The Lets Read Podcast - 225: NEVER MEET AN INTERNET STRANGER | 19 True Scary Stories | EP 213

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about the Break Ins, The Middle of Nowhere, & Internet Strangers... 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/LetsRead ♫ Background Music & Audio Remastering: INEKT https://www.instagram.com/_inekt/

It's the Lexus Demonstrator event at Don Valley North Lexus. During May, Don Valley North Lexus has rates as low as 1.9%, with savings up to $9,000 on select remaining 2024 Demonstrator models, while supplies last. See DonValleyNorthLexus.com for details, or visit them at 7200 Victoria Park, just north of Steeles. A proud member of Wayne's Auto Group. at 7200 Victoria Park, just north of Steeles. At Don Valley North, Don Valley North for Lexus. A proud member of Wayne's Auto Group. Back when I was completing my master's degree, I had to share an apartment with someone to keep the cost down. After putting out an ad on Facebook, I received a message from a guy called James. I started out looking for a roommate,

terrified that I'd end up living with some psychopath, but the person I found ended up being my longest and closest friend. One of the things we immediately bonded over was our mutual love of long-distance hiking. He first mentioned it on the phone when I asked what his hobbies and interests were, and after that, we spent about a half hour sharing experiences and enthusing over the great outdoors. We went on our first trip during spring break of 2004, and it was pure bromance, if you catch my drift. James was like a brother from another mother, and although we both moved elsewhere following the completion of our studies, we made sure to keep in touch via social media and online games. Then on top of that, we headed out on some long distance hike together either once or twice a year. We used to go real hard back when we still had the knees and ankles for it and our choices of destination tended to be extremely remote. Most of our friends who joined

us would blister up their heels for a few days with us and then say never again on the ride back. So for the most part, the trips tended to be just me and him. We both ticked off Baxter State Park and the Adirondacks while we were both living in the northeast. Then after James moved down to Virginia, we visited both Shenandoah and the Great Smoky Mountains. But then as time went on, we started both Shenandoah and the Great Smoky Mountains. But then as time went on, we started pining for somewhere a little further afield, if you catch my drift there as well. And that's how we settled on heading out to the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming, or more specifically, the Cloud Peak Wilderness. The Cloud Peak Wilderness is the centerpiece of a roadless block of land that's almost 200,000 acres in size,

making it one of the single largest wilderness areas in the entirety of North America. If ever we were going to get the full Lewis and Clark experience, it was there. So late one spring, we met up in a small town called Buffalo before heading out into the mountains. The Cloud Peak trip happened in 2013 and we were both pretty experienced outdoorsmen by that point, so at first, marching off into the trees just felt like business as usual. It was only around 24 hours in that we realized that we were a day's walk from the nearest highway, meaning we were almost completely cut off from civilization. I'd been to some far-flung places before, but there was something different about being out in Cloud Peak. Areas like the Appalachian Trail feel

wild, but there are roads more traveled, if you will, whereas out in Cloud Peak it felt as if though we were crossing over some dangerous frontier. In light of that, we remained cautious and careful as we progressed along our route. But as the days went by and the fatigue started to set in, we began to get more confident and much more explorative. James was carrying an old Colt.45, having obtained the necessary permits to do so, so we weren't particularly worried about bears or any other variety of wildlife. What we were worried about was our dwindling water supply. In order to walk the vast distances that we tended to cover, we kept our water supplies minimal in order to maintain mobility. You could always find a stream

or creek to top up your canteen's mid-journey, whereas trying to lug gallons worth of water just wasn't an option if you wanted to cover any serious ground. Every other hiking trip, we'd had no problem finding water, and we'd even plan our routes to leapfrog from water source to water source. But then late April of 2018 turned to be unlike any other I can remember, and it completely sent our plans askew. It was hot, real hot, and as much as it made for great tanning weather, days upon days of unseasonably high temperatures meant a lot of our water sources were too shrunken and stagnant to be safe. Each one we passed we got more and more desperate, until in the end we just about jumped for joy when we came across a fast-flowing mountain stream.

We filled our canteens as much as possible, but we knew the rest of the hike would be pretty hellish unless we got some serious rain. If we wanted to make it out of the wilderness without risking heatstroke, we needed to be conservative, resourceful, and a little bit lucky. We managed the first two. The third, not so much. On day six of a planned nine-day hike, we were once again in dire straits in terms of our water supplies. You can always tell when things are getting really bad when your pee starts to look like Bacardi Dark, and although we really didn't want to, it was looking like we might have to cut the hike short to make a beeline to the nearest convenience store, which, by by that point was going to be a day and a half's hike at least.

We pushed on, and at one point we're walking along some barely carved out trail when we decided to stop for a water break. We sipped, and I mean sipped at our half-filled canteens, then James walked off to take a leak up against a tree. He walks out of sight and then the next thing I hear is like a high-pitched yap or bark, the kind you hear out of a fox or coyote. The next thing I hear is James saying, Jesus Christ, as if the bark had suddenly spooked him. Honestly, I thought the whole thing was pretty funny, some hardened hiker getting scared by some furry woodland creature. So I picked myself up and headed off in the trees to make fun of him.

I found James alone and visibly shaken, fastening up his pants while looking up at the slopes above us. Given the high-pitched noise the animal made, I figured it was something small and fairly harmless, so the fact that James was so spooked made the sight all the more amusing to me. I asked him what it was that he saw, be it a fox or a coyote or what have you, and he tells me no, that it wasn't an animal that made the noise. It was a boy. A boy that had then scurried off into the trees after scaring him half to death. After a touch more humiliation on my part, James started wondering aloud what a kid would be doing

out there all alone and, to me, the answer was fairly obvious. The kid wasn't alone. He couldn't have been. He was probably out here camping with his family or something and he just stumbled across some hiker taking a leak while out playing. I guess we skipped a few logical steps given how thirsty we were because all I could think about was finding their camp so we could beg for some water. If they had kids, chances are that they'd be good folks willing to share a little H2O with us, in which case we'd be all set until the next reliable natural source. James, on the other hand, he didn't seem to think that it was a good idea at all. I thought he was crazy. We had a golden opportunity to resupply our water and maybe get a little hot food out of it too and there he was, second guessing the whole thing.

When I asked him why he was so nervous, he replied and I quote, I think there's something wrong with that kid. I took this to mean that the kid had maybe learning difficulties or something like that, but I also knew that James wasn't so backward as to be freaked out over something as simple as a disability. Then, when I asked what he meant by wrong with the kid, he just went quiet before agreeing to go look for the kid's parents. I just figured that he changed his mind, that his rational brain took over and accepted that we needed water. I didn't stop to think about what he'd seen might have actually scared the life out of him, even if it was just a kid. James pointed us in the direction the kid ran off, then we trudged up the hill in the hopes of finding his parents.

After a few minutes of walking, dense forest opened up into a football field-sized clearing, and on the other side of it stood this ancient-looking log cabin. From where we were standing, I was pretty sure that I could see someone little on an old porch swing that was sat out front. This was great news. Our problems were solved. At least, that's the way I saw it. James was still reluctant to approach them. He didn't say it.

He could just see it in his face as we slowly walked towards the cabin. As we got closer, I realized the person on the porch swing was very old. Like so old it didn't look like they ever really left that swing. They were also, and I don't mean to sound so judgmental, I know time comes for us all, the single most facially disadvantaged person I had ever laid eyes on, and that's putting it as politely as I possibly can. I figured it was all down to some kind of medical condition, but when I politely asked if they had any water to spare, someone emerged from the cabin and the proverbial penny dropped.

Neither person had a chin to speak of, both wore big thick glasses and both had this completely blank stare that seemed to bore right into you. The person who walked out of the cabin was holding a small dog and although they were short enough to be mistaken for a kid, they had to be in their late teens to early twenties. Then, right as we made eye contact, he barked at me. I think my eyebrows must have shot up to my hairline as I turned to James who was already slack-jawed and gawping as if to say, it's him, I told you. I remember stammering the beginning of something, then just stopping when I realized these people simply weren't going to talk to us. Not even because they weren't willing to either,

but because they just couldn't. Something you also have to understand is that the barks didn't sound voluntary. They sounded like ticks, like something he didn't have any control over I started to talk to them both real slow, like you talk to a child or something Telling them, hi there, we need some water, could you get some water from your house? We'd be super grateful if you... The dog the man-child was holding barked right as I was trying to talk, and then the man-child himself barked even louder. It pains me to admit it, but I started to get really nervous when the man-child walked back inside the house.

He moved with purpose, like he was going to get something, and I said a small silent prayer that thing wouldn't be loaded if he kept my drift. Me and James were both wound up like springs waiting for him to reappear but when the door opened again, it wasn't the barking man-child who appeared, it was someone so strikingly different looking that I was actually dumbstruck for a second. It was a girl, a younger girl probably in her early to mid-teens and unlike the rest of her family, she acted relatively normal.

But when it came to her looks, they were beyond striking. She looked like she could have been a child star or something. She had this jet black hair and these bright amber eyes, both in stark contrast to the sandy blonde hair and pale blue eyes of her relatives. She could also talk, albeit in extremely broken English, and made that clear before I could even introduce myself by asking, What do you want, mister? She was much more receptive to our requests for water and invited us inside to fill up our canteens from a water tank that

they kept in their kitchen, or at least would pass for a kitchen. The inside of the house was filthy, with junk and trash covering almost every available surface, and the water inside the tank the girl referred to did not look like drinkable whatsoever. We started searching the cabinet for any kind of bottled water, being more than prepared to pay well over regular sale price for whatever we could find, but the little dark-haired girl interrupted our search, embarrassing us in the process. I started to explain that we were just looking for soda or bottled water, anything to quench our thirst, but the girl just told us, you need to leave. When we asked why, she explained that her daddy had arrived home and that he didn't like strangers.

For a moment, James seemed to find some courage, possibly on account of how close we were to resupply, so he walked out of the kitchen and back down the short hallway in the direction of the home's front door. The next thing I hear is a bark much similar to the one the man-child had emitted, only this one was much louder and much deeper. I too moved in the direction of the hallway, my heart rate climbing rapidly as I did so, but I was cut off by James who had a terrified look on his face. All he said was run. A second later, he lunged past me in the direction of a screen-covered back door,

then after he opened it, we went tearing out the back of the house and into the woods. The whole time I could hear this huge, daddy person screaming and shouting in complete gibberish, probably furious that his family had allowed strangers into the house. Had we been wearing our heavier packs, we would have been screwed, but since we were traveling relatively light, we didn't have to put down our packs to go in the house to collect water. If we'd had to, we'd have left them out front with the family, meaning we'd have no choice but to confront Daddy to retrieve them. I didn't get a look at the guy, but James did, and when I asked him to describe the guy, he used but one word. Monster.

He certainly sounded like it to me from the noises he was making, and I'm grateful to this day that we didn't have to deal with him. The only problem we were left with then was our original one, and after having ran full pelt for a sustained period, we needed water more than ever. We walked a little further north, just running on pure adrenaline by that point when, out of nowhere, we heard the sound of rushing water. Whatever water that family lived off, it most probably came from there, and chances were that daddy saw it as part of his property.

We moved fast to collect water so we didn't exactly have time to celebrate the stream's discovery at the time. All that came later, once we were at a safe distance. We were able to complete the remainder of the hike and by the end of it, the incident with the house in the middle of nowhere had already become a kind of campfire story style anecdote. It was definitely unnerving to see the condition those folks were in, and downright scary when we realized that we were inadvertently trespassing in the home of a furious giant. But those parts aren't what stuck with me after we got home and went on with our lives. After having talked about the whole

thing with James during the remainder of our hike, we came to a very depressing conclusion. The family had probably been living there a long time and most likely refused to move after the region was declared a wilderness area. There was also a really good chance that there had been some interbreeding in the family, most likely going back generations considering the condition they were in. At least, everyone except the girl. She looked so unlike her relatives that after a while I started to suspect that she wasn't related to them at all. And this is where I started to go down a rabbit hole of sorts. I did a ton of research into inbreeding in the United States and as you can probably

figure, it makes for some pretty horrifying reading. I'm not going to share all of the deeply unsettling stuff that I've learned, just two little tidbits that I think might be relevant. Number one is that historically speaking, inbreeding in the rural United States happened out of necessity. Some families were simply too isolated or unwilling to give up a family member capable of farm labor. For the most part, second cousins would wed second cousins, but sometimes, in more disturbing cases, brothers would wed sisters or fathers would lay with daughters. But even someone comfortable with such perversion knows that there are limits to how far you can push a small gene pool, which is undoubtedly what led to nasty rumors of kidnap and forced breeding.

I read multiple accounts of this, some more reliable than others, but it definitely seems to be a thing among isolated or reclusive families and tribes all over the world. After hours of research, the situation seemed obvious to me, but after failing to find any kind of missing persons report that might correlate with the girl we'd seen at the cabin, I decided to contact the police out in Buffalo to see if they knew anything about the family living out near Cloud Peak. The first officer I spoke to claimed no knowledge of them and insisted that permanent housing wasn't permitted in any of the state's wilderness areas. He explained that we must have gotten lost and

wandered onto someone's land and rudely dismissed the idea of me and James being capable navigators. I had to repeatedly request a phone conversation with the town's chief of police to get any kind of clarification, but when it came, it only raised more questions than it answered. The day I finally got him on the phone, I was actually out running errands, so I had to pull over to the side of the road in order to talk with him. I was practically shaking with anticipation when he told me that he'd already heard my story, and when he asked me if I was a journalist, I had a pretty good feeling that I was about to finally get to hear the truth. I told him no, that I wasn't a journalist, and that everything he told me would be completely off the record. I also made it clear that I simply wanted to reassure myself

that whatever I'd witnessed wasn't the result of some hideous case of kidnapping, as I didn't want my lack of action to plague me for the rest of my life. And that's when he gave me the respect enough to admit that there really was a family living out near Cloud Peak. And that yes, their family tree had indeed included some questionable choices of mate. However, there was no evidence that the little girl had been kidnapped. At least, there had been no missing persons reports that would suggest that that was the case. Instead, Buffalo's police department, as well as those in other towns around Cloud Peak, had all come to a general consensus.

It was common knowledge among certain folk that there was a family living up near Cloud Peak, and there had been for generations. The region was only declared a wilderness area in 1984, and records showed that the authorities had offered the family a large monetary sum to vacate the property. The offeror received no reply. The chief of police then told me that a handful of cops and low-level politicians then paid the family a visit, hoping to personally persuade them to leave their land. The only details of this visit are a vague report of a refusal, then after that, there's no mention of the family in any of Johnson County's official records. Instead, the truth of their continued existence evolved into a sort of urban legend, and encounters with the family got so rare that they're now dated by decade. And despite how unusual and unsettling they could be, they didn't cause any trouble,

so folks just left them alone. As for the girl, it was the opinion of regional law enforcement that she was something of a genetic miracle. Somehow, someway, the family's genetic stagnation had resolved itself, resulting in an angelic little girl with hair as dark as coal dust. No one knew how, and no one knew why, but until anyone could prove otherwise, the girl was just part of the family, just as her yapping man-child of a brother or her monster of a father. And that was the official story, and when it came to me questioning it, the chief of police just didn't want to know. The last thing he wanted was some east coast city boy prodding at old wounds, and he made that politely but perfectly clear to me before we amicably ended the call. I called James immediately, and we talked for hours and hours, arguing back and forth,

taking turns to play the devil's advocate to each other's harebrained ideas. I'm not claiming that we're ultra-astute investigative journalists or whatever and at no point did we agree on how and why that little girl came to be there, but this is the theory that haunts me some nights when the podcasts aren't enough to keep the bed dread at bay. I think, deep in my heart of hearts, that Buffalo's chief of police knows darn well that that little girl was taken. I think every other cop in the area knows it too, but keeping it a secret serves a grander purpose. The man that girl called Daddy was always going to snatch someone, specifically someone female, in order to inject his family tree with some fresh blood. Now that female could have been a relative of any of those police officers, or anyone else in the

surrounding towns for that matter. So to prevent that, I think someone facilitated the trafficking of a child to that family. As me and James discussed, there's no way in God's green earth that any state adoption agency would allow custody of a child to those people. So to prevent them from just taking someone, arrangements had to have been made. Granted, I have absolutely no way of proving my claims, and like the chief of police told me, there might well be an innocent explanation for the whole thing. But at this stage, I honestly think it would be remiss of me to not dig a little deeper. I plan to return to Cloud Peak to find out what's become of that little girl. If she's still there, maybe I'll get a chance to talk to her, find out if she

has any memories of a time before. I have plans to write a book about my experience along with what I find out there. Maybe this will serve as a kind of first draft, who knows. I'm excited about it, I won't lie. But I'm scared too. Part of me thinks that if I actually find my way back to that cabin in the woods, I'll never be seen alive again. again Back in the day, I used to work for the National Trust up in Scotland. It was a really lonely job, with a lot of it spent either driving long distances or walking around the highlands in dire weather conditions. At work, I used to drive around this big 4x4, but duty, I had to use my own car which was absolutely crap.

So this one Saturday I planned to drive back down to England for my mom's birthday. Me and my boyfriend had this whole big thing planned for her. I'd drive down in the morning, help get set up then I'd go and pick mom up for the big surprise. I was massively excited about it and massively confident that my mom would be over the moon with it. What I wasn't confident about was the ability of my poor little Nissan Micra to get me there without giving me trouble. I was driving through the highlands, absolute arsend of nowhere and all, and the engine started making some really unhealthy noises. I pulled over to the side of the road, but I couldn't work out what was wrong.

I thought I'd be able to get it to a garage and risk being a little bit late, but when I got back in my car and tried starting it up again, nothing. The engine was trying to turn over, just never coming to life, and no matter how hard I tried or what little tricks I tried to pull, I just couldn't get the car to start. These days, I'd have just pulled up an app and had it bloke out for repairs or a tow within an hour or so. But back then, in the age of flip phones and spotty mobile reception, breaking down in the middle of nowhere could be a huge pain in the bottom.

I tried the engine a few more times while mentally preparing myself to actually get out and walk. This was in the middle of November, by the way, so it was absolutely freezing as it was, but then the highland gales meant the idea of walking anywhere was grim beyond belief. I fought it for as long as I could, but in the end, I fastened up my coat, whacked on my hat and gloves, and got out of my car to face the cold. The plan was to walk to the nearest anything which hopefully had a phone or someone capable of engine repairs but then no sooner had I started walking but a car suddenly appeared in the distance. Each side of the road was lined with trees and the road kind of snaked

off in the distance so the car's appearance took me by surprise at first. I actually said a prayer to myself that whoever it was would pull over for me and when they did, I thought those prayers had been answered. But at the risk of sounding a bit melodramatic, I don't think it was God that answered my prayers that day, rather than his opposite number downstairs. Anyways, the car pulls over and this quite friendly looking middle-aged man rolls down the window and asks if I'm alright. I explain the situation, tell him where my car is and he says that depending on how bad the damage is, he might be able to get his mate to come and fix it on the cheap. I just about danced a little jig that I was so happy. Then he invites me into his car and gives me a lift back to mine. We made a bit of small talk after I noticed his

English accent and we both swapped stories explaining why we were both up in Scotland. After we pulled up behind my car, he pulled out his mobile and started texting someone, apparently the person who was going to come fix my car. When I asked him, he explained that up in the highlands, it was much better to send texts with that little signal you could muster. It was a little slower in terms of response time and all, but the message actually went through loud and clear instead of garbled and spotty. He told me not to worry though, as his mechanic friend worked Saturdays and was probably close to a phone. Those of you in your twenties might not remember the ritual of holding your plastic brick of a phone high above your head to try and force a text message through, but after a minute or so of that,

my highland Samaritan assured me that the text had both been received and read. Everything was looking hunky dory, all I had do was to be patient and hope for the best. Within a few minutes, the kind stranger's phone had buzzed and he reported that his mate was on the way, although he wouldn't be arriving for another 20 minutes or so. 20 minutes I could deal with and if the guy could get me to my mom's surprise party on time, the one I'd spent a month planning, I was willing to give him everything I had in my wallet. But then, as I sat waiting with the bloke, still making the same small talk, I noticed that he'd changed some minor detail on his story. I won't bore you with the ins and outs of it, but he basically told me his business was in one place, and then about 10-15 minutes later,

he told me it was based somewhere else. I didn't jump on the sudden change of detail or anything, I mean, a business can have more than one branch, can it? And people misspeak all the time, so I'm not exactly going to act all Sherlock Holmes on a bloke who's supposedly doing me a favor, am I? That was the first red flag, you might say. One I didn't really acknowledge until after the event itself. It was only the second that actually caught my attention. After a brief lull in the conversation, the man asked if anyone was expecting me. He used that exact same phrase too, expecting you, and I must have given him a funny look or something because he clarified with, you know,

have you got any plans later? I started telling him about my mom's party, how I'd been planning it for ages, how my whole family expected me to be there. And instead of showing any interest or enthusiasm whatsoever, he sort of nodded and started staring off into the distance like he was thinking about something. That wasn't what got me though. It was how he'd phrased the question. Was anyone expecting me? And then considering he was apparently just bringing his mate to fix my car and I hadn't heard what they'd said to each other. It all added up to a really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Call it a woman's intuition, but I knew I had to do something, anything to try to get ahead of what I feared the most. I asked the guy how long his mechanic

friend was going to be, and after his long and contemplative state, he snapped right back into his friendly. He checked his phone, and then told me, seems like it's only going to be a few more minutes. So I put my little plan into action. I told the bloke that I had to grab a few things from my car just in case it needed a tow or I had to go anywhere, then slipped out of his car and walked towards my own. Once I was there, I put on a show of looking for things and when what I was doing in actual fact was delaying time until his mechanic friend arrived. If it was some bloke in overalls driving his work van, then yeah, I probably had nothing to worry about. But anything

else, I'd put phase two of my plan into action. I kept at it for a few minutes, fishing around for absolutely nothing while keeping my eyes glued to the road behind us. Then lo and behold, a big white van comes from around the bend a few hundred yards behind us and starts pulling in behind the stranger's car. The van was all white, no marking on it at all, and it looked brand new. On top of that, there were two people sitting in the cab, not just one as I'd been expecting. Like I said, if everyone's intentions were good, then me acting a bit paranoid wasn't going to do anyone any harm. The mechanic and his friend might think that I was a bit weird, but weird I can live with. What I couldn't live with was the feeling I was walking into some kind of trap.

The moment the van started to pull in behind the stranger's car, I hurried back to him and told him something like, I'm just going to nip for a wee, I'll be back in a few. At that, I scurried off into the trees at the side of the road and kept myself crouched and out of sight as if I was actually having a wee. But in actual fact, I'm just watching the seemingly kind stranger and his friends to make sure that they didn't have anything planned. I stayed where I was, telling myself I wouldn't move until I got a good look at the two blokes who'd just pulled up in the van, but the minutes ticked by and no one moved. Eventually I heard the stranger's voice calling me from the side of the road. He sounded friendly at first, and just let me know that the blokes were

working on my car. Only thing was, I could see a bit of my car and there was no one standing near it. I still felt like I was going half mad at this point, that I'd gotten myself into a tizzy and had completely overreacted. Then, right as I told myself that I was going to feel very silly after this if the guys really were there just to fix my car, the stranger's tone of voice changed dramatically. That alone sent a chill through me, but what truly terrified me was when he used my name. At no point in our conversation had we ever swapped names or introduced ourselves formally. I know that sounds a bit mental, since I was sitting with the bloke for the better part of a half hour, but

my mind was on other things, and evidently, his was too because he never bothered to introduce himself either. I know there's always a chance that I let it slip during our chat and just not remembered it, but I certainly didn't know his name, which made it all the more frightening when he told me to show myself. He made it clear that if I didn't, it wouldn't be good for me, and that I might actually get to my mom's party on time if I just did as he told me. Squatting down among the clump of trees, trying to stay out of sight of those not-so-benevolent strangers, they made for the scariest few moments of my entire life. I didn't think it was possible to get any more frightened than that, but I was

wrong. Suddenly I heard an engine start up, but I knew from how healthy it sounded that it wasn't mine. The next thing, I see the stranger's car drive off, and that's the first stranger who picked me up, not the two strangers in the van. I thought that might mean that the van was about to drive off too so I poked my head out from behind the trees a wee bit to get a better look. That's when I see a man wearing a balaclava walking through the trees with his head on a swivel like he's searching for me. Remember what I said about being wrong regarding how scared I could be? I can actually remember most of the stuff that happened but after seeing that guy in

his mask quite obviously searching for yours truly, my memory actually gets a bit spotty. I know I just ran, further and faster and harder than I ever ran in my life. I remember being sick a bit when I couldn't run any further, and I remember many cars passing me before a driver finally bothered to stop to see if I was actually okay. I also remember being frightened out of my wits that the first stranger or the guys in the van would come across me, but thankfully that didn't happen. Instead, I was driven to a police station where I gave a statement. After that came a trip to a mechanic's which resulted in me finding out my car wouldn't

be road worthy for at least 24 hours. After that, I got a room and a bed and breakfast, got myself a late lunch, then cried on the phone to my mom up in my room. I actually think it was the single worst day of my life. I let my mom down, had to dip into my savings to pay for engine repairs, think it was the single worst day of my life. I let my mom down, had to dip into my savings to pay for engine repairs, and it was just a complete nightmare of a day. And to top it all off, I almost got kidnapped or murdered as well. I just didn't think things like that happened in real life, or if they did, I certainly didn't think it had ever happened to me.

I was able to give a really detailed description of the first guy along with what car he was driving but as for the other two men, I didn't have much to say aside from what their van looked like. The police promised that they'd do all they could and they even got the first guy in for questioning but given that he hadn't actually broken any laws, they were unable to charge him with anything. The police had asked him about the masked men in the white van but he just claimed he didn't know what they were talking about. According to him, he tried to do a favor to a young woman whose car had broken down and the next thing, she's off into the woods in a blind panic. They let him go but I know he was involved in it, and I know he only let me see

his face because he thought I was a done deal. But if that's the case, how many other women and girls have his tactics worked on? And that's the thought I find myself living with after all these years. I can be thankful and grateful and whatever else I can be that I didn't end up a victim that day. But I can't be the only one. There have to be more. Girls who didn't get away. And it haunts me to wonder where they are now. In the mid-1980s, four very different women were abducted and murdered in rural Texas, in a place that came to be known as the Killing Fields.

On the surface, the women had little in common. One was just a teenager, another was a local bartender, the third was a 30-year-old mechanic, while the fourth was a young unemployed mother. Yet despite their differences, their lives all ended in the same place, in a rural field just off a dirt road near League City, Texas. The area surrounding League City was once a desolate and barren place, with the only landmarks being the occasional oil rig, the perfect place to bring a person if you didn't want anyone to hear them scream. On October 10th of 1983, a pretty blonde bartender by the name of Heidi Fye disappeared while walking the short distance home from a convenience store.

Six months later, her lifeless body was found in the Calder oil fields. Due to the fact that there were contusions around Heidi's wrists and major fractures in her ribs and skull, a medical examiner concluded that she had been bound, tortured, then beaten to death with some kind of blunt object. There was very little in the way of forensic evidence at the scene, and without any witnesses to the kidnapping itself, the investigation into Heidi's murder ground to a halt, and the case eventually went cold. Just over two years later, on February 2nd of 1986,

four young cyclists were riding through the Calder oil fields when they suddenly detected the scent of death. Upon further inspection, they discovered that the source of the foul odor were horribly decomposed remains of a young woman. After rushing to inform some adults of their find, the police were summoned and they opened up an investigation into the woman's death. Since it proved impossible to identify the victim, she was declared a Jane Doe, but was described as being in her mid-twenties, around 5'7", with reddish-brown hair and a distinct gap in her teeth. The cause of death was a single shot to the back, one which sent a bullet tearing through her heart and lungs, and her body was found just 50 yards from where Heidi Fies was found.

Then, when the police were still in the process of examining the initial crime scene, they came across another dead body, that of 16-year-old Laura Miller, who had vanished on September 1st of 1984. When police dug out the file detailing her disappearance, they discovered something chilling, that Laura Miller had been abducted from the same convenience store that Heidi High had been walking home from when she vanished. By 1991, the murders of all three of the aforementioned women remained unsolved when a fourth body was found in the Calder oil fields.

Unlike Fi and Miller, who were both positively identified through their dental records, the limited scientific options of the era meant that both unidentified bodies would remain so until the middle of 2019. While the League City Police Department remains responsible for the investigation, the FBI has often loaned its considerable resources to beleaguered local law enforcement. Their dedicated laboratories have pored over forensic evidence while expert behavioral analysis created a psychological profile of the potential killer.

Yet despite their hard work, leads have come and gone, evidence remains inconclusive, and the murders remain unsolved. There are no known witnesses to any of the killings and no common person connects all four, yet although the choice of victim is seemingly random, law enforcement seems certain that a lone serial killer is to blame. Although the prospect of multiple murderers cannot be rolled out, the nature of the location in which the bodies were found, it was likely someone with roots in the area. As one prominent FBI investigator explained, someone must have been very familiar

with those fields if they knew such an effective spot to hide a body. Investigators have scoured missing person databases and appealed to the public for tips, but with each passing year, the case gets harder and harder to solve. Special Agent Richard Renneson, who has worked the Calder Road Killings case out of the FBI's Houston field office, has echoed this sentiment. With that much time going by, people lose their memories, Renneson said. People pass away, people just simply forget. It's hard to remember significant details from that long ago. Over time, the murders went from a professional curiosity to a deeply personal mission. Agent Renneson is actually from League City and began his heady rise in law enforcement with the League City Police Department in 1993. As we know, Agent Renneson later graduated to the FBI and,

due to his deep ties to the Calder Road area, he became the case agent for these killings back in 2005. While the avenues of investigation have narrowed over the years, law enforcement technologies have advanced significantly, and in January of 2019, Agent Renneson received a call that gave new hope to his apparently lost cause. One of the Jane Doe corpses found in 1986 was discovered to belong to a woman named Audrey Lee Cook. Cook had worked as a mechanic in the Houston, Channel View, and Heights areas of Texas, and was last seen in December 1985. The 1991 Jane Doe, however, was determined to be Donna Guslin Prudhomme. The belated identification of the bodies has finally given law enforcement something to work with

and, as of 2019, agents were contacting the victims' friends and neighbors while reviewing police records from the period. However, when a key part of any investigation is appealing to the public for help, progress isn't promising. Agent Renneson, as well as local police, have requested to talk with anyone who can provide additional information. And in cases like these, it could be something as simple as where the woman worked,

or the names of friends who haven't been interviewed that are the key to solving these murders. When interviewed by a local TV station, Laura Miller's father, Tim, said his daughter had big talent and big dreams and refused to let her epilepsy become an obstacle to her aspirations. She was popular at high school and even maintained a romantic relationship with a high school classmate. But at some point, the Miller family packed up their lives and moved out to League City. Laura was quietly devastated by the decision. She had to leave her friends, her boyfriend,

and her beloved choir behind, and she struggled socially following such a sudden move. What made matters worse is the fact that that for almost a week following the move, the phone in the Miller's home had yet to be connected. It meant that the incredibly lonely young woman had no means of contacting the friends she so desperately missed, at least no means to contact them from her new home. On September 10th of 1984, Laura's mother drove to a nearby payphone so she could call her boyfriend. Since the weather was so nice, Laura planned to walk the half mile back home when she was done. When Laura failed to return home, her parents were quick to report her missing, but at the time, police considered her to be a runaway on account of her severe homesickness.

Law enforcement told the Millers not to worry, that they'd do everything that they could to find their daughter and would be in touch as soon as there'd be any developments. But as month after month went by, it became increasingly clear that Laura was not coming home. Yet instead of intensifying their investigation, law enforcement began to allocate resources elsewhere. In their view, Laura was most

probably dead, in which case it was only a matter of time before her body was discovered. Out of frustration, Tim Miller began researching similar disappearances in the area. What he discovered was horrifying. Over the previous decade, 15 other young women had disappeared in the region. Some were still missing, others remained unidentified following the discovery of their corpses, but not a single woman's killer had ever been identified. I knew in my heart that Laura wasn't coming home alive. I was afraid she was never going to be located, her father later said.

But just over a year after her disappearance, Laura's body was found. The Millers had to wait 17 months to learn of their daughter's fate. Diane Gonsolin Hastings, on the other hand, had to wait more than 30 years to find out what happened to her sister Donna. Donna and Diane grew up in the Port Arthur area of Texas. Donna later married and had two sons, but when her husband became abusive, she was forced to flee the marriage with her two boys in tow. She had a pretty tough life, her sister explained, but she loved her children so much, we just did the best we can with what we had. By the late 1980s, Donna was raising her sons with a stepfather in Leek City, but kept in touch with her family often while assuring them that she was happy. But after that relationship ended, Donna fell on hard times.

She took her children to their grandmother's house and moved to Clear Lake, Texas, to try to rebuild her life and one day take her children back, her sister said. In 1989, Donna asked her sister for a copy of her birth certificate so she could obtain a passport. Diane mailed the birth certificate to Donna's home in Clear Lake, but after that, she was never heard from again. Donna's family rationalized her absence by assuming that she was traveling overseas, but when her absence dragged on for months at a time, people began to worry for her safety. They reached out to Donna's close friends and associates, but when they discovered that not a single one had seen or heard from her, they approached law enforcement to report her missing. Years went by, and Donna's sons grew up without her. Then one day, tragedy touched the family once again.

Her eldest son was paralyzed in a devastating traffic accident. He spent the remainder of his life requiring almost constant medical supervision and sadly, he passed before his mother's remains could be properly identified. In 2008, and against the advice of her own family, Donna's sister began working with a private investigator. Some believed that she simply moved away to start a life anew somewhere else, yet others were convinced that Donna would never just abandon her children. In 2019, those that had faith in her as a mother were proven right. The 1991 Jane Doe from the Calder oil fields was confirmed to be Donna, and although her family finally got the closure they deserved, they were

heartbroken to have their worst fears confirmed. Much like Tim Miller, Donna's sister had also put a great deal of time into researching the killing fields' murders, and although she's been horrified by the scale of them, she's accepted there's very little she can do about it. We gotta move forward with our lives, she explained. I can't just get into the justice part of it because for me, it's about healing our family. The area around the Calder oil fields has been developed considerably since the time of the murders. Encroaching residential spaces mean that it's only a matter of time before every time of the murders. Encroaching residential spaces mean that it's only a matter of time before every inch of the killing fields had been dug up

and examined by all manner of inspectors and tradesmen. Perhaps there are even more bodies to be uncovered on the killing fields, just waiting for someone to stumble across them. A brand new church was recently constructed in the area, with community members putting together a peace garden in memory of the four women who've been possibly identified. Each victim has her own marker decorated with their photos, names, and mementos. We really claimed that area and we got plans for more, said Laura Miller's father. We're changing the name of that place from the Killing Fields to the Healing Fields, and we're actually going to build a little park there. As for FBI agent Richard Renneson, the Killing Fields are

the only cold case he's worked that remains unsolved. As he approaches retirement age, agent Renneson hopes to finally finish what has become his life's work, for the victim's families, the wider community, and for himself. Anything the public knows, no matter how small they think it is, we really want them to come forward because it may be very significant to us, he told one local media source. It's important for the public to know that we have not given up. It may be labeled a cold case, but that doesn't mean it's sitting on a shelf. It's being worked actively at the FBI and actively at the League City Police Department. This isn't over, and we're not giving up. Many years ago now, me and my best friend from high school decided to go on a fear and loathing and Las Vegas style road trip through Nevada. It was almost identical to the movie we'd grown up idolizing, with the only major differences being the total lack of hallucinogens and the fact that we didn't go anywhere near Las Vegas.

For us, it was more about just cruising through the desert, jamming out to mixtapes than getting weird with whatever beer or grass our meager supply of cash could get us. It made for a pretty good time at first. We hit up some wild places and met some even wilder people, and that was just the first day of our road trip. We planned to stay on the road for about a week or so, and given how well it went that first day, we were real excited to find what the rest of our journey had in store for us. At the end of the first day, we were still very much in the middle of nowhere, so we just pulled onto a back road, found ourselves a dried up riverbed for concealment, then laid out two bedrolls under the stars to catch some shut-eye on. It might sound crazy, but I think that was

the best night's sleep I'd ever gotten. And the next morning, both me and my old high school buddy were raring to go. I put on my boots, then got to giving myself a baby wipe shower while my buddy had his morning smoke and drank some water. Then out of nowhere, I hear him curse. Then I hear him curse louder like he's obviously in pain. Then when I turn around, he's lying on his bedroll, holding one of his ankles with both hands with an expression like he just took a red hot poker up his butt. I asked him what was wrong and he just kept saying, I don't know, I don't know, it was my boot. I look over to the boot that was closest to him, lying on its side in the dust, and I swear to God,

right as I'm looking at it, wondering if he might have gotten some broken glass in it or something, some huge scorpion comes crawling out of it and scuttles off across the sand. Now, we're from Wisconsin, we knew nothing about scorpions, so you could have shown us the most benign little scorpion ever and we both would have been like, deadliest scorpion in the world. But my buddy's screams made it clear that this was no ordinary sting. We used to skateboard together, a whole lot during all the summers that we had in high school. Both of us had taken some really bad falls during that time and we were both very well

accustomed to pain. I'd seen my buddy take some pretty nasty hits and just get up without so much as a grunt. But after that scorpion stung the bottom of his foot, he was literally in tears from how bad it hurt. My first thought was to just get him in our car so I could get him to a hospital. So I tried to help him find his feet but the pain was so bad that he literally could not move his leg. I basically had to drag him up, grimacing and groaning, then help him hop to my car to get him into the passenger seat. The things that were coming out of his mouth had me scared beyond belief. It hurts so much, dude. I can't feel my leg. We need to get to a hospital soon, man. I want to die. All things you never want to hear out of another human being,

let alone your best friend. That kind of fear meant that I drove faster than I ever have in my life. Dangerously fast. The way I saw it, my buddy had minutes before his organs were about to turn to mush, so I had no choice but to drive as fast as I could. When I saw it, I actually did a double take just to make sure that my eyes weren't playing tricks on me. But there it was, bold as brass, a cop car zooming up behind me with its lights and sirens on. I don't know how I managed to avoid getting shot, because the second I pulled over, I jumped onto the driver's side and started screaming at the officer that my buddy needed

a hospital right away. The cop was incredibly edgy at first and drew down on me as I held shaking hands above my head. I just kept repeating, my friend needs a doctor, over and over before he finally asked why. Then when I told it was a snake bite, I misspoke due to how anxious I was, the cop told me to follow close behind him before jumping back in his car. The guy gave me and my friend a full police escort all the way to Yuma where there was a fully equipped hospital and was ready to deliver the necessary anti-venom. Based on our description, a doctor quickly determined that my buddy had been stung by an Arizona bark scorpion.

They delivered some pretty nasty stings as it is, but unless it's a kid that's unlucky enough to encounter one, the stings tend to be very painful but generally harmless. My buddy, however, was having an extreme reaction, and the doctor wanted to keep him in the hospital overnight, just in case he needed any further treatment. He spent most of the day either puking or just lying in bed too weak to do or say anything. The nursing team promised that he'd make it through, though, as there had only been two people killed by a bark scorpion since like the 60s, but I still couldn't quite shake the fear that something would go wrong and that he'd somehow

pass away during the night. I wasn't allowed to stay in his room overnight, so I just slept in my car, but I was back in there first thing to hear the good news in the morning. My buddy was on his way to a full recovery, as all of his symptoms were subsiding and by that afternoon he'd been discharged with a pair of crutches. He wasn't happy to be hit with the medical bills, but he thanked me for getting him to the hospital on time. And I know he got in touch with the cop who pulled us over just to thank him for pulling us out of the fire when we needed it most. Back in late 2016, early 2017, I was super hyped for Ghost Recon Wildlands. I didn't get a chance to play much of the beta, so I was ultra hyped to play the full game as part of a full team. And for those of you that don't know, Wildlands is this third-person shooter game where you can play with three other people as part of an elite special forces squad. The only trouble being is you need to find three friends that are competent and reliable enough to play on the regular. So for that, I joined a

Discord server. For reasons that'll become evident, I don't really want to name names here, so I'm not going to tell you what the server was called or the usernames or real names of any of the folks involved. I know, that's always the cop-out line people give when they're just making up a story for internet points, but I was witness to what might have serious legal ramifications for those involved, so I don't want to say anything that might later be found to be inaccurate or anything that could be used to incriminate or defame someone, especially if they might not necessarily deserve it. I know that might sound pointlessly convoluted, but I can promise you that you'll see what I mean by the end of this post. So, this Discord server had only about a small but dedicated membership of just over a hundred

people, all chatting and posting in a variety of different channels. But very quickly, one particular user stood out. And we'll just call this person Tom for sake of simplicity. The server wasn't just people looking for other players to squad up with. The admins had created all kinds of different channels for non-video game related talk. These were obviously much less active than the other looking for group channels. But Tom enjoyed posting in them to a great deal and his posts were unusual, to put it kindly. I remember the first post of Tom's I saw. It was a selfie of a young man with blue eyes, strawberry blonde hair, and sharp

features. He was sweating profusely. It was kind of unsettling, actually, as he had this really intense look on his face. His eyes were wide, his veins were bulging, and it looked like his jaw was clamped shut. Not the kind of thing that you'd expect to see while scrolling through a channel entitled Casual Chat. Tom had added a caption claiming that he just ran, like, two marathons or something, which is basically a world record for what his critics in the replies said. He also made wild claims that he'd aced the hell-weak part of Navy SEAL training and had only failed to graduate because he made the instructors look bad. Basically, he was full of crap. But no matter how many times he got called out and humiliated, he kept on coming

back with more and more laughably spurious claims of personal glory. And perhaps the single most effective and lauded critic was a guy that we'll just call Clancy. Clancy won the hearts and minds of the whole server by basically humiliating Tom in increasingly hilarious and creative ways. He'd make memes of him, debunk his wild claims with witty little link-laden retorts, and he was the perfect antidote to all of Tom's soul-sapping, self-aggrandizing poison. And for that, we had a lot of affection for him. The admins, all two of them, refused to step in and remove either user, basically saying it was all just banter and that no one was saying or doing anything ban-worthy. To be fair, it was all fairly harmless. But as things began to

escalate, the once playful conflict grew increasingly bitter and increasingly vicious. Soon, it wasn't just Clancy making fun of Tom, it was a massive chunk of the server, all under the assumption that if he really didn't like it, Tom would just leave. After all, he was the one who kept giving them ammo by posting weird selfies and making up cringeworthy stories. What came next happened quickly and mostly offline. I didn't exactly check the server religiously either, so some of this I saw with my own eyes while other stuff I heard second-hand accounts of. But this is how it went as I understand it. At some point, Tom and Clancy

started arguing back and forth in one of the server's text channels and it got so brutal that for the first time, one of the server admins actually stepped in and told them to take things to their DMs. This is where things get sketchy, because I don't know exactly what was said in these DMs and I haven't spoken to anyone who really does. No screenshots were taken, and neither user really talked about it, and no one rushed to find out until after this whole thing concluded. However, I think it's fair to assume that they both went at each other pretty hard, until Tom basically vowed to find Clancy,

so he could kick his butt or whatever dumb threat he'd thrown out there. After that, Tom actually went dark for a little while, and I only learned about the whole argument thing after asking where the old rascal had gotten to. It was definitely welcome news. I mean, he was incredibly annoying, but he also hadn't left the server, meaning that there was a chance that he and Clancy had just talked the whole thing out. After a few days later, Tom proved that little theory to be way off the mark. He posted in all of the text channels about how he had a genius level plan and that Clancy was going to be sorry for disrespecting him. Clancy then

responded by telling him to give it his best shot and he'd relish the chance to break his teeth then. Admins once again stepped in, warning them of bans if they didn't stop threatening violence, so they either took things to DMs again, or just quit their bickering while everyone just figured Tom's threats were empty. But it turns out, they weren't. After Clancy was offline for a few solid days, people started asking where he was, and to get a definitive answer, some folks reached out to a member of the server who was Clancy's in-real-life friend. People were genuinely speculating that Tom had made good on his threats or something,

so there was actually a great deal of relief when they discovered that Clancy was okay. However, someone very close to Clancy was very much not okay. His sister, who had been subject to a brutal attack while attempting to drive home from work. She was in the hospital, in critical condition too from what we heard, and he was offline because he was taking time out to help his family and caring for his sister. It was horrible news, but like I said, there was this element of relief that Tom hadn't done anything crazy. Days later, he proved us wrong again. Now this part of the story I actually did bear witness to because it was Tom's first video post in a while and I was in the mood for a little hate watching. What also attracted me to watch the video were all the replies saying things like

WTF dude and that's so messed up why post that. I've always had a morbid curiosity over violent content, definitely not the healthiest of inclinations but it is what it is I guess. So I ended up pressing the little play button instead of deducing its content through the replies. The opening of the video consists of nothing remotely discernible, as the person filming is obviously just walking with a phone on record. Then suddenly, you hear a voice, Tom's voice, quite easily recognizable thanks to the host of other videos he'd posted of himself working out or talking nonsense. You hear him ask someone,

Hey, I think I know your brother. A confused reply comes from a youngish sounding girl, who's obviously puzzled by the vagueness of the statement. But then, Tom says something like, I'm not sure I know his name, but we play a lot of video games together. The clarification obviously rings true with the girl who laughs before throwing some quip about how her brother never comes out of his bedroom some days. Tom then says,

at least he's a sports team fan, right? Tom named a sports team, but again, for the sake of anonymity, I'm not going to repeat it. The girl then confirmed that yes, her brother was indeed a fan of this particular sports team, and this is where the context got downright chilling. Clancy's profile picture was the sports team's logo, and it was the mention of that team that had two and two finally making four for me. Then, as if to drive the point home, the attack began. Again, the video just showed a flurry of nothingness but you could

tell what was happening from the audio tom was beating the absolute life out of this girl and when he'd finished hitting her you could hear him doing something else and the final shot of the video showed the results of the attack and i can assure you they were beyond sickening. It took the admins way too long to react and I think the server saw it before they finally took it down. Tom didn't even give it any context either. He knew people would figure it out and when they did, things got crazy. I was glued to that server for a few days after that, constantly checking it from my phone while at work and then just sitting there watching things unfold after I clocked out and drove home. Everyone wanted to know how in God's name Tom

had figured out where Clancy's sister was and if indeed it was her who was attacked in this video. I'm not sure we ever got a definitive answer from Clancy but after figuring out how Tom had worked out where she worked, it was all but proven. You see, way back when he'd first joined the server, Clancy had posted about how his sister had brought home a bunch of free food from the restaurant she worked at, with proof of the abundance coming in the form of the photo. This photo showed stacks and stacks of takeout containers, each bearing the same name and logo of the restaurant his sister worked at. And this is how Tom had figured out where she worked. He either lived close enough for him to

just drive over, or he'd taken the time to drive out from god knows where to enact his despicable idea of revenge. This is where the server seemed to divide itself into two distinct camps. One camp worked at forwarding as much information as possible to the cops, with a lot of that info coming from Tom's collection of insane video posts. I guess they figured that with as much information as possible, the cops could figure out where Tom was at. But the other camp was doing some sleuthing of their own, only unlike the former group who passed all their info to the cops, this group passed their info directly to Clancy. Then one day, almost all of the server's text channels disappeared.

I remember waking up for work, then rolling over to grab my phone so I could check for any overnight developments. But when I brought the server up, I was sort of taken aback to find that nearly all of them had been nuked. There were plenty of users questioning the decision in the surviving text channels, with some even tagging the server admins to try and get a quicker answer. Neither admins answered a single question, but we didn't have to wait long to figure out why. Following the deletion of the text channels, I suspect it was only a matter of time before the server was just shut down entirely. It wasn't even about a video game anymore.

The entire focus of the server was on the attack and the subsequent responses to it. So I guess it was only natural that the creators would eventually grow tired of the whole thing and either delete the server or just move on. Eventually it was deleted, but not before one final climax of a development. I didn't actually see the post myself, I woke up to the server having been deleted, but I had added a number of fairly close friends that I met in the server and one of them was able to spill the proverbial tea for me. One of the last major posts in the server had been a link to a news story. My buddy had saved this link and forwarded it to me upon my request. There had been a murder in St. Paul, Minnesota.

One where an apartment invader had beaten, tortured, and murdered their victim before fleeing in a stolen vehicle that was later abandoned. The article didn't name the victim or show any pictures of them, but it did include a statement from the cops that implied that the murder was linked to violent online video games. We had no way of confirming our suspicions at first, but then about a week later, I was sent another article. This one did have a picture, and I think my jaw must have hit the floor when I saw the victim's face staring back at me with those pale blue eyes with an uncharacteristically sweet grin on his face, was Tom. Somehow, someone had gotten to his apartment, then done unspeakable things to him, and the only link was video games. We knew what had happened, and we knew who'd done it too, but more importantly we both understood why the server was shut down.

To us it looked an awful lot like folks were trying to hide the evidence of something, and I personally believe that that something was the second camp, continually feeding Clancy with a torrent of information regarding Tom, who may or may not have attacked his sister. Then, in the end, he just acted on it. I think people were so scared that they'd get wrapped up in aiding and abetting a murder that they just nuked the whole server completely. Like I said, I'm still buddies with a few of the guys from the server, but the admins and the vast majority of those who fed Clancy info had either deleted their accounts or tried to ghost as best they can. Last I checked, Tom's murder is still unsolved, and there have been no arrests made, but since the cops have a pretty good inkling what the motive was, I figured it's only a matter of

time before the law catches up with people. Surely all those chat logs are recoverable, I mean, nothing is ever really deleted online, right? There's all the meta and cloud data still on the computers, and I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure it's all trackable. I'm still not about to name names or anything like that or give away any serious details, but between you and me, keep a lookout for headlines regarding this whole story in the coming years. It's still very much an act of investigation, and it leaves me and other folks from that server in a pretty weird position. See, on paper, the moral thing to do would be to go to the cops and tell them what happened, but then who's to say that Tom didn't deserve it?

A huge chunk of that server's occupants, who fed Clancy all the info and maybe spurred him on to do something, they probably have zero regrets and can sleep like a baby every night thinking that they did the right thing. But me, it just doesn't sit right with me for some reason, and I have and all that other stuff, you had internet relay chat. These were primitive chat rooms where you just picked a username and boom, you could talk to all manner of complete strangers about innocent and not-so-innocent topics. If you've heard the term ASL before, that's where it came from, because you always open by asking someone their age, sex, and location, and what you got in reply could wildly vary from user to user. One night, I see this username, DesertRoadsF18. I figured it was probably a girl around my age in the southwest or southeast, and given that I was still living in Texas at the time, I figured that I'd just hit her up. I was right about her being in the south, as she was apparently

just over the state line in New Mexico. So that gave us something to talk about at first, but then as the conversation meandered on, things started getting more and more personal. She told me her name was Rose, duh, and that she needed someone to cheer her up. So I set about trying to do just that. I thought I'd done a pretty good job, and when she seemed sufficiently chipper again, I asked if she wanted to talk about whatever was making her blue. And that's when she tells me that she was sad because she had to drop out of college, but that she'd done so in order to take care of her mother, who was suffering from a very painful variety of terminal cancer. Honestly, that was just about the heaviest

thing I'd heard at the time, and I thought her attitude to it was nothing short of incredible. Sure, it hurt to put her dreams on hold for a while, but it would be worth it to know that she'd been a dutiful daughter as she phrased it. At one point, and I know this sounds crazy, but I asked if she needed me to send her any money. Honestly, it was just bait to see if the girl was some kind of scammer. I mean, I'm dumb, but I'm not that dumb. And when she said no, that she'd never take money off of someone as sweet as me, direct quote, I was convinced that she was legitimate. And not just legit either, but maybe the sweetest, maybe most pure-hearted girl I'd ever come across. We talked for hours and

hours about every little thing, all our passions and interests and hopes for the future. I think it was around 9pm when I first sent her a message, and we didn't stop talking until just after 4 in the morning. It was that kind of intense, and I had butterflies in my stomach the whole time, especially after she sent me a picture of herself. She was gorgeous, and when I playfully accused her of being a catfish, she sent me a picture of her holding up her palm with my username and a rough heart drawn on it. I felt like the luckiest guy in the world. She was the kind of girl I'd be way too nervous to approach in real life, but as I mentioned, I had all that internet confidence on my side and it seemed to have paid off massively. We kept on talking for like a whole five days afterwards,

morning till night, getting more and more affectionate and romantic as the days went by. It got to the point where we discussed long distance relationships, moving cities, if only for a short while. Like I said, it was that level of intense. I remember the pair of us being like, whoa, this is all going very quickly and we haven't even talked on the phone yet. So, to fix that, we agreed to a phone call the following evening. The plan was, I'd hit her up around the time we agreed, get her phone number, then we'd talk on the phone for a little while. I was very excited, in fact I looked forward to it all day. All the crap I had to put up with at work, and it was an unusually high amount that day, and it was all just like water off the duck's back.

None of it bothered me because after I clocked out, I'd get to go home and talk to Rose. The thing is, things didn't quite work out like that. I got home, got online, logged into IRC chat, but Rose's username was nowhere to be seen. No big deal, I thought. I'll just make some dinner and wait for her to come online. So that's what I do. I make some food, take a shower, walk to the corner store to pick up some beers, but even once I'd gotten all that out of the way, there was still no sign of Rose. Around maybe 8 or 9 in the evening, I started to think that I was being stood up, and it's kind of embarrassing to remember how upset and anxious I'd actually got.

But eventually, my patience paid off and the click of that chat notification sound had me running to my PC to find that Rose had sent me a message. She apologized for being late, saying it was typical that she'd get held up picking up medications on the one evening that she had something planned. I tell her it's no problem and then she gives me a phone number to call. It was a 575 number, and I knew that was the area code for a bunch of New Mexico phone numbers, so it all matched up with the story that she'd given me thus far. But then, she tells me that when I call, I'm to ask for Annie, and not Rose.

When I asked why that was, she told me that her full name was Roseanne and that she'd always gone by Annie, a name she now loathed in favor of Rose. I did think that was kind of unusual, but it didn't put me off calling her in the slightest. She also told me that her uncle might answer the phone so not to be alarmed or intimidated by some moody sounding older man if he happened to pick up the call. I take this all in my stride, totally unquestioning, and when I was ready, I called the number. And just like Rose had said, a man with a very unfriendly tone answered the call. So, just as she told me to do so, I asked the guy if I could speak to Annie. And there was a long silence, and then the man asked, who is this? I was honest with him. I told him I was friends with Annie and then the man asked, Who is this?

I was honest with him. I told him I was friends with Annie and that she'd asked me to call her. Again, there was a long silence, then literally said the words, Is this supposed to be a joke? Sure as hell isn't a funny one. And then it was my turn to be silent for a few seconds as I tried to work out exactly what I'd done wrong. It definitely wasn't the wrong number. I'd been ultra careful in dialing the numbers so it couldn't have been all that.

And all I could think to do was just ask again, being polite as possible while apologizing for the confusion. The man seemed to relent a little then explained that the confusion was entirely on my part. Annie couldn't have told me to call her that night because Annie was dead. The man then excused himself, sounding like he was choking back emotion as he did so, then he hung up. I'm not going to lie, I was extremely freaked out at first. I didn't exactly think that I'd been talking to a ghost on IRC or anything dumb like that, but I was most definitely in a state of shock and confusion. I typed to Rose, are you sure you gave me the right number?

And after some time, she replied that she had indeed given me the wrong number, and apologized if it had caused any trouble. Me, like a total idiot, takes her apology at face value, even though there's this burning sensation in my head telling me that something is very wrong. I call the second number that she gives me, which again has a New Mexico area code, and as it rings, I realize I'm actually sweating from how nervous I am. I'm also literally praying that Rose isn't just ghosting me, and the longer the call rang for, the more and more beside myself I became. In the end, the call went to an answering machine and the answering machine apparently belonged to the University of New Mexico's Adult Psychiatric Center. Things still didn't make sense, but they

started to make a little more sense if you get what I'm saying. If some kind of mental health issue was at play, I honestly thought that I could have looked past it. I really did like this girl that much, or at least I'd like the idea of that girl enough to look past it. But again, things didn't quite go as I planned them. When I asked Rose if she'd lived in the UNM's psych center, she simply replied, LOL. I thought this was her way of breaking the truth to me, so I launched into some line-by-line speech of how I didn't care and I was willing to look past it.

And this was before the whole typing feature that modern direct messages apps employ, so I had no idea that Rose had been typing some big all-caps reply, probably from the moment I told her it's okay, I understand. I don't remember what it said word for word, but it was pretty nasty. In the most humiliating way possible, Rose told me that, well, there was no Rose, and that idiots like me were so stupid and lonely that we believe anything we're told. It went on and on like that, the most brutally insulting and demeaning things you can possibly dream up, and in the end, I just found myself asking, why? And do you know what this person said in reply?

Because it's fun. I guess this sounds kind of pathetic, but it hurt. It really hurt me. And I realized that there were people out there who got off on building up people's hopes only to dash them when they least expected it. I'd rather they were a financial scammer because at least they'd actually get something out of it, but going to all that trouble and effort of convincing me that Rose was real and being satisfied with just knowing I was hurting, the existence of people like that is something that, still downright, terrifies me. To be continued... I don't know if it's even still a thing to be honest, but going back almost two decades now, I used to be super into it.

Think of it as being the first real incarnation of the metaverse, as it was essentially just a social life simulator for people incapable of socializing in the real world. I say that with love, after all, I was one of those socially stunted individuals. And in actual fact, I met some of the most fascinating, innovative, and downright bizarre people I'd ever come across through Second Life. I know of a guy who started a free virtual nightclub, literally just him in a little room, playing his own set list of anyone who would listen and hang out. Guy's a professional DJ now, legit living his dream, all after starting out on a freaking second life of all places. There were also game nights, D&D sessions, speed dating sessions, all in this

virtual world and it was through a speed dating session that I met an American girl named Tara. Tara was a pretty nice girl and although actual dating was off the menu due to the distance, we got on like a house on fire. We had a lot of similar hobbies and interests and dating was off the menu due to the distance, we got on like a house on fire. We had a lot of similar hobbies and interests, and I was always very honest and open with the things I told her. Tara, on the other hand, seemed to have a certain very secretive hobby, one she wasn't too keen on revealing to me at first. It seemed to take up an awful lot of her time, and I think she wasn't the only one doing it because she mentioned having discussed it with some close friends. After that, they all began doing this mysterious thing that was somehow thrilling enough to obsess over, but too embarrassing to share with a nice boy that

she met on the internet. As you can imagine, I was incredibly curious as to what this thing was and whenever we'd voice chat on Skype, I'd often pester her to tell me what it was. Eventually, I gave up on asking her and figured that she'd just tell me when she was good and ready. And eventually she did, and I swear I'd never have guessed in a million years what that secret hobby actually was. But what I also didn't count on was being so completely creeped out by it that it marked the beginning of the end for our little online tryst. It goes a little something like this. Tara lived in a smallish-sized town in America.

I'm not sure what it's called or what part of America it's in, but it was small enough for one horrible car accident to send the entire community into mourning. Two trucks had collided on a dark road one night. One driven by a drunk driver who walked away from the crash with only cuts and bruises, the other being driven by a college girl and three of her friends, all of whom either died in the crash or afterwards as a result of their injuries. According to Tara, the drunk guy had managed to avoid all charges because his cousin was the governor's wife or something crazy like that. Some kind of corruption was at play. So instead, Tara and her friends had taken justice into their own hands.

Their hobby consisted of them tracking down the drunk driver and his family members online. Then they'd create faked email addresses, fake MySpace profiles, all in the name of each of the four girls who died in the crash. They'd seriously deck them out too, using actual photographs of the deceased girls in order to make the profiles look as real as possible. Some would just bear the girls' names, whereas others would be things like the ghost of XYZ at AOL.com, stuff like that. Then, once the profiles were complete, they'd use them to haunt the drunk driver's family, friends, and co-workers. At the time, I think it was the single craziest thing I'd ever heard, but I wasn't completely put off by it. Sure, it was a very unusual hobby and definitely not the kind of thing I'd be into personally, but at the same time, I could

understand why she did it. That level of corruption for the guy to just skirt without any formal charges. If that were my friends killed by that guy, I'd want to see some variety of justice too. But to create all those fake profiles with the names and likeness of the victims, that was something that I couldn't quite justify. Tara herself admitted their activities had some dubious moral foundations, as she didn't know whether the family members of the deceased actually approved of what they were doing. But in the grand scheme of things, she believed that what she was doing was right. For a while I believed that too, but then I decided to do a little of

my own research. I don't know why it took me literally days to cross-reference some of the info she'd given me, but when I did, I discovered that Tara hadn't quite given me the full story. The man who'd apparently been responsible for the girl's death had been completely sober on the night of the accident, and in reality, it was the 19-year-old driver of the college girl's car that was driving while intoxicated. The guy had been suffering some engine trouble and had pulled over to the side of some well-lit highway, flicked on his hazard lights, and got to work checking his engine out. Around this same time, the girls, who were already traveling way over the speed limit, came tearing around a corner, apparently didn't see the guy at

all as he was parked at the roadside then smashed into his car at almost 50 miles an hour. The guy got out of the way in time, or they'd have pinned him between their bumper and the hood of his car. The girls, however, their car was tumbling off the road and down an embankment where it eventually burst into flames. Once all this evidence emerged at his hearing, a judge ruled that the guy hadn't committed any crime and that the onus lay with the 19-year-old driver of the other car. The guy was obviously dealing with a lot of guilt too. He was extremely emotional at his hearing, apologizing not having serviced his vehicle earlier and he basically took way more responsibility than he ought to and reached out to the families

to try to aid in their respective grieving processes. Essentially, he was a good guy, one who'd been traumatized by accidentally being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and from what I could gather, most of the community agreed that was the case, all except for Tara and a group of her close friends, who decided that regardless of his intentions, the man needed to be punished. To me, this was already completely unacceptable. It made Tara seem like an evil brat who just couldn't accept the tragic reality. To harass the guy was one thing, but to actually try and haunt him using the names and likeness of those poor dead girls,

it made me realize just how sick she really was. Or rather, I didn't think she was sick at the time, just mistaken. But then when I tried to explain that she might have gotten her wires crossed, she turned nasty, really nasty. I'll try not to bore you with the details of the horrible things she said. They might have been grim, but they were depressingly predictable too. I was accused of misogyny, bootlicking, being a police show, and when I tried to defend myself, she blocked all lines of communication. I was devastated at first. I know that seems silly given what an absolute horror she turned out to be, but I suppose I was more mourning the person I'd hoped she was as opposed to the person she turned out to be.

I want to say that I learned some valuable lesson from that whole experience. I'm just not sure what that lesson is. Maybe it's that way sometimes. There's a huge difference between the way people see the world and the way the world actually is. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but it's when people inflict that worldview onto others, that's when things start to get very frightening indeed. To be continued... online stranger was when I met a girl in an AOL chat room. At least they claimed to be a girl, one around my age of 16 too, but thinking about it now, I could have been talking to just about

anyone. I used to visit this particular chat room quite often and this one time, I noticed someone was spamming a bunch of evangelical Christian stuff in the main chat. A lot of it sounded very familiar to me. I wouldn't call myself religious or anything, but my grandma took me and my sister to church enough times for me to know my way around the scriptures. But then other parts sounded like some pretty wild stuff that they had either learned somewhere else or just had made up on the fly. The user was being warned over and over again to stop spamming, but they always ignored the warnings and always got kicked. Nowadays, companies can remotely scan the product's IDs of smart devices, meaning any new account can get an instant banhammer,

but back then, the crazy Christian girl could just come back with a new username on the drop of a hat. I could have just gone to a different chatroom, but to put it bluntly, I like that one. So, unlike the admins, whose only tactic was whack-a-mole chat bands, I decided on a different method to rid the room of the proselytizing menace. I decided to engage her. It started out as pure trolling, but curiosity soon got the better of me and I found myself wanting to know what their whole deal was. I didn't think the conversation would last five minutes. Turns out, it would last almost two hours. So we had some

preliminary chit-chat and like I said, they claimed to be a newly 16-year-old girl who simply had a passion for faith and church and all that stuff. Aside from that, she seemed like a fairly normal teenage girl. She was into boy bands, she seemed to love Whataburger, but that was just about all we talked about in terms of normal day-to-day stuff. The vast majority of our conversation consisted of religious discussion, and whoever this person was, they had some extremely disturbing opinions. One of the first things they told me which really stood out was when she said, Satan is inside of you. I want to know exactly

what she meant by that and if I had to guess, I'd have said that she was implying that some kind of inherent evil was inside of me. But no, she threw me a total curveball and at first I honestly just thought it was funny. This girl who claimed her name was Mary claimed that every night the devil himself appeared in my bedroom. Then, while I was fast asleep, he, and these are her words, diddled me. This wasn't some juvenile metaphor either. Mary was deadly serious in her claim that Satan himself was physically violating me on a nightly basis. That's what she meant when she said that he was inside of me. Like I said, I thought this was very amusing and I still couldn't quite tell if this person was high-level trolling or not, so I decided to carry on chatting to her to see what else she'd come out with. She echoed a great deal of right-wing Christian nonsense that you hear in a lot of other places,

and not just harmless God and country stuff either. I'm talking the apocalypse is just around the corner kind of thing and the only thing that'll save humanity is if we consent to some kind of mass sacrifice a la the flood from the Noah Ark story. I told her this was an interesting take, mainly as like a backhanded compliment because it all sounded insanely nuts, but I think she took it as genuine interest because she asked if I'd help her kill certain people, people she called names that I won't repeat here for decency's sake. I told her no, obviously, but that I was still interested in her ideas,

so I just let her carry on. She had this weird way of being incredibly insulting to me, like telling me I was a godless sinner bound for the lake of fire But also wrapping it up in a Trying to help you because I love you vibe She eventually got bored of telling me how the world worked And that's all she focused on for a while Trying to fully convert me to her worldview in the clumsiest way imaginable And I kept politely declining

Hoping that it would in fact be me who deprogrammed her, but in the end, she gave up and started saying some incredibly dark things about people taking their own lives. Looking back on it, I figured that she must have been struggling with severe mental illness because her mood seemed to shift so radically when she realized I wasn't receptive to her preaching. She told me that if she couldn't help save the world, then there was no point in living in it, and that she had been thinking about taking her own life so she could be closer to God. I told her that that was a sin, actually kind of surprised she hadn't factored that into it,

but just like a lot of other stuff, her own opinions totally contradicted the actual biblical teachings. She told me that God had personally told her that there were sometimes a good time to take your own life, and that Christians who did so in the name of Jesus would always sit at God's right hand. I was actually really freaked out when she first said it because by that phase, I was thoroughly convinced that she believed her own hype. She told me, I'm gonna cut my wrist in a hot bath now. And I actually begged her not to. But then suddenly, when she typed, I'm doing it right now, it hurts. I began to get a whiff of bullcrap.

I typed back, how can you type if you're hurting yourself? And after that, she didn't reply, but it was way too late for her. I was convinced that she'd only said it for attention. After that I was kind of bored with her whole shtick, so I closed the chat window after telling her to get help. If she really had hurt herself in some way, then telling her get help would be all I could do about it really. I didn't know her real name, where she was from, none of that, but at the same time, if she really was just talking crap, then she really did need to seek some help. Her username was still in the chat list when I logged

off, so I figured that I'd see it again the next time I logged on. Only, I didn't. The first time I didn't see her username or any of the variants of it, I figured that I probably just missed her. The second time I wondered if she was just taking a break, maybe had some family over or something. But the third time, I just got this terrible feeling that she'd actually made good on her threats to hurt herself. Obviously, I had no way of confirming or disproving that, so I just had to go on not knowing.

I'd always check if the girl's username was there, for months afterwards too, but it never was. On more than one occasion, I saw someone in the main chat asking what happened to that crazy religious girl. I didn't want to go alarming them by bringing up what she told me, which I still thought might have simply been attention-seeking at that stage. I'd only be doing her job for her if I helped fuel some kind of mass panic regarding their seemingly fictitious situation. I actually thought they might be watching an amusement from some brand new inconspicuous username, but as time went by, I started to think Mary had actually made good on her threats.

I suppose I'll never really know, and I can't rule out the possibility that she was just some elaborate troll before trolling was even really a thing. But there's always a part of me that worries over the idea that she was genuine, a traumatized young woman who tried to understand the world through the lens of religion, one who gave up when things got too bleak to handle. So, back when I was hardcore into DayZ, I used to clan up with a group of guys from the US, and we'd play on a nearly nightly basis. DayZ is basically this giant multiplayer zombie survival game, and much of the appeal hinges around random interactions with complete strangers. Most of the time they'll just shoot at you while saying mean things about your mom, but every so often someone comes in peace.

And this is how we met, Rabbit. Rabbit crawled right up to our base while we were just screwing around. Easily could have killed us all if he wanted to, but he didn't. I can't overstate how much of a setback that would have been. We'd been accumulating supplies for months by that point, and we'd have lost everything if Rabbit had tossed a grenade or two our way. But instead of getting greedy and talking us out, he started talking to us via text chat. Text chat on DayZ is barely visible, like you can really not see it unless you're looking for it, but suddenly, we see someone talking to us, and after a few seconds of just abject panic, we realize they're friendly, and we started talking back. We learned that Rabbit was from Russia, and that he'd learned English from watching Western-dubbed anime,

and he called himself Rabbit for two reasons. One, he wasn't comfortable sharing his name, voice, or location online, and two, he had huge ears. He was very self-deprecating like that, which is a very endearing quality, so he soon found himself assimilated into our little clan and he hunted and scavenged with us regularly. He was kind of skittish at first and naturally kind of quiet because he didn't use a mic, but he slowly warmed up to us and after a few weeks, he asked for a link to the Discord server that we'd been pestering him to join. It was only a small one, just the five of

us after Rabbit joined and the process of him being quiet and skittish before opening up repeated itself. And this is how we found out what Rabbit did for a living. At first all he said was that he worked with computers, so we assumed that he just had some pretty regular IT job. But it quickly became obvious that he didn't just make spreadsheets all day. I don't know much about coding, but one of our clan did and according to him, Rabbit was basically a genius level coder. He had made some good money, but when he told us the exact amount, I almost fell out of my gaming chair. Rabbit told us his yearly salary was around $730,000 and that's with a dollar sign. But since

the figure was so obscenely high for a quote unquote IT guy, I figured that he must have meant Russian rubles or something. But no, he meant 730,000 US, which meant if he'd been working that salary band for a couple of years, our new Russian friend was a bona fide millionaire. A few of us didn't believe it at first and figured it was just Russian trolling at its finest. The coder guy on the other hand, he figured that there might be something to it. We pressed him a little and he definitely played it coy for a while, but eventually he came out and told us how he made his money. Rabbit wasn't just some IT guy. Rabbit claimed that he was a hacker. This time the vast majority of us just didn't believe him, or rather we figured that he might have been over-exaggerating his job description.

After all, if he was some master hacker capable of making millions through digital heists or whatever, why didn't he just mod the heck out of DayZ and become an in-game god? He replied by telling us how that wouldn't be fun, and that only children cheated games. It sounds like a total excuse written down, but in the moment, I kind of bought it. I still wanted more proof, but it wasn't like he mouthed off about it the first time we met him. The general rule of thumb is that anyone who says they're a hacker online is definitely not a hacker, but we'd been talking to Rabbit for months by that point and we literally had to squeeze it out of him. Then there was the fact that he was just so freaking private as he was. I knew all the other clan buddies' full names and had a few of them on Facebook, even sent one a birthday gift to his home address one time. But we still knew nothing about Rabbit,

even after months of talking and gaming. Like I might have said, I was 90% convinced, but I still wanted that little bit of proof. Call it a juvenile desire to see a fiber optic magic trick or what have you, but I asked Rabbit if he'd like to hack me. I didn't want him to steal my identity or drain my bank accounts, nothing sinister like that. I just wanted him to do something, and I figured some low-hanging fruit would be my Amazon Alexa. I had it hooked up to a bunch of stuff in my apartment, not quite a full smart home or anything like that, but definitely not a dumb home if you want to call it that.

That'd give Rabbit plenty of stuff to play with if he had the chops, and as it turned out, he did. This almost complete stranger, thousands and thousands of miles away in deepest, darkest Russia, put on a literal light show in my apartment while playing weird German house music through all the smart speakers in my home. It was incredible, truly impressive. We had a real-life Russian hacker as a clanmate, and he was actually a really sweet guy. He wouldn't talk about what he did, but he did clarify one thing for us. He didn't hack into banks or pull off mega-heists or anything from the movies. What Rabbit and his hacker buddies did was much smarter. In short, Rabbit wrote programs that skimmed a fraction of

a penny off of financial transactions all over the world. Half a penny obviously isn't a lot of money, but when the process is repeated hundreds of thousands of times a day in multiple different countries, those half pennies start to really add up. Rabbit didn't even like the word hacker. He was just a nerd who wrote computer programs because he hated going outside too much to get a job. He didn't think what he did was very cool, but we sure did. We liked having Rabbit around and that's why we were so bummed when he suddenly disappeared. I say bummed, but it was more like mourning because the last interaction we'd had with Rabbit scared the crap out of us.

All he said was, I think I hacked the wrong person. I might not be around for a while. Then his little green online indicator turned to grey and that was the last we ever heard of Rabbit. I hope he's okay and I imagine the other older DayZ guys hope he is too. But Rabbit was never one for bullcrap. If he thought he was in trouble, then I'd put money on it being bad, and I know that in Russia, there are some very powerful and very bad individuals who can up and disappear you if they want you gone bad enough. I pray that didn't happen to Rabbit, but without knowing anything about him, there's no way of me looking him up But even if I did know stuff about him

Maybe there wouldn't be anything left To find My boyfriend is a nurse who works a lot of night shift, which means I'm often alone from 6pm to 6am. Now, being 4'11 and 120 pounds means that I have to be slightly more security conscious than your average Joe. So once I realized that there'd be long stretches of time where I'd be totally home alone at night, I realized that I had to be extra vigilant when it came to home security. We didn't live in the best of neighborhoods and after one of our neighbors got their apartment broken into while they were home in the best of neighborhoods and after one of our neighbors got their apartment broken into while they were home in the middle of the day, the threat became very real and very frightening to us. We beefed up the locks on the front door and my boyfriend

insisted I go down to the range with him so I could learn how to use his handgun. I always made sure the front door was double locked at night and I always made sure the gun was loaded and ready in the safe under our bed, especially when I was alone. All this is why it seemed so inexplicable to me that our safety could have been compromised in any way and what makes what I'm about to tell you so incredibly scary to me. It was one of those weeks where my husband was working nights so I was home alone for the evening. I finished my bedtime routine, turned on my electric blanket, then settled in to a half hour or so of Nintendo Switch until I felt sleepy enough to drift off. Just like every night I made

sure all the external windows and doors were locked and I went to sleep with my bedroom door open so I'd be able to hear if anyone tried to break in. At some point, I remember waking up and almost immediately seeing someone walk past our bedroom and into the living room. I figured it's my boyfriend who was maybe home a few hours earlier than usual and I roll over to check my phone and see what time it is. 3.36am. I swear I'll never forget those numbers for as long as I live. Usually, after my husband came home from a shift, I'd get up and have some breakfast with him, then he'd go to bed and I'd go about the rest of my morning routine.

It was still pretty early when he arrived home that night, and so I figured that I'd just drift off back to sleep until he came to bed. But as I lay there, I realized that I was listening to nothing but silence. Even though my boyfriend was trying his very best to be quiet, there's no hiding the beeping of a microwave or the sounds of silverware coming out. And he was always hungry when he got back from his shift, so the fact that I couldn't hear him at all just kind of bothered me. So instead of going back to sleep, I got up, put on my bathrobe, and walked into the kitchen to see if he was okay. We had an open plan kitchen slash TV room back then, but as I stepped out of the bedroom, I see no lights coming from the room that I thought my boyfriend was in. I looked over my shoulder, making sure the bathroom is empty, then right when I see that it was dark and deserted,

I hear the soft sound of sobbing coming from the dark TV room. As creepy as that sounds, fear wasn't my first emotion. The way I saw it, my boyfriend was crying in the dark room, so all I wanted to do was comfort him. I didn't hesitate to flick the light on, walk in and ask if he was okay. But when I did, I let out the biggest gasp of my life. Someone, who was definitely not my boyfriend, was sitting on the carpet in the corner of the TV room. They were sitting on their butt, knees up, tucking their face against their thighs so I couldn't see what they looked like, but I could see their body trembling gently from the sobbing. They were half naked, they were filthy, and even in this curled up posture I could see that they were very tall. The run back into my bedroom was a total blur, and I remember this

bolt of fear going through me when I initially struggled with locking the door. Once it was secure, I ducked down to the safe, grabbed our gun, and called the cops. I sat on the window ledge of our bedroom, opening up the window as I talked to the dispatcher. My plan was to shoot the guy if he broke into my bedroom, but on the off chance that the bullets didn't stop him, I was going to jump out of the first floor window. It was obviously a huge risk of maybe hurting my ankle or something, but I figured it would at least buy me some time seeing how I wouldn't last a minute in a straight up fight with this guy. Being faced with that decision was probably the single most frightening moment of my entire life, but at the same time, it was such a simple with this guy. Being faced with that decision was probably the single most frightening moment of my entire life, but at the same time, it was such a simple one to make. Jump and hurt myself, or hope that he killed me quick. I chose jump.

I sat there on the window ledge, pistol aimed at the door, talking to the police dispatcher through my situation for around 15 minutes. She just told me to sit tight because the cops were going to take my door off the hinges before clearing the apartment. Having the property damaged was the least of my concerns at the time and finally hearing the loud booms of their boots hammering on the door prompted this wave of sweet relief to wash over me. I braced myself to hear a bunch of screaming from the TV room, maybe even shots if the guy charged them with a knife or something. But there was nothing. It was eerily quiet as I put my gun back into the safe, hands trembling the whole time, and it got to the point where I was wondering what in God's name was going on.

I put my ear to the door and all I could hear was the same sobbing sound while the cops tried to talk to the guy in low voices. Eventually I started hearing the voices getting louder as the cops started escorting the guy out of the room and as they passed our bedroom while walking down the hall, I distinctly heard the crying man say, thank you, thank you. That struck me as kind of sad, but I was just so wired from the fear and adrenaline at the time that I didn't really stop to process it. I just listened as the cops got the guy out of my apartment, their voices getting quieter and quieter until I could no longer hear them. A few minutes went by before I heard the footsteps of one of the cops returning to take a statement from me. I was really shaken up at the time, having gone from half asleep to heart-pounding terror in a

matter of seconds, so I kept apologizing to the cop for almost crying every other second. Yet slowly but surely I managed to give him a clear and coherent statement. And that's when things started to get weird. The first thing was when the cop tried to establish how the man had gotten into our apartment. They themselves could confirm that the front door was locked when they arrived, and there were no other signs of forced entry anywhere in the apartment. So other than a handful of logical explanations, I really had no idea. Either I'd neglected to lock our front door or the guy had managed to somehow obtain a spare key. And I could categorically confirm to the cop that I'd locked our front

door that night, which in turn meant that I was faced with the distinctly creepy possibility that this man had a copy of our front door key. The cop told me that there wasn't much he could do about it there and then, but if it was his apartment, he'd change the locks just to be safe. Before the cops took off, they asked me if I wanted to press charges against the guy. My first instinct was to say yes, but honestly, I also had a strong suspicion that the guy was struggling with some deep-seated mental illness. Half-naked, crying, thanking the cops who arrested him. He didn't seem like he was living his best life and I didn't know if I wanted to add a criminal conviction to his extensive list of problems. I asked the cops to keep me updated and let me know if he had a

history of break-ins or home invasions and they assured me that they would and off they went. Now a few days later I get a call from a detective calling himself Mike, who asked if he could stop by the apartment sometime. When he arrived, he told me that there had been some interesting developments in the case. As far as my own personal curiosities were concerned, the man had no history of break-ins or any other crimes for that matter. In fact, he was the one claiming to be a victim. The man told police that he'd been kidnapped and held against his will for weeks,

hence why he was so grateful to be found by police. As you can imagine, I was horrified to hear this and protested my innocence to the detective as he tried to reassure me. They didn't believe that this was the case, but logically speaking, the man had to have gotten into my apartment somehow, in which case, they wanted to know how. The detective then asked for a quick tour of my apartment, saying that he was looking for crawl spaces, false walls, faulty locks, and that kind of thing. But then as I watched him, it occurred to me that he could have just easily been looking for a place we might use to keep prisoners. He still hadn't totally rolled us out as suspects and that creeped me out. But thankfully, the cops didn't move on us and we weren't harassed in any way.

Common opinion was that the guy had somehow obtained a copy of our key while suffering a severe mental health crisis. And that the best thing for us to do would be to change the locks. You can bet your bottom dollar that was the first thing me and my boyfriend paid for after he used our city payout to fix our door. But somehow, that didn't quite snuff out all the fear from the incident. I'm not saying that the guy had superpowers and could walk through walls or something, but no copy of our front door key was ever found, either on the guy's person or there at the scene. So in my mind, something else had to have been going on. We don't live in that apartment anymore, so it's not really an issue for us.

But all the unanswered questions really bug me sometimes, and it sucks that I'll never know the whole truth. To be continued... was as you would expect the first few months. Painting, decorating, renovating, basking in our newfound slice of the American dream. You get the idea. Unusual things started happening several months ago. One day as I was getting home after work, I passed by a strange truck two or three houses down from ours. I say strange for a few reasons. We know literally everyone in our small neighborhood and I'd never seen this truck or person before. There's no reason for through traffic to come down our street and the truck was driving very slowly. Like, put it in drive but not press the gas slowly. As I pulled in the driveway,

the truck flipped a u-turn and came back towards my house. Getting out of my car, the truck crawled by and the driver stared daggers at me as he passed, then just sped off. I don't like to judge based on appearances and I like to think that I don't really scare easy, but something about this guy's eyes gave me a bad feeling. Obviously, this was weird. I mentioned what happened to my wife, telling her that we should be more mindful about security. When I told her the type of truck, my wife, telling her that we should be more mindful about security. When I told her the type of truck, my wife said, that same truck drove by and the guy stared at me when I got home this afternoon. I thought he was just being creepy and checking me out.

I tried to tease her a bit to lighten the mood, calling her cocky for assuming any guy driving by was checking her out. I didn't want her to freak out, but I was definitely freaked out. We saw the truck a few more times over the next couple of months, either driving by slowly or parked down the block and facing our yard. But one day the truck stopped driving by and we haven't seen it since. I sort of dismissed the whole thing as me being paranoid. But then other things started happening. In the past month or so my wife and I

have been hearing tapping on the windows at the front of our house at night. It's happened two or three times to each of us separately, always at about 10 or 11pm, and always a soft but distinct tap, tap, tap, tap. It sounds like knocking with a single knuckle on the metal part of a screen door if that makes sense. The first time that my wife and I heard the tapping together was last weekend. We were in the front room playing with our daughter at around 9.30 just about to settle down for bed. Our front room has a large almost floor to ceiling window running the length of the wall next to the front door which faces the street. We were all sitting on the floor with our backs to the window reading our daughter a book when we heard it. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Now our house is older, creaks and cracks are not uncommon,

but this sound was so distinctly intentional that my wife and I immediately looked at each other and bolted up out of the room. I had my wife and daughter lock themselves in the back room while I turned on all the lights and did a sweep around the outside of the house. Of course, I didn't see anything and was ready to dismiss the whole thing as more paranoia over something that probably had an innocent explanation. Until last night. At around 9.45 we heard our daughter making noises on the baby monitor. I waited a few minutes to see if she would settle down, but when it became clear that she wouldn't, I got up to put her back to sleep. The layout of the room is important to visualize this next part. This room is on the side of our house, but the exterior wall juts out a bit in an L shape,

and the corner of this L is made up of windows. If you're standing in the door to the room you're directly across from these windows in one corner and there's a rocking chair in the other corner pointed towards the front of the house. One window faces the street and the other faces our neighbor's house, a garden bed planted with small shrubs wrapped around the outside of the house directly underneath. I was sitting in the chair getting my daughter settled down. I had a lamp on so the room was softly lit. When she fell asleep, I stood up to put her in her crib when something caught my eye. There was a figure standing about a foot away from the window in the bare space between the shrubs and the house, and they were staring at us. I didn't look long enough to see anything more than what appeared to be a man in

a light grey hoodie standing a few feet away on the other side of the glass. Springing from the room, I brought my daughter back to my wife and I's bedroom, leaving her there while telling my understandably confused wife to lock the door. After turning off all the lights inside the house and turning all the lights outside, I began moving from room to room, peering out of the windows into the darkness. I couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. Whoever it must have been had taken off after seeing me notice them and me making a quick exit. Obviously, I had some trouble sleeping after this. I spent hours checking security cameras and going from room to room looking out windows into the night, hoping but

also not hoping that I would see anything that could explain what happened. This morning, I went outside to the spot where the figure would have been standing. I thought and hoped that maybe there was a plant or something that I mistook for a person. When I got to the spot, I realized the figure had been standing exactly in a bare patch of ground about two feet in diameter directly in front of that window. Part of me is still hoping that I'm being paranoid. The mind can play tricks on you in the dark, seeing things that aren't there, especially when you're sleep deprived and a new parent. But with everything that's been happening, I can't shake the feeling that there was actually someone out

there last night, watching us. But please, let me be wrong. I just came across this subreddit and gosh, some of these are terrifying. I do have a story of something that happened to me from a long while ago, but in hindsight it was really dumb of me and I feel terribly dumb now, so I've always been hesitant to tell. This was a few years ago. It was pretty late, past about 1.30 or 2am. I was living with this boy who was pretty abusive and he had gotten really jealous at this party that we were at earlier

that night. Not even an hour after we had gotten home, he tossed me out onto our front porch and locked the door behind me. I was knocking and pleading for him to please let me back inside. I was still wearing what I had worn to the party and it was freezing out. I wasn't sure what to do. He had my phone, purse, and wallet in the house with him so I just sat on the porch crying. When he turned off the lights both inside and outside of the house, I knew that he wasn't going to let me back in. I felt so helpless and cold. I thought about knocking on a neighbor's door, though he didn't have many, but I had anxiety about waking any of them up and causing trouble for my boyfriend.

So instead I decided I would try to walk to the gas station and motel, which was like a little less than a mile away, so I could use their phone to try to call a girlfriend of mine to see if I could sleep over with her. Ironically enough, the road I was walking on was Donner Pass Road, so the freezing cold was fitting. But anyway, a little bit into the walk, this tall white pickup truck was approaching on the opposite side of the road that I was on. I tried not to make eye contact for obvious reasons, but then I heard the truck stopping and beginning to make a U-turn and my heart just started pounding. I just about froze up but forced myself to speedwalk at the very least. The truck pulled up to me and this guy

rolled down his window and asked what I was doing out this late. I told him how I was going to meet my friend at the gas station and that she was expecting me. He sort of smiled and offered me a ride. I said no thank you, citing that I shouldn't hitchhike. He told me, well good, I don't pick up hitchhikers or anyone. You don't look like a hitchhiker though, you just look like you need some help. He just kept driving next to me and told me that I shouldn't think that he was a creep and he pulled out what looked like a police badge and told me that he had just gotten off of duty which is why he was in civilian clothes and out so late. He said he wouldn't mind driving next to me just to make sure I get to where I was heading safely.

I was naive and a bit too trusting of his kindness and credentials when he offered me a ride again. I said that it would be nice because the gas station wasn't that far anyway. He popped the door open for me and I hopped in. The radio was low, it was a little messy, the ashtray was full of cigarettes, and there were a lot of newspapers on the passenger floor, so as I was moving my feet some of the papers shifted, showing a pair of handcuffs, some coffee cups, empty water bottles, rags, and a highlight colored bandana and some other things. He apologized saying it was the truck that he took hunting but it was super warm so I was happy and didn't mind at all. He told me his name was John and asked why I was scantily dressed without

a jacket and I started to tell him about the party and the fight that I had with my boyfriend. He was super charming and attentive. He even laughed that he could go back and arrest him. I asked about him and he told me about his family. He was a young dad, he had a wife, a daughter, a son and a dog. And I told him it was like he had the perfect little family and he laughed and said he certainly did. Then it had sort of clicked for me to ask him if I could use his phone, but he said no because he had to save his battery. We were approaching the gas station and he drove right past it. for me to ask him if I could use his phone, but he said no because he had to save his battery. We were approaching the gas station and he drove right past it.

I politely said, oh, I think that's the one, but he didn't answer me. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach. My heart started pounding. I started getting choked up. My eyes started tearing up as I was looking out the windows and watching the lights behind us get further and further away. It was hard for me to even speak, but somehow I murmured, asking if he could please turn around, and he ignored me. Whenever I would look at him, he just looked empty-eyed and emotionless, totally dead and glazed. I looked back out the window and down at the road to see if maybe we were going slowly enough that I could make a leap out of the car without seriously injuring myself. I remember always hearing, never go to the second location. But I thought about the possibility of jumping out and breaking an ankle and how it would be a lot harder to get away with one foot as

opposed to two. Debating with myself that there was snow on the ground but then again, snow was hard to get along in, especially when you're not fully clothed. I feel so dumb now too because I wasn't even tied up or anything, I was just so scared though, like there was nothing but trees, an empty road, and us. I was crying pretty badly at this point and asked if I could please borrow his phone again, I don't know why I even asked and he told me to stop talking. Then he started talking under his breath saying, Girl shouldn't be out so late. You shouldn't have been alone this late.

Look what you're doing to me. Dressed like a little cutie. And other just creepy derogatory things. And he kept saying these terrible things too. Too many to type out here and I wasn't even responding. I was just crying and trying to think past the fear that I was feeling. I remember the pair of handcuffs I remember seeing under the papers beneath my feet so I used that little, I don't know how to describe it, like scoopy motion. I managed to use my feet to

scoop the handcuffs up and use my heels and toes to push them under the bottom of the seat as far as I could. I was thinking of different things I could do to try to help myself, like if we were close enough to some upcoming lights or structures, if I ever made it to them. I could just grab the wheel and cause us to crash into them. Or maybe how if I got lucky enough for a cop to pass us, I could grab the wheel and swerve so he would appear to see a drunk driver and we get pulled over. I guiltily thought about the possibility of this man as just having a weird night and how if I did anything it would hurt him, but I told myself that that sort of thinking sort of got me into this mess in the first place.

He pulled off the road where there was still woods on both sides of us. On his side, the wooded trees were closer to the road. On mine, there was a small gap fully covered in thick, I don't know how many feet of snow, before the trees thickly picked up maybe 10 to 16 yards away. He turned off the car and coldly said that there was something wrong with the car and to get out with him. As he grabbed the keys and was stepping out of the car, I grabbed onto the center console and cried and pleaded not to make me get out with him because it was too cold. He turned around to face me, his door still open and shouted at me to get out of the car because we had to go check out the trunk bed hatch. I dug my fingernails deeper into the console, thinking my cries of no and head shaking

would cause him to come around to my side of the car and drag me out himself. I was crying and said, please John, I'm so cold and scared. I was thinking of everything I'd heard. Humanize yourself. Use first names. He stared at me in this way I can't even describe to this day. I don't even know how to start. He got back in the car and slinked towards my window, scared he would drag me over the console. He turned off the lights and everything just looked dark blue. He stared at the steering wheel for what felt like years before lighting a cigarette and looking out his window and back at me then back out his window. He heard me shuffle my feet on the newspapers. I was just adjusting my legs but while still staring out his window

told me if I thought about running he'd had a quick way to get where he wanted me. And oddly enough I was sort of thinking of running minutes before that, but reasoned that if he wanted me out of the car, then I definitely should stay in. Otherwise, he would chase me or shoot me. In case he had his hunting rifle in the back, I didn't dare look. I'm glad I was right. I think at that point, I sort of hit some sort of bottom of my reserve, and instead of panic, there was sort of a numbness and exhaustion.

There was still an occasional hot tear or two but I just remember being numb. I talked to a psychiatrist about this sort of thing and he thinks it just came from my ex-boyfriends giving me PTSD. It was dead quiet but I finally just barely audibly told him that my friend was still waiting for me and asked about his wife and children and he flatly said that he didn't have a wife or children and that his house was empty. I asked him what he was thinking about and he said, I'm thinking about what to do with you. He didn't say it angrily, he just said it flatly and coldly which sort of scared me more.

I did start getting worked back up to cry and at that point he told me not to cry and turned the car on offering me some heat. I just cried and said I wanted to go home. Eventually he started driving and kept driving until we were approaching a gas station. I was gauging the right time to reach for the wheel but before I could he started slowing down. While pulling up he told me not to tell anyone or he would find me. Then he told me all that he was doing was teaching me a lesson to not hitchhike with strangers. He was almost coming to a complete stop when he told me to get out before he changed his mind.

Before he could even get another look at me to assess my understanding, I was already down out of the truck and sprinting towards the gas station. The panic was overwhelming me, but then I stopped and remembered to try to see his license plate. I turned around but only caught the blur of the last three numbers as he was driving off. I ran inside and asked the clerk behind the counter to please call the police. I waited until the police officer got there and I'll be honest, I was a little scared that it would end up being John. My fears melted away when the new faced police officer got there. I gave him the description of John, his appearance, the vehicle color and type, the parts of the license plate

number I had caught, the fact that he was an off-duty cop, just basically anything I could. I asked him if I could look at the camera and the officer disappeared in the back for a little bit then came back out saying that there was nothing on them. I asked if I would be able to look and the officer said no and asked me if I didn't trust him and I told him of course I did. The officer gave me a ride to my friends lecturing me for hitchhiking consisting of him repeatedly asking if I knew who Ted Bundy was. Of course I knew, I was just naive to think it could never happen to me and I was just desperate for some warmth. I never heard anything back about the report that was made so I would try to follow up and each time I did they never got back to me aside from this one time I was told my case number

didn't exist but that didn't stop me from trying to follow up. Throughout the months and years I asked my friend whose home I slept over that one night if she had ever heard of any like weirdness or anything since that incident had happened to her or anyone up there and she always says no. So I sort of let it go and try to tell myself that maybe he actually was just trying to teach me a lesson or something. I mean I definitely never hitchhiked again so if it was a lesson it certainly worked. I never heard anything back having to do with the case. I never heard of any other odd experiences up there. Maybe it was just one man trying to teach me something. But honestly, sometimes I think I tell myself all of that to help me sleep better at night. It all felt very real. Even if it wasn't real, I'm really glad that I didn't get out of

that car in the woods that night. I've been debating about whether or not to post this, but I finally decided that it's been long enough for me to talk about it. This happened to me and my mom a few months ago back in October. It happened in a very rural part of New Hampshire, like a side road on a side road type of neighborhood. It was pouring out, as it had been raining for pretty much the whole day. My mom had gotten back from down the street in my sister's car and I was on the couch in the living room when suddenly I hear the doorbell ring. Our front door has a big glass pane in the front so you can look out from the inside and someone can look in from the outside. Through this window pane, I see a man.

I didn't get a great look at him as I didn't have my long distance glasses on. The man noticed that I had seen him and waved as if though he was trying to be friendly. For the rest of this post, I'll just refer to him as Poncho Man. I got up and thought about opening the door for Poncho Man, but relented. As I couldn't properly see who it was, I didn't want to let a stranger into the house. Instead, I went down the hall to my parents' bedroom where my mom was getting ready for work. She asked what was up, and I explained to her that a man in a poncho was outside our door and wanted to talk to us. She went as white as a ghost. Immediately, she stopped getting ready,

closed and locked the bedroom door, and started checking the windows to make sure they were locked. I asked her what was going on. My mom explained that as she was driving home, she had seen the poncho man. He had been standing, motionless on the side of the main street. As soon as my mom turned down a road, he started to walk, presumably to follow her. She said the encounter was weird but thought nothing more of it. Why would someone be out in the pouring rain, down a back road in the afternoon? It was like he was waiting for something. I started to panic as well. My mom called my aunt, the two were like best friends, and asked what she should do. My aunt told her to call the police immediately,

and so we did. We proceeded to pace around the bedroom, frantically looking out the windows to see if we could see Poncho Man. From where the bedroom was angled, it was impossible to look at the front porch and see if he was still there, but we were desperate for anything. After what felt like hours, we finally saw a police car pull up. We carefully unlocked the door and went down to let the officer in, and we explained what we saw and he agreed to do a scan around the neighborhood. As he left, I noticed that there was something on the doorknob. I took it off and it was a political ad for a candidate that was running for office. It's possible Poncho Man was just campaigning for the candidate but there are a lot of holes in that story. It was pouring out so why would you go

door to door? And why would you go that route in such a rural neighborhood? The houses are so far apart you barely make a dent on foot. The time doesn't make sense either. Sure, I and my mom were home, but it was about four in the afternoon. Most people would still be at work, so you'd probably get no response from knocking anyway. Eventually, the officer returned, and he had found the guy down the road and had questioned him. Poncho Man was able to ID himself, and he claimed that he was a political campaigner and was just knocking on doors for that reason. When probed further, conveniently enough, Poncho Man couldn't provide any other door signs as the one he had left on her house was the last

one. And that makes the campaign story even more absurd. Our house is in the middle of the street, it's not like we were the last by any means so why wouldn't you bring enough for the whole street? Even the officer pointed this out to us and said it was unusual behavior. Although the officer was suspicious of him, there wasn't anything he could do about it, as there was no way to prove intent. He told us to be alert and do not hesitate to call if Poncho Man returns. I fast forward a few weeks and I start noticing that a police car seems to be permanently stationed down the road from us about a three minute drive. I got curious and asked my mom about it and she said that

there were multiple break-ins into houses down the road and the police were doing a sort of sting operation. The Poncho Man encounter and the break-ins may be unrelated but considering how Poncho Man acted, I have a sinking feeling that they're connected. To be continued... be exact. I'm a huge fan of hiking or just simply taking walks in the woods. The only time I go alone is when I'm in the woods that I live near and this day I was not. I was with my friend Lars in a walk about three hours from my house. We were planning on traveling around and staying at motels in the meantime. That day we decided to take a walk in a popular area for people who like to walk in the woods like me.

The catch was that this woods was freaking huge. Not really bad to us though as we were pretty thrilled about it. There wasn't much. It was pretty, we escaped the crowd, but every now and then we could see someone walking by. We walked for a while until we got to this one spot. Not too different from the rest except for one thing. Nobody else was around in the section, and that's why me and Lars took this turn. The other turn had a bit of people. After a while of walking down this path, we spotted a man. A naked man. And we gave each other the look and turned around, and the man was slightly off the path, bent over and looking at something. As me and Lars were walking back, talking about the strange man, I heard a voice behind me. I turned to see the man, who was talking to us about the bug he picked up.

I got a good look at him. He was a bit tall, nothing crazy, bald, with a few brown hairs beginning to grow, but completely naked. I flashed the man a smile and sped up. We got out of the place as fast as we could and once we got to the car we kind of just laughed and yes it was creepy but in a weird way it was kind of funny. The car ride was nothing so we'll skip to the motel and as we were checking in the motel we see the man walk in. He was a bit hard to recognize considering the fact that now he had clothes on, just torn up clothes though, and he waited behind us in line. And good thing we were almost done checking in because as soon as we did, we went right to our room and locked it with no thought. Now it was definitely getting creepy.

Was he following us or was this just some coincidence? We both decided that we weren't going to stay at this hotel for more than a night. Heck, I don't even want to stay one night if it weren't for Lars telling me that it was going to be fine. That night, Lars wanted to go outside for a cigarette. I don't smoke, but no way was I going to stay in this room alone. I followed him outside and we chatted for a bit. And after a few minutes, I see the guy walk out the doors. Lars put out his cigarette and began to walk inside, but before we got in, the guy pulled out what was probably a knife or something else sharp. It was dark, I could barely see, and started carving through his sleeve and right into

his arm. I saw liquid trickling to the ground and immediately knew that it was blood. I rushed into the lobby and Lars got the idea and followed and we alerted the staff but by the time they got someone to come out, the guy was gone. To this day I still have so many questions. Did he follow us? Why was he naked? Why was he doing that to himself? I'll probably never know the answer, but I honestly am still spooked, and I don't know what I'll do if I see him again. I just hope I don coming home to Brooklyn from a movie in Manhattan with my friends. I was the only one who lived in BK, so I walked home from the train alone. I was used to being out late by myself.

I had a midnight curfew, but I frequently broke it because I thought nothing bad would ever happen to me, despite an uptick of assaults in our neighborhood at the time. This night, however, I was actually slated to get home on time for once. It was the summer after I graduated high school and I was feeling amazing. I'd had a little to drink and a little to smoke and I felt like I was on top of the world. It was so hot out and I remember that I was wearing this long, sheer cape thing with a very tight and revealing little dress underneath. Not that anything would have probably been different if I had been wearing shorts and a

t-shirt. However, because of my fun little outfit, I was feeling myself and being so stupid, taking selfies while I walked down the dark streets and listening to music with both headphones and not paying any attention to my surroundings. And I think I even sang as I walked. I got to my building after finishing my ten minute walk from the train and walked up to the steps to our apartment. We lived in a brown stone with apartments in it and ours was on the third floor. We had a gate at the bottom of the steps separating us from the sidewalk. I pulled out my headphones and began to fumble with my keys at the top of the steps. And just as I had found the correct key, still humming to myself and thinking about my great night, I heard the latch on the gate clank as if it were being opened. I turned around and

saw a man standing at the gate, staring at me. He was young, probably early twenties, wearing a grey hoodie with the hood up, covering part of his face. But I could see his eyes, and immediately I knew something was off because of how blank yet nervous his expression was. One hand was on the handle of the gate, as if he were about to open it completely, but stopped once I turned around. Somehow my fight or flight instinct didn't kick in yet. It was probably the alcohol. I cautiously called down, can I help you? And he didn't respond. I looked him over more closely and realized then that his other hand, the one not on the gate, was moving, fast and low near his waist. I registered that he was touching himself, gasped, and within

milliseconds, he was sprinting up the stairs behind me, reaching out his hand to grab me. My brain clicked into place and I started screaming at the top of my lungs as I jammed my key into the door and slammed it behind me. I ran up the stairs to my apartment screaming for my dad, not even stopping to make sure the door was locked, thinking that if he followed me upstairs, he'd soon be met by my very tall father and our very loud dogs who slept in the bedroom next to our apartment door. As I looked over my shoulder while tearing my way up the stairs, I saw his face pressed up against the glass window still watching me, but now his eyes were furious. I ran into our apartment, still screaming to my parents to call the police. My dad went upstairs and looked around, but he was gone. The police came anyways after my mom called and came upstairs to take my statements so they could make their report. The two cops

who showed up asked me to describe him. I did and they said they'd cruise around for him and regardless if he was found, a detective would call me soon to make a more detailed report. But they never called me. There were many more assaults that continued to take place in my neighborhood for the rest of summer and I shudder every time I think about what would have happened if I hadn't taken out my headphones before I began unlocking my door. I don't know how long he was following me for, and as far as I know, he was never caught. From that point on, for those last few weeks before I left for college, I would call my dad and make him meet me at the train station so he could walk me home safely. Now, as an adult, I am far more cautious than when I was a teenager. I am always extra

aware of my surroundings, especially at night, and I don't look at my phone while I walk home. I'll never get the image of his blank stare as he lunged towards me out of my head. I will never forget the feeling in the pit of my stomach as I realized that he followed me home, watching me and touching himself, and was now waiting to strike. It was like being a deer realizing it's being stalked by some sort of predator. Because a predator, like a tiger, accidentally stepped on a twig and gave itself away, right before it could pounce on its prey. The story took place in early 2017. I had recently moved from a major city to a small town in the Midwest to get myself together and separate myself from bad habits that I had developed.

Previously, I had been living on the west coast and worked for a couple who were pot farmers, just trimming their weed for one season with a few other trimmers. Nothing major stuck out to me other than the guy in his mid-thirties who was a major jerk and super protective of his weed, and his girlfriend was someone I wouldn't normally get along with, but she was alright. I trimmed their weed that season and they paid me a portion up front. They, he, said the rest would come after he sold a few pounds or whatever because that was just how the business went. They did end up paying me within a few weeks so all was good with me. However, the man here kept texting me after I moved with random hey how you doings. I never liked the guy, got bad vibes from the get-go, but his wife and girlfriend was a friend of a close friend, so I sort of gave them the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, the wife and girlfriend started messaging me via text nearing spring after I had worked for them trimming weed that fall season, asking if I would be available to house-sit for them while they were on vacation out of the country. At this point, I was living in Colorado and the farm was in California. I did not have a permanent job set up yet and they were offering good money to house sit plus make some extra money trimming weed that they had left over for the season. Stupidly I drove my butt 17 hours with dollar signs in my eyes and all was terrible from there on. I would like to write out something long and detailed and make this like a horror story but the gist of it is that someone was there at their house the entire time that I was house sitting. I'll try and set up the

scenario for as best I can. They have a full house with gardener's quarters attached to their main house. There was one bedroom and a bathroom, an electric stove, kettle, kitchen area in the gardener's bedroom. There was also a doorway from this area into the main house blocked by a bookshelf on my side. When they invited me to stay and house it, they were there for about two or three days and part of their stay included drilling the door shut on the opposite side so that I couldn't enter their house. This didn't bother me, and I honestly understood why they may lock up their house, but things got really freaking weird afterwards. I had been there alone for a few days, just trimming weed, walking the dogs,

filling the hummingbird feeders, watching the house like I was supposed to. Honestly, this house was out in the middle of BFE so I don't even think anyone would have even come out there anyway. The girlfriend slash wife would call from Morocco every so often to check up on me. I thought everything was fine until I started to hear water running from the kitchen inside of the house. The part of the house that I had no access to but was directly connected to. I immediately called the couple or texted them maybe and told them that I could hear someone in their house. And their response was literally, it's none of your concern what you hear on the

other side of the wall. You guys, this just turned my stomach. I was in the middle of nowhere, locked by a gate on their property, hired to house sit, and all of a sudden it was not my concern if someone was inside their place. It freaked me out. I still had two more weeks to be at this place and without phone service I was properly freaked out. Over the next few days I would feel scared and calm in sort of waves. At one point I was sitting outside with the dogs and they all ran up to the side of the house, wagging their tails like they were greeting someone and I heard a very quiet shush, and footsteps patter off.

I continued to hear the TV microwave water running from the main part of the house. The language the girlfriend slash wife was using with me via text was too personal in regard to what I was doing. I mean, sure, they could have had a camera installed, although I scorched the room for any devices, but the sounds and even the dogs reacting to what I heard was enough for me. Once I realized that I was house-sitting but also being spied on in some weird way, I started to have fun with it. I don't know if I figured that I was going to die anyway, or maybe if I acted crazy enough they wouldn't want me for whatever their purposes were. But one night, I was out on the small porch steps having

a very late cigarette. It had to be eleven or midnight and I could hear someone walking around the perimeter of the house. So I stood up, opened the door to the gardener's quarters and closed the door. As if I had walked back inside but I just opened the door and closed it to give that impression, keeping my position with my cigarette on the porch. Immediately someone walked out from the side of the house because they thought I went inside, noticed me, and ran into the woods. In my mind, I set up a tiny trap to see if I was delusional and it proved that I wasn't. So I started doing crazy, dumb stuff because I was alone. Nothing too wild, just blasted backstreet boys, set up their garbage cans like a drum set and walked around topless. Honestly, I thought that

if these people were crazy enough to freaking watch me while I house sat for them, I had to do something more ridiculous to push them away. Maybe that doesn't make sense, but I can't help to reference the Hey Arnold episode where a bully is after him and he says, don't hit me, I'll hit me, I'm crazy. Anyway, the couple finally came back to their house from Morocco and acted like they didn't want to pay me. They did after some polling and tugging, but good god, don't ever go house sit and not really know the people your house sitting for in the Emerald Triangle, or just don't even go there. It's truly a shady business. It was the spring after I graduated college. I'm a 22-year-old female and didn't know what I wanted to do with my life.

So, I decided to take a pause and ride my bike down the coast from Canada to Mexico. I was pretty nervous to be going by myself but for the majority of the time I felt safe. Halfway through or so I got pretty comfortable with sleeping alone in fairly empty campsites and parks. There were even some stretches on the trip that I rode with other bike tourists. This one encounter however brought my guard back up for the remainder of the time. I was halfway down the Oregon coast and was a mile or so from the campground that I had planned to stay for the night. There was this notable, yellow vintage Ferrari car that had passed me headed in the opposite direction.

When I pulled into the campground, I stopped at the information board to look at the map and fees. As I'm sitting there, I see the yellow car coming down the road and it stops where I am. This older guy in his late 50s, maybe early 60s gets out and starts looking at the board with me. He's friendly and seems completely normal, charismatic even. He's asking me about my trip and starts mentioning how he's from the area but has never checked out this campground. At this point, I'm still pretty naive. There's plenty of nice people I've met on the trip that chat me up and ask me about the bike tour. He's talking to me and getting closer and this part is what starts to make me uneasy.

He would repeatedly reach out his hand and shake mine like he was about to leave but every time he shook my hand, he would grab my forearm with his other hand and do this weird gasp laugh thing. The way he did it looked insane and the arm grasp was very firm. It sent shivers down my spine. Then he dives into another topic and repeats this freaky handshake maybe two times more in between. I realize that I'm completely out of sight from anyone in the campground. I have no phone service and I'm now very close to him and in this open car door. There's a knot in my stomach. I'm on the verge of tears and my voice is shaking with every response.

At the time, I didn't even know why, but something felt very off about him. I finally speak up loud, hoping someone can hear me and tell them that I got to get going, run to my bike and speed to the campground. When I get there, I don't even try to find the hike and bike spots and just throw my tent down directly across from the camp host. Again, I had a lot of encounters with random strangers at this point, but none of them terrified me like this one did. I fought with the idea that

he was probably just an overly friendly guy, but the fact that he would repeatedly grab my arm and laugh was just frightening. All in all, most people I met were very sweet and it made me very trusting of others. Even if he was harmless, his actions were a good reminder that I had to be mindful of my vulnerable situation and be much more alert. About two years ago, a group of my friends went out to a concert. We had a good time, plenty to drink, and the concert had ended and we were outside trying to figure out a place to cure our drunchies. We were standing in a circle on the sidewalk and our friend group consisted of seven guys and one girl. Some random guy comes up and stands way too close to the girl in our group. We didn't know what he was doing and it was very odd. All seven of us guys just stared at him like, what are you doing? He noticed us staring at him and he just silently left. Our friend, Lexi, had a disgusted look on her face and told us he was

standing so close that she could feel his boner on her leg. As he gets further up the street, we see him approach another woman who ignores him and keeps going on her way. He then turns around and starts coming back to where we are and walks past us staring at our friend Lexi and we tell him to keep it moving you creep. About two minutes later we hear a woman screaming and our whole group starts spinning towards the screams. He's fully on top of a woman and there's a guy laying on the ground next to the woman screaming. My friend jumps on his back and gets him in a headlock and starts pulling him off the woman. I was fuming with anger and disgusted and just started punching the guy in the face multiple times while my friend had him in a headlock. At this point the guy is basically

unconscious so we stop and leave him lying there on the concrete. The guy who was lying on the concrete next to the woman being assaulted then wakes up and comes over and kicks the creeper in the face very hard. Apparently the creeper came up to this guy and woman and started trying to touch the woman and saying that he wants to do terrible things to her. Well the guy and the woman were boyfriend and girlfriend so obviously the guy was livid. But they were out celebrating his birthday and he was super drunk and unable to defend himself. The creeper guy punched him in the face, knocked him out, and had the woman to the ground and began assaulting her, which is when we showed up. I'm just thankful that we were around and showed up quickly as it could have been so much worse. I normally don't condone violence at all, but sometimes it's the only option. Last night at around 5am I was asleep.

I heard a lot of the dogs in the neighborhood, including mine, barking. I tried to ignore them because they do that sometimes. They bark for anything and everything. Then a couple of seconds later I think I hear what sounds like people yelling. At least two different people. I'm still half asleep, so at first I'm thinking it's a bunch of teenagers just being rowdy and annoying. I used to do stuff like that. But then I started to understand what they were saying. It sounds more like arguing. I'm starting to wake up and grab my phone and call the police. I'm on the phone with dispatch

and hear what sounds like a woman screaming bloody murder. I've never heard anyone scream in such agony. And then I hear a man's voice go, oh god, oh god, oh god. And dispatch tells me that the other people have called the police so they're on their way. Sounds like the people are right in my yard. My mom is awake at this point and comes to my room asking if I hear it too. We finally get the courage to look out the window. It's just one woman and she's standing right under the streetlight near our yard and screaming. At points she's making her voice deeper and kind of sounds like a man but it's just her. Her hair is tangled and she's wearing only shorts and a tank top in January. The police pull up two minutes later and they

try patting her down. Every time they go to pat her down she grabs her pockets. Eventually they just arrest her. I know she probably just wasn't all there or high but it was really scary. I'd never seen someone acting like that and I'd never heard someone in such agony. I don't know what was wrong with her or what happened to her after that, but I honestly can't stop thinking about it. To be continued... and Friday at 7pm EST. 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

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