I was pacing while reading a book to prepare for

an upcoming test at my university. I stopped pacing for a little and just stood near my front door to read, and that's when I heard my doorknob turn. For some reason, though I nearly soiled myself in the moment, I was able to calmly look down at my deadbolt to double check that it was locked. It was. I looked through the peephole to see who was trying to come in, but no one was standing there. Obviously, this was very confusing. I am neither superstitious nor a believer in the supernatural but I'm also kind of stupid so my first thought was, is a ghost trying to break into my house? Thankfully that thought gave way to a more logical thought of, maybe they're going around back. So I quickly moved to the back door to

make sure it was locked. It was, thank god, but then my front doorknob turned again. I tiptoe ran to the front door. At this point my heart is pounding. My dog, a big protective teddy bear, is looking at me with major concern in his eyes. I look through the front peephole again, but there's still no one there. And that's when I hear a small knock on my door, as I am looking through the peephole. Then a small child's voice said, Let me in. Silence. Let me in.

I'm still looking through the peephole, while covering my mouth with my hand to make my breathing quieter. Through the peephole I see a small three-year-old-ish girl walk to the end of the porch and look into my bushes. She nods and says, Okay, in what I think was supposed to be a whisper. She walks closer to the door again and I lose sight of her in the peephole. She tries the handle again then knocks and says, Please help me! No, my uncle was a cop, so I had heard about people using children as a way to get people

to open their door before blitz attacking, so I'm pretty sure that was what was happening at this point. I wasn't sure how to handle the situation so I just said, not even into a phone, Hi, I think someone's trying to break into my apartment. Yeah, my address? And then I said it, Yeah, I'll stay on the line. I then saw a shadow emerge from my bushes and thankfully they scooped that kid up and ran off. There were two people and that kid. I kinda know for certain that these people were planning to break into my apartment, to rob me, or do god knows what. A little background, I was at my mom's house which was a basement apartment of a house. My mom was an alcoholic and addicted to other things so typically had very unsavory characters

around and I was around 8 years old. It's Friday, my mom had this guy N, come around two or three times before. She went upstairs to the main part of the house to cook dinner. I was left downstairs with this guy that she'd met a handful of times just partying. We were both sitting on this sectional couch. He was in the corner seat, feet up on the couch with work boots on, which was disgusting to me, and just lounging. I was in the cushion next to him but within arm's length between us. He was staring at me with a half smile and asked me a few random questions about school. I stared straight ahead at the TV. I don't remember the questions but even at 8 years

old I was very intuitive due to always having to observe and be on guard in my surroundings. I remember being very creeped out and afraid to move too obviously. Then he took the back of his finger and rubbed them up and down my upper arm in a slow motion on my bare skin. He was flirting with me and I knew it. My mom calls us up for dinner about this time and I guess he leaves shortly after. I was scared and didn't want to be around him again. Sunday comes. My mom's other partying friend Jim comes over early, knocks on the door and asks to speak with my mom at the top of the driveway. I overheard him tell her basically that she needs to stay away from Nino because he's told Jim that he has his

eye on me and he could potentially do some very dangerous things to me. My mom argues with him and is basically like, yeah right, you're just being dramatic. And Jim is actually pleading with her and she still doesn't believe him. Cool mom. Now a week later, my younger brother and I were in her co-worker's car headed to her job. My mom was reading the newspaper and it says, oh my god. Nino had been arrested for breaking into a home and assaulting a child. And I was absolutely shook. For months after I struggled to sleep, we were in the basement apartment and there was a large sliding door and a ground level window in the bedroom and I was afraid that he would get out of jail and I would see him in the window coming for me. As a young woman who lives alone, I tend to be cautious when it comes to who I open the

door for. One evening some time ago I ordered some food and per usual I requested it to be left outside as I prefer no contact. So when the guy shows up he has problems finding the right place and I go out to get the food. I get bad vibes from this dude quickly. He waits a few seconds before he hands over the food and while doing so, he looks me up and down. Then he said, I bet you live alone because you didn't order that much. He said this in a joking way, but I just said nah, then went off into my home and locked the door twice.

I was a bit creeped out already and decided to peek outside to see if he left. He hadn't. Delivery dude stood there for a good couple of minutes, checking his phone a bit and also just standing around. He leaves and I start to relax. Then comes the first call. I can only hear a slight breathing on the other end. No one is speaking and I hang up. Then there's a text. When can I come over and kiss you? Another call and no one's speaking. I check out the number from the delivery app and of course it's the creepy delivery dude. Another text asking if I want company tonight. So I block the number and try to contact the delivery company and no luck there. Then I'm getting a call from a hidden number and try to contact the delivery company and no luck there.

Then I'm getting a call from a hidden number and it's the same thing. No one speaking on the other end. Now I'm starting to get terrified. So I call the cops of course. They showed up pretty quickly and I showed them everything. They took my statement and went on their way. After they left I didn't get any more calls or texts but I'm still very wary of delivery dudes. I finally did get in contact with the delivery service the next day and told them about what happened and by then I had already contacted the police.

I asked how this could have happened and the only explanation I received was that the app requires a number to be registered and that this person most likely just took it from there. They apologized and said that they would deal with it, whatever that meant. I have no idea how or why this guy also used the delivery phone for some nighttime harassment. These days, I can do anything from my phone. Book a vacation, order a meal from a five-star restaurant, buy and trade stocks. But maybe the most amazing thing I can do is make my dirty laundry disappear, and then reappear perfectly washed and folded. I have Rinse to thank for that. I just schedule a pickup in the Rinse app or at Rinse.com. A Rinse valet comes to get my clothes, and before I know it, they're back, crisply folded, and ready to wear. They even do dry cleaning, which is returned hanging in a nice Rinse garment bag. And with Rinse, my satisfaction is guaranteed. If for any reason I'm not happy, they'll re-clean my clothes for free. Best of all, Rinse saves me tons of time each week. That's time I get to do something I

love versus something I have to do. So if you want to save loads of time by not doing loads of laundry, remember, there's an app for that. Rinse. Sign up now and get $20 off your first order at rinse.com. That's R-I-N-S-E dot com. This morning, I got out of class and was headed home. I then saw a crippled old lady begging for help and telling me that she needed to get into her apartment. I helped her, took an elevator and took her to her door. To my surprise, the door was wide open. When I went inside, she told me I could go to a nearby shop to buy her wine and some cigarettes. She then proceeded to give me her credit card and keys and insist on the fact

that I should leave my bag in her house. I said no thank you. Even though the situation was weird, it wasn't that that scared me the most. It was the inside of the apartment. There was no decorations, pictures, or anything. It was disgusting. There was some kind of chair with excrement on it and walls were filled with cracks. I got scared, took the card and keys, tried to act normal and then I wanted to test if it was a real card. I went to the store and the woman said that the card wasn't a real one. It was at this moment that I decided to not go to her house and gave the keys and the cards to the police. A friend of mine told me that she saw the exact same old lady saying the exact same thing she told me and the scariest is that she saw a man bring her outside and immediately

go inside the apartment. The area where she was is known for being extremely dangerous. There were recently a shooting between two drug dealers in daylight for example. And I think I just nearly died or something, but what do you guys think? This encounter happened this late afternoon. I'm still very shaken up about this and cannot get it out of my mind, so bear with me. My day started as it normally does. Early morning work shift, come home, drive my partner to work, come home to nap. However when

I get home my partner texts me saying to pick them back up because they just got news that they were laid off for the winter due to a very slow season. I went back out, came back and went for my nap while my partner went to play video games. I was in a pretty deep sleep with my favorite TV show playing in the background as I've seen it a million times. About two hours or so later I'm awoken up to my creaky front door being opened followed by a deep and unfamiliar, hello? I've listened intently as I thought it could be my partner's friend who often stops by. I didn't hear anything further so I shrugged it off to my TV and tried to go back to sleep. Shortly after that, I hear my partner open their bedroom door and I hear them

yell, who are you and why are you in my house? As I panic, I don't know who they're talking to, but I listen to the short interaction. An older man, very startled by my partner's presence, explains that he had watched a package be delivered, and after no one came to get the package right away, he decided to come inside. The package was still on my porch afterward. My partner tells this stranger who had been walking directly towards my bedroom to leave and that they were calling the police. The man lingers, stalling my partner and asking if he can use our bathroom. They just scream, no, get out, and the man slowly makes his way out and drives away. We called the police immediately after he left giving them his and his vehicle descriptions. I called my neighbor to let them know and keep an eye out and he informed

me that when he came home two three hours earlier that vehicle was parked at the end of our street and when he drove by the man covered his face. I cannot stop thinking that this man knows my schedule and has targeted me for something, but I'm so lucky that today of all days, I was around seven years old, my mom and I lived in these apartments in a border town. My mom's a single mother. Anyway, in our apartment complex, like most, it had a playground in it. Luckily, our apartment was on the bottom floor and right next to the playground. And like most children, I loved playing there. Every day I'd play there. I honestly can't remember, but my mom either went inside the apartment to grab something or let me play alone, but while she was gone,

a random lady approached me. I'd never seen this lady before but she told me she had a huge Barbie doll house and a lot of toy Barbies. She told me she lived not too far and asked if I wanted to go and play. I remember saying I have to ask my mom first and that's when she said she knew my mom and that it's okay. I didn't know any better and agreed to go. She grabbed my hand and led me to her house. She did have a lot of Barbie toys and I was playing but she didn't have any other children around so I'm not sure why she would have all these dolls. Apparently I was gone for some time because it was starting to get dark and that's when there was a loud bang on the door. The lady opened the door and it was my mom.

She looked so frightened. She grabbed me and we moved out of that apartment complex soon after what happened and honestly I don't remember what happened after that. This memory came back to me not that long ago and my mom told me that that was the worst thing that's ever happened. But I don't remember feeling afraid but honestly who knows what the lady had planned for me. Since we live five minutes from the Mexican border it is known for trafficking children and I could have easily been taken to Mexico and never seen again. My mom did tell me that the reason she found me was because some bystander saw me walk off with that lady and then saw my mom frantically looking for me. To be continued... Wednesday, and Friday at 7pm EST. If you get a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit,

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