The Lets Read Podcast - 273: MY PSYCHOTIC NEIGHBOR | 19 True Scary Stories / Rain Ambience | EP 261

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about dark family secrets, social workers & creepy tenants HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT? [e-mail] FOLLOW ME ON - ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsRead ♫ Music, Audio Mix & Cover art: INEKT https://www.youtube.com/@inekt Today's episode is sponsored by: - Betterhelp - Acorns

6 years ago, at the tender age of 29, I became the recipient of my granddad's home after he died. It was very surprising if I'm being honest, but the story goes that shortly before he died, he had his last will and testament amended so that my parents could get the majority of his money while I received full ownership of his old Georgian townhouse. I think the idea was that since my parents already owned their own home, passing his house along to me was a way of getting me onto the property ladder nice and early. I appreciated the sentiment back then and I appreciate it now. I still live in that house and it's where I'm actually typing this right now. But when I first inherited

it, it left me with something of a problem. I wasn't doing all that great financially at the time and when you're no longer renting, there's no landlord to summon whenever anything goes wrong in your home. I learned very quickly when I was living somewhere above my pay grade but in addition to taking on extra hours at work and fighting for a promotion, I needed some fast cash. And that, boys and girls, is how I became a very young and very hesitant landlord. It just so happened that the basement of my granddad's old house had some plumbing fixtures, and that, with a little bit of work, it could be turned into a single-bedroom flat. It would be a small one, just a kind of crash pad really, but I'd easily be able to advertise it for

about 250 to 300 pounds a month, which would cover all my bills and council tax with a wee bit left over to spare. Doing the place up was a bit of an investment, and I put quite a bit of money of my granddad's inheritance into turning it into not just a livable space, but a pretty cozy one too. My philosophy was, if I wouldn't be excited to live there if I was a few years younger, then there was no way I was about to ask upwards of $2.50 a month for it. I wanted a few extra quid, not to become a single property slumlord, and I thought that a nicer property would attract nicer tenants. I'd like to think that I was right about that too, because my first tenant was this lovely master student. But then, with all the lockdowns hitting at that point, and as we all know, that changed a lot of people's financial situations dramatically. My lovely master student had to move out, and it might sound a bit silly,

but losing that $250 a month was quite a big hit to my pocketbook. I was home all the time, so my bills went up, and with it being COVID, I just couldn't find anyone to move in, since everyone was basically paralyzed by all the restrictions. Things only started to loosen up again around Christmas time and by that point, I was absolutely desperate for a tenant. Then after putting up a round of fresh ads on various rental websites, I got an application from a guy called Stefan. Stefan wasn't his actual name, but he was a youngish Romanian guy, so I've just picked a

random Romanian name to keep it anonymous and for reasons that become obvious as the story progresses. Stefan seems shy and quite artsy, but aside from that, that's all I really knew about him. A lot of landlords will ask for proof of earnings and from foreign nationals, a copy of their visa and all of that. But me, all I was interested in is if Stefan could pay the deposit and his first month's rent up front. That'd have covered me over the Christmas period, and if I had issues with Stefan afterwards, then so be it. But he paid the next month, and the next,

and by his fourth or fifth month of living in the basement, I was more than happy to extend his six-month contract to an indefinite one. I had zero idea of what Stefan did for a living. All I knew is that he traveled into Edinburgh a lot, and he paid the rent on time. Everything else was none of my business. I also have to emphasize just how quiet Stefan was. Half the reason I knew nothing about him was because we never saw each other. Occasionally on the first of the month, he'd just slip an envelope full of cash through my letterbox and that's the most interacting I'd do with him for a whole month. I didn't think he was actively trying to avoid me.

I just thought that that was his way. He was out a lot, never played any loud music, and he always paid the rent on time. In many ways, he was a dream tenant, but then around month 7 or 8, so late summer of 2021, I started noticing some increasingly weird things. The first was that Stefan seemed to be getting an awful lot of deliveries to his flat. The entrance to his flat was just outside my living room window, and one morning, I saw a delivery truck at the end of the drive, while Stefan was signing for something in a large cardboard pallet.

It looked like Ikea furniture or something, and he caught my eye as he carried it back to his door, but I just gave him a wave and that was that. Another weird thing about Stefan was that whenever we did bump into one another, he sometimes just wouldn't return my greeting. I'd say, morning Stefan, or ask, you alright Stefan? And he'd just look at me in acknowledgement, but never reply. The first few times I just thought that he was a bit shy or something,

but then it got to the point where I thought that it might be a kind of language barrier thing. The Scottish accent isn't the easiest to understand, and like I said, I put it down to a bit of communication barrier thing at first. But after a while, I started thinking something was a bit weird about Stefan. I know that he wasn't obligated to talk to me or anything, it's just something that I look back on now and think, yeah, maybe I should have paid a bit more attention to that. But anyway, back to the deliveries, there was a time when he was getting one one day, and he'd mostly hang around to sign for them himself, but then one day, something

arrived for him and he wasn't there to sign for it. The delivery man then knocks on my door and asks if I'll take care of it for the tenant. I tell him no problem, sign for the item, then I discover it's another large flat cardboard package, so big I needed the help of the delivery guy to get it safely into my hallway without dropping it. I keep it in my house until I see Stefan coming home later on that evening and I give a shout to let him know that I've got his package. Instead of thanking me or whatever, he looked almost panicked and immediately asked me if I'd opened it in a very accusatory fashion. I was taken aback a bit, told him no, I hadn't looked at his package, and if I'm being honest, I resented the accusation a wee bit. I told him as such too,

not in an aggressive way, but just to make it clear that I wasn't that kind of landlord or that kind of bloke, and he seemed to calm down after that and mumbled something about the contents being expensive. That was the last time I saw or spoke to Stefan before the incident. But before then, there was one more thing that had my concern mounting prior to that big incident. One day I nipped down to the local high street to get a few pints of milk. It's a short walk, ten minutes there, ten minutes back, but then as I'm returning with my bottles of milk, I see someone walk walk, 10 minutes there, 10 minutes back, but then as I'm returning with my bottles of milk, I see someone walk into the driveway of my house. It definitely wasn't

Stefan, so I sped up my walk a wee bit just to see who it was and what they wanted. When I got to my driveway, I saw this bloke, light-colored jacket and red hair, and he just sort of was staring at my house while walking slowly up the drive. I asked him, can I help you? And he almost jumped out of his skin before turning around to look at me. I was trying to be as friendly as I could, but I was still a bit wary of this bloke because he's both randomly on my property and he's acting all anxious and nervous, which to me was not a good sign. I started to back off a bit, asking him if we had a problem, and he used the space that I

gave him to dart down the driveway and suddenly out of sight. I walked out into the street to try and see where he'd ran off to, but when I looked, he was nowhere to be seen. I called the police just so that they had something logged. I wasn't overreacting and demanding a visit from any officers. I was just letting them know in case it happened again, at which point they'd know that it was an ongoing thing and therefore a more urgent situation. Anyway, I get that logged and then not long after, Stefan comes home and, just on a whim, I decided to tell him about the weird bloke in the driveway, just so he was forewarned if it happened again. I caught him in the driveway, told him about the bloke, and immediately he starts acting a bit cagey.

The way I see it, if Stefan didn't know him, he'd have acted as uninterested in me as he usually did. But he didn't. He actually stopped and conversed with me, as much as Stefan was capable of anyway. I started telling him what the guy looked like, and there was this definite look of recognition in his eyes, despite his attempts to hide it. But then I asked if he knew the guy, or if there was anything I needed to know about him. Stefan shook his head and then carried on towards the basement. I was a bit annoyed to be honest. I could tell that he was lying when he shook his head,

but then again, what was I going to do? Interrogate him? If he didn't want to tell me, he wasn't going to tell me. And the best I could do was make it clear that I'd be calling the police again if there was any unwelcome visits. And that'd be a lot less likely if I knew who he was. I felt like that was me giving Stefan a soft out, so to speak. Just tell me who it is, and why he's hanging around, and I'll try not to get him nicked. But again, he just nods and sort of walks off, like he doesn't want to tell me. And in that moment, I knew it wasn't over. I just had a feeling. This guy had come looking for Stefan, and I was almost sure of it.

It was just a question of why. He didn't seem dangerous or anything. I wasn't exactly scared. I was just a bit uneasy about some stranger creeping around my property when I wasn't around. Anyway, a few weeks go by and there's no sign of our skittish ginger friend at all, so I start to basically forget his visit ever occurred at all. And Stefan had obviously dealt with the situation because the old ginger bloke hadn't showed up again. And if he hadn't dealt with him and the ginger visitor had simply lost interest, well, it had all worked out the same way anyway, hadn't it? So then, one Friday evening, I once again nipped down to the pub to see a few old pals of mine.

I only went for one or two pints, as it was a last minute invite, but then more and more of my old mates started showing up, so I stayed out later and later until, admittedly, I was at least two-thirds pished, and by that time I came to my senses and headed home before closing. Like I said, I'm a bit worse for the wear, so I popped my headphones in, listened to a few tunes on the way back, and I'm almost certain that I was singing along by the time I got to my driveway. In fact, I know that I was singing because I was on exactly the third verse of Glen Campbell's Southern Nights by the time I got to my living room, took out my earbud things, and then tried to fire the old Bluetooth to my speakers so I could carry on with my one-man karaoke night. But then, in the little window of silence between the song

going from my headphones to my speakers, I heard something else that caught my attention. I thought I was going mad at first, so I paused the music, and stood there in silence just straining my eyes until I realized what it was. It was the sound of music coming from the basement. For the first time ever, Stefan was playing music so loud that I could actually hear it. Come to think of it, that was the first time I'd ever heard Stefan do anything at all, and I assumed that he was only playing his music that loud because he thought that I was going to be out all night. Which, to be fair, isn't completely out of the ordinary for me.

I could hear the sort of bassy thump of his music, some sort of EDM kind of beat, so I thought that he might have been having a sort of party. I didn't have a problem with it, but his wee basement flat didn't even have room to swing a cat, let alone have an actual shindig. I suppose I was feeling a bit sociable, so I walked out into the driveway and peered over the railings to where his little kitchen window was. I know that's a bit of intrusion, but I was drunk, curious, and honestly wanted to carry on the party a wee bit, so off I went. But when I looked, I couldn't see anyone in Stefan's small kitchen,

meaning that it must have been quite a small gathering confined to the bedroom, which was probably the most spacious room in the flat. I was feeling like a right perv by that point, so I took myself off back inside, turned up my own music, and then went into the kitchen to make myself some drunk food. I'm doing my thing in the kitchen, but I'm still thinking about Stefan and his little party going on downstairs. I knew next to nothing about the bloke and assuming that he wasn't just blasting that music down there on his own, I was happy that he finally had some social life. I definitely didn't want to be the creepy landlord trying to interject myself into his personal life either, so I resigned myself to having one last beer with my food and then headed off to bed. So I microwaved some chicken drumsticks, grabbed a

final beer from the fridge, and then watched a bit of trash TV as I'm eating. Then when I'm all done, I wash up, go back to the TV room, and turn everything off. Now once again, I'm standing there in silence and I can hear that same thump, thump, thump of Stefan's dance music from downstairs. But then, that time, it was accompanied by another, much less rhythmic noise that sounded an awful lot like someone shouting. It was one voice, that much was clear, but after kneeling down and putting my ear closer to the floorboards, I realized that it sounded more like screaming. And that's the point when I had this real uh-oh kind of moment, one that was probably slowed down from how smashed

I still was. But it eventually dawned on me that I had to go down to Stefan's flat and see if everything was okay, because whoever was screaming down there was obviously in a huge amount of distress and they weren't shutting up anytime soon. I ran outside, rushed down the stairs to Stefan's flat and then when I listened, I could still hear the screaming. I knew it was urgent, seriously urgent, so I started calling out, Stefan, I'm going to break in, hang on. And then, that's what I did. I kicked at his door, over and over again, nearly going arse over tit a few times, but I got that door open.

The man was still screaming when the door flew open, and that music was still going too, but I could barely hear it at all. I was that fixated on those horrible screams. There was no one in Stefan's wee kitchen and dining area, so the only place left to look was the bedroom, which was also where the music and the screams were coming from. So I rushed towards the bedroom, peered around the threshold, and the first thing that drew my attention was the man who was screaming. He was sitting with his back against the bedroom wall, knees pulled up to his chest, and I didn't see it at first, but he was attached to the wall by something that was around his neck. It was short, keeping him low and close to the wall,

basically forcing him into the position that he was in, and when he saw me, we locked eyes. For the briefest of moments, something about his eyes seemed oddly similar to me, and then once again, all I could hear were those screams. After he'd spotted me, instead of just wordless screaming, he started begging me in these screeches to get it off, get it off me, please get it off me. I would have done it too, I really would have. I had no idea what was going on, but I was terrified for the bloke right up until I saw Stefan on the other side of the room. He was lying there, not a stitch of clothing on him, with more blood than I've ever seen in my life pulled around underneath, and the handle of what I assumed was a knife sticking out of his stomach. So much blood was soaked into the carpet that it looked thick like

mud, and his eyes were wide open. I mean wide open, like he'd passed out with a shocked look on his face. In an instant, the screaming man's plea to get it off of him wasn't nearly so appealing anymore. I assumed that if I did get that neck restraint thing off of him, he was going to do to me what he'd just done to Stefan, and as you can imagine, I didn't fancy that at all. So instead of doing what he was begging me to do, I just bolted out of the flat, up the stairs, and back into my house before calling the police. Then, while I was on the phone with them, I realized why the screaming man had seemed so oddly familiar to me. It was the ginger guy I'd seen walking up my driveway a few weeks prior. It had to be him, I was sure of it, and I've never had that confirmed, but I'm bloody sure that it was

him. Anyway, I was up in my house, basically screaming down the phone to 999 to get police and paramedics out to me as fast as they possibly could. I didn't know if Stefan was actually dead or not. He bloody well looked like it, but I know paramedics can work wonders if they get to a person in time, so I made it clear how urgently they were needed. There are two things from that phone call that really stuck with me. The first was that the operator stayed so calm throughout the whole thing to the point that it sounded really bizarre to me. For example, I remember telling her, there's someone tied up down there, there's something around his neck, and she repeated in the most monotone voice, there's someone tied up, is there? Okay, is the injured person still

breathing? She said it back to me like it was nothing, like it was the most boring thing she'd ever heard. Then she went right back to her job of assessing the situation at hand. I know she was just doing her job and that it speaks volumes of how unflappably brave our 999 operators are, but in the moment, it made me a little bit angry. It also made me angry that she asked me to go back downstairs to take another look at Stefan. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was go back down there to see all those things and hear that guy's screams again. I kept telling her, no way, I'm not going back down there to see all those things and hear that guy's screams again. I kept telling her, no way, I'm not going back down there, mainly because I'm still very much under the impression

that the ginger bloke down in the basement was the one who stabbed Stefan. Only when I made it clear that it was dangerous down there, potentially anyway, did the operator relent and she told me to wait in a safe area inside my house until the police showed up. By that time, I couldn't hear any more screaming coming from downstairs, but I could still hear the music, and God help me, I wish I'd turned it off when I had the chance to. The police turned up quite quickly. It felt like a lot longer than it actually was, but to their credit, they only took around ten minutes to get out to me.

I directed them down into the basement flat, and they made sure the guy who had been screaming was safe but secured, and the paramedics arrived not long after to do what they could, but it was too late for Stefan. I actually thought that he might have had a chance at the time because none of the paramedics mentioned anything about him being dead, and they still looked like they were trying to save his life when they put him in the back of the ambulance. It was only later when some police officers told me a murder investigation had been opened, and that's when it really sunk in that Stefan was gone. The flat downstairs went from being a nice little earner to being an active crime scene for about 10 days afterwards.

The police had the whole circus out. Forensics, CID, social workers. They were in and out at all hours, and that was all after extensive interviews with me, and I'm assuming interviews with that ginger guy too. They also took away all the weird contraptions in Stefan's bedroom, which is something I should have mentioned earlier. There were all these things, like exercise equipment, but it looked more like something you'd use to torture someone. I'm assuming that's what was going on anyway, some kind of party or game that went wrong,

and I'm also assuming that's what Stefan was having delivered all that summer. It certainly explained why he didn't want me to see what was inside his packages. Obviously, I mentioned all this to the police during the interviews, and I kept in touch with the two detectives who were responsible for working on the case, and that's how I found out that he was probably going to get off with manslaughter, and that's if the CPS even brought charges against him at all. According to the man himself, the ginger bloke I mean, they'd been playing a kind of game when Stefan had produced a knife out of nowhere.

He was restrained and terrified, but his legs were free, so he kicked out at Stefan, who went tumbling back, and he fell on his own knife, he said. The CID guy I spoke to said the story matched the crime scene, and it's not like the guy could have arranged it that way, considering he was basically bolted to the wall. It sounded like an open and shut self-defense thing to me, but then apparently it all depended on what the prosecution service said, and obviously I wasn't privy to that decision or what happened to the ginger guy in the end. I also have no idea what happened to Stefan's body, if it was taken back to Romania, or if he had family there to receive it. The only time I asked, the detective told me that he had no idea, and how all that was down to the foreign office and had nothing to do with the police. The last time I spoke to the detective was the last time I heard anything about Stefan's death, and now I'm left being the owner

of a home in which someone has been murdered. I'm not proud of it, and I certainly don't advertise it. And I don't believe in ghosts, but some of my tenants might, and that's half the reason I'm not proud of it, and I certainly don't advertise it. And I don't believe in ghosts, but some of my tenants might, and that's half the reason I'm not putting any major details into this. People say sometimes I sound like I feel sorry for Stefan, which I suppose sounds crazy if it really was about the murder of the Wee Ginger Guy, slaughterhouse style, right there in my basement. But if I'm being honest, I do think it was just like a weird roleplay thing that went horribly, horribly wrong.

Or maybe that's just what I tell myself, so I don't consider myself in any sort of danger for all that time with a wannabe Jeffrey Dahmer living right beneath my feet. Back in the late 80s, around the time my first son was born, I used to work for quite a large property management company in Seattle. We managed about 100 to 150 apartments and rental homes at any one time, and my team was charged with scheduling and carrying out viewings for potential tenants. I had quite a large team under me, and we were very close-knit, which made what happened in the fall of 89 that much harder to bear. I worked with a team of very talented young men and women, but perhaps one of the brightest I ever worked with was a young lady named Vicky. Vicky was by far the best talent we had on staff during the fall of 89. She could close almost anything.

I used to put her on viewings of a place we'd been having trouble filling, and within a few days, Vicky had us a tenant. The same applied to the more high-brow properties too, where an empty unit meant thousands in lost revenue every month. I'd put Vicky on it, and then lo and behold, we'd have a tenant within weeks, sometimes days, if the market was right. So, when I got a call regarding one of our six-figure executive apartments in one of the new high-rises downtown, I knew Vicky was the right girl for the job. The place was probably one of the most expensive properties in our

portfolio, and it had been empty for almost three months at the time, so filling it would be a huge win for both my team and the company as a whole. So on the day of the viewing, I gave Vicky a call in the morning to make sure the appointment was still scheduled, then wished her the very best of luck. Not that she needed it, but I always found it best to create as positive an environment as possible, especially when it came to sales prospects. Then after hanging up the phone, I simply waited until the early afternoon to hear back from her on how it went. The viewing was scheduled for 1.15pm, so I expected it to be over at around 1.40-1.45 at the latest. After that, it was a short trip back to the office, and we'd find out if she'd sealed the deal or not.

But then, 2pm comes and goes, and there's no sign of Vicky. Then 2.30 comes and goes, and there's no sign of Vicky. Then 2.30 comes and goes and there's still no sign of her. We go from excited to hear from her to impatient to downright worried. So we tried calling her at home but there was no answer. Eventually it came to the end of office hours and we still hadn't heard from Vicky so I assured the girls that I'd keep on calling her out of office hours and that I'd let them know what I'd uncovered as soon as I uncovered it. I know that might seem like something of an overreaction, but it was so completely unlike Vicky to just go AWOL like that, and we just knew something had to be wrong. So I got home, and I kept on calling Vicky's home address every half hour or so.

I must have left like three different messages on her machine, just asking her to call me back, when my phone finally rang at around ten that night. I picked up, fighting off the urge to ask Vicky as soon as I did, but I might as well have asked her name because it was her, and the sense of relief that I felt at first was gigantic. I'd gotten it into my head that she'd been hit by some kind of medical emergency, so just to hear her voice and for her to tell me that she was fine was a huge relief. But then I could hear in her voice that she was not fine. She just meant that she was okay physically. Mentally, on the other hand, that was clearly a different thing entirely. I remember telling her that she

didn't have to tell me what happened, I just needed to know how long she needed to recover. But I also said that if she did want to tell me what happened, if she wanted to tell me something, I could pass it on to the rest of the team, then I was okay with that too. She told me everything. How she'd been talking to the police for the last few hours, how she felt like she needed a few days off, but no more than that. But most importantly, she told me the reason she'd talked to the cops and the reason she needed those days off to recover. And it all started with that afternoon viewing. We were all expecting some kind of high roller to show up to the viewing, as, like I'd already mentioned, the apartment in question was priced at thousands of dollars per month. So when a very average-looking Joe showed up and introduced himself as the prospective tenant,

Vicki said that she was a little taken aback. Obviously, you can never judge a book by its cover, especially when it comes to real estate. I've known a lot of very healthy buyers to dress like crap and so had Vicky, so she knew to turn on the charm all the same and give him the five-star treatment she'd give someone in a three-piece brioni. The band was unshaven, wearing an all-waterproof jacket, faded jeans, and dirty sneakers. But Vicky said that he greeted her very confidently and purposefully, and so she simply continued with the viewing as usual. The apartment in question was one or two above the 20th floor.

It was either the 21st or 22nd, I can't quite remember, but Vicky takes him up there and makes a little small talk along the way. The guy said he worked in computers, which actually made a whole lot of sense, and would have made a whole lot of sense to just about any property manager or realtor at the time. About ten years prior, two computer nerds moved from New Mexico to Seattle and established a little company known as Microsoft. And 10 years later, Seattle was practically flooded with all kinds of computer types, and a fair share of them had a big old chunk of change in their pocket once the company started to really take off. I'm telling you this to make it clear that by the time they got to the apartment,

whatever reservations Vicky had about the man's style of dress had completely dissipated, as they would have done if that were me doing the tour instead. They got to the apartment, and the guy's asking her a lot of financial questions. What are the monthly utilities estimated to be? Does the company offer a rent-to-buy program? And if so, what kind of time scale and value projections would he be looking at? Vicky trying her best to keep up with the guy, but he clearly knew what he was talking about. She couldn't just dazzle him with the kitchen island or the huge floor-to-ceiling windows.

He wanted cold, hard figures. So, Vicky being Vicky, she sets about giving them to him. Where she can't, she just gives estimates that are both optimistic and enticing as possible. But then all the same, the guy starts checking out the big floor-to-ceiling windows and gazing out over what was potentially his own personal vista of Seattle. Vicky said that she asked him if he liked the view, and he replied by asking if the windows opened. Vicki then explained that they did, via a hinge on the other side of the large panes center. You can open all four windows at any one time, with the bottom leaning towards you and the top leaning away. The fixtures were very strong, and the glass was tempered and

shatterproof, and it meant the apartment was pretty much off-limits to anyone with small children. A person could also quite easily squeeze themselves through the small gap if they really, really wanted to, but then who would ever do such a thing? Vicky mentioned almost all of that to the viewer, who replied that he didn't have any children, so the windows wouldn't be an issue. But then, he looks at Vicky, with this sort of sly smile, and says, But someone as small as you could fit under there pretty easy, right? Vicky said she thought it was a poor attempt at humor, so she returned a polite laugh and made a comment about how she'd never be in that situation. And I'm with her in that. If those windows were open, I'd always keep ten feet away at all times. I'm a real fraidy cat when it comes to heights,

you see, and I'm a 250-pound lump that'd have to run a couple of marathons before being able to even fit through that gap. But then, in response to Vicky's comment about never being in that position, the man replied, but what if someone forced you into that position? Vicky was a gem, but she was no pushover, so she politely informed the viewer that she didn't appreciate his style of humor, and would be grateful if he refrained from making such jokes. But he starts telling her, oh, it's not a joke, and that if he

really wanted to, he could force her down and shove her through the gap, sending her hurtling down hundreds of feet onto the concrete below. Vicky said that she felt her blood run cold, not just at what he'd said, but because of the way he said it too. He didn't say it with this deadpan expression. He said it like it was the most amusing idea that he'd had in a while, and I guess it amused him so much because it put the fear of God into Vicky. She said she started backing up away from him and instinctually looked over towards the door, but that only prompted the viewer to close the gap between them and assure her that any attempt to escape would be useless. Vicky reminded the guy that we had his name and contact details, but this only caused him to erupt into laughter.

He asked if she really thought that he was that stupid, that he'd used his real name to book a viewing where he'd planned on murdering the realtor. Then, upon seeing the expression on her face, the guy started laughing and insulting her, calling her a stupid bee and saying how she was so much dumber than she looked. Vicky said that that was the point that she got really scared. She said she raised her foot, took off her heel, then kicked off the other before brandishing the first as a weapon. She kept on backing up, ready to at least try and defend herself. But this time, the guy didn't try and follow her.

He just kept on laughing, even harder too, when he saw how afraid she was. Vicky hadn't been in that apartment before, and she'd already made a note of where the bedroom and bathroom were. So she knew that with each step that she took away from the viewer meant that she was one step closer to being able to lock herself in the bathroom. And so that's what she did. She kept on treading backwards, telling him that he'd crack his head open if he tried to rush her. Luckily, that had the guy doubled over laughing.

The Vicky said that she got this surge of adrenaline and knew that it was her moment to make a run for it. If she tried to go for the front door, there's no doubt that he'd catch her, as, like I've already mentioned, it was a very spacious apartment. But on the other hand, if Vicky rushed for the bedroom and its en suite bathroom with a thick lockable door, the guy would need superhuman speed to catch up with her in time. And that's what she did. She turned and ran to the bedroom and slammed the bathroom door behind her before turning the lock. She said that there was the obvious sense of relief from knowing that she had a nice thick door and a lock between her and that psycho. But then seconds later, something awful dawned on her.

Something the guy was so acutely aware of. He started mocking her again, laughing and saying things like, You've trapped yourself. I can't wait out here all night. If this was a time when cell phones were common, this wouldn't have been a problem. But all Vicky had was a simple beeper, or pager as they were sometimes known, which could only receive messages, not send them. Vicky said the guy knew this and kept on taunting her for the better part of half an hour before things finally went silent. She then thought that it might have been safe to leave, and she slowly turned the lock on the bathroom door before

opening slightly and peeking out to see if the guy was gone. He wasn't. He was just sitting on the little kitchen island in complete silence, staring at the bathroom door. He'd been waiting for her to come out. He didn't even rush to grab the door or anything either. Vicky just said that he'd started laughing again, saying that he didn't have to rush, that he'd wait there all night if he needed to. She had to stay inside that locked bathroom for hours and hours before she finally felt safe enough to come out,

and even then, she was completely gripped by the fear that the guy was lurking somewhere, waiting for her to come out. She walked back to the elevator with her high heel in hand, still hoping to use it as a weapon to defend herself. Then when she got down to the lobby, she burst into tears when the attendant asked her if everything was okay. That's when the cops were informed, and Vicky said they got to the building at around 5.30, which was the exact time that we'd been leaving the office, still worried about her. It made me sick thinking that, for that brief time when we'd been leaving the office, still worried about her. It made me sick thinking that, for that brief time when we'd been mildly frustrated with her supposed tardiness, she'd been trapped in the bathroom by some complete psycho whose idea of fun was scaring

the hell out of some poor innocent young woman. Then by the time we realized something was wrong, it could have been far, far too late. Vicky said to me, and she told the cops this too, that she really did think that's all he was interested in doing. I mean, if he really wanted to, and he might have taken a few hits from that high heel before it happened, but that guy could have overpowered her, opened up that window and shoved her out. Or not even that. He could have just attacked her when she wasn't expecting it, and she might never have left that apartment alive.

But that's just the thing. He didn't. He liked the idea that she was afraid. That's what made him laugh so hard. That's what got him off. I can't imagine how harrowing of an experience that was for poor Vicky, but incredibly, she was back to work in just a few days. She said she realized that if his whole thing was to make her afraid, then cowering at home would be exactly what he wanted her to do. Her only frustration was that the cops never caught up with the guy. He would have only been charged with harassment and

maybe issuing a deadly threat or something, and probably would have only been charged with harassment and maybe issuing a deadly threat or something and probably would have just gotten away with a misdemeanor. But still, it would have been some small amount of justice for all the terror that he put Vicky through. To me, it's frustrating to know that people like that exist in the first place. I can't even imagine how sick in the head a person has to be to be able to list tricking and terrorizing random women as one of their hobbies I just hope karma caught up to him one day and it caught up to him hard Before I officially started up my business, I used to work as a general handyman, and on a very casual basis too. I was fresh out of the county and determined to turn myself around, but I barely had two cents to

my name, so I just started hustling with whatever I could get my hands on. And about six months after, I had my own van, my own tools, and I had everything except a contractor's license. But that sure as hell didn't stop me from building my business and growing my revenue. About a year later, I was basically working on retainer for a landlord who operated multiple different properties across the city. Some were in nice areas, some were in not so nice areas, and I wasn't actually on retainer. We just joked that he gave me so much work that I might as well have been. Anyway, one day he asked me

if I could fit some veneers on some old cabinets. So I tell him sure, get the address to the place that he wants me to visit then headed over the very next morning to get it done. The tenant of the apartment I was working on had been asked to vacate while the work was going on. So I was free to do my thing to vacate while the work was going on, so I was free to do my thing, which for the most part consisted of applying a super strong adhesive to the cabinets

before carefully fitting the veneers. I was about halfway through the job when I heard the key turning in the lock of the apartment's door. I waited until the tenant was within earshot, then called out an apology for the smell of the glue, which by that stage was still real strong and thick in the air. A second or so later, a woman of maybe 35 to 40 appeared in the doorway, and she looked at me with these big, wild eyes before asking me, Where is it? I was still halfway up a ladder at the time, so I'm halfway turned around on it when

I ask her back, where's what? Instead of answering me, she got really angry all of a sudden, stomped her way to the center of the room and told me word for word, tell me or I'll kick you off that effing ladder. I start feeling incredibly vulnerable after that, so I start climbing down real fast in the hopes that she was only bluffing, or if she does kick the ladder, then I'll have less of a fall and less chance to really hurt myself. I expected some kind of confrontation when I got to the ground so I can feel my adrenaline start kicking in as I stepped off that bottom rung and turned to face her. By the time I did, she was gone. Gone in the sense that she was no longer in front of me,

and gone in the sense that whoever I had just been talking to was gone too. She dropped to her knees, grabbed the open tube of adhesive that I'd been using, and started to sniff up these deep huffs of the fumes into her nose. I must have asked her something like, what the hell lady, and then reached down to take her by the shoulder to try to pull her away from it. But the second I touched her, she turned and it was a totally different person looking back at me. The lady that walked into her apartment had been rude and confrontational, but the lady staring back at me now looked like she could have ripped out my liver, eaten it raw, and then asked

for seconds. She screamed, get your effing hands off of me, shoved me, then went right back to huffing the tube of industrial strength adhesive that I had sitting at the bottom of the ladder. And I'm serious when I say it was like a transformation. Her eyes were different, still angry but full of something else too. She was like a mountain lion if a person got too close to her cubs, completely rabid, and even though she was small enough for me to toss, I got to admit that in that moment, I was goddamn terrified. She kept on huffing and puffing on that tube of glue, until all that rage just seemed to wash away from her.

Then when she was done, and with the tube of glue still in her hand, she got up, walked over to her couch, and just plopped herself down and lay there looking all blissed out, like she didn't even know where she was. I remember telling her that I was going to get my stuff and put it in the van and get the hell out of there and that she'd have to deal with her landlord if she wanted the rest of the cabinet veneers fitted. She just groaned at me and waved her arm as if to say, just go away already. So I did. With her lying there like a zombie, I packed up my stuff and got the hell out of there before she decided that she wanted to help herself to the rest of my gear. I left her with that tube of adhesive too. That stuff can be expensive, but there was no way that I was

about to risk getting my face ripped off by trying to pull it out of her hand. So I pack up my gear, trying to carry as much as possible out to the van just in case the glue-sniffing tenant decided to steal something. I manage to get everything except my ladder under my arms, then on the way out, I started hearing this kid crying. There's no telling how long they've been wailing, but I guess I just filtered it out into background noise while I was trying to keep from getting shredded by that crazy glue sniffer lady. But then when I step outside, I see where the crying was coming from. There was a car right there on the curb with both the driver's side and

rear passenger door open. In the back, there was a kid still strapped into the car seat and was screaming out mommy, mommy over and over again. There were grocery bags sat in the pathway to the apartment too like the woman had gotten home, saw the van and rushed inside after abandoning both her grocery bags and her kid. Maybe she just forgot that I was stopping by that day and rushed inside to check it out before bringing her kid and groceries inside. I'm not sure. But either way, she walked in. The smell of the adhesives hit her and that's all that she had in her mind. And that was the scariest thing of all. Way scarier than the prospect of getting my face chewed off by this crazy lady. This woman was such a degenerate drug addict that

one little whiff of industrial strength adhesive and she was gone. Hell, she might have been mother of the year before she walked into that room and then just boom, she was just right back to the bottom of the barrel getting high all over again. I don't honestly know what her situation was and I shouldn't speculate. I just hope her kid ended up okay, because with a mother like that, life sure is going to be an uphill struggle. After I got out of the Marine Corps, I found a job working for a property management company as their resident knuckle-dragger. I'd move furniture, perform small DIY jobs, and occasionally I'd be called in to help clean out the apartment of some scumbag tenant

who trashed the place either deliberately or through their sad excuse for a lifestyle. The single worst one I'd ever had was a small rental home on a real nice street in a real nice neighborhood. My employer had already called to warn me that it was bad. She'd only taken a few steps in before the smell turned her around, and she knew that it had to be bad in there, maybe even dead body bad, so she called me in to help the usual cleaning crew. I drove over, met up with Rosa, shout out to the nicest Filipina cleaning lady, and then I went in first to make sure that there were no dead bodies inside. I knew next to nothing about the previous tenants at the time,

only that they'd disappeared after going delinquent on their rent. I bussed in, searched all the rooms and the places absolutely disgusting, but I was confident that there were no corpses inside, so I told Rosa and the girls that it was safe to go inside. The only thing was, they need to put on as much safety gear as possible. Vicks under the noses the whole nine yards. Because inside one of the upstairs bedrooms was a huge stack of used diapers. I don't mean a stack of as in five or six piled in a corner or something. I'm talking a pyramid-shaped pile that was at least waist high, and I'm not exaggerating at

all there. The division of labor was such that anything big and heavy that needed to be moved out, that was down to me. But anything that could be moved by hand, which included the diaper pile, was down to Rosa and the girls. So other than catching a glimpse of it, I didn't get to grips with the diaper pyramid, and I only heard Rosa and the girls making passing comments about it, one which was such a big baby. Now, me with my low IQ self assumed that we're talking about either the size of this kid's dumps or the sheer number of diapers in that pile. I guess that in my wildest, most disturbing dreams, I never would have guessed exactly what that lady meant when she said, big baby. It was only afterwards, when I

talked to the employer, that I actually realized what had been going on in that house. I mentioned something about being no place to keep a kid and such a filthy, disgusting place and all. My employer was like, huh? Family? The rental had been a single occupancy, just this one lone dude.

And the comment about the big baby, it's because those diapers were adult-sized. The guy had been filling those diapers, taking them off, and then just tossing them into the pile in the same freaking room that he slept in. And I don't know about you, but that's probably the most disgusting, disturbing thing I can possibly conceive of. I don't know what happened to that guy, nor do I really want to know. I just hope that he's got some help, because Lord knows that his stinky butt needs it.

This all happened to my dad way back when I was a kid, so I have no memory of it whatsoever, and all I have to go on is what he's told me. But here goes. When I was younger, my mom and dad were in a kind of precarious financial situation, so we rented out the second floor of what was quite a large house to this older lady named June. Well, one day, she starts getting behind on her rent and my parents understanding at first, but after a while, she started acting more and more squirrely, as they put it, and the relationship between her and my parents got worse and worse. At first, it was just excuses as to why she didn't have the rent. After that, she got more and more aggressive every time my dad brought the subject up. In the end, she owed four months worth of rent when my parents finally decided that they couldn't have June living there anymore. It wasn't an easy decision either. They'd started off really liking each other, but the situation had just soured over time. So then, one day, dad goes to confront her and

tells her that they want her to move out. Dad says he was expecting quite a confrontation, but to his surprise, June said she had the cash for two months of back rent and promised to get him the rest by the end of the following month. My dad said this is obviously a welcome turn of events, and he accepted June's invitation to come up to her half of the house so she could give him the cash. She asked him to wait on the landing, which was decorated as a kind of sitting area with a coffee table and a few chairs, then she went off to get the money. Dad said that he waited for a little while, then as time started to drag on, he got more and more impatient. He went off looking for June, but he found that she'd locked herself in her bedroom. Dad asks what's going on, but June says everything's fine, and she's just looking for the cash.

Dad asks why she'd locked the door, but she repeats that she's looking for the cash and that everything is fine. Dan then waits some more, growing more and more frustrated, but the next time he calls June's name, she won't reply. Dad then puts his ear to the door because he can hear whispering, and he's almost certain that he hears her saying, help me, please. I'm trapped in here. It takes Dad a second or two to figure out what's going on, and he said at first he started asking her, are you okay in there? What's going on? But again, she doesn't answer him. Dad said he was thinking, who the hell is she talking to? But then a minute later, it dawned on him. She's talking on the phone, and by the sounds of it, there's a good chance the person she's talking to is a 911 operator. Dad's suspicions were confirmed a few minutes later when he heard sirens in the street outside,

and he went out to meet the cops to explain how it was all just some kind of false alarm. The cops said that June said that she had been violently assaulted by the homeowner, i.e. my dad. But since that wasn't remotely true, he was only too happy to allow them entry into our home. Dad showed them up onto the landing, how there were no signs of any struggle or anything, and then directed them to the room where June was held up. Once she heard the cops were there, June opened the door, but only allowed them entry into the room and not my dad. Minutes later, the cops came out again saying to dad, you're not under arrest right now but she needs

more medical attention, referring to June. My dad panics and once again explains to the cops that he didn't hit her and that he's genuinely stunned at how she'd gotten hurt when just moments before she'd been fine. But then the cops are all chill with him and explain they know that he hadn't hit her, because they can clearly see where this lady had been bashing her head with something blunt in the same place over and over again. The lady said dad punched her, and there was no way those wounds came from punches unless my dad was wearing a brass knuckle or something, and after talking to my mom, who had been sitting downstairs the whole time and had heard nothing, they let the EMTs take the lady to the hospital,

then waited a few days before telling her that there was no case against my dad. They didn't charge her with a false report, which made my mom really angry, but it did give my dad enough leverage to get her gone once and for all. He said if she hadn't moved out by the end of the month, he was going to sue her for filing a false police report against him.

Dad said that he wasn't even sure how that'd work, but he sure as hell scared that lady enough that she packed up and found somewhere else to live. I have a vague memory of this woman, but no memory of all the drama that unfolded. But my mom and dad say it was a particularly stressful time in their early parenting days. After all, they were sleeping in the same house as some obviously crazy woman with their kid who was still only like three or four years old at the time. And it kind of creeps me out to think about sometimes too, because if she'd do that kind of thing to herself, who knows what she would have done to us if the urge had suddenly taken her. Many years ago now, back when I was in college,

I worked as the property manager at a 100-unit apartment complex here in Charleston. It was a pretty awesome job, in that I had all my rent covered by the company, and the only truly taxing things they expected of me consisted of filling out paperwork and scheduling the maintenance workers. The place had a pretty even mix of tenants. There were a lot of college kids along with a bunch of post-grad singles and roommates and the occasional young family too. But there was one guy that I always felt kind of sorry for. He didn't seem to have any family and I think that he might have been on disability, but he kept to himself. And the most I ever saw of him was when he was walking to a nearby convenience store around once or twice a week. Around June of my second year there, I got a call from one of the tenants in his building complaining that there was a funky odor coming from his apartment.

I went in, and it smelled kind of like someone had puked in the hall, and seeing as there was a handful of college kids in that building, that was actually a pretty depressing and common occurrence. We had the carpet shampooed the next day. Then the cleaners used a bunch of that industrial-strength shaken vac that always makes the place smell like a hotel. Once that was done, I honestly figured that'd be the end of it. But then I think that it was maybe three or four days after, I get calls from half a dozen other tenants saying that the smell figured that'd be the end of it. But then I think that it was maybe three or four days after,

I get calls from half a dozen other tenants saying that the smell had only gotten worse. I remember being sat in my car, trying to figure out just what the hell was going on when, suddenly, my cell phone started buzzing. Remember the sickly-looking loner that I just told you about? The one who I only saw walk over to the store every so often? Well, the person calling me turned out to be that guy's daughter, calling all the way over from Michigan. Her dad hadn't answered his phone in a few weeks, and she was getting kind of worried about him, and could I go over and check on him to make sure that he just lost his cell phone while on D&D or whatever. I said that I'd oblige her, then head over to his building again just to do that. As I'm walking, I put two and two together.

It's summer, there's a bad smell in the building, and my sickly-looking loner hadn't been heard from in a while. I immediately called my on-duty maintenance guy and told him about the call, and he too thinks that we're both about to have a really bad day. We met up, walked up to the guy's floor, and sure enough, the smell hits us like an absolute freight train. Then, when we manage to get the door of the loner's apartment open, the smell is considerably stronger. We knocked on the door a few times, and to this day I'm not entirely sure why we did that. I guess it was just one final grasp at home before we had to deal with the reality in front of it. But when we got no answer,

I opened the door and all we could hear was the non-stop buzz of all the flies in the apartment. I immediately slammed the door, walked out of the building with the maintenance guy behind me, and we slowly figured out a plan of action. Then within the hour, the cops were on the scene, closely followed by the fire department and eventually the county coroner. Apparently the guy died from some sort of natural causes probably three to four weeks earlier. By that time, the temperature was regularly in the 90s outside,

so in an apartment with no AC, it was cooking this guy at about 100 to 110 degrees. He was practically a puddle by the time we got to him. The cost to recover the apartment was close to $30,000. It was stripped down to the studs. Every thread of carpet, every appliance, every cabinet, every hunk of drywall, it all got torn out and replaced. That whole ordeal is how I found out that there are actually specialist cleaning companies who specialize in the cleaning of human remains. And I also learned that they don't come cheap. Even after that, there was always a faint odor in the apartment, and trying to get it filled again was an ordeal all into itself. To be continued... colleagues and I ended up going to the pub one Monday night after work. One was another new start

like me, but the other was an older bloke called Andy, who had been acting as a kind of mentor to us. He'd been in the job for almost 30 years, but unlike a lot of the people he'd started with, he'd stayed on casework instead of progressing into upper management. That meant that he had a lot of experience, which in turn meant that we had a lot to learn from him. But then, thankfully, Andy was a top bloke, so glomming onto him and his ideas was much more agreeable than it had first sounded. So me, Andy, and this other colleague of ours finished up the office about six-ish, and since it had been such a long day, we usually knocked off at around five,

Andy asked if we fancied nipping into the pub around the corner. Neither of us had anywhere to be, and my younger colleague was driving and said that he was happy to leave his car in the car park, so off we went. Anyway, one pint turns into two, and then we agree to have one more before we head off. It was my round, so I nipped off to the bar, and then we agree to have one more before we head off. It was my round, so I nipped off to the bar, and then when I got back, Andy and my other colleague were discussing the most challenging cases that he'd dealt with at that point in his career. We'd only been there a few months each, so we didn't have much to offer in terms of stories. But then it came Andy's turn to discuss some of his most memorable cases, and there was one which stuck out to me in particular, for reasons that'll soon become obvious.

For many years before, Andy was assigned a case involving an at-risk child, who was the unfortunate offspring of a violently alcoholic father. The kid had learning difficulties and had spent just over a year in foster care while his parents tried to clean themselves up. But eventually, their case came up for review. Apparently, it wasn't so much that the dad was a drunk, the mom was completely unfit to be one and was suspected to be suffering from learning difficulties of her own. But after the dad supposedly stopped boozing and the mom showed more of an interest in learning to be one, their child was returned and Andy was assigned as their social worker. He said he used to go around a few times a week just to talk to the family and have a look around, and at first they seemed to have really turned things around. But then as time

went by, Andy said the cracks started to show. As far as the father was concerned, he was obviously finding long-term sobriety to be increasingly difficult, which in turn made the mother regress into old apathetic habits. For example, neglecting to take their kid to the local primary school where they ran a dedicated special needs class. Basically, it was looking more and more like they were going to get their kid taken away from them again. But Andy said that they didn't seem like bad people, so he was sort of rooting for them to get it together again. But then, one day, Andy gets a call at his desk,

and when he picks up, he hears the voice of the little girl with learning difficulties. She asks him, Are you Andy? And he says yes and then confirms it's her. He asks her if everything is okay and she says no. Then when Andy asks what the matter is, the girl tells him, Daddy's put mommy in the bath.

And Andy said that at first, he didn't really understand what she was getting at, so he asks, Is he giving her a wash? And the girl then replies in a way that makes Andy's blood run cold, I think so, but now she's asleep and now daddy wants me to go to sleep too. Andy said it was probably the single most frightening moment of his entire career. Not so much because this little girl's life hung in the balance, but because whatever he instructed her to do next might either save her life or seal

her doom. He said that he told her to stay quiet, hang up the phone, and either hide or run to a neighbor's if possible. Andy said his first thought had obviously been to tell her to call the police, but he also realized that if the girl's dad could hear her talking, then he could find her and put her in the bath too. Once he'd given her what he believed were the correct instructions, Andy hung up the phone, called the police, and drove over to the family's block of flats at speeds that verged on illegal. But it was too late.

Andy got there just in time to see the father calmly sitting in the back of a police car. He rolled down his window and called out to one of the officers, who told him to sod off and mind his own until Andy mentioned being the family's social worker. The policeman couldn't tell him anything pertaining to what he'd seen inside, but when Andy asked if anyone else was alive in the house, if they'd found the child unharmed, the policeman just gave him this sad look and apologized and asked him to move along. Andy said he was devastated, beyond devastated to the point that he had to pull over to the side of the road and just cry until he was calm enough to drive again. The next morning he called into work and told them everything, then informed them that he wouldn't be in for a few days.

His manager okayed his leave, and then Andy spent the next few days at the bottom of a bottle, just trying to forget the whole thing had ever happened. He was back at work a few days later, but said that it took him a while before he could get back to his regular caseload. And that's how he got around to the actual point of his story. He hadn't told us about that little girl to traumatize us, although he did a bloody good job at that. He told us because when we inevitably faced something that had a similar effect, we needed the correct toolkit to deal with it. And according to Andy, that toolkit involved a lot of trips to NHS therapists and a lot of trauma counseling. And above all, it involved a lot of talking about the thing that has you so traumatized and depressed,

and a lot of listening to the experiences of others. And that, my dear Let's Read, as I send this to you, is why I thought to send it in in the first place. I've realized I've loved your channel because it's like a giant trauma counseling group that meets two or three times a week. We can learn from each other's stories, each other's journeys, and when we're ready, willing or able, we can learn from each other's stories, each other's journeys, and when we're ready, willing or able, we can learn from each other's stories, each other's journeys. And when we're ready, willing or able, we can recount our own experiences by writing them up and sending them in for you to read aloud to all the other attendees of this enormous global support group, at least in my mind. I'd say that I'd wished I had my own story to send in, but I'm honestly glad I don story with a kind of disclaimer. Making the decision to become a social worker was probably the best decision I've ever made.

It's been rewarding, enlightening. I met my partner through social work, and I really can't imagine doing anything else at this stage. But I'll be honest. There have been one or two times when I've asked myself if I'm really in the right line of work. I know it probably goes without saying, but social workers deal with some pretty heavy stuff, sometimes on a day-to-day basis. But without a doubt, the worst case I've ever dealt with involved a guy that we'll call Tim. Tim, which obviously isn't his real name, reminded me of a young Tim Robbins from around his Shawshank era. He was quiet and well-spoken, but he had been dealing

with paranoid schizophrenia since his early 20s. He'd been in and out of institutions, but had apparently made a lot of progress after happening across the right combination of medications. So, instead of regularly checking in with doctors and being unable to work, Tim found himself a job as a part-time library clerk to supplement the money that he already got from the state and was assigned a social worker to keep tabs on him. The social worker being me. So one day I make a stop at Tim's place for a quick face-to-face that we had planned but he's not home. I give him a call in a cell and when he doesn't answer, I assume that he's

picked up an extra shift at the library or something. Tim had already told me that he couldn't answer his phone while he was on shift, and while I thought this might have been a little overzealous, I could understand him wanting to protect the sanctity of the library's silence or something. But then at the same time, missing a meeting like that was extremely frowned upon, and I wasn't looking forward to warning him about it, which might put pressure on what was generally a healthy working relationship. I gave Tim a few more calls later on that day, but still he's not picking up, and the longer my calls and texts went unanswered, the more I started to worry.

I went to bed pretty much resigned to the fact that I'd have to tell my superiors about the missed meeting and that Tim appeared to be ducking me. But then bright and early the next morning, and by that I mean just after six in the morning, Tim returned my call. But he sounded very different. Like I said earlier, Tim was a pretty quiet kind of dude. Sometimes he'd only ever return single word replies after a moment or two in deep thought. He pretty quiet kind of dude. Sometimes he'd only ever return single word replies after a moment or two in deep thought. He was that kind of person. But when he called me that morning, he sounded frantic. He apologized for having missed my calls and explained that he'd been busy. But when I asked if it was a work thing or some kind of family

emergency, he said no. Instead, Tim explained that he had what he called a breakthrough, and that he'd like me to stop by his apartment as soon as possible so I could discuss it with him. I told him the earliest I could be there was maybe 7.30 to 8, and thanked him for getting back to me, but I also told him that he'd only narrowly missed being written up for a missed appointment, and that if it happened again, I'd have no choice but to inform my superiors. Again, he sounded like a goddamn Tommy gun when he spoke, but he said that that was fine, and how all that mattered was that I come over to his apartment so he could make up for the missed appointment. So, I get out of bed and get started with my morning routine like an hour

earlier than I normally would, so I'm not exactly in the best of moods by the time I get out of bed and get started with my morning routine like an hour earlier than I normally would, so I'm not exactly in the best of moods by the time I get into my car and start driving into the city. I grab some coffee, then drove over to Tim's apartment, when I arrive just after 7.40ish. He buzzed me up, I took the elevator up, and then knocked on Tim's door, but he doesn't let me in right away. He called out all frantic, asking who was there. He sounded afraid of who it might be, and when I told him, I got the impression that he took a long hard look at me through the peephole of his apartment door. His breathing sounded shaky when he asked me to do him a favor. When he opened the door,

I had to promise not to freak out. That request of him woke me up faster than any amount of coffee could. I told him that I'd try not to freak out, but that it'd depend entirely on what I was about to be faced with. And there was this moment of hesitation, and then Tim opened up the door. The upper half of his head was covered almost completely in bandages, and there was a huge blotch of dried blood on the clump of rags covering one eye. At first I thought I'd solve the mystery on why Tim had missed his meeting the day before, and all I wanted to know was what happened, if he was okay, and if he wanted me to drive him to the hospital or something.

I can tell the difference between a professionally applied medical dressing and some franken bandage that had been clobbered together from the contents of an old first aid kit, and what was wrapped around Tim's head was definitely the latter. My first priority was to get Tim proper medical attention because whatever injury he'd just taken, it most definitely hadn't been treated properly. But Tim insists on showing me something first. He also mentioned that he had a favor to ask of me, which I assumed was to drive him to a hospital. But as it turned out, that's not quite what he wanted from me. In his frantic state, with half his head bandaged and what appeared to be a near life-threatening injury, Tim refused to go to the

hospital until I'd heard what he had to say. I agreed to listen to him for one minute and then we were going to the hospital. Tim says he doesn't need a minute and runs off to what I'm pretty sure was his bathroom and then comes back with what looked to be a small glass ashtray that was smeared with blood. I remember feeling my heart start to race as I realized that something was really, really wrong. Tim hadn't had an accident or been attacked. He looked very proud of what he was about to show me. I'm surprised that I didn't put two and two together sooner, but even if I did, I still think that I'd have reacted the same way. Because in that little glass ashtray, or whatever it was, was one of Tim's eyeballs.

I remember physically pulling back from the sight of it, all bloody with some of the nerve fiber still attached, it seemed. But as crazy as it sounds, the most frightening thing was the look of what little of Tim's face I could see. He looked happy. I was terrified, I'm not afraid to say it, and there was this voice in my head just screaming at me to get the hell out of there. But I couldn't. I was just rooted to the spot through some kind of fear response or something. I guess it was the idea that if I tried

to run, Tim would be able to close the distance pretty quick if he had ill intentions. So the best thing for me to do was to make sure that he was calm and that he knew that I was on his side. And that was the best chance at preventing any kind of escalation. I started by reminding Tim that he had one minute to explain, and then we were going to the hospital together. He just kept saying that he found it, over and over again. Tim said someone put something in his eye and that after removing it, their link to him had been severed. He said he was fine with going to see a doctor, he actually wanted to, but we had to go right then before they figured out what was

going on and replace the device that he'd removed from his head with another one. And by that point, I figured out what was happening. Tim was suffering some kind of schizophrenic episode. What surprised me is just how calm and cooperative he was. As long as we left the device in his apartment, they'd think that he was still home, but they wouldn't be able to track his movements. Not for a while, anyway. I just went along with what he was telling me, saying, sure, leave that thing here, let's just get you to a doctor. And then we got into my car and drove to a hospital, but not before Tim insisted on lying down in the backseat so that none of them would see him go.

I didn't ask who they were or why they were stalking him, I just did the only thing I could think to do that would get him to a hospital and to treatment. As soon as I handed Tim over to the hospital staff, I took one of the nurses aside and explained the situation. I was Tim's social worker, the wound was self-inflicted, and Tim was going through some kind of psychotic episode, and the only reason he was calm was because he believed that he was being tracked. The nurse assured me that they'd handled the situation appropriately, then told me that I was free to leave. I stopped in with Tim before I left, and told him that he

could call me if he needed anything. All he did was thank me over and over like I'd saved his life, which I guess I sort of did. If that wound would have gotten infected somehow so close to his brain, that could have ended very badly for him. I remember walking out of the hospital and getting to my car and I guess I was still high on adrenaline because I thought I'd be okay to drive over to the office to write the whole thing up. But then as soon as I slid the key into the ignition, this wave of relief hit me, and as much as I tried to fight back the tears, they came flowing all the same. And just to be clear, I wasn't crying for me. I had only believed that I was in danger for a few short minutes and after that, my only concern was for me. I'd only believed that I was in danger for a few short minutes, and after that, my only concern was for Tim. What had me in tears was that they hadn't hit him yet. He believed what

he'd done was a good thing, but it was only a matter of time before he realized that he'd half blinded himself over nothing. I can't even imagine how painful an experience that must have been for him when it eventually occurred, I mean. And it's that thought in particular which made me burst into tears in my car at like 8.30 in the morning on a Tuesday. The next time I heard from Tim, he was in a psychiatric hospital on the other side of the state. He thanked me for helping him that day, for getting him to a doctor by any means necessary, and said that he was doing slightly better, but had a long road to recovery ahead of him, both in terms of physical health and his mental health. Obviously, I didn't have him as a case anymore, but he kept in touch for a while, checking in every so often until he finally just stopped calling. I got in touch with the facility

that he'd been a patient at and they said that he'd been discharged about a month prior. I asked them where Tim might have gone and they said that they didn't know. If he had been released conditionally, i.e. the state wanted to keep tabs on him, I'd have been able to track him down. But he was released unconditionally, meaning his doctors believed he'd progressed so far that he didn't require any supervision post-release. This was great news, and I was definitely happy for him for the most part, but it was also kind of sad news too. Unless he took it upon himself to get in touch with me, I'd never get a chance to talk to Tim ever again. I think if I really had to choose, I'd rather that he was doing much better without me. The alternative is that I'm still his social worker and he's still suffering, so obviously the former is the better option. But I can't silence the part of me that screams out to

know how he's doing and how he's progressing, both in his life and his mind. I don't want to hear him thank me again, and Lord knows that I don't need another apology. I just want him to know that it was worth it, and that I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. This might surprise you, but I think nine times out of ten, removing a vulnerable child from an unsafe environment is actually quite a straightforward uneventful process. Some of the time, the parents just aren't there. Other times, they're too whacked out on whatever drugs they're on to even notice their kid has gone missing. But then, around 10% of the time, getting that vulnerable kid to safety can be a dangerous process all on its own. On one occasion, I was tasked with removing an 11-year-old boy from a home where his guardians were suspected methamphetamine abusers. Neighbors said the kid was always crying and the one time they'd seen him playing outside, the poor thing was covered in bruises, scabs, and what looked a lot like cigarette burns. I was accompanied by four sheriff's deputies and

they'd received numerous reports that the man of the house was thought to be involved in the narcotics trade. The presence of so many deputies usually makes the process much more manageable, and sometimes a kid actually wants to get out of a messed up situation and will leave voluntarily with a social worker that they've had prior dealings with. But not on this occasion. It turned the process of retrieving the child into a living nightmare. When we arrived at the home in question, it was despicably filthy. There was all kinds of trash out in the lawn outside, the interior looked like it hadn't been cleaned in heck knows how long,

and I shuddered when I saw the flies and roaches buzzing and skittering around the floors and ceilings. We start hammering on the door and it takes a few minutes, but the mother of the child eventually opens up the door and asks why we're there. I start telling her what we're there to do and she just loses it. She starts screaming to her kid about how we're there to take him away and how they're going to hurt his mommy and how they'll never see each other again if we take him away with us. As you can imagine, all hell breaks loose. The woman's neighbor starts coming out of their homes to see what was going on, and

with her putting on such a dramatic display, there was a danger of them reacting negatively to us. This meant that two of the deputies had to step away to deal with the growing crowd of people, leaving me alone with the mother, the kid, and her drug dealer boyfriend, who by that point had emerged from an upstairs bedroom. Another deputy then had to step away to detain the boyfriend, since he started acting super sketchy and tried to get back upstairs, maybe to get something that he shouldn't. But the point is, they just left me and the other deputy to try and pry the kid from his mother's arms, all while they're screaming and crying. When I finally put hands on her and asked the deputy to help me, the woman started spitting

and scratching at me, calling me all kinds of racial slurs in the hopes that something would hit home. The deputy had to physically restrain her, then I had to peel the kid off of her body, then just hold him until he tired himself out. I know some of you might be thinking that it was a struggle, trying to separate a child from his mother, and it was, just not physically. The kid was so malnourished that there was hardly anything to him, so since his mother was restrained, getting a hold of him was depressingly easy. Obviously, there's a warrant on this woman for child neglect, child endangerment, you name it, so the one other deputy that was with me put her in cuffs,

then leads her out to one of their cruisers outside. But then, the room I'm holding him in, it has these big windows that look out onto the street outside, which, if you remember, was how we were able to see into the house so easily when we arrived. The kid sees his mom being put into the back of the deputy's vehicle, gets this sudden burst of energy, then sinks his teeth into the meat of my bicep so hard I yelped out in pain. I couldn't help myself. I instinctually pulled my arm down and away from him, giving him just enough room to slip away from me. Then what he did next is something I'll be able to see on repeat anytime I close my eyes or have a few moments of spare thought until the day I die.

The kid runs towards the window and grabs a little side table, then with all his might, he throws it towards the pane of glass, and it knocks large shards right out of it. Then, and he's running, but the way I remember it was in slow motion. The kid tries to run and jump out of the hole in the glass, which in all fairness was pretty large, but in his panic, he completely misjudges it and basically jumps head first into the sharp edge of the brake. The kid scalped himself, actually scalped his goddamn self, and if he'd been a little more lucky, then the fallen glass might have taken his head off too.

When the first deputy got to him, the one that had to put his mom in the car, he actually walked away and puked a little before calling the EMTs on his radio. The kid stayed awake, completely drenched in blood, until the ambulance arrived to take him to the hospital. What I saw that day accounted for the single worst thing I'd ever seen in my job as a social worker, and I still remember the screams of all the bystanders when they saw that kid stand up after somehow avoiding a shower of razor-sharp glass shards. His scalp just slid off. Not all the way off, but it just slid off of his skull a little, leaving behind a smear of blood. It was horrifying, truly horrifying, and it was one of those where afterwards I wondered if I really had it in me to carry on doing social work. That maybe I'd just seen too much, and it was time to move on before I had a nervous breakdown.

I wasn't the first social worker to ponder that thought, and I know I won't be the last. And just like the many who've preceded me, and the many more who will follow, I found a way to return to work after a short period of absence. Like I said, I really did wonder if I was in the right line of work, and I seriously considered a change of career to something that was much less traumatic or violent. But in the end, two things keep me coming back. The first is your coworkers. The idea of leaving them to deal with all the cases felt like a betrayal or something. It was up to me to work my caseloads, not just because it was my job,

because it meant that they didn't have to. But then the second thing that keeps me coming back is the people. At the risk of sounding kind of corny, social workers fight in the corner of people who don't have anyone else to fight for them. We're the last line of defense for some folks, quite literally sometimes, Social workers fight in the corner of people who don't have anyone else to fight for them. We're the last line of defense for some folks, quite literally sometimes, between hope and despair. As for anyone wondering, the child did survive, just with some nasty scars to remember it by. I'm a state patrolman out here in Idaho, and I recently came across your channel during my nightly quest to find things to put me to sleep. I think I'll like listening to your stories more than I'm going to enjoy writing this,

but it's my own special means of contributing, so here goes nothing. About ten years back, when I was just starting out in ISP, I got asked to attend a welfare check out near this little place called Troy, way up north of the Nez Perce reservation. I was told that there'd be a social worker on scene and that they'd become concerned after a house call had gone unanswered. It was my job to gain entry to the property, forcefully or otherwise. So I show up, greet the social worker and right away she tells me to expect the worst. She said her client was suffering from some kind of mental illness and had been acting real strange for a few days before going quiet. Then, with his truck in the driveway and

no answer at the door, she feared the worst. I asked if her guy might be armed and she said yes, so after calling out that I was from the state patrol, I forced my way in through the back doors and was almost immediately hit by that old ammonia smell of death. The homeowner had sat down on his couch, propped a long brake barrel 20 gauge between his legs, and then blew his own brains out with his toe on the trigger. Fella did it in one clean shot, too. Still sat there, toe on the trigger, leaning back like he's enjoying a well-deserved rest. But then, surprisingly, that's not what caught my eye when I first walked in.

As gruesome as the homeowner's taking his own life was, it wasn't nearly as intriguing as what he'd done to the hardwood flooring. Before he took his own life, the guy had taken a whole heap of tools, smashed up the flooring, and then pulled enough away until there was this big hole missing. He did this in every room except the kitchen, where on the table was what appeared to be the man's note, and all it said was, I'm sorry, I had to see who was underneath. In that moment, I figured the poor guy had just totally lost his mind, and he had, just not in the way that I first thought. I thought that he had been hearing voices, probably coming from

under the floors. He digs them up, there's no one there, but he's still hearing voices so rather than wait for a re-up on his meds to shut them up, he eats a shotgun shell and ends it all for good. Sad story so far, right? But people don't listen to your channel to be sad, they listen to be scared. Only I wasn't scared, not until I climbed the chairs and saw the guy's bedroom. That's when I realized what he meant by underneath. Lying on the bed was the body of a woman we later determined to be the wife he separated from many years before. But then, at the time, we had no idea who she was, and we knew that we'd have to wait for fingerprint or DNA identification too,

because this woman, she had no face. Our guy's shotgun had hacked away her entire face, leaving just this mess of blood, meat, bone, and broken teeth. He hadn't wanted to see who was underneath the floorboards, he'd wanted to see who was underneath, her face. And we later found out that she'd stopped by to check in on him, presumably after he'd stopped answering her calls too, and turned out to be the last thing that she ever did. This situation, even all these years later, is the worst crime I'd ever come across. I've seen gorier ones, ones with more bodies, but it's the story those scenes tell that really scare you. And none have scared me worse than this shotgun situation, and what he went looking for underneath. On November 2nd of 1991, Francis and Bert Kleembe welcomed the fifth of their seven children into the world. She was born in the northern suburbs of Abidjan, the Ivory Coast's most populated city, and was given the name Victoria in the

hopes her life would be one success after another. Victoria remained in Abidjan until she was almost seven. Then, in October of 1998, she was visited by her paternal great-aunt, a woman named Marie-Theresa Coual. Marie had returned to Senegal to attend a funeral, and had been living in France for almost two decades, and had an interesting proposal for Victoria's father. To ensure little Victoria grew up with a higher standard of living, Marie offered to take the girl back to France under the guise of being her biological daughter. Such informal fosterage is fairly common in West African society, Marie offered to take the girl back to France under the guise of being her biological daughter.

Such informal fosterage is fairly common in West African society, and Victoria's parents understood that a move to France would mean access to superior education and medical care. They were not happy to see their daughter go, not by any stretch of the imagination, but Victoria's success in her new European home could transform their family fortunes within the space of a single generation. It took weeks for them to make a definite decision, but when they did, they gave the move their blessing and said goodbye to little Victoria. Victoria and her great-aunt Marie then flew to Paris in November of 1998, where she was subsequently enrolled in the city's school system under the name Anna Kual. For the next four years,

Victoria's parents are believed to have been in regular contact with her and were confident that their daughter was happy and healthy. But just over a month later, the calls stopped and Marie began ignoring their attempts to contact her. Around this same period, Victoria's school teachers became deeply concerned with her well-being. Marie often failed to take her to school. And when Victoria did show up, the poor girl was exhausted and displayed symptoms of a dermatological condition. They warned Marie that unless Victoria's condition improved, she'd be reported to social services. Marie responded by removing Victoria from the Parisian school system and fleeing to the United Kingdom.

Marie and Victoria arrived in London on April 24th of 1999, where they found a room at a small hotel in the west end of the city. Just over a week later, the pair moved into temporary accommodation in the borough of Brent, then visited the local council's homeless persons unit the following day. She was refused council housing on the grounds that she was a permanent resident of France, but over the next three months, Marie returned almost 20 times to claim welfare money pertaining to emergency food and housing. Each time, council workers noticed that little Victoria seemed exhausted and dangerously underweight. But instead of reporting Marie to social services on suspicion of neglect or abuse, she was given help to find work in the hope that employment would allow her to provide a high quality of care. On June 8th of 1999, Marie became a member of staff at the nearby

Northwick Park Hospital, and during the hours of her employment, Victoria was left in the care of a local childminder named Priscilla Cameron. Priscilla said that at first there was nothing to raise any concerns regarding Marie's treatments of her young niece. Yet later on, she noticed that Marie appeared very casual when it came to Victoria's safety. On one occasion, Priscilla noticed a small but very deep cut on one of Victoria's fingers. Then when asked Marie how Victoria had sustained such a wound, Priscilla was told that Victoria had been playing with a razor blade. Priscilla gently scolded Marie for allowing such a thing to occur in the first place, who replied that it wouldn't happen again.

Yet Priscilla wasn't the only person who'd noticed Marie's cold and callous attitudes to child rearing. On June 14th of 1999, Marie was visited by a distant relative named Esther Aka. The deeply religious Esther was employed as a midwife and had already suspected Marie of being an unfit mother. Yet when she arrived at Marie's residence, those suspicions were proven horribly correct. Victoria exhibited fresh wounds, this time to her face, while Marie appeared to have made zero effort to childproof the home.

Dangerous kitchen chemicals were in arm's reach, disposable razor blades left on the side of a bathtub, and perhaps most damningly of all, the home didn't look like it had been cleaned in months. Esther was horrified by what she saw, so much so that she anonymously contacted social services and asked them to investigate Marie's suspected child abuse. Esther was assured that the situation would be dealt with urgently, and evidence showed that during the initial stages, every effort was taken to commence an investigation. However, at some point along the line, Esther's report became lost in the system. Three days later, and concerned by the lack of correspondence,

Esther Acca once again contacted social services and asked how the investigation was progressing. The woman she spoke to had personally faxed a report of the suspected abuse to her superiors, and had done so the same day that she was informed of it. She had no reason to believe the investigation hadn't already commenced, so she informed Esther that the situation was most probably being dealt with. This breakdown in communication meant that Victoria's case didn't reach the desk of the relevant social workers until three weeks after it was originally logged, by which point the neglect she was subject to had reached a dangerous new stage. On June 14th of 1999, the very same day Esther Acca decided to report her for child abuse,

Marie-Theresa Kual boarded a bus during her daily commute and exchanged pleasantries with the driver as she did so. Then, as she disembarked, the driver called her over and slipped her a piece of paper with his telephone number on it. The driver was 26-year-old Carl Manning, and despite being 16 years her junior, he found himself magnetically attracted to the 42-year-old Marie. They began dating shortly afterwards, and just weeks following their first rendezvous, Carl invited Marie to move into a single-bedroom apartment at Somerset Gardens in Tottenham. The day after Marie and Victoria moved to Somerset Gardens, local social services finally got around to beginning an investigation and mailed a notice of inspection to the Nickel Road residence Marie had recently vacated. The subsequent inspection, which took place on July 14th, found no one residing at the address, but this left social workers with a huge problem. Not only were they almost a month late in the investigating an already urgent case,

but their subjects had completely slipped through their fingers. London has a population of almost 9 million people. That's more than the entire state of Virginia. And they're packed into an area of just over 600 square miles. That's comparable to the size of Oklahoma City, which, by comparison, is home to just 600,000. In finding Marie in Victoria, local social workers were faced with a truly Herculean task. And time was not on their side. Around the same time that social workers made their visit to the Nickel Road property, Marie asked Priscilla Cameron to take care of Victoria while she was at work.

Priscilla, who was aware of Marie's budding relationship with Carl Manning, asked why he hadn't elected to watch her. Marie told her he doesn't elected to watch her. Marie told her he doesn't want to, then swiftly changed the subject. Priscilla and Marie then made arrangements for Victoria to be dropped off at the former's residence, but before hanging up the phone, Marie made an unexpected plea. She asked Priscilla if she could take care of Victoria on a permanent basis. Priscilla agreed to watch Victoria for the day, even agreed to keep her overnight, but argued that an impromptu adoption was not the right course of action.

If Marie was incapable of taking care of her child, then she needed to contact the appropriate authorities. Yet Priscilla didn't understand the gravity of the situation until later on that day, when Marie dropped Victoria at her home before making a hasty exit. Both Marie and her two children were horrified by Victoria's condition. There was a burn on her face, a piece of torn skin hanging from her eyelid, and there were numerous signs of blunt physical abuse on her emaciated arms and legs. The very next morning, Priscilla's daughter, Avril Cameron, took Victoria to the hospital. She was called by Dr. Reese Bannon at exactly 11.50,

who concluded that Victoria's injuries were almost certainly caused by deliberate physical abuse. Dr. Bannon then referred Victoria's case to Dr. Ekundayo Ayagi-Obe, a pediatric registrar who asked Victoria if the wounds were self-inflicted. It should be noted that while Victoria responded in the affirmative to this question, Dr. Ajayi-Obe did not believe that this was credible, and not only noted that her wounds were strongly suspicious, but that she may well have been coached into making claims of self-harm to cover her abusers. Following her conclusions, Dr. Ajayi Obey admitted Victoria to the hospital's pediatric ward

and told nurses to alert local law enforcement to a possible case of child abuse. Victoria was also subject to a special protection order, meaning that under no circumstances could she be removed from hospital for a period of 72 hours. When interviewed by the police, Marie claimed that Victoria suffered from scabies. Scabies is a parasitic infestation caused by tiny mites that burrow into the skin and lay eggs, causing intense itching and rash. Sufferers have been known to scratch at the affected areas, leaving painful open sores, and Marie claimed that this was why Victoria's skin

was so scratched and scabby. The doctors on duty found this claim laughable, but regardless, they still had to wait for the opinion of the consultant pediatrician before making a definitive judgment. Yet shockingly, with only a cursory medical examination and without ever having talked to her alone, Dr. Ruby Schwartz agreed that Victoria was suffering from scabies, then directed one of her junior doctors to inform social services that there was, and I quote, no child protection issue. Upon learning of Dr. Schwartz's judgment, social services immediately downgraded the severity of Victoria's case and ordered the police to lift the protection order which forbade Marie from taking her home.

The officer who rescinded the order, Rachel Dewar, failed to perform any kind of follow-up liaisons with Marie or Victoria, even though she was duty-bound to do so. A few weeks later, on July 24th of 1999, Marie took Victoria to the Accident and Emergency Department of North Middlesex Hospital. She exhibited signs of severe scalding to her head and shoulders, and at one point during the examination, Marie addressed Victoria in a voice so stern that the young girl seized up and urinated on herself out of sheer fright. Marie once again informed doctors that Victoria was suffering from scabies, and once again, they found her assertions incredible. A consult doctor named Mary Rositer also felt that Victoria was being abused.

Yet for some reason, she still found it acceptable to write able to discharge on the girl's medical chart. She later claimed that this language implied Victoria was physically able to leave the hospital and not that she wanted her to be discharged. Dr. Rositer then rushed to contact both the police and social services, ensuring that the priority of the investigation was swiftly upgraded. Finally, in early August of 1999, social worker Lisa Arthur-Wurry and police officer Karen Jones were scheduled to visit Marie and Victoria at Carl Manning's Tottenham apartment.

Yet upon hearing that at least one NHS doctor had diagnosed Victoria with scabies, the two women cancelled their visit over fears of contamination. Officer Karen Jones later claimed that she'd consulted with nurses at North Middlesex Hospital to ascertain the risks of contracting the disease, yet none of the hospital's doctors or nurses were able to recall any such consultation taking place. The next day, another social worker, Barry Almeida, took Victoria to a crisis center run by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, or NSPCC for short. There, she was assigned to another social worker, Sylvia Henry. Yet, as the situation progressed,

there was some confusion on which jurisdiction bore responsibility for Victoria's case. If you remember, Victoria was originally registered as a resident of the borough of Brent, but since her current address was in the borough of Haringey, her case was not being handled by the appropriate authority. Sylvia Henry says that she was forced to close the case and claims she contacted Barry Almeida by telephone to inform him of the decision, yet Almeida claims that he has no recollection of any such phone call. Meanwhile, at the same time Victoria was being turned away from the NSPCC in Brent, Marie successfully convinced social workers that her

niece's scalded skin was the result of her pouring boiling water over herself in an attempt to prevent her scabies sores from itching. The social workers advised Marie to take Victoria to the hospital in order to have her rashes treated. In response, Marie stopped visiting hospitals altogether. Throughout the fall and winter of 1999, Marie forced Victoria to accompany her on frequent visits to local churches and chapels. She told the pastors and priests that Victoria was her biological daughter and that she was possessed by demons. Some of these pastors offered prayers to cast out the devil

and openly professed their belief that Victoria's wounds were satanic in nature. At a branch at the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, Victoria personally told Pastor Alvaro Lima that her injuries had been inflicted by Satan. Pastor Lima later said that he did not believe the girl's claims. He had failed to inform the proper authorities of his suspicions. The frequent visits to Men of the Cloth coincided with a frightening escalation in the abuse.

Following a relentless period of bedwetting, Carl Manning forced Victoria to sleep in a bathtub with only a trash bag to cover herself. Marie then reported that Carl was violating Victoria, but withdrew the complaint when social services attempted to follow it up. Following standard protocol, social services were legally obligated to inform police of the abuse accusation, but, incredibly, refused to cooperate with a proposed investigation.

Sergeant Alan Hodges, the police officer charged with conducting the investigation, later claimed that he was told that Victoria was not at risk, and accused social workers of obstructing their efforts to obtain information pertaining to her case. Over the period of Christmas and New Year, social worker Lisa Arthur-Wurrie workers of obstructing their efforts to obtain information pertaining to her case. Over the period of Christmas and New Year, social worker Lisa Arthur-Wurrie made three separate trips to Carl Manning's apartment in the hopes of getting a face-to-face meeting with either Manning or Marie. Each time, there was no response from Manning's apartment, and on the third occasion, one of his neighbors told the social worker that Marie and Victoria had returned to France. It's unclear if this neighbor was willingly deceiving the social worker,

or was unwittingly disseminating false information, but either way, Arthur Worre reported that the subjects had departed the area, and their case was scheduled to close. On February 18th, social services made one last attempt to reach out to Marie pertaining to her claims of Carl Manning's abuse. She was informed by letter that she had a week to get in touch with social services or her case would be closed. But before that deadline was up, something truly terrible took place. On February 24th of the year 2000, Marie carried an unconscious Victoria to her local branch of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. Those that saw the young girl were horrified

by both her appearance and her condition, and she was soon rushed to the accident and emergency department at North Middlesex Hospital, then transferred to the intensive care unit at St. Mary's Hospital. Doctors and nurses fought to save Victoria's life, but she was found to be suffering from a combination of hypothermia, multiple organ failure, and a shockingly severe level of malnutrition. Despite intensive treatment, her heart failed at around 3.15 the next day, and following an unsuccessful attempt to resuscitate her, little Victoria passed away. During the subsequent autopsy, the pathologist who examined her body noted 128 separate injuries and scars, and described it as the worst case of child abuse

she'd ever seen. She concluded that over the course of many months, Victoria had been tied up, tortured with boiling water and lit cigarettes, starved, beaten, and then eventually murdered. Marie Teresa Kual was arrested just hours following Victoria's passing, while her boyfriend Carl Manning was arrested the next day. Marie played the part of a grieving mother, while the much younger Manning seemed shell-shocked by the proceedings. They feigned confusion and innocence, yet the charges against them were crystal clear. Both were being accused of torturing and murdering an innocent young child, and the details of the crimes proved nothing short of harrowing.

When their trial began on November 20th of the year 2000, Marie-Theresa Kulau denied all charges, while Manning pleaded guilty to charges of cruelty and manslaughter. The prosecution then presented the jury with extracts from Manning's personal journal, and his reasonings for pleading guilty became horrifyingly clear. In his own hand, Carl Manning had privately expressed his belief that little Victoria was an embodiment of the devil himself. He also wrote that no matter how hard he hit her, she didn't cry or show any sign of being hurt, and this could only mean that she was under the influence of some great demonic force. In his mind, this completely justified his relentless abuse, resulting in what

the judge described as Victoria's lonely, drawn-out, unimaginably agonizing death. A few months later, both Marie and Manning were found guilty on all charges and sentenced to life imprisonment. Shortly after the news of Victoria's death hit headlines across the United Kingdom, the British government announced that they'd be conducting an inquiry into the events surrounding it. The inquiry cost £3.8 million, making it the most expensive child protection investigation in British history, and was officially launched during May of 2001. Phase 1 investigated the involvement of people and agencies involved in Victoria's death, while Phase 2 sought to examine the child protection system in general.

The inquiry heard that many of the councils and relevant agencies were understaffed, underfunded, and poorly managed, with one executive calling his own department seriously defective. By 1999, chronic underfunding had resulted in a drastic deterioration of child protective services, and that by the time Victoria's case was being dealt with, more than a hundred vulnerable local children had yet to have their cases addressed by social workers. Eventually, Marie Teresa Kuao herself was called on to give evidence, becoming the first convicted murderer to physically appear in a public inquiry.

Initially, she refused to answer any of the solicitor's questions, and when she did, she merely used the opportunity to protest her innocence. Carl Manning also gave evidence, but did so via video link from his prison cell. He apologized for his actions and agreed that it was not the fault of the various agencies that Victoria had died. Lisa Arthur Wurie, the junior social worker who took on Victoria's case, had only 19 months of child protection experience when she was tasked with investigating Marie and Manning. Many claimed that she and she alone could have prevented Victoria's death, but Lisa refused to be scapegoated and criticized her superiors for failing to provide proper guidance. She also argued that she was hideously

overworked at the time, a claim which was corroborated by records of her heavy work week schedules during the winter of 1999. At first, Lisa's supervisor, Carol Baptiste, refused to attend any of the hearings. She was later convinced to give evidence but only provide vague responses to questions and claim that she was suffering from mental illness at the time of Victoria's case as it was handed to her department. It was alleged that in one meeting pertaining to child protection cases, Baptiste was preoccupied by her relationship with God and that her own child had been taken into care just months before Victoria's death. Baptiste admitted that she had neglected to

properly acquaint herself with the details of Victoria's case, and claimed to bear no grudges against those who sought her removal or replacement. At the inquiry's conclusion on January of 2003, it was judged that the agencies involved in Victoria's care had failed to protect her, and that on at least 12 occasions, workers involved in her case could have prevented her death. A 400-page report was published, recommending a total of 108 charges to Great Britain's child protection system. The British Health Secretary, Alan Milburn, said, Yet another participant in the inquiry, Paul Burstow, had a far more poignant point to share. The majority of the children who die from abuse or neglect in this country know the perpetrator, he said, and it is within the family or close community that most

abuse occurs. As a society, we are still in denial about that hard truth, and until we do so, the abuse of vulnerable people will remain a horrible inevitability. I can't believe I'm about to tell you this, but I made a throwaway email, and I'm not going to use any real names or places, so let's just go. The biggest, darkest secret in my entire family involves my granddad, his little brother, and a little Southeast Asian country called Vietnam. Granddad, his youngest brother, so technically my great-uncle, and two of their close mates were lucky enough to have their numbers called in the draft for Vietnam. Obviously, none of them wanted to go.

But if they didn't, they'd get arrested, lose their jobs, and it'd be a world of hurt for each of them. So instead, they had to come up with a plan to get themselves out of it. The plan was they'd drive out to get their medicals done together, but on the way there, they'd have themselves a little accident and drive their car into a tree or a ditch or something. Obviously, the plan was to get too injured to get sent to Vietnam, but not so injured as to be permanently crippled or what have you. But most importantly, it'd have to look like an accident so that nobody got pinched and sent to jail for being a draft dodger. At the time, they were all living out way out in the middle of nowhere in Western Australia,

so all they had to do was say they swerved to miss a kangaroo, hit a tree, then Bob's your uncle. They're just too bloody banged up to go to war. But then, things didn't quite pan out like that. My granddad was driving the car, his friend was in the passenger seat, and the two others were in the back, his brother included. They were driving along when they see this lone tree coming up in the distance. My granddad asked all the lads, You ready, boys? And they said, Yeah.

Let her rip and skip. Then, wham. The car smashes into the tree, doing about 40 kilometers an hour. Granddad's right leg gets smashed in an instant. No Vietnam for him. The guy behind him breaks his arm and some ribs. No Vietnam for him either. Their other mate gets a few broken bones too, meaning no playing at being a soldier for him anytime soon. There was just one massive problem. Because this was rural Australia in the 60s, wearing seatbelts really wasn't compulsory. But then, knowing that they were going to be in a big crash, my granddad had worn his,

as had his two mates in the back and passenger seat. But his little brother, hoping that leaving it off would make for more debilitating injuries, had neglected to wear it, and the impact had ruptured his spleen. Nobody had found the car for an hour or two, and neither had anyone in it factored serious internal injuries into their genius-level scheme. My great-uncle was dead before they could even get him to a hospital, and my granddad never, ever forgave himself. I only found out in the last couple of years following his death from heart disease. My grandma was the only one he ever told, as far as we know, and she didn't tell my mother until after he died, which is when I found out too.

After the funeral, we found a small box in their bedroom when we were cleaning out the house. It had a clipping from the local newspaper at the time about the accident. It said that they had swerved amidst a kangaroo and called it a tragedy. I don't think my mother told any of her siblings, so technically this is still the family secret. I guess now you're all in on it, so why don't you keep it hush-hush? Growing up, I always knew my family was different. When I was seven, we moved from a crummy single-bedroom downtown apartment to a five-bedroom, three-story suburban with a swimming pool and a tennis court in the backyard. It was a huge move, but I was just a kid, more concerned with Pokemon and Little League than why or how we'd relocated.

I loved my brand new, very own bedroom, and I loved the backyard and the pool and all that stuff. But not once did I ever ask how or why we'd move there. I also very naively thought that just because we'd moved to a place like that, we were exactly the same folks as the people who were now our neighbors. But it was only when I started to hang out with some of the neighborhood kids that I really noticed how different we were. One of the first things I noticed was that pretty much everyone talked differently than we did. I don't want to say exactly where I'm from, but the inner city accent is very distinct

from the one in the suburbs, and since it was such an obvious change, that was the first major thing that struck me as different. The next thing was the way the other kids' parents acted. Both my mom and dad smoked cigarettes. They smoked inside when we lived in the apartment, like I had quite vivid memories of having ashtrays around and stuff, but when we moved, they tried to smoke outside to keep from messing up their new house. This meant that mom was almost permanently lounging on one of the patio chairs, smoking a cigarette with either a coffee or a glass of wine. But when it came to other moms, they didn't smoke. I never saw them drinking and they never, ever cursed in front of their kids. On top of that, other moms seemed to actually do stuff.

They had jobs, careers, or they were members of the PTA or the HOA or any number of other TLA's, these three-letter acronyms. There were a lot of nannies in other kids' families because both of their parents had very busy schedules. What all my mom did was lounge around the house, occasionally go out to get her nails or hair done while my dad stayed away at work for days at a time. I also had no idea what my dad did for a living. Other kids knew exactly what their dad or mom did for work, be it a doctor or lawyer or whatever, but I think I must have been around 11 or 12 the first time I actually asked him how he made his money. And all he told me was shipping, and that his job was boring. Like I said, I kind of knew we were different.

I just didn't see anything wrong with it, and on its own, there is nothing wrong with a working class family making themselves some money and then moving up in the world. But in my family's case, things weren't that simple and they weren't that innocent either. One afternoon in my freshman year of high school, the vice principal pulled me out of class and called me to her office. I thought that I might have done something wrong so I was already kind of nervous when I got to her office. I thought that I might have done something wrong, so I was already kind of nervous when I got to her office, but when I saw her sitting at her desk with one of my aunts sitting in front of her, I realized something else was happening, and whatever it was, it was very clearly bad. It wasn't even so much that my aunt was there, it was the look on both of their faces.

They obviously had bad news to share with me, and up until that there. It was the look on both of their faces. They obviously had bad news to share with me, and up until that point, it was the worst news I'd ever received in my entire life. My mom and dad had gone missing, and for the foreseeable future I'd be staying with my aunt. Now, there are two things you need to know here. First off, missing wasn't some kind of stand-in word for something else. They hadn't been in some kind of horrible accident, not to our knowledge anyway, and there was no sign of them being hurt in any way. Instead, they were just gone. My aunt had been due to meet with my parents in the morning, just after I left for school,

but when she arrived, there was no one home. The cars are in the driveway, the TV is on, but neither of my parents were anywhere to be found. My aunt got in through an unlocked back door, same one we always kept unlocked, and chilled in the house for a while in the hopes that they might soon return. But they didn't, and after looking all morning for them, she realized something weird and potentially very bad was going on. This was before cell phones were widespread too, so there was no calling them to see where they were, only calling places that they might be to see if they were there. But again, there's no sign of

either my parents at any of their usual hangouts, so she swings by my school to make sure I'm okay, and that's when I got called into the office. Second thing you need to know, my aunt wasn't really my aunt. I had a whole bunch of aunts and uncles who weren't really related to me. And I know what you're thinking, but no, it wasn't some Italian-American thing with an Uncle Vinny and Uncle Tony. It was a whole bunch of people who were around my family when I was growing up who basically took on that status to me. And that was another kind of weird thing. I didn't have much family in the traditional sense.

I have these vague memories of seeing a grandpa when I was very young, but then when it came to who'd be taking care of me in the absence of my parents, it fell on my aunt. I'm not saying I'm not grateful for that. She treated me like I was her own flesh and blood. Always had done, hence the name aunt. But that was definitely another weird inconsistency that I noticed as time went by. Other kids had blood relatives. aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents they saw on the regular, but not me. I didn't have anyone but this motley assortment of my parents, friends, and associates who all stopped by to pass on their condolences and ask if they could help out. I say condolences like someone knew that they were dead or something,

but it wasn't like that. They were just sorry that I was going through something so awful and, like me, hoped my parents would show up again soon. Anyway, from the ages of 14 to about 19, I really struggled with the fact that they seemed to have just disappeared. Eventually there came a point where it was very obvious that people were expecting to find bodies, and not live people, and the most messed up thing is I actually wish that were true. In my mind, I'd rather they had been killed in some freak accident than they willfully abandoned me. Not just me either, they left their entire lives behind and they didn't even bother to tell us why. Did I matter that little to them? That they'd just up and run off like that without even saying

goodbye? That was the question that had me wishing that they were dead. Not something I'm proud to look back on, but it was a way of dealing with the pain of it all, I guess. Then, after five years of adjusting to the idea that I was never going to see or hear from my parents ever again, I guess. Then, after five years of adjusting to the idea that I was never going to see or hear from my parents ever again, I got home from work one day to find my aunt sitting in the TV room with a friend of hers. The friend was someone that I'd come to know over the years. Not quite an aunt, but definitely someone I knew and liked. My aunt told me to sit down, and for the first time in a long time, I got that same creeping dread that I was about to hear some bad news.

I remember just straight up asking my aunt, did they find mom and dad? And she said no, but that the thing that they wanted to talk to me about was related to them. And like I said, I'd long accepted the idea that they'd disappeared somehow, possibly in like a kidnap or home invasion gone wrong or something. So to learn that there was some kind of new development, all I felt was curiosity and really nothing more. My aunt then told me in the next couple of days I was probably going to hear some stuff about my mom and dad. I asked what kind of stuff and from who. My aunt and her friend looked at each other,

and then my aunt said, you're going to hear some stuff about your mom and dad, and it's going to be in the news or on TV and probably in the paper too. As you can probably imagine, this brought everything to a whole different level. It was one thing to have this personal tragedy of my parents just disappearing, As you can probably imagine, this brought everything to a whole different level. It was one thing to have this personal tragedy of my parents just disappearing, but then to not only hear that it was about to be broadcast to the whole world,

but that new details were about to emerge. I actually know what people mean when they say that something made their head completely spin. My aunt then told me that in order for me to understand what I was going to hear, I needed some context, and that context was this. My mom and dad were good people, as in their hearts had always been in the right place, but they made their money in a way that wasn't at all legal. Then, prior to their disappearance, something happened which may or may not have been related to them vanishing. All I needed to know is that that thing was a mistake, a terrible one, and not something my dad would have ever done on purpose. I asked my aunt what that thing was and she told me, but honestly, you're better hearing it in the way the newsreaders talked about it, because if there was

one thing that I've learned, it's that the truth really doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what everyone chooses to believe is the truth, and I guess a lot of that is dictated by whoever writes the headlines. But around the time of my 14th birthday, a truck with one of those cabs, the kind that you use to transport frozen seafood, was found abandoned at a truck stop just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. It sat there for a day or two before someone finally called the cops, who showed up, inspected the thing, and then busted open the cab to see what was inside.

They found a whole bunch of dead, frozen meat in there. It just didn't belong to any farm animal or sea creature. It belonged to the 30 plus corpses of illegal migrants that had hopped into the wrong truck before it came across the border. It caused a big stir down in the southwest, but not up where we lived, so I literally didn't hear anything about it until my aunt told me about it. Anyway, the FBI had been hacking their way up the chain of human traffickers before they finally figured out who was in charge of that particular trafficking route,

and that person was my father. I remember seeing his pictures on the news and thanking God that my aunt had given me the heads up, because if I had no idea and I saw all that, I think I'd have puked and passed out or something. My aunt had told me that my dad just wanted to help people get into the country who wouldn't be able to do so otherwise for whatever reason. If it meant that he could make money doing it, then fine, it was a living. I guess that all those dead migrants, that was his big mistake. The buck stopped at him after all those accidental deaths were discovered, and I don't know if my parents just wanted to get ahead of everything and left right away,

or someone in the same organization decided that he was a loose end that needed tying up. But either way, the timing of it, as in the fact that the deaths happened just a few weeks before they disappeared, meant it was probably related to their disappearance in some way. And as you can imagine, it's not something I particularly enjoy talking about with people, but this way, anonymously I mean, it actually feels kind of good to get it all off of my chest. I don't know where my parents are, if they're alive or not, or if I could ever find it

in my heart to forgive them, but I hope that one day I can at least get the opportunity to talk to them, even if it is some kind of deathbed exchange. I know they did some truly awful things, and I know they deserve to be punished for what they did. But they're still my parents, and I've still missed them. Every single day since the moment I found out that they were gone. When I was a kid, I always believed my paternal grandmother was no longer with us. We only ever visited family on my mom's side and we'd get visits from my paternal aunt and uncle, but I always figured that we never saw or spoke of my dad's mother because she was no longer with us. Well, as it turns out, she was alive when I was growing up, and she didn't pass on until I was in my early twenties. In their defense, mom and dad never actually said she was dead. They just never, ever brought her up. To me, grandma and grandpa were literally the names of the two older folks that I visited every

other weekend, and for years, I didn't even realize those weren't their names, and that I was supposed to have another pair of grandparents on my dad's side. I'm sure I might have asked at some point, I just don't remember it, and so I grew up thinking both my dad's parents were deceased. But then, years later, my paternal grandmother actually dies, at which point my parents decided that then was the best time to tell me about her. I don't know why they took it upon themselves to do so, but there's a lot I don't understand about my parents, so excuse me if I just toss that onto the stack of other crap that mystifies me about them. They could have told me all about what I'm about to tell you when she was alive,

when I could have actually done something about it. But they waited until there was nothing I could do or say about it that would really matter, and I guess I still resent them a little for that. But then I can already hear you asking, what awful thing did grandma do that meant my parents didn't breathe a word of her until she was dead? Well, I'm about to tell you. So my dad's side of the family is all Polish, and his mom was, well, kind of crazy. It wasn't her insisting on him marrying a Polish girl that made her crazy. That was a pretty common thing. It was all the crazy things that she did that made everyone think that she was crazy. My grandpa pretty much hated her. He only stayed because they were hardcore Catholic, and she made life pretty hard for my dad and his

two siblings. But they didn't know any different, they just thought that that was family. They didn't realize other families actually made an attempt to be happy, or how other parents had some semblance of emotional maturity. And in my dad's case, he only realized things could be different when he met my mom. Her family is Cuban, and they're crazy in their own way, trust me. But the grandparents I grew up with are some of the most loving and welcoming people you could ever wish to meet. All they gave a damn about was if dad treated mom okay and if he did, so they treated him like their own flesh and blood. Dad put off introducing mom to grandma. His own dad had passed by that point because he knew that she'd only react badly. But mom being mom, she insisted that

they at least give it a try, so dad calls grandma and tells her that he has a girlfriend. Grandma was acting all pleased for him at least, but dad could tell it was just an act. She'd only be truly happy once she'd heard the girl was Polish, so when she heard mom's background was Cuban, she was not happy. She wasn't particularly unhappy about it though, like she didn't slam the phone down or start giving my dad the cold shoulder and she actually agreed to the offer of a meeting over dinner and this was a huge thing. Dad thought she'd go nuts if he brought home a Cuban girl so to have her even agree to a meeting was like a really hopeful sign. Anyway so a few weeks go by and it finally comes time for mom and grandma's first meeting. Grandma insists on doing the cooking and when mom and dad arrive, she told them that she made a kind of stew called bigos.

Bigos is actually pretty good. Like imagine a stew with a little fruity fragrance to it, but just like my paternal grandma, I didn't even know it existed until I was like 23. And then weirdly enough, it was for the exact same reason too. So things are actually going much better than expected. The bigos is good, grandma's being nice, but then mom seems to have a real problem with her food. Mom wasn't a fussy eater or anything, but she was clearly just trying to be nice when she was calling it delicious. But then, it really was delicious. Grandma had clearly worked hard on it, and even way back then, mom was open-minded and adventurous with food. The whole thing had my dad sitting there thinking, just, what the hell is going on? Dinner carries on for a little while longer, and mom throws in

the towel after just a few more spoonfuls grandma asks if she's okay and mom says that she must be feeling a little under the weather but then suddenly seconds later mom actually projectile pukes onto the table like it caught her completely by surprise she covers her mouth mortified, then runs off to the bathroom to finish throwing up. Dad is completely flabbergasted by what's going on, but he figures mom must really be sick or something, so he starts looking around the kitchen for some paper towels or a cloth or whatever to clean up mom's puke. Only then does grandma actually react to what's going on, and tells my dad to sit down and finish his food while she's going off to get the paper towels.

And to him, this doesn't make one single solitary bit of sense. Grandma was a huge germaphobe, and there's no way that she'd allow anyone to eat on a table with vomit on it, especially not her food. So to Dad, there had to be some ulterior motive for her unusual behavior. She starts shooing him back towards the dinner table, but he insists on checking in the cabinet under the kitchen sink for a dish towel. But then when he does, grandma actually puts herself in the way of the cabinets, legit like she's trying to hide something. Things are starting to look pretty dark at this point. Mom got randomly sick and grandma looks like she's hiding something, so as you can

imagine, my dad is starting to freak out. He basically shoves grandma out of the way, opens the kitchen cabinets, and there, half hidden by a bunch of plastic tubs and kitchen utensils, was a bottle of bleach. And here's what you gotta understand about Grandma, or at least, this is what I heard from my dad. Grandma was crazy. Really crazy. And remember I said that she was a total germaphobe? Well, she was terrified of chemicals too. Everything that had to be all natural, including all the cleaning products that she'd used. Grandma used to use a lot of old-fashioned castile soap, a lot of baking soda, and a lot of salt and a lot of cornstarch.

For anyone scoffing at the idea of using cornstarch to clean windows or shampoo carpets, it might seem nuts, but that's just what people used before chemical cleaning products became household items. Grandma didn't trust any kind of chemical, but she did trust stuff like white vinegar to clean almost everything, which is why my dad, aunt, and uncle grew up in a house that perennially smelled like vinegar, and I'll despise the smell of that stuff now as a result. So the fact that there was suddenly this bottle of bleach under the kitchen sink, my dad said it was this moment of awful realization. It hadn't been that mom hadn't enjoyed her stew. Grandma had tried to poison her. The way dad tells it, he never figured

in a zillion years that grandma would ever admit to doing something like that, so at first, he didn't think that there was any point asking her. But then at the same time, he couldn't not ask her, you know, so he does. But instead of the lie that he expected to hear, grandma told him the truth. Yes, she had put bleach in mom's stew, but it was just a tiny amount, not enough to really make her sick. She didn't want to kill Dad's new girlfriend, but she was hoping to kill the baby, if there was one growing inside of her. Grandma figured that the only reason Dad was bringing this girl home to meet her was because Mom was pregnant. And that's just the way Grandma was.

No one could do anything for any good reason or out of the kindness of their heart. There had to be some ulterior motive, something bad that they were masking with the good. So when she heard about dad's new girlfriend, she was convinced it was the worst case scenario. And in her mind, that worst case scenario involved a non-Polish girl being pregnant with her grandchild. Now luckily, mom was not pregnant, but obviously that didn't matter in the least. Dad had known grandma to do some screwed up things in her time, but trying to poison one of his girlfriends was obviously a different thing entirely. It obviously caused a huge fight, and I mean a huge one. Things got smashed, the cops got called, grandma threatened to stab herself and had the cops

pointing their guns at her, cause she'd suddenly forgot all of her English and started talking only in Polish with a big old kitchen knife in her hand. It was a huge thing that everyone in their neighborhood talked about for a long time. But in the immediate aftermath, all my dad cared about was what was going to happen between his mom and his girlfriend. Incredibly, mom told him that she wouldn't press charges against grandma, but only under one condition. She didn't mind if my dad kept in contact with her, but she didn't want my grandma around if they started a family. That way, grandma didn't get a charge, all respective relationships could continue,

and any future children they had, i.e. me, would be 100% safe from that psycho wannabe baby killer. My dad agreed, and kept in touch with his mom for a while too. He tried to get her to apologize, but she wouldn't, because she literally doesn't even regret trying to perform a home abortion on my mom. Dad cut her off when he realized how far gone she was. She'd been getting worse and worse ever since her husband, my dad's dad, had passed away from a heart attack, but I guess no one realized just how bad she'd gotten until she tried to delete future me. I know I wasn't actually at risk in that situation, but you get the idea. I don't resent my mom and dad for keeping me from having a relationship

with my paternal grandma. I resent them because I never got the chance to tell her to burn in hell. Maybe if she came to realize what a terrible thing she'd done, maybe then we'd have been able to have a relationship. But hearing how unrepentant she was, how her own son had tried his best and she threw it back in his face, that makes me hate her in ways that are impossible to put into words. My grandmother emigrated from the U.S. from Estonia, just before the outbreak of World War II. You might think that that would mean that she had avoided a lot of tragedy, escaping Europe before the war and all. But in actual fact, it was her own personal tragedy that prompted the move, or to be more specific, the death of my grandfather. My mother was an only child at the

time, so she remembers my grandmother and other siblings being very sad about something, whereas she was just confused. She didn't understand where her father had gone, only that she should be sad that he was never coming back. Sometime later, they moved to America, and many years passed before my mother explored the subject of my grandfather's death in more detail. But when she finally did, she was horrified about what she'd heard. Originally, all my mother knew about my grandfather's death was that it had been a sudden and tragic accident. He had been out walking one day when an innocent misstep caused him to bash his head onto a jagged rock. Then, before anyone realized that he had hurt himself, it was too late. That's what my mother and her siblings were told, that it was all a tragic and unforeseen accident.

But that was only partially true. The story goes that my grandfather used to wake up real early for work. I'm talking pre-dawn. He used to make his own breakfast, head out to work before anyone else woke up, and then he'd return home late again in the evening after his long shift working at a lumber mill. One morning, my grandmother wakes up and she goes downstairs to find no dirty plates from my grandpa's breakfast, only a small scribbled note saying that he was gone and he was never coming back. Obviously, this shocked my grandmother, but mainly because it was completely out of the blue. They were happily married, at least that's what my grandmother says, so his sudden departure made her question his mental state. My grandmother then walked all the way into the nearest town from the farm that they

were living on, told the constable that my grandfather was missing and that she was concerned for him. The constable then organized a search of the surrounding area in the hopes of uncovering the man's trail, but no one found him, and no one appeared to have seen him either. Once the sun went down, the constable suspended the search until the following morning and promised my grandmother that he'd extend the range of the search to the surrounding towns. But the very next morning, before the search could recommence, a local altar boy went running to the constabulary to report something awful. There was a dead body lying in the church's cemetery, and upon investigation, they found

it was my grandpa. A doctor was summoned to the scene to determine the cause of death, and following a short inspection, he declared my grandfather had frozen to death He had simply walked into the cemetery at some point over the previous 24 hours, laid down, and then just stayed still until he froze lying directly on top of this one particular grave, too, so perfectly aligned with where the casket would be that it terrified the townsfolk when word filtered down to them. The grave was an old one, and its occupant bore no relation to my grandfather. According to the inscription, the deceased woman passed when my grandfather was just a child. There's a chance the pair may have met in some capacity, but there's no way that they had any kind of personal relationship,

and the reason for this particular grave selection remained a mystery. The official explanation was that my grandfather had simply lost his mind, walked off into the cemetery, and was dead before my grandmother even knew that he was missing. The cemetery was small and isolated, and it wasn't every day that someone tended to it, so there was a chance my grandfather had lain there for a whole day before that altar boy finally found him. Folks tried to work out why he'd gone to that particular grave too, and that led to all kinds of really gross speculation. If he wanted to take

his own life, there were far more effective and far less poetic ways to do it. And if it was indeed him doing so, what had been bothering my grandfather so terribly that he felt the need to actually take his own life? The never-ending mystery, all those unanswered questions were like a curse on my grandmother, and not long after my grandfather passed, she left Estonia and emigrated to America, like I said. She told my mother when she was an adult and had always regretted doing so. She then made her promise never to tell me until she was dead. She had lived with the pain of it and had seen what it had done to my mother, but she also knew that I had the right to know what really happened.

My grandmother's only request was that she wouldn't be there to see it break my heart, in the same way that it had broken my mother's heart when she learned the truth. My mother became obsessed with the subject, and it tore my grandmother up to see her putting all this time and effort into something so fruitless. The only person who really knew what happened that morning was my grandfather, and unless there truly is such a thing as an afterlife, then our chance of getting answers died with him. I've accepted that we're never going to know what happened to him, and I'm inclined to believe that he suffered some kind of manic-depressive episode,

and that's all there is to it. But as mom told me, there are others in our extended family, mostly back in Estonia, who think that something considerably more frightening and considerably more supernatural occurred that morning when my grandfather walked off towards that cemetery. Personally, I think that's a bunch of crap, and that any kind of speculation like that is an insult to his memory. But they really do think that it was some kind of curse, that the woman whose grave my grandfather laid on was some kind of witch, and that my grandmother fled Estonia to escape that curse. I can only safely say that neither myself nor my mother or grandmother believe there's any kind of supernatural element to my grandfather's death. To us, there's nothing more terrifying than the idea of someone just walking off into an icy cemetery, laying down and fighting off every overwhelming urge to seek warmth

before finally blacking out forever. Because if it can happen to someone as loving, hardworking, and stable as my grandfather, then it can happen to just about anyone. It was only in the last couple of years that I found out how an uncle of mine had been touched as a child, and that the perpetrator was actually a priest at the family's church. This was way back in the 1950s in rural Pennsylvania, when there was no sex ed and when kids were told to religiously obey the commands of their elders. By the time he even realized what was going on, he knew no one would believe him, and there was no getting out of Sunday school either,

so he was basically stuck getting abused from the ages of 10 to 13. By 14, he was avoiding church entirely, which caused a huge rift between him and my grandma. And then to combat all the stress which that caused him, he started drinking more and more heavily until he basically was a functioning alcoholic by age 18. And by the time he was 20, he was stealing cars, taking benzos and quaaludes. Then when the law finally caught up with him, he was given two choices. Join the army and set himself straight, or spend the next six years in jail.

He chooses the army, thinking the three years as a soldier will beat six in the slammer. But boy was he wrong. Because just a year into his service, Uncle Sam went into South Vietnam, and my uncle went with him. To me, this is where the story gets really weird. Because if my uncle did what he did next as a way of getting out of Vietnam, then I'd get it. In fact, a bolder man than I might even say that it was the smart thing to do. But at least officially speaking, my uncle's service record was impeccable. He served his country honorably, did one tour, came home,

then he was discharged once he'd completed his contract. My mom said that the whole family thought that he turned his life around, but after a few months of being back home, my uncle started to act really, really strangely. So while he was over in Vietnam, my uncle had found religion. I guess it all makes sense in the world to get a little spiritual when you're so close to death every day. And when he got back, he joined a local church and spent a fair amount of his spare time helping out. But then one day, he just stopped going, and he didn't find any other church to go to either. Instead, he started acting depressed. He stopped going to work, stopped returning calls,

so my grandma and grandpa reached out to the church that he suddenly stopped going to, and asked the pastor if he had any idea what was going on. The pastor was over the moon to hear from some of my uncle's relatives, and he had had no other way of getting in touch or getting information about him. My grandparents figured that they were getting somewhere, but then the pastor hit them with some very terrifying news. My uncle had claimed to have been experiencing stigmata. And for those of you that don't know, stigmata is a Catholic thing,

and it's when a person experiences unexplained wounds or scars that occur in the same place that Jesus was wounded during his crucifixion. We're talking wounds on the palms or wrists, wounds on the feet, near the heart, or on the person's head or back. My uncle had them all. Only his pastor said the wounds were quite obviously self-inflicted. He said the one example of stigmata that he actually believed was a girl in Brazil whose stigmata consisted of a sudden and unexplainable lack of pigmentation in the affected area, and that the general consensus among most men of God was that the Lord does not inflict physical wounds and call them a blessing. Stigmata is a reminder of Christ's

sacrifice, not a reenactment of it, and when the pastor confronted my uncle with this idea, that he was hurting himself, I mean, my uncle freaked out, stormed out of the church, and that's pretty much the start of him going AWOL. As soon as they heard that he was potentially harming himself, my grandparents enlisted the help of a few friends. Then they drove over to my uncle's place to stage what I guess these days you'll probably call an intervention. They went over to his place, and at first it seemed like he wasn't home. But when someone peeked through a window and saw blood on the walls, they smashed their way inside and found my uncle upstairs in his bathroom.

They caught him doing it, cutting himself I mean, and they basically dragged him off to the psych ward after convincing him to put the knife down. He was later diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, which had latched onto his newfound religion with manifesting religious-based hallucinations and delusions. My family had him committed to the state psychiatric hospital and he seemed to get a little better there, but was still very much in need of round-the-clock treatment to prevent him from doing any further damage to himself. A few years later, the state governor closed the facility my uncle was staying in, and he was basically given a choice between living in a group home or living on his own.

Only those that had improved since their committal were given such a choice, and my uncle chose his freedom. My family never stopped being concerned for his mental and physical health, but he lived out the rest of his life in relative peace until he died of liver cancer when I was just a kid. My parents didn't tell me this story until I was way older, which made sense given how freaking dark it is. I just wish I had a chance to meet him. I mean, he lived one hell of a life, and even with all the crap he went through, he ended up finding a degree of peace in his final few years. It might sound weird,

but it kind of gives me hope. He fought in a war, was addicted to drugs, and went through a hellish kind of mental illness, but then managed to get past it. Or at least he got past it enough to live a somewhat normal life for a while before his long overdue date with destiny. When I was growing up, I had a friend who told me this wild story about his family's history. It wasn't totally unbelievable, but it was very, very far-fetched, and whatever shred of credibility it had evaporated when he asked me, don't tell my mom I told you this. We were 12, going on 13 at the time, so I was old enough and smart enough to realize that when my friend told me, please don't try and verify this, what I should be hearing was, nothing I just said was true. But then, the more I thought about it, the more I felt kind of insulted that my buddy thought that I was dumb enough to believe such an outrageous story. And so, I took it upon myself to try and

embarrass him a little, and concocted a scheme to inflict some petty revenge. I guess that doesn't make me sound like a very good friend, but we were just dumb kids, and if anything, this whole incident actually brought us closer over the long run. But at the same time, I just couldn't resist myself, and in doing so, I well and truly kicked a hornet's nest. But anyway, so I'm sitting at the kitchen table in my friend's house. Me and him are having some dinner, and his mom is kind of wandering around the kitchen doing dishes and stuff. The three of

us are talking about nothing in particular, when suddenly I ask my buddy's mom, Hey, Mrs. P, is it true your family used to be gangsters? I expected her to say something like, No, what are you talking about? And for my buddy to just get embarrassed or something. But instead, she froze, and without looking around at us, said to my buddy in a voice filled with tension, tell your friend that he has to go home, now.

My buddy looked like he was about to pass out, like he'd turned so pale that he was a little green, and then he did as his mom asked. He told me that I had to go home, and I did. As I rode my bike back over to my parents' place, I felt like the biggest piece of crap in the history of pieces of crap, but I also couldn't believe what he had told me was true. It sounded so much like bullcrap that I was convinced that it was just that, but from what I could tell from his mom's reaction, every word my buddy said was true. She'd obviously sworn him to secrecy, and he'd trusted me enough to tell me all about his family's dark past. And then in response,

I'd completely and utterly betrayed him, all while unwittingly relishing the chance to do so. He was grounded for a long time afterward, and his mom took literally years to warm back up to me. She didn't try to keep us separated or anything, I guess she just didn't like the fact that I knew. And this, all of you who are patiently listening to me, I appreciate that, is what I knew. Back during Prohibition days, my buddy's family were the most prolific bootleggers in the entire Ozarks. They covered southern Missouri, western Tennessee, northeast Oklahoma, northern Arkansas, and part of Kansas. They also supplied elements of the Italian Mafia over in St. Louis, who in turn sold the booze for a huge markup. They were based over near a place called Ava in Missouri, but

when they started out there, there was already a bunch of different outfits running liquor, and they were doing it in a kind of syndicate. They controlled the market, leaving no room for anyone else. So how did my buddy's family muscle their way onto the scene, you might ask. Well, the answer to that is sheer goddamn brutality. A group of around a dozen different brothers, uncles, and cousins, all young, wild, and hungry enough to do something so goddamn crazy, they get together and they decide that they're going to go to war. Only they don't fight fair at all. The bootlegging syndicate idea of fighting fair involved hosing each other down with tommy guns and bars in broad daylight. But my buddy's family, they killed those men in their homes, in their beds. They took their time

over it and they never, ever left any witnesses. They were ruthless in the very sense of the word. They didn't care if they had to kill women or old men or kids, and no one could know who they were. And in the end, they just sort of ran out of people to kill. Any bootlegger with a brain between their ears got the hell out of Douglas County. It was all about who wanted it the most, and my buddy's family simply showed that they did. Eventually, the family took over the entire bootlegging business in Douglas County

and began to spread out to all the areas they ended up covering. But then everywhere they went, they kept on stamping out the competition in the only way they knew how. Whenever they expanded into a new area, the competition could either join forces with them and keep a cut of their earnings, or they could just pack up, move someplace else, and carry on keeping all their money.

Anyone who defied them, they took it like a personal insult, like they were taking food out of their mouths. And what was the old-timey punishment for stealing food? Execution. My buddy told me that there was this small-time distillery someplace that didn't want to shut up shop when the family rolled into town. They were run by another family, not so different from my buddies, who only wanted to put a few extra dollars in their pocket during the hardest times in living memory. It took them months to track the distillery down, and when they did, it was a massacre. They ambushed their competitors, shot them up,

tortured the survivors, then trashed their equipment and burned their bodies. And the thing is, it was a celebration, you know. It had taken them long enough to track those boys down, so it felt good to them, like something worth celebrating. They drank, danced, and played the fiddle around the fire the slain bootleggers' bodies were roasting on. And one time, and this was the part which made me think there's no way in a million years this actually happened, the family were hunted by some federal men, like from whatever they had before the FBI. The family simply killed those men too, didn't wait for them to come look for them either. They just found out where those old bureau men were lodging in town and then

sent some boys over in the night to rig their entire boarding house with dynamite. They killed the landlady, the clerk on duty, and a handful of other guests. But most importantly, they got all four bureau men while they were asleep in their bunks. Poor bastards never knew what hit them. And after that, the feds rolled into Douglas County, intent on putting an end to all the violence. They hunted down my buddy's family, sending any survivors fleeing out of state. And that's how my buddy's family ended up where they were, far from Missouri, and far from places where their names had become a byword for death and destruction. My buddy said that he found all this out from a senior citizen uncle of his

who let slip and told him and a bunch of his cousins all about it when he was drunk one time. He then mentioned it to his mom and it caused a huge fight and he was sworn to guard the family secret at an age when he was nowhere near ready to do so. And years later, he told me. I asked his mom about it over dinner, and well, you already heard the rest of that story. And that should have been the death of our friendship right there, and I guess it did deliver something of a knockout punch that left our companionship on the mat for a while. But after that, he could have told me that the moon was made of cheese,

and I'd have believed every word. It's hard to find that kind of trust in life, and my buddy knew it too. He knew damned well that I'd believe every single word that he told me from there on out, and I guess he understood the value of that just as well as I did. We reunited in spirit during our sophomore year of high school, and we've been friends ever since. That friendship has survived a lot of rough seas, too, but it's always survived because there are a few things as rare or as powerful as unquestioning trust. To be continued... Hey friends, thanks for listening. Click that notification bell to be alerted of all future narrations. I release new videos every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7pm EST.

If you get a story, be sure to submit them to my subreddit, r slash let's read official, and maybe even hear your story featured on the next video. And if you want to support me even more, grab early access to all future narrations for just $1 a month on Patreon, and maybe even pick up some Let's Read merch on Spreadshirt. And check out the Let's Read podcast, where you can hear all of these stories in big compilations and save huge on data, located anywhere you listen to podcasts. Links in the description below. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you again soon.