The Lets Read Podcast - 183: LAND OF THE DYING SUN | 24 True Scary Stories | EP 171

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Japan, Baby Thieves, & Night Shift... 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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Download the bed MGM Ontario app today. Visit bed MGM.com for terms and conditions. 19 plus to wager Ontario only. Please gamble responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. The Born on December 30th of 1984, Lindsay Ann Hawker was the daughter of Bill and Julia Hawker and was raised in the English city of Coventry.

She attended the King Henry VIII School, then went on to study biology at the University of Leeds, graduating with a first-class honors degree in the summer of 2006. Initially, Lindsay had plans to pursue a master's degree in her chosen subject, but began to feel a deep wanderlust after watching friends take gap years to travel the world. To her delight, Lindsay discovered she could blend travel and academia when she came across an organization known as NOVA, a Tokyo-based conversational English school. She applied for a teaching position and was subsequently accepted,

flying out to Japan in October of 2006 to commence her employment. Lindsay stayed and shared accommodation with two other foreign teachers and regularly used email, Skype, and telephone calls to maintain contact with her family. She also used an email to keep in touch with her English students, one of whom was named Tatsuya Ichihashi. Tatsuya was born on January 5th of 1979 and spent his formative years in both Gifu and Chiba prefectures in southern Japan. He came from a family of professionals, with his mother working as a dentist while his father was a widely respected medical doctor. Yet after graduating from Chiba University in 2005, Tatsuya failed to find work, and at the time he enrolled at the Nova English School, he was living on a parental monthly allowance of about 100,000 yen, which is equivalent to about

760 dollars. Although Tatsuya had no previous criminal convictions, he had once been accused of assaulting a man during an attempted robbery. However, before the matter reached a court of law, Tatsuya's parents essentially paid the man to drop the charges. Despite his penchant for antisocial behavior, Tatsuya had a long-term girlfriend and regularly worked on his physical fitness. Once claiming to cycle around 25 kilometers a day, six days a week, yet he also kept a large collection of extremely violent comic books and was said to pore over them for hours at a time on a nearly daily basis. And when Tatsuya learned that Lindsay was his online English teacher, he obtained her email

address and began to communicate with her outside of professional hours. Nova's website included small biographies of their teachers and this was how Tatsuya was able to find out what Lindsay looked like. A few days later, he happened to be present at the same train station that Lindsay used for her commute, and he approached her to initiate conversation. Once he established that she was indeed the same Lindsay Hawker who taught him English online, he walked her back to her shared accommodation, and it's then that Lindsay invited him inside for a glass of water before he made his own journey home. Once he was inside, Tazia apparently made a quick sketch of Lindsay, signing it with his name and phone number. This endeared Lindsay to him so much that she agreed to meet him for a private English lesson at a cafe four days later.

It's not clear if this was a date or simply a professional courtesy, but what is clear is that this was arguably the biggest mistake of Lindsay's entire life. The pair met at the cafe on Saturday, March 24th of 2007, and for some reason, Lindsay agreed to briefly visit Tatsia's apartment once the meeting was over. After catching a cab to the apartment, which was just a few hundred yards from the cafe, Lindsay asked the driver to wait outside for a few minutes, as she wasn't planning on staying very long. Around 10-15 minutes later when she failed to emerge altogether, the taxi driver drove off having assumed she'd changed her mind. Back in the UK, as the hours ticked by, Lindsay's parents noticed that she hadn't been in contact with them that day. Due to the huge time difference between England and Japan, it was common for their communications to be staggered, but Lindsay never failed to check in with them. Her parents then

contacted Lindsay's boyfriend, who was also patiently awaiting her return to the United Kingdom, but he told them that he too hadn't heard from her at all that day and was starting to become very, very worried. When Lindsay's parents asked him if he had any reason to be particularly worried, he told them that she was meeting one of her students that day for coffee, and that she'd gone dark right around the same time this meeting was due to commence. By this point, Lindsay's parents were in full-on panic mode, as were her close friends, but their attempts to contact Japanese law enforcement were hindered by time zone differences and language barriers. It took until Monday, March 26th, for a substantial missing persons report to be filed by the staff of the Nova English School,

who contacted the police in the middle of the afternoon. Police officers first visited her accommodation, but were told by her roommates that she hadn't returned following a meeting with one Tatsuya Ichihashi. The officers then drove over to Tatsuya's apartment, and although they didn't have the correct level of probable cause to break into his home, they stayed outside, observing for any suspicious behavior from the man himself, and eventually called for backup at around 7pm that evening. Two hours after the call for backup was made, nine heavily armed police officers had assembled outside of Tatsuo's apartment. Yet, upon seeing them gathering outside of his home, Tatsuo made a run for it. The police spotted

his escape attempt, chased him down, and cornered him in an alleyway not far from his apartment. Yet Tatswa utilized his considerable athletic abilities to scale a nearby wall before absconding altogether. His attempt to flee constituted reasonable grounds for a search, and not long after he was detained, the cops broke into his apartment and began searching for signs of Lindsay. Upon making their way onto the apartment's balcony, police officers made a bone-chilling discovery. There sat a detached bathtub, one that had been filled with a mixture of compost soil and sand. They only pawed through the surface layer of the dirt before uncovering

evidence that a human corpse was concealed underneath, and after emptying the bathtub, the officers discovered that the body belonged to none other than Lindsay Hawker. She had been bound and gagged with plastic zip ties and a woolen scarf, and bruising across her upper body indicated that she had been subjected to a prolonged and brutal assault. Egg-sized swellings on her face indicated that she had been struck repeatedly with a closed fist, with lesser bruising on her arms and ribcage suggesting that she had collided with furniture as she attempted to evade her attacker. It was evident that she had been killed via intense strangulation,

as the cartilage in her neck was broken, and although it's not clear why, her killer had shaved her head with a straight razor following her death. After she had been killed, Tatsuo had soaked the mixture of compost and sand with a substance used to compact and decompose organic waste. And since multiple trips to a gardening supply store had been made over the course of several days, it became obvious that Tatsuo had been planning on killing her, or at least somebody, for quite a while. As a result of the investigation that followed, police determined that Totsua had dragged the bathtub onto his balcony following Lindsay's murder, as several

of his neighbors said that they heard sounds of something striking metal and something being dragged during that time frame. Tatsuo's was subsequently placed on the nationwide list of wanted criminals, and an intensive search commenced shortly afterwards. That same day, 20 armed police officers raided the Hotel Chateau, a brothel located just east of central Tokyo. Intelligence suggested that Tatsuo may have been laying low at the brothel, which also functioned as a kind of budget hotel, but unfortunately, he was nowhere to be found.

Police then appealed the Japanese public, begging them for any and all information that may lead to his capture. They released updated images of him, detailing any potential disguises he might use to evade justice, one of which included what he might look like if he applied makeup and dressed in female clothing. They also released images of the sketches he'd made of Lindsay Hawker, in the hopes that someone might recognize the drawing style. But despite law enforcement's extensive search campaign, they were unable to locate the fugitive, Tatsuya. During the first few months of 2008, police gleaned intelligence that suggested that Tatsuya was hiding out in a place called Kapokicho, an area of Tokyo famous for its red light district. It was here that a number of escorts identified Tatsuya as having paid for their time at some point during the previous years. Some even stated that they believed him to be present in Kabukicho.

Yet despite an intensive house-to-house search of the district, Tatsuya once again evaded capture. By October that year, officers began to suspect that the reason they couldn't find Tatsuya was that he had taken his own life, while others purported that he had fled the country and was taking refuge in the Philippines. Yet despite many losing hope of ever finding him alive, certain sections of the Japanese police refused to give up, and by the summer of 2009, the cash reward for information leading to Tatsuya's arrest was raised from a million to a whopping 10 million yen. Then in November of 2009, police announced they'd received a tip that Tatsuya had undergone plastic surgery at a clinic in Nagoya. Not only had he received a nose lift to obscure his identity, he had two moles on his cheek removed, had folds added to his eyelids, and had both lips thinned out. The knowledge that he was both still alive and still

in Japan spurred police to close the capture net around him, and finally, in November of 2009, he was spotted in the southern city of Osaka. It was while trying to board a ferry to the island of Okinawa that Tatsuya was finally arrested. Upon his detention, he was charged with both murder and carnal violation, but refused to say a single word to investigators during questioning. It was only when threatened with the death penalty that he released a statement through one of his lawyers, and even then, he refused to accept full responsibility for Lindsay's death. Tatsuya claimed that he hadn't actually meant to kill her, and what occurred was a bedroom game that had gone horribly wrong.

According to him, after Lindsay had passed out, he attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and it was only when it failed to revive her that he panicked and attempted to dispose of her corpse. It was only in court, probably in an attempt to avoid a death sentence, that Tatsuya admitted that he'd suffocated Lindsay in order to prevent her from screaming for help while he attacked her. In response, a district court sentenced Tatsuya to life imprisonment, and there seems very little chance that he'll ever be paroled. On the second anniversary of Lindsay's murder, her father revisited the country to express his gratitude to the Japanese police force and all others who gave information or who aided in the judicial process. Years later, Tatsuya wrote an autobiographical account of his time on the run, which he called Until I Was Arrested. Its publication was extremely controversial,

so to offset the outrage, he offered to pay every penny of the book's revenue to Lindsay's family, but they rejected the offer. In their eyes, Tatsuya had taken away the thing they valued most in the world, the life and love of their daughter, and nothing, especially not money, could ever heal the wounds they'd suffered. This happened when I was taking a gap year to travel around Japan, and I happened to be in a place called Shinjuku in Tokyo. Shinjuku has a pretty famous red light district, and although I don't partake in that kind of thing, the rest of Shinjuku is a pretty amazing place to be, and I don't think this whole incident should reflect badly on it. Anyway, I was just hopping on my scooter outside a 7-Eleven when a young woman ran past me and into the store. I didn't get a good look at her, but the speed

that she was moving definitely got my attention. Then, as I heard her start to scream at the guy behind the counter, even when she was behind the glass doors, I knew something awful was happening. I was so engrossed with the whole situation that I didn't write off just yet. Call me a nosy parker or whatever, but I wasn't about to just move on when something so exciting was going on. I say exciting, that's what it felt like at the time. I had no idea how much that poor girl was suffering, and even exactly what was happening to her. I was trying to peer into the shop to see what was happening and maybe work out why she was screaming so much,

and I was so busy looking in that I didn't even see the three blokes who had walked up behind me, past me, and then entered the shop itself. They were all wearing suits, like pretty expensive looking suits too, and I didn't put two and two together until I saw them grab the screaming girl. The biggest guy just grabbed her from behind, like wrapped her arms around her body, while another just grabbed her legs and as much as she was struggling, they just walked her out of the 7-11 like they were carrying a carpet. It was only when they carried her back past me that I

saw what kind of state she was in. Her clothes were ripped, her face had dried blood around the nose and mouth, all stuff I missed when she bolted past me the first time. Then, just as I was about to say something to one of the guys, I don't know what exactly, just anything to let them know that what they were doing was horrible. One of them turned to me and gave me this death stare, and I saw he had this massive knife in his hand, kind of like a samurai sword type thing, but smaller. I have no idea what you call it, but I know a scary knife when I see one, so I kept my mouth shut as the guys bundled her into a car and sped off. I always felt so guilty that I didn't do anything more, so I kept my mouth shut as the guys bundled her into a car and sped off.

I always felt so guilty that I didn't do anything more, but I also know the guy with the knife probably would have stabbed me if I'd have even laid a finger on him. I did call the police, and although there was a real language barrier at first as my Japanese was terrible and the police didn't speak English, some random walking past offered their help in translating as they were basically fluent in English. But get this, as soon as I mentioned the bit about the guys in the suit showing up and bundling the girl into a car, the officer taking notes literally just gave me this tired look and put his notepad away. They were suddenly just not all that interested in the crime anymore, and not long after some weak assurances that they go investigate, they just buggered off from their car.

The kind stranger then explained that the guys in the suits were probably Yakuza, a kind of Japanese gangster, and that the girl was probably an escort from another country. The gang pretty much runs all of the red light district around Shinjuku, at least they apparently did when I was over there, and the police get reports like that all the time. Most of the girls are there illegally or are always in trouble with the police for various reasons, so sometimes the bad things that happen to them barely get investigated at all. Pretty scary if you ask me. Like imagine being the girl and just knowing that no one was going to help you. Born September 28th of 1982, Tomohiro Kato was raised in the suburbs of Aomori, a large city on the northern coast of Japan's largest home island.

His father was a high-ranking executive in a large financial corporation, and like many Japanese fathers, he demanded a lot from his firstborn son. In light of this, Tomohiro didn't disappoint, and not only did he achieve immaculate grades throughout his education, he was also one of his school's top track athletes. In high school, he became president of the tennis club and continued his run of academic excellence well into his late teens. However, during his final exams, his grades plummeted dramatically and he failed the entrance examinations of the prestigious Hokkaido University. So instead of following in his father's footsteps, he enrolled at the Nako Nihon Automotive College,

where he studied to be an auto mechanic. Upon graduation, he was hired as a temporary worker at an auto parts factory, and once his employment was terminated, he became restless, directionless, and violent. It was around this time that Tomohiro's relationship with his parents began to reach a breaking point. Both had put immense pressure on him to return to school to properly complete his final year examinations, but Tomohiro refused, and in an incident which would scar him for much of his adult life, he was once made to eat scraps of food from the dining room floor. His parents apparently told him it would make good practice for when he was homeless, and understandably, Tomohiro developed a deep resentment for them.

A neighbor of the Kato family once recounted an incident in which Tomohiro's parents forced him to stand outside for hours in deep cold snow during winter. So, it'll come as no surprise that by the time social media became popular, Tomohiro dedicated a lot of posts to putting his parents on blast for the way they mistreated him. By 2006, Tomohiro had been all but cut off by his parents and was deeply in debt to several major credit card companies. Having fallen into a deep depression, he attempted to take his own life by crashing his car into a solid concrete wall, but was unsuccessful in the attempt. In the two years that followed, Tomohiro sank into a deep pit of depression and anger, culminating in a huge outburst at his workplace on June 5th of 2008. When Tomohiro seemed to have misplaced some of his uniform, he accused his co-workers of having hidden it.

They told him he was crazy, and in response, Tomohiro violently attacked them. Security had to intervene, and anticipating being fired for the indiscretion, he immediately announced that he was quitting. Over the next two days, Tomohiro posted a series of messages onto a website known as Extreme Exchange Revised. One section read, If only I had a girlfriend, I wouldn't have quit work. I would never have become addicted to my mobile phone. Anybody with hope couldn't possibly understand how I feel. I don't have a single friend and I won't in the future. I'll be ignored because I'm ugly.

I'm lower than trash because at least the trash gets recycled. The message also referred to a stabbing spree that he was planning on committing, but Tomohiro often spoke of having violent fantasies, none of which have ever been fulfilled. However, it seems that around the same time this message was posted, something seemed to push him over the edge of reason. Some later suggested that other users on the website began insulting him, pointing out that he often threatened violence without ever following through with them. They may have called him a coward, or a fake, in which case Tomohiro set out to prove them wrong. The following day just after noon, Tomohiro posted another message to the same website

claiming, I will kill people in Akihabara. These were once again dismissed as nothing but empty words, but his detractors couldn't have been more wrong. Tomohiro had rented a five-ton Isuzu Elf truck from a local rental company and was waiting for a pair of busy streets to be closed off to traffic. The barriers weren't physical ones and there was nothing actually stopping anyone from driving into the area. But traditionally, these areas were closed to vehicles during Sunday lunchtimes for the convenience of shopping pedestrians. The only thing really stopping anyone were the hordes of foot mobile citizens, but that wasn't about to stop Tomohiro, as he was about to make good on his promises of murder. At exactly 12.33pm, Tomohiro slammed his foot on the truck's accelerator and sent the truck hurtling through the crowds.

He almost immediately slammed into five different people after running a red light, and as those around them ran to their aid, Tomohiro jumped out of the truck, let out a horrifying war cry, then began stabbing them with a large knife. At least 12 people received stab wounds that day, and Tomohiro would have continued the attack if it wasn't for the swift intervention of local police officers. They chased Tomohiro down a narrow alleyway, guns drawn, until he finally dropped his knife and surrendered just two minutes after the attack commenced. Tomohiro was arrested and held for almost two weeks while being subjected to numerous psychiatric tests. He told police that he'd been planning on killing people for a long time, and despite deleting all of his online threats in the moments before the attack,

he gave law enforcement an in-depth account of all the things he'd written, claiming they were all cries for help, posted publicly in the hopes that someone would stop him. He'd purchased the knife at a military supply shop just two days prior and had even sold his personal computer to raise money to rent the truck. This led some to speculate that Tomohiro never intended on surviving the attacks and that he was hoping that his life would be taken by the police. Where he changed his mind was when he actually was faced with death. The attack made global headlines, as well as horrifying the Japanese public. Aomori had long been considered an incredibly safe city to live in, with no such mass casualty event having occurred

there before. In response, the Japanese government claimed it would launch a lengthy review of the laws which regulated knife ownership, while the Tokyo Metropolitan Public Safety Commission announced that the 35-year-old practice of closing busy streets on Sundays and holidays was to be suspended until safety measures could be put into place. In order to sate the public's desire for swift justice, the Japanese government fast-tracked the execution of a famous serial killer who was executed by hanging on June 17th. The massacre also sparked intense debate on internet censorship

when it was discovered that two Ustream users had broadcast live video streams of the tragedy, both of which had attracted an estimated 3,000 viewers. Both users were then suspected of being complicit in the attack, and had to fight hard to clear their names of any suspicion. In the media frenzy that followed, a number of Japanese journalists labeled the attack as a symptom of a growing epidemic of Kieru, a name given to acts of rage committed by Tokyo's alienated youth. Given that the stabbings occurred exactly seven years after

the Osaka school massacre, where eight elementary school students were killed by a crazed criminal, some believe the two incidents might well have been connected. Prime Minister Fukudai Osu, who visited the site a week after the massacre, offered a tender prayer to those that had lost their lives. He added that he was worried that similar cases occur about 10 times a year in Japan, and cited statistics from the National Police Agency, which stated that 67 similar random attacks have taken place between 1998 and 2007. In the week that followed the attack, police claimed to have arrested several people

who were intending to commit copycat killings elsewhere in Japan. Yet one seemed to have slipped through the net, as on June 22nd, three women were slashed by a 38-year-old woman at Osaka Station. By the end of the year, between 8 and 23 people had been arrested and 5 people warned for making threatening messages, all of whom were between the ages of 13 and 30. As a result, the Japanese public developed a terrifying obsession with seemingly random knife attackers and began asking themselves what exactly would cause such a frightening phenomenon. In 2010, Tomohiro's father issued an apology to the victims in a live television interview, announcing that he had resigned from his job and was living in seclusion in Amori.

His mother, on the other hand, had been hospitalized for mental health reasons, apparently all stemming from the shame of her son's actions. Then, in April of 2014, Tomohiro's 28-year-old brother took his own life, having previously indicated that he was unable to live with the deep shame that resulted from the massacre. It was clear that the victims of Tomohiro's attack weren't just confined to those he actually killed. In the process, he had torn apart his own family. Finally, on March 24th of 2011, Tomohiro was sentenced to death by the Tokyo District Court after it found him fully responsible for the attack. Tomohiro has since confessed to deep

feelings of remorse over the massacre, stating that he would like to apologize to those that passed away, the injured, and their families. However, he also stated that he had no memory of some parts of the incident, and it's unclear whether this was to diminish his own responsibility or a natural trauma response at having committed such an obscene act of violence. But regardless, Tomohiro is doomed to die for his actions, and he is currently on Japan's version of death row, awaiting his inevitable execution. We'll be right back. Can get a pro at Tread Experts. Conquer rugged terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard

when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there at treadexperts.ca. In the quaint, quiet suburbs of the Japanese city, Sagamihara, lies a place known in English as the Tsukui Lily Garden. The Lily Garden is a residential care center for folks who are unable to look after themselves, and is situated within some outstandingly beautiful woodlands on the bank of the Sugami River. It's home to around 150 residents between the ages of 19 and 75, all of whom suffer from some kind of mental or physical disability. The more capable often engage in rudimentary forms of

education and outdoor activity, while those that are bedridden are made as comfortable as possible by a team of dedicated doctors, nurses, and general care workers. One of these employees was named Satoshi Uematsu, and although he once enriched the lives of those under his care, his enduring legacy would be one of utter destruction. In July of 2016, Satoshi was a 26-year-old qualified in elementary education, and for more than three years, he was paid by the Lily Garden to provide the basic standard of education that I mentioned earlier. Yet in February of that same year, he suddenly resigned from the care facility after some had noted a dramatic shift in his personality. Neighbors have described him as being a friendly, outgoing, and good-natured man, who suddenly took on a dark and brooding

persona that caused deep rifts in both his personal and professional relationships. Shortly after this bizarre personality shift, Satoshi handed in his resignation papers and broke off contact with almost all of his former co-workers. Around the same time that he quit his job, Satoshi visited the Tokyo home of a high-ranking politician named Tadamori Oshima. Although he was denied entry by Oshima's bodyguards, Satoshi returned the next day with a handwritten letter and implored the guards to hand it to their employer. According to one of them, Satoshi gave such an impassionate speech regarding the importance of the letter that one of them actually did hand it over to Oshima. Satoshi had claimed that he had

an idea of what would improve the lives of every Japanese citizen and how it might even make the entire world a more stable and more prosperous place to live. But when Mr. Oshima read the letter, he discovered that Satoshi's idea was anything but benevolent. Satoshi's letter outlined the need for and the the benefits of, one of the evilest ideas in human history, euthanasia. He begged Oshima to propose legalizing ending the lives of those with multiple disabilities, but only in cases where it was requested by their guardians. He knew that Oshima had the ear of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, with one passage reading,

I envision a world where a person with multiple disabilities can be euthanized, with an agreement from the guardians, when it is difficult for the person to carry out household and social activities. Satoshi added that the murder of the disabled would not only be beneficial to Japan, but would also contribute towards overall world peace. In his mind, it would boost economics to the point of staving off the advent of the Third World War. All that was chilling enough, but what Mr. Oshima found particularly alarming was the fact that, towards the end of his letter, Satoshi volunteered to target two separate facilities responsible for housing the mentally and physically disabled. If Oshima would promise him legal immunity, he said that he could kill 460 people in the course of just one day.

Satoshi then signed the letter off with not just his name, but also his address, telephone number, and the name of his former care home employees. Oshima immediately handed the letter over to a branch of the Tokyo police force, and in turn forwarded it to the police over in Sugamihara. But the process seems to have been painfully slow, and it took them far too long to catch up with an increasingly bloodthirsty Satoshi. In that time, the man himself had posted numerous tweets detailing how Japan was being ravaged by radiation and venereal diseases, how its natural and financial resources were being drained by those in no state to give back to society. Finally, when the police caught up with him, he was arrested, detained,

questioned, and then involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital for two weeks. After those two weeks were up, a doctor assessed Satoshi and declared that he was no longer a threat to those around him. But his newfound sanity was nothing but an elaborate front, and he saw his freedom as a chance to finally reap the merciful destruction he'd always longed for. And so, he began to plan an attack on those he believed needed saving from unhappiness. Just after 2am on July 26th, Satoshi crept along the tree-lined bank of the Sugami River,

eventually finding himself outside the facility he was formerly employed at, the Tsukui Lily Garden Care Home. He silently scaled the side of the building, then used a small hammer to knock out a pane of glass from a first floor window. It wasn't the violent, crashing, splintering sound you might expect either. He was subtle, arguably delicate about it, and the sound didn't alarm any nearby nurse, so much as confuse her. She entered the room to investigate the source of the sound, only to find a waiting Satoshi, armed with a long sharpened kitchen knife. She begged him not to hurt her, and Satoshi assured

her she'd be fine. All she had to do was stay quiet, let him tie her up, and give up her keys. And in her terrified state, she did so without a word. Satoshi now had access to almost every room in the entire care home, and while utilizing controlled aggression, as well as the element of surprise, he rendered each of the overnight employees defenseless and without recourse. Then one by one, he visited each of the care home's residents, and one by one, he plunged his knife into their necks. Bound employees later said that the terrified screams of the dying were something that'll haunt them for the rest of their lives. Most knew Satoshi as a kind and caring man,

one who taught them almost everything they knew about the world. So when he appeared in their bedrooms in the dead of night, with a knife and a look of pure malice on his face, their fear must have been indescribable. Uematsu killed ten women and nine men that night, each aged between eighteen and seventy years old. On top of that, he injured twenty-six others, inflicting life-threatening injuries on people that had grown to love him over the course of his teaching tenure. But it would have been many, many more if it wasn't for the courageous actions of some of the care staff, who broke free from their bonds and rushed in to inform emergency services. They made the call just before 2.30am and began screaming in Satoshi's direction that

the police were on their way. Satoshi entered a frenzy of violence following the news, but he was unable to take revenge on the escaped workers thanks to them barricading themselves inside one of the wards. 20 minutes after the call, Satoshi fled the care home just in time to avoid capture by the responding police units, who were greeted by nothing short of a bloodbath when they arrived. A total of 29 ambulances were sent to the facility and this is mostly the reason why so many of the severely wounded had their lives saved. Satoshi, on the other hand, was actually not attempting to escape and had handed himself into a local police station.

He'd also brought the murderer weapon along with him as proof of the evil he'd wrought on those who'd once trusted him, even loved him. When news of the murders hit the headlines, the shock and horror of the Japanese public was palpable. The horror was even felt by those around the world who wondered how such an act of evil was even possible. The Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary acknowledged that the attack was a heart-wrenching and shocking incident in which many innocent people became victims. He also said that the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare would investigate ways to prevent a similar attack from reoccurring. Several of Japan's major media outlets labeled the murders a hate crime against the disabled,

and the fact that Satoshi was a vocal proponent of euthanasia stunned all who learned of it. Shockingly, by September of 2016, the case had generated a huge amount of controversy both in Japan and abroad. Very little information had been released about the victims of the attack, and some Japanese were quick to inform the wider world that this was due to Japanese culture and stigma, how they were considerably less accepting of the physically and cognitively impaired than their western counterparts. In Britain and America, the victims would have been venerated, perhaps had a memorial erected to honor them. Yet in Japan, there was nothing of the sort, and some said even the families of the victims were reluctant to publicly identify themselves.

On February 20th of the following year, after a thorough analysis by Japanese psychologists, Satoshi was legally declared sane to stand trial for the 19 murders he'd committed. On top of that, he was also charged with 24 counts of attempted murder, two counts of illegal confinement causing injury, and one count of violating the swords and firearms control law. A few months later, Satoshi defied the wishes of his defense counsel, saying that denying the charges against him would be quibbling and would make the trial too complex. Even in light of his guilty plea the prosecution announced that the death penalty

was officially being sought against Satoshi on account that his rampage was inhumane and left no room for leniency. Finally, on March 16th of 2020, Satoshi was sentenced to die by the Yokohama District Court, and just two weeks later, his death sentence was finalized after he withdrew his chance of an automatic appeal. In order for the local community to move on from the painful memories of the massacre, the owners of the sukui lily garden ordered the main residential facility to be demolished however the facility has since been rebuilt and was opened in

july of 2021 complete with a memorial to those that lost their lives the memorial represents a shift in japanese culture which has since made an effort to further recognize the struggles of those with mental and physical disabilities. The mother of one of the victims, a 19-year-old girl named Miho, told a national news outlet, I hope the victims will continue to live in someone's heart. I want people to remember Miho. It's hard and discrimination has caused a lot of sad cases, but I find that when I write Miho's name on the monument,

it keeps her alive inside my heart. To be continued... retiring from the military. I fell in love with Japanese culture, their food, and their people. But another big reason was that I met my wife here, and since she wasn't willing to move to the United States, I made the decision to settle here instead. Now, the story I have to tell you isn't strictly my story, it's hers. But I know for a fact that she wouldn't be happy on typing it out, nor is her English to the level that she'd be able to properly describe the whole thing. But I can assure you, I have her consent to tell the story as it's almost as morbidly fascinating as it is horrifying. In early 2002, my wife was around 10 years old and she was living in a place called Kokorokitoku. One day, she saw her neighbor's car pull up outside his home,

and it looked like he was kind of dragging a girl from the passenger seat and back inside the house. Not dragging like she was kicking and screaming, more like a scolded child who was in trouble with their parents or something. But it was still very distressing to see a man treat such a young girl like that. Japanese parenting can be extremely harsh, and girls like my wife were taught that the father is always right, no matter what. So although what she saw was very upsetting, she didn't think it was any of her business or whatever, so she didn't speak up about it.

But then a few days later, she happened to see the exact same girl escaping from the house again. Only that time, she looked like she had been through torture. She absolutely bolted off down the street, hair a mess, half clothed, and it was only then that my wife knew something was seriously, seriously wrong. She mentioned the whole thing to her mom, trying to tell her that she thought something really bad was going on in that house. Turns out, there was, and it's one of the evilest things I've ever heard in my whole life. Her neighbor turned out to be a guy named Futoshi

Matsunaga, and I swear to god that man was the devil incarnate. He once blackmailed a guy into moving into his home, as the guy used to be a criminal who hadn't been caught for his crimes, and Fetoshi said he'd go to the cops and snitch on him if he didn't do what he said. Once the guy had moved in, he basically tortured him to death with electric shocks. At one point he made the guy eat his own feces, but he soon got bored of doing all that stuff himself and then started getting the guy's own daughter to torture him too. I heard he made her bite her own father so hard it drew blood, and once he made the kid electrocute her own dad so much that his heart stopped, and he died. After that he made the girl smash up her own dad's body with a hammer before tossing the remains into the sea.

And after that, he kept the guy's daughter prisoner, basically with the same ploy of, do as I say, or I'll tell the cops what you've done. And the girl believed she'd go to prison too. I mean, he talked her into thinking she'd kill her own dad, which I suppose she had, so I get why she was so terrified of him. But anyway, Fotoshi ends up meeting one of his murder victim's friends, takes a liking to her, and decides to make her his next victim. I have no idea how he did this, but he ended up either blackmailing or conning her out of tens of thousands of dollars. He then basically mentally and physically tortured the woman and her daughter for years,

until the woman finally jumped out of the second floor of his house. Some think it was an attempt to take her own life, others say it was an outright escape attempt, but the end result was the woman being put in a mental institution. So, the whole time this is happening, Potoshi has an accomplice by the name of Junko. After the first two messed up things happened, Junko tried to escape. So to get her to come back, Fotoshi actually faked his own death by pretending to take

his own life. I have zero clue how a person would go about doing that, maybe via a phone call or something so she couldn't actually see what he was doing, but it worked, as she ended up going back to the house where she was then taken prisoner again. Junko's family then came to try and rescue her and somehow Futoshi held them captive too, and basically used them to bankroll all of his evil acts. From what I heard, after the family had a huge fight, Futoshi forced Junko to electrocute her own father to death, just like he'd done with his first victim. He then talked Junko's brother and sister into killing each other, and then locked one of them in a room where he starved them to death. Quick side note, I know this all

sounds completely insane and far-fetched, but it is true. You can look it all up if you need to, and it's all there in media articles and everything. But obviously, there aren't too many gruesome details and basically no one but Fotoshi knows really what happened, and I don't think he ever really talked about any of it. But anyway, Fotoshi basically manipulated the whole family into actually killing each other and then had them boil the remains away in giant pots before they threw them into the sea. The whole time this was going on, he was holding the first guy's daughter captive and it was her who my wife saw escape that day. If you ask me, the girl who escaped is basically a hero because if it wasn't for

her survival instincts and her determination, the guy might have gone on killing for years. Even after he basically wiped out the family, he kept on conning people out of money and convincing their kids to come live with him. People say he used drugs or hypnosis to get people to kill each other and I'm not sure if that's actually true. But I really can't imagine what could make a whole family turn on each other like that. So maybe it is true. I own and operate a farm here near Okuma, Japan. It was started by my grandfather who passed it down to my father, who in turn passed it down to me. I had career plans and a job in the United States waiting for me,

but when my father died at a fairly young age, I gave everything up to follow in his footsteps. It was his dying wish that, instead of just selling the farm off to another family or a large company, his own blood would continue to run it, so that we could still have our name attached to it. How could I say no to that? Well, I couldn't, so here I am. Not many of you will be familiar with the name Okuma, although maybe some of you are. I met some Americans who have an astonishing amount of knowledge concerning Japanese culture and geography, but it's a prefecture with a very famous name and once I tell you it, you will start to understand why my story is so horrifying. The name of the prefecture I live in as Fukushima. It was the 11th of March 2011, a day I'll never, ever forget.

It was the middle of the afternoon when we felt the ground begin to shake and here in Japan, earthquakes are still frightening, but they are something we all sort of get used to after a while. Even the tsunami wasn't very bad for us as we are far back from the coastline on higher ground in the cities so the water didn't reach us. We saw all the destruction on television and although I felt very bad for those affected, it would obviously not affect our farm very much. I remember hearing about the nuclear power plant and how some people living close to it had been evacuated, but the TV said it was merely a precaution at first. Only later did they admit that there had been meltdowns in the reactors and that the explosions had contaminated the air around it. At first, it was just a few thousand who needed to leave their homes, then it was ten thousand, and before long, everyone within a 13

mile radius of the power plant had to leave their home in order not to be affected by the radiation, and that included me. When the men from the government showed up at my farm and told me to leave, I refused. I couldn't leave my horses, I just couldn't. Without me or my farmhands, they would starve to death, all 130 of them. The men told me that if I didn't leave, I would be at risk of developing cancer or worse, I might be overcome by the radiation and die a very painful death. I told them that I would rather die the worst pain imaginable than dishonor my father by letting the farm die.

While the farm lives, part of my father and grandfather still live. If it died, their legacies would also do so. And so, you must understand, that is completely unacceptable to me. I couldn't leave the farm and I did not develop cancer either or yet, but staying at the farm was still incredibly painful for me. Of my 130 horses, I watched 90 of them die over the course of the next five years. Sometimes it was two or three a night. I would walk out into the morning to check on them and see their dead bodies just lying in the fields or in their stables. Slowly, it slowed down until only one a day, then once a month, until it was only the survivors left. I was told I could collect compensation for the deaths, but after so many, the authorities began

to doubt that they were all radiation deaths. We had to start performing autopsies on the bodies to prove that they had lethal amounts of cesium in their skin and organs, and sometimes we were told it was not a lethal dose and they refused to pay us money. It was one thing to watch my beloved animals die over time, but then to be called a liar or a cheat by the same people who were so very sorry at first. This is the gravest insult imaginable to me. Some of my horses have been sent to live on other farms to keep them safe and as the levels of radiation decrease over time, I'm slowly bringing them all home. Day by day, the farm is coming back to life, and I will never give up on it.

If need be, I'll die here with it, and I'll be buried where my horses are buried, right along with them. In Japan, we call the survivors of the atomic bombs the Hibakusha, but if you add another Chinese character, most of our letters are taken from Chinese, mind you, the word becomes one that means someone exposed to radiation. I know my suffering doesn't compare to those who suffered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I would not pretend to have suffered the same as them. But sometimes, with the way we are treated by the rest of Japan, with the way my products are constantly tested for radiation even though I make sure that they're all safe to eat, sometimes I too feel like I could be called a Hibakusha. I don't know. Back when I was vacationing in Japan with some friends of mine, a dude fell off a balcony,

I think from being drunk. But instead of just straight up responding, emergency services spent five minutes on the phone asking me what my relation to the man was, who he was, and what he was doing, etc. I speak fluent Japanese, so communicating was no problem, but the big deal they made about his identity was just so frustrating. I kept saying I just ran into the man and didn't know any of these things. I explained that I didn't even see it happen, I just heard what sounded like a watermelon hitting pavement abruptly. I was hoping that they would get to ask me where I am and send someone.

He was unconscious and bleeding from his head as I was on the phone basically doing a job interview. Then after the ambulance arrived, they asked me to get in the ambulance with this guy and even had him taking off his clothes while I was there. They spent 15 minutes in the parking lot asking me and him questions. He clearly had amnesia and didn't know anything and I was still just as clueless as to what happened as I was on the phone. I hope he's okay but honestly, they wasted so much valuable time trying to get pointless answers out of the guy instead of treating him. It made me scared that if anything bad happened to me, I might bleed out or drown or whatever, and they'd be asking some other person all these same dumb, redundant questions. We'll be right back. terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you

purchase Kumho RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumho TreadExperts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca Born on September 30th of 1969, Efren Saldívar was raised in Brownsville, Texas. But shortly after he was born, his father relocated the young family to Los Angeles, California, in order to find work as a handyman.

His mother found work as a tailor, and as a staunch Jehovah's Witness, she raised her children to be both pious and proselytizing. A huge aspect of her child-rearing method was placed on them earning a place in paradise, do good works in life, and spend eternity in peace. But if Efren's worldly actions are anything to go by, he's a man who spends his afterlife in hell. During his time in junior high, a friend proved to be a subpar student. Despite being popular with the teaching staff, a friend failed to fit in with any particular social group. He was an awkward kid, and his large stature made him even more self-conscious and anxious.

He lacked the confidence to approach the girls he found attractive, yet his inability to do so didn't prevent him from developing deep and longing obsessions with them. He sent them secretive, intimate, handwritten notes, seemingly unaware of how creepy and unsettling they found them. He sent them secretive, intimate, handwritten notes, seemingly unaware of how creepy and unsettling they found them. Towards the end of high school, a friend found that he had no long-term goals to speak of. He toyed with ideas of going to college or enlisting in the military, but acted on neither. When he told his father that he believed himself unable to work with others, Alfredo suggested he start his own business. A friend found the prospect quite appealing, but his deep-seated fear of rejection held

him back from it. His first real job was working for a supermarket, and it's here that his sociopathy bloomed in earnest. He'd regularly steal things from both his store and his co-workers, believing himself to be more worthy of possessing them, since his poor social skills left him at a distinct disadvantage. After failing his senior year of high school, Efren found himself even more directionless, and this seems to have fostered a dark and brooding anger in him. Yet it's around that same time that Efren bumped into an old acquaintance

who was wearing a nursing uniform. This friend was enrolled at the College of Medical and Dental Careers in North Hollywood and spoke fondly of their studies as both financially and spiritually rewarding. Efren was jealous, but soon discovered he had the opportunity to follow suit. He easily passed a high school equivalency test before enrolling in the technical school in 1988, and in less than a year, he not only had his certification, he had a job waiting for him close to home. Suddenly he went from being rudderless and broken to being uniformed, qualified, and upwardly mobile. The job was at the Glendale Adventist Medical Center in Southern California, and to his employer's surprise, a friend volunteered himself for duty during the medical center's night shifts. Due to the antisocial hours involved, these shifts were extremely unpopular with the bulk of the nursing staff.

Nurses would often beg for a reprieve or depart entirely rather than condemn themselves to a nocturnal lifestyle. The medical center considered themselves lucky to have a friend in their employment, but the reality was more likely they'd been cursed. A large part of a friend's job was to determine if patients were having difficulty breathing and if there was enough oxygen in their blood. His job also included respiratory rehabilitation, which involved putting tubes down patients' throats when they couldn't breathe well on their own. He was also in charge of placing people on ventilators that had to be monitored and adjusted,

which was obviously a huge responsibility. The friend relished this responsibility, though, and poured himself into was obviously a huge responsibility. A friend relished this responsibility though and poured himself into his work as a result. He researched extensively outside of professional hours and gained a vast amount of knowledge pertaining to the drugs and equipment used in his work. He was so well versed that even some of the center's doctors became impressed with his level of expertise. They liked him, they trusted him, but they couldn't have been more wrong to do so. Working night shifts allowed a friend to work without supervision or accountability.

During that time, there was only one other technician like him in the hospital, making him an extremely valuable and lauded asset. Due to his skills, he found the work easy and emergencies rare, but he still dealt with the same psychological problems that had been festering since high school. As a result, he took Zoloft to ease a long-standing depression. Yet at some point, a friend stopped taking the medication altogether. In anyone else, the changes in his personality might have been easier to observe, but due to his isolated nocturnal lifestyle, it was difficult for many to see how his perspective was becoming warped.

During the twilight hours, night shift staff were unable to enter and exit the rooms of patients without anyone seeing them. On top of that, staff performing medical routines hardly draw a vast amount of attention. It's taken for granted that everyone is simply getting on with his or her job, allowing a friend to essentially hide his misdeeds in plain sight. Some patients were more demanding than others, and one of these was a woman by the name of Jean Coyle. On February 26th of 1997, she pressed her call button only for a friend to respond. Yet instead of remembering him dealing with her issue, all she remembered the next morning was blacking out. Jean had no idea how she'd fallen into unconsciousness, but considering her location and condition, barely gave it a second thought.

In actual fact, Jean had been lucky to ever have woken up at all, as she would turn out to be a precursor victim of a man who described himself as the Angel of Death. A few months later, the center's only respiratory therapist observed some extremely disturbing behavior from Efren. As such, he suggested to his employers that Efren may have been doing unsavory things to patients during his night shifts. A more pointed accusation was that Efren was injecting them with something, before these exact same patients were suffering unexplainable deaths. Yet despite the urgency of his accusations, there was absolutely zero proof of them, and without proof,

Efren was unable to be fired, suspended, or even called into question without the possibility of serious litigation. During this period, the head of the respiratory department was a man named John Bechthold. Bechthold harbored an intense dislike of a friend, but was concerned that moving on him would simply look like manifest bias. He informed another senior member of staff that he was deeply concerned with the spate of recent inexplicable deaths, and without naming names, told them to heighten their vigilance. It was around this time that those who worked closely with Ephraim noticed that his shifts appeared to be somewhat cursed. Nurses would talk about patients who were irritating or unduly suffering, and then out of almost nowhere, that patient would inexplicably pass away. Sometimes several such patients would expire in the space of just one night, yet the highest suspicion didn't gaze upon Efren until his co-workers decided to play an

innocent practical joke on him. One night, a pair of fellow nurses decided to put someone else's clothing in Efren's locker, so on his night off they pried it open. It was then that they made a very chilling discovery indeed, one in the form of a bag containing some extremely powerful narcotics, including morphine, and a drug known as Pavalon, which is used to stop the breathing rhythms of patients who are going on to a respirator. It was completely forbidden for respiratory therapists to handle these drugs, and the discovery meant the medical center now had real, tangible evidence to support their morbid suspicions. However, there was just one problem. Because the stash of drugs had been

uncovered by breaking into Efren's personal locker, the practical jokers were forced to remain silent regarding their discovery due to fear of term personal locker, the practical jokers were forced to remain silent regarding their discovery due to fear of termination. Despite the compelling evidence of wrongdoing, there was a high chance that only they would get into trouble, not Efren. But then, something rather bizarre occurred that set the wheels of justice into motion, albeit in a very unconventional way. A nurse by the name of Ursula Anderson happened to mention Saldivar's after-dark activities to a man named Grant Brosses. Brosses believed he could earn a reward for the information and basically planned to extort the medical center to the tune of $50,000, and so, in February of 1998, he made a call to the Glendale Adventist Medical

Center. Brosses didn't have the exact name of the so-called Angel of Death, but when a receptionist listed over 40 staff names, a friend's name jumped out at him as all too familiar. Obviously, the hospital's administration was extremely disturbed by yet another outright allegation of murder, but instead of paying Brosses for the information, they fed it straight to the Glendale Police Department. The investigator who took the case was Sergeant John McKillop in Robbery Homicide. It was horrified to discover that in the time it took him to compile a case file, two more patients had died on the hospital's respiratory unit. If he was dealing with a serial killer, it was an extremely bold and prolific one.

Sergeant McKillop quickly organized a sit-down with three of Glendale Adventist's administrators, who didn't hesitate to inform him of the previous year's accusations. They also gave him the pager number of Grant Brosses, who funnily enough suddenly decided that without a financial reward, he wasn't sure of anything and knew very little. However, he did pass them the name of the nurse who'd given him the tip, but she too suddenly pretended to have no knowledge of what was going on. Yet given the serious nature of the accusations, as well as the circumstantial evidence in deaths, investigators weren't nearly ready to give up the hunt for the Angel of Death. It wasn't long before Detective McKillop learned of the vials of drugs

Ifran had kept in his locker, but given the illegal nature of their discovery, he decided on another, more forward approach. He decided on questioning Etren directly. On MacKillop's orders, the hospital rearranged their shift patterns to keep Etren away for several days, not only to prove that far fewer deaths occurred when he was away, but to ensure his availability for MacKillop's interview. When the days finally arrived, Efren was invited to take a polygraph test and was asked if he understood why he was being subjected to one.

He replied that he simply wanted to clear his name and how he'd heard that some anonymous caller had accused him of being a murderer. It seemed he proved his innocence, and at first denied all wrongdoing. But in a shocking twist, he suddenly made a frank and chilling admission. During the first months of employment at the Glendale Medical Center, a friend had been assigned an elderly female patient who was on a life support system. She had a terminal case of cancer, there was no hope for her,

and according to a friend, doctors would soon turn off her machines once her family had given permission to do so. Yet instead of waiting for their permission, Ephraim admitted to effectively suffocating her, an act of mercy, as he called it. He then admitted that, years later, after finding a half-empty discarded bottle of the stuff, he'd injected Pavalon into one patient by pumping it through their IV tube. This had stopped their breathing, effectively killing them by suffocation. Detective McKillop immediately read Ephraim his Miranda rights, informing him that he no longer had to incriminate himself. But Ephraim carried on talking, for two whole hours, pouring his soul out regarding his

murderous nightly activities. He would sometimes go from room to room, injecting multiple people at night, people who shouldn't have to live any longer, claiming he did so because he felt sorry for them. When asked how many patients Efren murdered, he replied, less than 50, meaning the number was easily in the mid to high 40s. When asked how he could justify such evil, Efren replied, they were ready to die. It was later established that Efren tended to stick to a very specific modus operandi. He would only ever target patients who had been given a do-not-resuscitate order or would have been unconscious for a prolonged period, with Detective McKillop later stating that a friend prided himself on having a very ethical criteria as to how he picked his victims. The friend also used drugs that were very hard to detect in human body tissue during autopsies.

It would not show up unless very specific tests were performed. This meant that getting a criminal conviction based on evidence alone be extremely difficult, and would depend on actually finding the drugs in his possession, and possibly even exhuming the bodies of the people he'd murdered. A friend was arrested that same day, and the following morning, police officers performed a thorough search of his home. They found tons of highly disturbing explicit material, but nothing in the way of incriminating evidence. This was very, very bad news for the police, as in the United States, a person cannot be held on verbal confession alone, no matter how much they confess or how brutal the crime. As a result, Efren was released after just 48 hours,

as the police were forced to conduct a more thorough investigation. Despite the lack of any formal charges being brought against him, Efren was fired from his job on March 13th of 1998, and 37 of his colleagues were suspended while the hospital conducted their own investigation. In the meantime, Ef friend contacted a defense attorney and on their advice, did something despicable. He completely recanted his confession, claiming he hadn't actually killed anyone and only gave a false confession because he had a depression-induced mental disorder. He cited a huge amount of police pressure to give a confession,

claiming he was so terrified that he'd be beaten by unhinged officers that he simply fabricated the entire story. The entire case now hinged on obtaining physical evidence, with Detective McKillop swiftly forming a task force consisting of six experienced investigators. They rented a house near the hospital, using it as a temporary headquarters to consult with numerous experts on medical malpractice. According to them, the angel of death phenomenon was not entirely uncommon. Some do it out of mercy, some for profit, some to look like heroes while they revive the patient, and some from a pure sadistic delight in playing God. Despite a friend claiming that he was motivated by mercy,

pharmaceutical experts told detectives that shutting down someone's respiratory system using Pavalon was anything but merciful. Pavalon is derived from a highly toxic South American plant known as curare, one used by certain indigenous Colombian tribes to poison their hunting arrows. Those stricken by the toxin D-tubocurarean fall into a conscious paralysis, and feel every minute of the death by suffocation process. They're fully aware of what's happening and are unable to scream or motion for help as their throats close over, and they're forced to lie there, completely helpless, as they slowly expire. and are unable to scream or motion for help as their throats close over, and they're forced to lie there, completely helpless, as they slowly expire.

It soon became apparent that investigators had a Herculean task ahead of them. During the eight years that Ithran had been employed by the hospital, over a thousand patients had expired during his shifts. Since police couldn't exactly exhume more than a thousand corpses, they began to narrow down the list until it included only more recent, more mysterious cases. It took an entire year, but eventually the task force narrowed it down to just 20 individual cases, and out of these 20, they only needed a handful of convictions to put Efren away for life. And so, in the summer of 1999, the grisly process of exhumations began in earnest. One by one, police and cemetery workers tore the bodies of the dead from their final resting places

before sending them to the pathologists who took tissue samples from the livers, bladders, and muscles. After that, the toxology labs went to work. Scientists at the Forensic Science Center in Oakland, California concentrated on searching for Pavalon. This is because the other drugs Efren used break down into elements natural to the human body and are therefore basically undetectable. Pavalon, on the other hand, could remain detectable in the body for years. All the scientists had to do was find dosage levels out of the normal range and bingo, they'd have found one of a friend's victims.

Initially, investigators were dismayed when the science team sent back a dozen negative results, and for a while, it seemed as if all their efforts had been in vain. Then, almost out of nowhere, tissue samples began to test positive for massive amounts of pavilon. At first, three positive results came back, then four, then five, and six.

In the end, it seemed as if detectives would be able to charge Efrain with a grand total of six murders, enough to put him away for literally hundreds of years if they could land concurrent sentences. January of 2001 saw the first criminal charges leveled against Efrain, who was arrested on his way to his new construction job one morning. This time, he gave a fresh but equally sociopathic version of events that the hospital had been so understaffed that he decided to ease the workload by murdering patients. As he himself phrased it, when he was at his wits end, he would look at the list of patients and think to himself, who do we have to get rid of? By the time he'd admitted to killing at least 60 different people, he claimed that he'd lost count, but figured he wouldn't be surprised if the number was higher than 100.

He said that after a while, he'd grown so used to killing that he'd just let it all slip from his mind. You don't plan it, he told Detective McKillop, so after you do it, you tend not to think about it for the rest of the day or ever. At Efren's trial, the prosecution's star witness was none other than Jean Coyle, the first woman he had chemically experimented on. Ursula Anderson, the female respiratory therapist who not only knew what Efren was doing, but had supplied him with Pavalon at one point, received legal immunity in exchange for her testimony. Finally, in March 2002, Efren Saldivar pled guilty to six counts of murder in exchange for life imprisonment rather than the death penalty. Efren contested nothing regarding the investigation and accepted his sentence. Judge Lance Ito, the same man who had presided over the O.J. Simpson

trial, gave Detective McKillop his wish, handing a friend six consecutive life sentences and 15 more years for attempted murder. During the aftermath of his trial, a friend offered an apology to the families. I know there is nothing I can say that can soothe their anger or bring relief to their anxiety, he said, adding, I want to say that I'm truly sorry, and I ask for forgiveness, although I don't expect any. It should come as no surprise that not a single family of his victims offered any words of comfort, but there was one point of sickening irony, and that's if he'd been condemned to die for his crimes, if Wren would have been given the same drug as the one he'd used on his patients, and that the substance he'd once used to kill the innocent

would have been the exact same substance used to kill him. In the early hours of December 9th, 2020, Spanish migrant worker Marta Elena Vento was manning the reception desk of the Bournemouth branch of the budget hotel chain Travel Lodge in southern England. The 27-year-old had moved to the UK in February of that year and had initially worked in a recruitment center before accepting a better paid position at the hotel. Part of the superior pay came from the fact that she would occasionally be forced to work the night shift, which proved to be as tiresome as it was exhausting.

Yet, Marta didn't complain. The lifestyle might have been exhausting, but there were considerably more employment opportunities in England than there were in her native Spain. Not only that, but the salaries were considerably higher too. Yet despite the promise of improved prosperity, it seems her decision to move to England had been a grave and terrible mistake. As that morning, a man named Stephen Richard Cole suddenly walked into the hotel's reception area and irreversibly changed her fate. Just a few days prior to walking into the hotel, Stephen had been kicked out of his temporary home at the Russell Court Hotel after getting

into a violent altercation with two of his fellow guests. He was forced to check into another hotel and did so on December 7th, opting for the same branch of travel lodge that employed Marta. Staff later said he exhibited some rather strange and decidedly disturbing behavior, saying he had become agitated about the room's smoke detectors. Unconfirmed reports have stated that Stephen believed they were not smoke detectors, but were instead a means of monitoring his brainwaves. Other reports state that at one point, Stephen had begun hammering his fists against the fourth floor windows of his hotel room, calling for help

from passers-by, as if he was detained against his own will. However, we can most certainly confirm that on the very same day Stephen checked into the travelodge, members of his family had contacted his doctor to request urgent antipsychotic medication. He was already being prescribed such medication, but had recently confessed to having thrown his pills away, telling his family they were turning him numb and zombie like. They may well have been having a distressing, debilitating effect on him, but without them, his mental health was rapidly deteriorating, and by the time he checked into the travel lodge, he was suffering from a full-on mental breakdown. What happened next is completely up for speculation, as we can

draw a number of conclusions as to why Stephen had hair clippers in his possession. One of the signs of a complete mental breakdown is that the sufferer suddenly feels the desire to shave all their hair off. A classic example of this would be the now famous Britney Spears incident of February 2007, when the young singer drove to a Los Angeles hair salon one night before shaving all of her hair off. Some psychologists describe it as a desire for purity, the desire to start again anew, manifesting in a mildly self-destructive behavior. But in Stephen's case, it could have been pure paranoia. If he believed that the fire alarms were brainwave monitors, if he believed

someone was after him to the extent of screaming for help from his hotel window, then he might have believed that changing his appearance could aid in him evading danger. But the fact is, we'll never truly know. All we know for certain is that Stephen had these hair clippers in his hand when he took the elevator down to the hotel lobby and began walking past the reception desk. When Marta heard the elevator's door opening, there's little doubt that she looked up to see who it was. Not many people roamed the hotel's hallways in the small hours of the morning, but those who did were always greeted by the same warm smile she had been trained to display upon the appearance of a guest. Martha was a beautiful young woman, with deep brown eyes, brunette hair, with dip-dyed blonde tips, and a wide ivory smile. It was a common occurrence

that guests would react positively, even with glee, whenever she flashed that smile at them. It meant they were welcome, that she was ready to help, that she'd do anything within her power to ensure they had a wonderful and comfortable stay. But to Stephen Cole, it meant the polar opposite. When Stephen looked over to the reception counter and saw the warm, inviting look on Marta's face, he didn't see a smile. He saw laughter. He saw mockery. He saw provocation. As he later phrased it, she was looking down on him. There's no way of us knowing how the actual exchange went down, but it's safe to say that there were at least a few words exchanged before what happened next.

Stephen might have asked what she was smiling about, and in all likelihood his confrontational, erratic demeanor would have caught Marta off guard. She may have attempted to defend the smile, perhaps reassuring him she meant nothing but positivity, but in Stephen's mind, he knew better. Marta was smiling, laughing at him even, because she was part of the ongoing conspiracy that plagued his every waking moment. Her smile was one of satisfaction, knowing that they, whoever they were, were entirely successful in making his life torture. He couldn't sleep, he could barely eat, and we know full well that he could barely keep a linear thought in his head. In an instant, she became the living embodiment of all his torturous woe. And in a flash of reckless abandon, Stephen charged.

Martyr had been alone in the lobby that night, with no one to save her from the brutal, prolonged assault that followed. CCTV footage showed Stephen hurtling behind the counter, bringing the full force of the clippers in his hands down on the side of her head. Marta was in the middle of finding her feet when the blow knocked her to the ground, but instead of leaving his victim to languish on the floor in stunned agony, Stephen began stomping on her head and chest with full force over and over again. Marta then tried to crawl away from her attacker, but only made it as far as an alcove set into the rear wall of the staff area. Essentially, she trapped herself in a

kind of bottleneck, allowing Stephen to continue the senseless and hideous assault. The footage showed that Stephen had already started shaving his head by the time the attack commenced, and the images of his half-bald skull made it obvious that he was a dangerously unhinged individual. He once again brought the clippers down onto her head with all the violence he could muster, and he continued to beat, kick, and stomp on her for 42 minutes. Only when his victim was a ghastly mess of blood and gore did Stephen even think to cease his assault. By then, there was blood on the floor, on the walls, on the desk where the staff computer sat. The hotel guests who later discovered Marta's lifeless body would describe the scene as looking like an abattoir or a slaughterhouse,

and that Marta's face, head, and chest were so badly bloodied and broken that the sight made him violently ill. CCTV footage showed Stephen pacing back and forth as the reality of the situation kicked in. Some of his movements and body language could be described as remorseful, as he seemed to be barely able to bring himself to look at the damaged he'd wrought. We know that he returned to his hotel room for a brief period, or he cleaned the blood off of his face and hands before returning to the hotel lobby. Only that time, he couldn't bring himself to look over at the vacant reception area. Stephen went immediately to the nearest police station and,

with deep black circles around his eyes, he approached a reception desk for the second time that night, before stating, I have just killed someone in the hotel. I think she worked there. I haven't been getting any sleep. I've had no sleep in six days. The attending police officers were so stunned by the shocking confession that at first, they asked him if it was some kind of sick joke. Stephen assured them that it wasn't, then showed them some of the blood he'd failed to scrub from under his fingernails. Only then did the grim reality of his confession kick in.

And although they maintained a calm and non-threatening manner as per their training, police officers placed Stephen under arrest at around 8.30am, then took him to one of the station's holding cells. They then ordered uniformed officers to drive over to the hotel to confirm Stephen's story, but by then, the first 999 calls had already started to flood in. Investigating officers soon discovered that Stephen was already known to them prior to the attack. In fact, Stephen had only been released from prison just two months prior, having been convicted of three separate incidents of indecent exposure during the summer of 2020.

A psychiatrist later said that Stephen had struggled to function following his release from prison and that the experience had prompted nothing short of a psychological nosedive. Stephen also had a previous offense of battery on his own mother stemming from 2018, showing that he was indeed an extremely dangerous and hideously violent offender. At his initial criminal hearing, the defending attorney stated that Stephen was suffering with schizophrenia which led to abnormal functioning. He was suffering from persecutory delusions, auditory hallucinations and disorganized thinking, abnormalities which impaired his judgment and self-control. The doctor who assessed Mr. Cole implied it was a sudden and impulsive decision

and caused by the way she smiled and looked at him. There's no doubt that he suffers from a very serious illness. After hearing that Stephen had been unable to obtain the necessary prescription medication, Judge Angela Morris said that there were irreversible failures in the lead-up to Cole's brutal, sustained, and horrific attack on Marta, and that questions had to be asked of local mental health authorities. Judge Morris added that Marta was relentlessly beaten and violently attacked in such a manner that she was not able to breathe while unconscious. She died alone and with no one able to help or save her. She subsequently advised that Stephen be detained under the UK's Mental Health Act

and would be interred at a violent offender's mental unit near Ferrum in the county of Hampshire. This kind of senseless murder proves just how devastating it can be when there are failures in a country's mental health system, and although Stephen was undoubtedly a disturbed and predatory individual, we're left to wonder if Marta's death could have been avoided if he'd only been able to obtain such vital medication. If his troubled mental state had been identified earlier, if his perversions had been isolated and treated instead of locking him away with other hardened criminals, then maybe, just maybe, Marta Vento

would still be right back. We're all Tread Experts. Conquer rugged terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca I'm on sick leave from work at the moment, and my therapist has advised me to partake in what's called cognitive behavioral therapy. According to our National Health Services website, cognitive behavioral therapy is a talking or writing therapy that can help a person manage their problems by changing the

way they think and behave. The website says it's most commonly used to treat anxiety and depression, but also can be useful for other mental and physical health problems. And right now, I'm dealing with some serious mental problems. It all started back in the summer of 2021. You see, I have a degree in sports science and physiotherapy from John Moores University in Liverpool and as some of you will know all too well, one of the biggest industries to be hit in the past couple of years are gyms and other sports venues. It's not so bad anymore,

and I was actually in the process of reapplying to a number of different venues at the end of last year. But the ongoing problems I've been experiencing have put a sharp dent into my ability to properly maintain my professionalism. And so, here I am, on sick leave from a night porter's job at a budget hotel. Nothing against anyone who works night shifts, works as a porter or even an overnight security guard. Work is work. And anyone who gives up their time to support themselves, or especially a family, is to be respected. But for me, being forced to give up my dream career to be all alone in an old Georgian townhouse was demoralizing to say the least.

I've always been something of a gregarious type, always playing sports, watching sports, talking sports in bars with friends or complete strangers. So going from a hyper-social environment to an extremely anti-social one was extremely debilitating, and I think this has been the number one factor in the decline of my mental health. But that's not why I'm writing to you. After all, you're in the business of scary stories, and what happened, well, what's still happening to me to some extent, has been one of the most terrifying and horrific experiences of my life.

So, it was the summer when I was forced out of my job and had to look for another one. But I found that despite some industries being closed off completely, some were severely in need of additional employees thanks to sickness, self-isolation, or simply stress. And one of the long-term positions I applied for was that of a night porter at an old hotel. I say old, it was built at around 1820, but it's received several renovations since then. So despite a rather elegant facade, it's decidedly modern on the inside. We're talking keycard locks, a very swanky polished steel lift, and most importantly to my hours of solitude, super fast wifi. I had access to some gourmet coffee making facilities, I was allowed to use the hotel's kitchen to make myself my shift meal, and due to people's reluctance to travel, the hotel remained completely empty for the vast majority of the time that I was

there, and business only picked up again about the time I started experiencing mental health problems. It was a very, very lonely existence, and despite the hundred megabyte a second broadband the hotel had, my employer's demands were such that I didn't really have much time for mindless surfing. Yet, even when I have a few moments to myself, there's only so much of YouTube I can stomach in one sitting before you start to get very, very bored indeed. And I knew the boredom and relative inactivity were becoming an issue one night when I had my very first visual hallucination. You know in cartoons when a character sees something that he or she doesn't believe is real and they rub their eyes comically before opening them again? That's a very real and common reaction to visual hallucinations and it was quite surreal that it

was my first reaction to seeing what I saw. The first thought that comes into your head once you realized what you're seeing is a physical impossibility. Is that there's either something wrong with your eyes or something in them. So, as one football sized spot on the wall began to almost bubble and froth before my eyes, that's exactly what I did. Only when I'd finished rubbing them, the spot on the wall kept frothing for a second before finally subsiding. I spent the next half an hour or so neglecting my patrol duties and googling visual hallucinations. What followed was a veritable rabbit hole of mental health conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and other much more devastating illnesses like Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease.

Since I didn't have a drinking problem and wasn't in the habit of taking hallucinogenic drugs, those first four conditions honestly scared the life out of me. I wasn't on any meds. I hadn't had surgery. I didn't think I was depressed or bereaved, although I found myself morbidly hoping that I was severely depressed, as that'd at least be better than having my brain rot away before my 30th birthday. So what in God's name could have caused such a thing? Given how anxious I was, I decided to book a doctor's appointment as soon as I was able. But to my dismay, the policy of my local GP was

not to receive any in-person visits. Because of the current situation, everything had to be done over the phone. Because of the huge demand for telephone appointments, it was around 48 hours before I could actually secure one. I can't even find the words to describe how desperate I was, and since the nurse didn't see my condition to be life-threatening, she asked if I considered taking my life. Of course I said no. I was basically bumped down the waiting list and told I might have to wait two whole days for a callback. I was so scared I'd experienced another

hallucination that time but despite me hoping and sometimes even praying for them not to return, they did, and this time it was even worse. There's this old painting in one of the hallways of the hotel, and all it depicts is two people walking through some park in Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background. It's not remotely creepy, has this rather generic, almost boring feel to it, and I don't think I'd look at it properly more than two or three times during the whole time I'd work there. But you know how when you're at a certain level of familiarity with your environment that a slight change seems to just jump out at you? Well, when I was still waiting for the callback from my GP, I walked past the painting one night and stopped dead in my tracks. The few strokes of paint that made up the two people was shimmering slightly, in the exact same way the wall had when I suffered my first hallucination. Then, I know this sounds completely

insane, but the two people turned their heads to look at me. Okay, so they didn't actually turn their heads, it's a painting and paintings don't move, do they? But you know in a dream when you just know someone is there, even though you can't see them? That's the closest thing I can describe to what I felt that night. I couldn't see the two figures looking at me, I just felt it in my bones. I suppose that gives away just how far gone I am, that I could even write something like that to you and feel like it makes even a shred of sense. But please try to understand me when I say that it was one of the most disturbing, frightening and harrowing experiences of my life.

To feel like you're losing complete control over your mind and your environment. Sometimes I feel like that's a fate worse than death. I was just frozen for a few moments, watching as the two figures began to dissolve into a mess of limbs and facial features, surging and bubbling up until they were indistinguishable from one another, like a multi-limbed, two-faced abomination made up of arms and eyes and teeth and fingers. I remember just running back to the porter's office and shutting myself inside, all in the grip of the first real panic attack I've ever had in my life. I sat down in the corner of the room, facing the wall with my eyes clamped shut, just praying for the whole horrible ordeal to just end.

I'm not even ashamed to say that when I finally seemed to gain a bit of sense, I had this quiet little cry in the office. I never thought mental health issues would ever affect me, not in a million years. I've always been a pretty chill, very normal kind of person. You could even accuse me of being flat out boring and I don't think I'd have taken too much offense. But oh, how wrong I was. And part of the reason I'm writing this is so that you, and your viewers should you choose to read this, are aware that these things can happen to anyone, absolutely anyone. But you shouldn't be afraid and you shouldn't ever think that it's the end of the world. The human brain is like any complex machine. Sometimes it breaks down and needs a little servicing to get it running again. And that's how the doctor explained it to me and it made total sense. And not only that, but when they told me something along the lines of

you're having a normal reaction to a very abnormal situation, I felt like I wasn't so alone anymore. I suppose that gives away the rather anticlimactic ending to my story. I got my call back, almost exactly 48 hours from when I made the first call and honestly, it couldn't have come at a moment too soon. I felt jittery with relief when I finally heard the words, I'm Dr. So-and-so from the Elms Medical Center, and I was soon in possession of an electronic prescription which allowed me to purchase a drug called trifluoparazine. And let me tell you, they've really helped, but as a precaution, I've been on sick leave for the past two months or so while my condition is being monitored remotely. All in all, it looks like I'm on track to a full recovery, but just how long

that'll take is something my doctors just aren't sure of. But I can assure you, I've been treating this whole thing the same way I treat my fitness training. When it gets hard, when I feel like I can't continue, I just remind myself that I'm much, much stronger than I think I am, and that it's always darkest before the dawn. I also feel that I should add that your channel and your lovely community of listeners, or viewers, whatever format they prefer, have been such a great help to me over the last 18 months and that I honestly don't think I have fared nearly as well without your calming, interesting videos which really help me keep

my mind off of things. So thank you, keep up the great work and hopefully I'll be able to send another email in the future saying how I've made a full and complete recovery. So, this isn't strictly my night shift story, but it involves interactions with a guy who worked for a company that monitored the nighttime security systems of the institution that used to employ me. You see, I used to hold a position of executive director of quite a large science museum on the eastern seaboard and at one time we hosted a human cadaver exhibit, very similar to body works over in Houston, Texas. For those that are unfamiliar with such exhibits, giving your body away to medical science upon your death isn't the only way to recycle your corpse. You can actually volunteer

to be given to a museum or some other such institution to be displayed to the general public. The skeletons you see at the front of biology classes tend not to be real anymore, as cheaper plastic options tend to be available. But some of them are real, and it's due to selfless individuals who allow others to learn from what they're not using anymore. Yes, I know it's very morbid, but it's also incredibly fascinating, and you'd be shocked at how many people are attracted to such displays. So, with that in mind, we hosted our own, and the run generated a ton of money for the museum. And that wasn't the only reason the exhibit was

memorable. In fact, it sticks out in my mind for entirely different reasons, and let me tell you why. One night, right in the middle of the exhibition's run, I received a call from the security company that monitored the museum out of hours. It was the middle of the night, just after 1.30am, and since part of my job was to oversee the museum's overall security, it was me that had to take the call. I remember rolling over half asleep before seeing the company's name flashing up on my phone screen. A lot of the time it was just a false alarm, and after reviewing security camera footage from my laptop in conjunction with one of their staff members, I could give the all clear and head back to sleep. Hardly the most efficient way of doing things, and trust me, I let our board of directors know this on multiple occasions, but the museum took its security very, very seriously, so unfortunately it was something of a necessary evil to justify my inflated salary.

So, as I said, I see the name of the company, so I roll out of bed while answering the phone, stumbling over towards my laptop to bring up the remote CCTV program. We didn't just have security cameras either. Due to the immense value of some of the equipment present in the museum, we had a series of motion detectors too. If someone was moving around the building after hours, we could pinpoint exactly where they were before passing the information on to the police. But not once in my time there did anything ever trigger the motion sensors, and 99% of the time the call was nothing but a false alarm in the form of an overactive door sensor. So when the security guy on the other end of the phone told me the motion sensors were picking up movement in one of the exhibits,

it really woke me up. The news generated mixed emotions in me. I was honestly surprised that we'd finally had our first break-in, as despite the value of some of the equipment, a family-oriented science museum isn't exactly going to be at the top of any hardened criminal's hit list. A museum with ancient, valuable jewelry, sure, but not a science museum. obvious with a degree of surprise that I brought up the security camera program from my laptop, but as I was doing so, I asked the security guard where the motion sensors were being triggered. That's when he tells me they were being triggered in the human cadaver exhibit. Just what anyone would want with a preserved human corpse, I have no idea.

But when I asked him how many people were walking around the exhibit after having presumably broken into the museum, he says to me in this slightly shaky and even fearful tone, see for yourself. I brought up the security camera feed, and that's when I started to seriously get the creeps. There wasn't a soul to be seen, not anywhere around the exhibit. There were only the preserved bodies, standing, sitting, or sometimes kneeling in their display cases, and as you can imagine, they were all perfectly still. I asked the security guy if he was 100% certain that the motion sensors had gone off, if it couldn't have been some kind of malfunction or error. He told me no,

that if there was any kind of breakdown with them, they'd simply cease to function entirely and that giving false readings was essentially impossible. He did so with that same shaky tone of terror and before long, I was starting to get pretty freaking scared myself. We watched those camera feeds for a good 10-15 minutes and the whole time the exhibit was quiet as the grave. Then at one point he says, the sensors just went off again. I asked him which ones, if he could pinpoint where exactly in the exhibit the movement was coming from. He just replied, all of them. I had to drive all the way down to the museum in the middle of the night to walk around a human cadaver exhibit to make sure that there were no actual intruders. I can assure you, in no uncertain terms, that it was one of the most unnerving and terrifying experiences of my life.

The place was empty alright, and no, of course the bodies weren't moving around, but as I said it was, without a doubt, the single creepiest security in a 25-story high-rise apartment building here in Chicago. One of the things we had to do every night as part of our duties was switch over the security camera computer tape so all the footage could be backed up onto the building's main server. If there's any tech nerds reading that, and I got it wrong, please don't crucify me. I'm just a lowly security guard. Anyways, I had the tapes in hand. I'm walking down the corridor towards the elevator and it had been a particularly tiring shift. Or rather, the shift wasn't so bad. It was more I had stuff to do in the daytime and so I couldn't get all the sleep that I normally would have been able to. Obviously I'm totally exhausted, barely awake, hardly even able to keep my freaking eyes open.

So when I got towards the elevator and saw that the doors were open, I thought to myself like, well, that's lucky, saves me from having to wait for the thing to come up like ten darn floors. But as I got closer, I realized that there was no elevator waiting for me. It was just an open, empty elevator shaft. I'm not particularly scared of heights or anything. I mean, I have a cousin who used to get woozy at the top of playground slides when we were kids, and they would have straight up died if they'd saw what I saw. But Jesus Christ on a stolen bike, man, I swear I felt my heart trying to smash its way out of my chest when I saw how far down that thing went. I swear, man, if I'd have been in a little more

of a hurry, if I'd have been just a smidge more exhausted than I already was. Heck, even if I needed to use the bathroom or something, I actually might not be here writing this. I'd have fallen like ten whole stories before turning into a human pancake on the top of the elevator. And even worse, I might not have been discovered until people started to smell something gross or blood seep through the cracks in the ceiling hatch or whatever. I know this kind of sounds like the scariest thing that ever happened on the job was something that didn't actually happen, but I suppose that just makes me lucky is all. And I know plenty of guys that definitely haven't been as lucky when it comes to life-threatening hazards. I grew up in a quiet suburb outside of Houston.

Some people talk about neighborhoods where people don't lock their doors. This wasn't that kind of neighborhood. Situations in Houston notoriously went from 0 to 100 quickly, so while the neighborhood was basically quiet, doors were locked and checked religiously. That being said, 90% of the time the big neighborhood problems would be teens vandalizing or car break-ins. Annoying but not really terrifying. I worked retail at a clothing store that closed at 9. I worked with a woman I was getting to be friends with who asked if I could

give her a ride home. It was a little out of the way but I didn't mind. Her neighborhood was pretty sketchy. I don't know if it has anything to do with what happened later but I drove her to her apartment and we sat in the car and chatted until she was ready to head inside. I sat in the car to watch her go inside. Around me, other residents were outside drinking and just shooting the breeze. It was around 10, so it would have been late for my neighborhood to be outside talking at a volume like this on a weeknight, but it was expected at this place, so I didn't think much of it. When she got inside, she blinked the lights a couple of times to let me know she was in safe and I headed for my childhood home.

I should note that this was a time before cell phones so this was kind of a basic routine. I was to call her from my house once I was home and everyone would be confirmed safe. I don't remember the drive home really. I probably blasted tunes and sang along as I usually did and parked in the driveway. The outside lights were on. Mom was good about turning them on for me so I went inside without fuss. Now a note about my parents. They weren't really mean drunks but they were alcoholics. They still functioned okay by day but it wasn't uncommon for me to arrive upon a scene as I did that night with all the lights on, the TV going, and mom passed out on the couch. Dad was presumably in the bedroom or passed out in his man cave. From experience, I also knew if I turned off the lights or the TV, mom would wake

up and be grouchy about me waking her up, so I left everything as it was and headed to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash up for bed. Once in my room, changed for bed, I called my friend to let her know I was home and all was well. One of my more annoying habits is that it's almost impossible for me to end a conversation. I'm incredibly tired and just want to read a book or something, but instead was just rambling at each other about work things or whatever. I had already gotten to bed and turned the lights out. I was just laying in bed in the dark listening to my friend rambling. My room was at the front of the house. It had a weird

wall in front of the window, some stylistic mid-century modern thing that didn't make a lot of sense, but did block out some of the light from headlights when cars passed. Ours wasn't a highly trafficked area, but cars driving by in a square pattern of light on the upper part of the wall wasn't an unusual sight. What was unusual, though, were specific beams of light bouncing around the upper part of the wall to the ceiling, and I stared at them for a moment before realizing that they were flashlights. That was highly unusual but I figured it was just kids. I wasn't the sort of kid that other kids bullied or pranked. We never had our house TP'd and I couldn't imagine anyone that would want to now that we'd all been graduated. I really needed to sleep because I had college finals the next day and yet flashlights were around the house and it was super weird.

I really needed to sleep because I had college finals the next day and yet flashlights around the house was super weird. My friend told me to call the police but for a variety of reasons I'm just not a fan. Besides, carrying flashlights in my front yard isn't a crime so I couldn't even imagine what the police would do. I see well in the dark and besides, the lights in the living room were still on, so still on the phone, but without turning on any extra lights, I got up and with the intent to check the front door. I really don't remember how long my friend and I were on the phone rambling, it had to be a while for what happened next to have happened. I get to the living room and I hear something in the kitchen.

It's this weird metallic slapping sound that makes no sense at all. I tell my friend and she continues to caution me to call the police, but for what? Flashlights? Metal sounds? The kitchen lights are also on, so you have to picture it. A barely lit living room with a woman passed out on the couch. The TV is on. The kitchen lights are on, but not the dining room. But for all intents and purposes, this looked like a house where people are awake. Except for my mom, who is very clearly dead to the world. So, I head towards the sound. At the very end of the kitchen there

is a smallish window with metal blinds. The blinds are closed but they're rattling, making that weird metallic slapping noise and I think, is the window open? We're not a window opening people. I know some people in the south open their windows on a nice evening but that's not us. Sometimes windows are open temporarily when mom would pass out while cooking dinner and something burned, but it was always for a very fixed time. It was possible that she left the window open, but unlikely, so I just stood there, staring at it, head cocked like a curious dog. And then I saw the front of a shoe on the sill. I screamed. Actually, just saying that I screamed way understates the noise that I made. I'm a notorious low talker and I assumed that

I'd just been saving all that volume for this precise moment. I wailed. I cried. I keened. I became a banshee and threw all my power into my voice and this mighty force. The foot immediately vanished. My mom woke. My friend screamed on the phone with me. From the back of the house, my dad came bounding out with his gun. I got off the phone and called the police. I grabbed another gun and headed outside behind my dad. I'm not a gun person and going outside was super stupid, but the scream to end all screams had apparently done its job as no one was there. Being kind of an expert in criminology due to watching police shows,

I told everyone to stay away from the sill so the police could investigate it. I had visions of them taking fingerprints and molding the shoe prints to find the culprit. It was an adorable thought. The police arrived half an hour later, so it's good we weren't actually under attack. In the meantime, my mom started to doubt that I'd seen anything and started to believe that she'd left the window open. But no, the police verified that the window had been pried open, that whomever it was very carefully took all the bric-a-brac that decorated the sill and set it on the ground, as if trying to remain very quiet.

At no point before this did I consider what the invader's plan was. Maybe it was shock or lack of imagination or just being tired, but they knew it was a full house and they were sneaking in. These weren't robbers who just wanted to take some electronics for quick cash, they were going to take us by surprise. To do what though? Thoroughly chilled, I asked when they were going to take fingerprints and the cops basically laughed me off because nothing was stolen. We locked down the windows and I stayed up all night trying not to imagine what exactly those people were going to do to us. I'm a single male, 33 years old, who lives alone in Denver.

My apartment complex is not what you would call a nice building. I'm on a road close to Colfax Avenue, which if you're familiar with the geography of this area is not the safest boulevard in town. I'm a few streets away from it, but close enough that I wouldn't consider this an up-and-coming neighborhood. This evening I was watching Netflix on my couch. My two cats were cuddled up against me as I lay under a comforter. The night before I was watching a horror movie that was scary enough to leave me in an unsettled mood, making it hard to sleep. So this night I decided to watch a stand-up special instead. Keep it light so I wouldn't have any trouble getting some shut-eye.

I have classes earlier the next morning, so I was surprised when I made the conscious decision to turn on a second stand-off special and let myself fall asleep on the couch. I was just so comfy where I lay and didn't want to move, not even to turn off the several lights on throughout the apartment. I remember dozing off at around 11 o'clock. It was effortless which meant I was really snug under the covers with my cats flanking me on either end, creating a tucked in feeling. I fell into a dream wherein I was on an impromptu date with this guy, whom I didn't recognize, at a blockbuster video store. He bought me blue and yellow underwear, you know, like a blockbuster would sell in dreamland, insinuating that I would take the hint of his intentions.

He was also desperate for a job, so when we got to the counter, he was given an off-the-cuff interview that didn't go well. And all of a sudden I'm not sleeping anymore. I'm woken up by a knock at my door. Then a man's voice saying, maintenance. I just sat there, sitting bolt upright on my couch. I knew something was off. I looked at my phone, which was by my left hand, and the time was 2.15am. I didn't move. The floors in my apartment are old wood and there are many creaky floorboards. I didn't want whoever was knocking to know someone was at home and awake, let alone alert to his presence.

My cats got up and ran over to the door as they normally would, but I stayed still and listened. After a few minutes with no answer, the man walked away from the door and down the hallway to the stairs. A moment after that I heard the back door to the building swing open and closed. I have one window where I had a partial view of that door so I break my paralysis and ran over to it. I saw an old looking green SUV sitting in the no parking zone just in front of the back door. It must have been running the entire time because I didn't hear it start up and the brake lights were glowing red. Someone, presumably the maintenance man, got in the car and it drove off. I don't know what his intentions were, but no one knocks on

someone's door at 2.15am, claiming to work for the landlord with good deeds in mind. Had it been a true emergency, wouldn't he have knocked again, used his service key to get in the unit? What did I just avoid here? I can only assume it was an attempted robbery at best or abduction at worst. When I was watching the SUV drive off, I surveyed the other apartment windows. They were all dark. I can see every unit except the two other corner apartments below me from that vantage point. I think because my apartment sticks out from the building and has many windows, that I was targeted because my lights were visibly on and noticeable from the street.

However, I don't know how this individual got into the building in the first place as you would need a key to do so. I've never been so legitimately afraid as a single person living alone. I'm grateful I installed a security chain on my door when I moved in. I'm also so grateful that, even in my disoriented state, I had the presence of mind not to move from the couch or make any noise. As I recount the event, I can't stop my eyes from leaking tears though I wouldn't call it crying. My nerves are definitely shot. I don't think I'll be going back to dreamland anytime soon. I have turned off all the lights save for the lamp by my bed.

I usually can't sleep with it on. Tonight I don't think I could sleep with it off. We'll be right back. You can get a pro at Tread Experts. Conquer rugged terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there at treadexexpress.ca So the encounter took place a few years ago. I was living in a super huge apartment block and quite a terrible one at that. One late afternoon I was just chilling with my then girlfriend when I suddenly heard faint scratching noises outside the door. Definitely weird but I dismissed it, thinking it's probably some neighborhood kiddo scratching walls with a

key or some other stupid kid stuff sometimes that they do. A moment passed and the noise didn't disappear. Quite the opposite, it actually got louder. At this point I started realizing what the sound was. It was the sound of a metal object scratching on my door's lock. I immediately get startled and went to look via the peephole. The longer corridor was half dark and right there in front of my door, there was a man. I couldn't see his face too clearly but I was 100% sure that I didn't know him. He was tinkering with a lock in some way, but with the people's limited field of view, I couldn't see what exactly he's doing. I made sure all the locks are, well, locked and backed off as it fell silent.

Just as I was about to return to the living room, the door handle slowly moved down, pressed from the other side and just as slowly returned to its initial position. I freaked out. I hurried to the kitchen, grabbed the biggest knife I had and squatted next to the door. It was locked, but if he'd managed to pick it, well, there I was, frightened and armed. For a moment, it fell silent again. Then the lever slowly went down and up again, more scratching, and the lever moved again. Then, silence again. And then, I heard a whisper.

Let me in. My heart skipped a beat, or a dozen of them probably. Let me in. Let me in. If he was screaming, it would be just as frightening. But he wasn't. He was whispering to my door, repeatedly. Let me in. I think I unfroze for a second because I grabbed my phone and called the security. The apartment block had the security, but they were stationed in a small booth outside of the block itself, which is huge, and I lived on the 8th floor, so it was a really long way to get there from their place, especially given that they were lazy idiots who usually just watch TV and smoke so much that there was a heavy fog inside of the booth. Still, I gave them a panic call, quickly explaining the situation.

Sure enough, the guard laughed it off, saying the stranger is probably just some drunk neighbor. He told me that the other guard is on patrol and that he'll call him and tell him to come to my door. I have no idea why I didn't call the police but I was probably just too frightened to think straight. The block was in the middle of nowhere so the nearest police station was quite far away anyways. My girlfriend just kept observing, probably some kind of a stress reaction too. Seconds felt like hours and after some time it fell silent, this time for good. Fifteen minutes later or so the freaking security guy finally knocked on my door long after

the guy was gone. Good job man, seriously. Took your sweet time, thank you very much. He said that they will close the gates and check the camera footage, but he didn't look too tense so I don't know if they actually did anything. To this day, I have no idea what happened. Maybe it was some drunk neighbor who left the elevator one floor too early or too late and thought his wife locked him out. Maybe he actually was some psycho or a junkie trying to purposely access my door. I'll never know, and I guess I prefer it this way. I'm a 20 year old female and I moved in my own place in the city about 3 months ago. First time living on my own and I'm in the heart of downtown trying to pursue acting.

I have two neighbors down the hall, both male. One is maybe around 40 and the other is somewhere around 70 to 80. We'll call the 40 year old 40 and the 70 year old 70 to keep it simple. Okay, these two have been fighting non-stop for the past two weeks. Like 40 is banging on 70's door yelling his name saying stuff like, you stop yelling or open this door and you stop being terrible, all these sorts of names that I can't repeat here and 70 will literally make threats like, stop banging my door or I'll kill you and your family and starts loudly mocking the noise of the knocking. Anyhow, when I first moved here, 40 kept asking if I was single or

married. I do have a boyfriend so obviously I told him that and he within seconds went from trying to flirt and being kind to literally just angry and telling me to get my dog to stop licking his shoes or whatever and just storms off. Fast forward a week and he sees me and asks me again. Again I tell him I have a boyfriend and he calmly says, nah that's okay I feel you girl. So I walked off and again a boyfriend and he calmly says, nah, that's okay. I feel you, girl. So I walked off and again a couple of days ago, this time a lot weirder, he says, hey, you know I was in love with you, right? And I responded saying like, no, I didn't. We barely ever speak. And he asked if I had lost my man yet. I told him no and he asked if I had lost my man yet. I told him no, and he asked if I was sleeping around.

I said no, and he asked how many people I had been with. I asked him why he was asking personal questions to a stranger, and he insisted that meant that I slept with a lot of people. I didn't want him to think that it was easy to get that, so I simply told him that I'd had two boyfriends, and I'd only slept with people I was dating. He stormed off and said, that's a lie. And I asked him what led him to believe that I was lying. He turned around and told me that 70 had told him I had been sleeping with him. This was obviously not true. And he said I just didn't want to share the love because he was black. And I told him I just didn't want to share the love with anyone I wasn't dating in general. And he got mad and stormed off yelling, I'll show you how to share the love someday girl.

And later that night he came past my apartment after yelling at 70 and just said my name by my door. I don't know how to interpret it. My mom wants me to request out of my lease and move into a house down the road. My boyfriend wants me to move in with him, and everyone thinks I should leave. I don't know if it's creepy or what, or what he even meant by it, but one of my sisters said it would be good to post on here and get others' views, so here goes. I'd like to add I don't just go around giving away my name. Everyone in my unit knows me because I work at

the grocery store literally down the road. I didn't think the people in this new building would be so different than the people in the last. To be continued... I took some melatonin to get to sleep early. I have an American bully who's scared of everything so I don't think of her as my protector. I feel that I'm her protector and I'm fine with that. My boyfriend works late so she usually barks when she hears the garage open. At 10.55 she started going crazy. At first I told her to go back to bed. I then heard my doorbell going off excessively and knocking. We never use our front door, and not once have we ever entered through our front door. We use the garage. My first thought was my boyfriend's garage opener must have been broken or something, but I had no calls or texts from him. My dog was still going insane. We live in

a little gated community, so I don't ever really feel unsafe. I go down and my dog's with me. I can see through the peephole cause I'm really short and I heard someone screaming, help me and they were still knocking and using the doorbell. I thought my boyfriend was just playing a trick on me. We have one of those hotel like locks at the top of the door so you can open it like two inches without really opening it. I unlocked the deadbolt and doorknob and opened it and a man was saying help me and then started jerking the knob. I screamed, what do you need help with? He wouldn't speak, he just kept jerking the doorknob while my dog is sounding the meanest

I'd ever heard. I slam the door with all my strength and lock it back up. I'm yelling that I'm going to call the cops. While on the phone he's still ringing the doorbell and beating on the door, and 911 couldn't even hear it. I felt bad because I wasn't sure if they were hurt, but why wouldn't they say something when the doors open? Why didn't my dog's bark faze them at all? He stays beating on the door until the cops get there, and when they get there I see them put an elderly man in the back of their car.

I find out that it's my neighbor across the street that I've never met and barely seen. Apparently he has dementia and got out of his house. I have a feeling of such guilt for calling the police and scaring his wife. I also felt stupid for how scared I was. I watch a lot of true crime shows and my boyfriend has an important job and sometimes isn't home until about 4am, so I immediately thought that someone was watching me and knew that I was home alone. I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but it was so scary in the moment and now I feel kind of silly and feel like if it was someone trying to hurt me, I did the wrong thing by opening the door a little even though it was still locked. I just keep telling myself I did the right thing because what was I supposed to do when all I knew was a strange man was at my door acting erratically and trying to get in my house. I feel bad for his wife and

that the cops made him take an ambulance to the ER to get checked out. Either way, that was my creepy encounter for 2022 and hopefully for the rest of my life. I grew up in a small beach town on the east coast. It had that cliche suburbia vibe, complete with book clubs and block parties. My sister and I were close friends with our neighbors as well, as they had a daughter, Kristen, who was around our age. A lot of times we spent playing together in our shared yards, at the beach down the street, and our nearby park. It had been one summer day that my mom and Kristen's mom decided to take us to this particular park, and as per usual, as soon

as we arrived, Kristen, my sister, and I raced to the swing set to claim our seats. Our moms had followed leisurely behind us, looking ahead to see if they could snag a spot in the shade. Once they picked a picnic table, they sat down and set up. They were chatting and got some snacks ready for us, occasionally glancing over to make sure we hadn't fallen off the swings. The afternoon was going well. Everyone was having fun and enjoying the weather when Kristen's mom pointed across to where we were playing. There, instead of just three kids swinging, there were four. Seems like the girls made a friend. She smiled at my mom as they looked at the other

girl who had just joined us. An older woman, possibly her mother, was standing off to the side as well. My mom nodded, thinking nothing of it. It was completely normal for kids to make friends at the park and especially in an area so friendly. Besides, she found it likely that the older woman was with her and would be able to help if anything was happening. They proceeded to talk for a little bit longer before my mom thought to look over again to check up on us. When she glanced over to the swings, she saw Kristen, she saw my sister, but she no longer saw me. She stared for one more second as it sunk in, and she realized the older woman was also not there.

Panic washed over her and she immediately alerted Kristen's mom. They rushed over, hoping I was just hiding behind the slide. My mom's eyes scanned over the playground, frantically trying to help me. She recalls Kristen's mom taking the other two girls by the hand, attempting to ask them what had just happened. But before either of them were able to offer any information, her eyes locked on me. The older woman had taken me by the hand and was leading me off of the playground, out of the gate, and into the parking lot. My mom began to run after her, not explaining a word, just yelling for her to stop. The woman did not pause, did not even

turn around to acknowledge my mom's screams until she was close enough to reach out and grab my one free hand. My mom immediately began to curse and question what in God's name she was doing with me. The older woman began to explain how this was a misunderstanding, that she was only just walking me to the baseball field that was right across the street. Of course, this answer was completely unacceptable, and my mom was making this clear as Kristen's mom was quickly behind catching up, coming to aid in whatever way she could. It appeared that when the older woman noticed Kristen's mom was there as backup, she let go of my hand and began to offer some semblance of an apology before hurrying to her car and quickly pulling away. And it was not until after she had already gotten down the street that my mom understood two suspicious details, which included, the direction the older woman was walking me was towards her parked car and not at all towards the baseball field. And two, the older woman did not

put a child in the car before she left, meaning she came to a playground of kids by herself. I often ask my mom why she didn't call the police at this moment, and honestly, she doesn't have a good answer. She tells me that it was just shock, and I'm sure part of it was, but I also think that it could have partially been due to embarrassment. However, I hope it's not that at all. There's no way she could have expected this to happen, and she may have very well saved my life right at that moment,

and I try to make it as clear to her as I can. While I'm into my twenties now, and this happened when I was like a toddler, I still think about it from time to time. At least, this recounted version my mom tells, and it's a terrifyingly scary idea to think that she wouldn't have seen me in time, and that I could have possibly had a completely different path in life. It was late summer and I was coming home from hanging out at the beach with my best friend Maya. It was her 17th birthday party. When I got off the subway at my stop, I looked at the

bus arrival screen. The bus I would normally take home was arriving in about an hour. Being a tired 14-year-old girl, I decided to take an alternative bus route home. This was a decision I would later regret. When I got off the bus at the stop, I have about a 10 minute walk to my building. My area at night is pretty quiet. Not many cars on the streets. As I'm walking up the street I hear the sound of an engine nearby. I look over my left shoulder and see a white panel van. I know right. How typical. It's rolling up the street. I try to think nothing of it but when I turn onto my street the van does too. Now I'm unsettled and start walking faster.

The van is driving slowly and it never passes me. When I turn up the long driveway to my building, the van once again turns too, and now I start to feel scared. The driveway to my building has an ice rink on the side of it with bright lights, so I walk beside the rink, under the bright lights. There are small houses on the other side of this driveway. The van catches up to me and stops. So I think maybe this person is lost and just trying to ask for directions. I was trying to find some way to rationalize this. I stop. I stay about four feet from the van just in case. I look in the van window to see an older man, starting to bald with black hair and a white t-shirt. I ask if they're lost and they don't

respond. Instead, they try to get me into the van. I say no and start walking but the van continues to drive slowly, following me. When a red car begins to drive down the driveway, the van drives all the way to the end of the driveway and waits for the red car to turn out before reversing to be beside me again. The van is still trying to get me into the van. I want to make a mad dash to my building, but I'm worried that he'll see where I live, so I keep walking. When another car comes down the driveway, the van does what it did before and drive to the end and wait for the car to leave. But this time there is a car dropping someone off at the townhouses. The cabbie is closing his trunk when he sees me.

Are you okay? Yes. I tell him how the van had been following me and every time a car comes, the van drives to the end and waits for it to leave before following me again. The cabbie tells me that he'll get in his car to drive to the end of the driveway and sit there for a bit so I have enough time to run to my building. I tell him okay and thank you. The van is back in line with me again so the cabbie gets in his cab and drives up the driveway and the van follows. I look and see the two vehicles sitting there. I ran up the rest of the driveway into my building's lobby and my heart is racing. When I get to my apartment, I'm still freaked out. I go into my room and call the

cops. While I'm on the phone with the cops, I look out of my bedroom window and see the van. It's slowly driving around my building looking for me. Now I'm fully panicking. The cops send officers to sweep the area but they don't find him. Two officers came to my apartment and they get a statement from me. About a week after this happened, the officers come back to my apartment. They show me a photo of the man from the van that they were able to get from the security camera on the side of my apartment. They showed me a photo of the man from the van that they were able to get from the security camera on the side of my building. I told them the man in the photo was the one that followed me. They told me that they were aware of this man and that he was already on an offender list. About five to six years ago, I was working at a gas station and I ran into a girl I recognized

from high school. She was with her boyfriend who was a regular in the store. I distinctly remembered him because he wore this really cool looking horn-rimmed glasses. We got to talking and I asked him if he wanted to get together and smoke a bit. He agreed and said that he'd wait for me after he dropped off his girlfriend. So end of shift is around 11pm and he comes and he's outside waiting and tells me that he knows a really cool smoke spot. I follow him in my car to said smoke spot and we end up in a gravel lot surrounded by various RVs and trailers. I didn't think much of it because it seemed pretty safe and out of the way from police. We smoke a bit and afterwards he invited me to his place and since I was pretty baked, I said screw it, why not.

The dude leads me to this really dark neighborhood and takes me to a house that he enters from the basement that leads into a nice room. Except for the fact that it had nothing but a bed and a TV. Did I mention that there were plastic sheets around the TV and near the bed? The hair stood on the back of my neck like I was in danger and when he asked if I wanted to sit on the bed, I politely declined and said it was about time for me to go home. He then asked me if I wanted to smoke another one before heading out and being the young fiend that I was I said alright but I also insisted on being outside.

He invited me to his car to roll up and smoke. Now I was already on edge, maybe from the weed but I'll maintain it was my sixth sense. And when the guy turns the radio on, he turns on some music from the early 1900s. Really couldn't tell you what decade. The type of stuff you hear in serial killer movies and starts going on and on about how it was his favorite music. I asked him if he was going to roll up or not because I was really only there to smoke before I left and he still hadn't started. So he pulls out the wrap and pulls out a knife and the second I saw the handle, I bolted. I'm talking fastest I've ever run back to my car. I locked the doors and turned the ignition on before he could even get out of the car. I screeched my

wheels peeling out of the neighborhood. Never spoke to him again. I swear I met a serial killer that night And I just barely managed to get away What do you guys think? Was I just tripping balls? To be continued... Hawaii. When we were first sitting in the airport waiting to check in for our tickets, some random guy started commenting on how beautiful my daughter was. That wasn't exactly unusual, people consistently told us Anna was the cutest baby they'd ever seen, so I politely accepted the compliment and thanked the guy for his comments. But he didn't stop there. The guy kept getting closer and closer to her, asking me stuff like, how old is she, when is her birthday, what her favorite things are, where we're headed. I started to feel slightly uncomfortable but kept up the polite pretense because my husband

would be back any second. Then the final straw was having the guy actually reach out and attempt to actually physically touch our daughter. I was like, hey hey hey, back off mister. Then my husband came back and the man stepped away pretty quick. We then told airport security about the guy, but he'd apparently made himself scarce since the mood turned sour. Anyway, a few minutes later we arrived at our gate, only to see the exact same handsy guy waiting for us, apparently getting on the exact same flight. Airport security then

caught up with the guy but all they seemed to do was ask him not to hassle us again. After that, we got on the plane, only for the guy to position himself in a seat where all he had to do was look over his shoulder and he could see me and my daughter. Then when my husband got up to use the bathroom, the guy ended up turning around and looking me in the eyes before saying in this like childlike baby talk voice, guess who's found out where you're going? We made a huge deal out of this and the flight attendants took our side, moving the guy to another seat and telling him not to move.

Upon landing, there were people waiting for him that he was forced to go with, security or airport staff, I don't know, but we didn't see him again. I can't say for certain what the guy had in mind for me and my daughter, whether he just liked harassing us or if he had something more sinister in mind. But I know for a fact that if it wasn't for my husband or for those flight attendants, things probably would have been way worse. That was also the day I realized that flight attendants aren't just servers in the sky. They go through a ton of training for how to handle different situations, one of which, often times, is human trafficking, which they take very seriously.

If you are ever in danger or you feel you're in danger while flying, speak to a flight attendant immediately. They can relay messages through the pilots and ATC and have police waiting to greet you right at the gate. Back in the summer of 2020, I was 14 and I would spend a lot of time with my cousin. We both loved going on walks and would always walk in the neighborhood near her house. One night I was spending the night over and we decided to go on a walk. It was around 10pm and I'd like to be precise that the roads weren't well lighted so it was very dark. We were used to doing that so we weren't too scared at all. But while we were walking, a white jeep started driving very close to us.

The guy who was driving lowered his window and there was another guy with him and they both seemed to be around 25 years old. The guys were just weirdly staring at us for like two minutes. Then the guy in the passenger seat started asking weird questions like, aren't you girls scared of the dark? And after asking this he drove away. Me and my cousin were relieved thinking that this was just a joke but unfortunately we noticed the jeep's lights on the road and it seemed like they were going back and forth before coming to our level again and this time it was the guy in the passenger seat who talked and he asked if we wanted a ride home then

said we will take care of you while smiling and it was at this moment my cousin's eyes opened wide and after that they drove away again. Me and my cousin were petrified that we couldn't even speak. We were still hearing that jeep so we didn't want to run home because we were afraid that they would follow us. We hid inside a garden behind trees for about 10 minutes. The jeep came back but fortunately they didn't see us. We didn't have our phones because we usually don't take them on walks. When the lights disappeared we sprinted home. We got there and cried quite a bit. My cousin told me that she got so scared because she had noticed that there was a knife and

some sort of pills in the back seat. We'll be right back. Bobbler peel, your tread's worn down or you need a new wheel. Wherever you go, you can get a pro at Tread Experts. Conquer rugged terrain with on-road comfort. Until June 15th, receive up to $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo Tread Experts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. treadexperts.ca This happened nine years ago.

I just ended a four-year relationship and moved into an old building in downtown Paris. I had to start all over again from scratch. I did the mistake to let my ex-girlfriend keep a lot of my furniture, kitchen cutlery, pans, coffee machine, etc. At the time, I worked as a waiter so I could only afford a one-room apartment from a council estate building. It was old and barely clean, but at least I had a roof. The first two weeks nothing happened but quickly I began to hear someone talk at night. It was mumblings. It basically said, go and die already, already, already. When I looked through the door, I saw a scrawny

shirtless guy smiling and scratching the door with his finger. That became a thing. Every two or three nights he came and threatened me, threw the door, or sang songs with a childish voice. I might have opened the door and asked him what in God's name he wanted, but I was afraid he had a knife or something and I couldn't see his hands while looking through the door. What stunned me is that he acted totally normal when I stumbled upon him during the day and denied being the one who did that at night. I even got mad at him but he seemed to genuinely not understand what I was talking about. One day I came home with a girl that I had met at the bar that I was working at. For

some reason she left during the night and I went back to sleep. The mumbling started again, only this time it felt really close. I opened my eyes only to witness the scrawny neighbor headbutting the wall and singing what sounded like a mix between religious chants and a lullaby in slow motion. I was honestly paralyzed by fear. I tried to communicate with him but he was just grinning and ended up exiting my apartment by himself. I decided to call the police that very night. They took him alright and he went straight to the psych ward. Actually this guy had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and I guess had been in and out of the psychiatric hospital before.

He wasn't supposed to live at his place anymore. He just ran from the hospital two months ago and they only reported it but there wasn't much of an investigation from the police. He initially got sent into the psych ward after bashing a shovel onto a postman's head, putting him in an actual coma. And he did it, for absolutely no reason. I never saw him again and I moved out two years after that. To be continued... Standard Time. If you get a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit r slash let's read official and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. And check out the Let's Read podcast

where you can hear all of these stories in big compilations and save huge on data. Located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the description below. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you again soon. We'll be right back. $60 on a prepaid MasterCard when you purchase Kumo RoadVenture AT52 tires. Find a Kumo TreadExperts dealer near you at treadexperts.ca slash locations. From tires to auto repair, we're always there. TreadExperts.ca.