The Lets Read Podcast - 61: Episode 054 | Pizza Delivery & Stalker Stories | 22 True Scary Horror Stories

Episode Date: January 27, 2020

Welcome to the fifty-fourth episode of The Lets Read Podcast! This podcast includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Pizza Delivery and Scary Stalker Stories.  HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?► www.Reddit.com/r/LetsReadOfficial FOLLOW ME ON- ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ► Twitter - https://twitter.com/LetsReadCreepy ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ♫ Background Music: Iron Cthulhu Apocalypse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFvrqVSJE8E PATREON for EARLY ACCESS!►http://patreon.com/LetsRead 

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If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. Then MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. I was a pizza delivery driver for eight months here in midtown Detroit. It felt like years. I've had some real terrible jobs since I dropped out of college, but being a delivery driver was by far the worst thing I've ever had to do for money. It goes way beyond just being talked to like a moron by some heavyset Armenian shop owner,

or being screwed out of a tip by some white trash bimbo who lies about the lateness of her order. I've been robbed, beaten up and almost killed while on the job. The first time was when I was delivering to an apartment building over near 8 mile. I had just gotten out of my car and was grabbing the pies from the backseat when I saw this group of teenagers approaching my car. They start making jokes about how beat up my old Taurus was and I'd be lying if I said they had no grounds to. That thing was a complete rust box. They're talking trash, I'm giving as good as I get and it seems like it's just a bit of fun. That's when I feel one of their hands in my pockets trying to grab the folded stack of dollar bills I use for change.

I'm mad, but when I turn, one of the kids has this huge knife out, telling me to hand over the cash. I just kind of reacted. I hurled the only thing I had available to me right at the knife wielder. Now, I didn't expect this, but as I throw the pizza box, the thing just sort of falls apart in mid-air, freeing the pie up to land right on the kid's face. I always knew our shop had a reputation for delivering piping hot pizza, I guess that's why it's so busy. But the way that kid was screaming when practically molten hot cheese was getting stuck to his thieving face,

wow, it was ear-splitting. I saw that same kid a few days later. He had a bandage over the side of his face the pizza hit, and I'd be lying if that didn't make me smile. It wasn't even the robberies that were the worst, though, because a few years back something started happening to pizza delivery drivers here in Midtown that's like something out of a horror film. A big part of gang initiations around here is taking a potential member out to jump someone. But since they were doing this in

public, the cops got wise to it pretty quickly. After trios of scumbag, crip or blood clones were getting locked up on the daily, the gangsters decided to smarten up a little. God knows whose idea it was, but some way, somehow, someone must have had the idea to ambush delivery drivers after luring them to abandoned spots throughout the city. The first I heard of this was a guy from another shop getting a call to a quiet, mostly derelict neighborhood on the edge of town. He'd arrived at this big red brick house, walked up to the front steps, then had apparently seen a handwritten sign on the door that read something like, doorbell broken, come around back, tip in it for you. Tip. That's the magic word that must have done the trick. Pizza box in hand, the guy walks in the backyard of this big old house where he sees some

kid, a pistol in his hand. No one knows just what went down, but it ended with a delivery driver being shot in the head and neck before their assailant stole nothing more than $20 in change and single bills. His funeral was about a month ago now. A few of the drivers at my shop stopped by to pay their respects. But I didn't. I kind of felt like I'd be imposing. Besides, I never mentioned it to anyone but I always thought that the guy was an idiot. No one deserves to lose their life over a delivery job but I always thought that the guy was an idiot. No one deserves to lose their life over a delivery job but this was right in the middle of this whole gang initiation thing happening. Who drives out to an abandoned neighborhood after getting an order of any topping, any soda? After that the shop I was delivering for started a blacklist of neighborhoods

that were forbidden to delivery after dark. But even that didn't keep us entirely safe. A buddy of mine at the same shop managed to get himself jacked in the middle of the day, delivering to a fancy residential neighborhood. Some gang members had busted into a house whose owners were on vacation. He rings the doorbell, they pull him inside, then proceed to rob him of the maximum $20 in change. When he tells them truthfully that was all he had on him, they beat him half to death before stealing his car. He was in the hospital for a week while his jaw was wired shut. That leads me to the last delivery I ever drove for Armin the Armenian pizza place. The fancy townhouse beating my buddy suffered had me paranoid. Borrowing a.44 revolver from

my buddy started me thinking that maybe I should just go ahead and quit. It was surreal in the extreme being given a little rundown of how to load and fire the thing where best to shoot someone if you didn't want to outright end their life. It felt like I was enlisting in the army or something. I had to remind myself this was a freaking pizza delivery job. So I rock up to the address I've been given, the two pizzas on the back seat, when I notice it's really quiet. There's a public park on the other side of the street and thanks to a row of bushes I can't see anything approaching from that angle. I get a bad feeling, like a really bad feeling, and take out the.44 from my glove box. That's when I see this dude

emerge from the bushes on the other side of the street and he's wearing one of those clown masks. This was right when all those attention-starved idiots were putting on clown masks and scaring people for the sake of getting that perfect viral video. But I didn't take the chance. I just started tapping on the glass with the revolver in hand, looking over at the guy with the gun plainly in view. He stops, takes one look at the revolver and then reaches behind his back into his waistband. I just remember cracking the window and shouting, don't do it man, don't do it, you don't want to get shot. I'm not a particularly brave guy but I don't know, the thought of ending up with a wired jaw, the thought of that poor kid who went out to work one night and never came home.

I actually think I was ready to end this guy in the clown mask. He just wasn't a real person to me. He was a living embodiment of everything I hated about living in this freaking city. I kept the gun pointed at him as I drove away, the two pizzas still sitting in the back seat. I quit the moment I arrived at the shop. Armin didn't even act surprised when I handed him back my uniform and collected the money I was owed for the shift. It's been a while since I quit that job but I still think about it most days. It's in the news all the time Some driver getting robbed or beat or worse Everyone seems terrified of automation right now

But it can't come soon enough for some jobs Jobs that just aren't worth losing your life over I've had a few delivery jobs that have given me the creeps. One or two that I was pretty sure I was about to be robbed. Another was a gunfight between gang members unfolding in the street I was delivering to, right as I was turning onto it. But these are just occupational hazards. Yeah, it sucks, but I guess you do get over them.

Only one delivery job really, truly terrified me. The only one that scares me to think about, even today. So we get an order from an address that none of us drivers had ever delivered to before. This normally causes some suspicion among us since we're always pretty wary whenever delivering to a new address. A fair few first time deliveries have resulted in an address getting blacklisted. Sometimes they try to stiff you for money or some other scam to get free pizza. Generally speaking, the drivers take turns delivering to a new address and this time it just so happened to be my turn. So once the order is completed and the pizzas are boxed up, I take them out to my car and punch the address into my sat-nav. It turns out the address is right on the edge of our delivery area, pretty much in the middle of absolute nowhere. It dawns on me that this could be the oldest trick in the book. Call the pizza

into some hard to reach location, then demand it to be free once it takes more than 45 minutes to deliver. But to my relief I make it out onto this old dirt road with time to spare. Yet my relief doesn't last long. Not when I see the state of the address I'm delivering to. The house is so run down it looks like a squat. like it's been commandeered by the homeless as a place to avoid sleeping rough. There's a musty old pickup in the driveway, its wheels all askew from years of misuse. I mean the place was just the very definition of haunted house. Needless to say I wasn't expecting a particularly generous tip. As I take the pizzas out from the passenger seat of my car, I start hearing this faint whining noise.

My ears prick up immediately and I freeze, trying to work out just what the sound is and where it's coming from. I come to realize it's the sound of a violin being played, but more accurately, it was the sound of a violin being played but more accurately it was the sound of a violin being played very badly. These discording noises carried on as I walked up the dirt pathway toward the porch and the front door. The sound of some old violin bow being dragged across dry old strings that were way out of tune. Creepy sure, but that's not what terrified me. When I knocked on the front door, the screaming cat violin sounds ceased instantly. A few moments of silence went by before I began to hear slow, heavy footsteps growing steadily closer. I can't be certain, but I'm almost sure I heard someone breathing on the other side. These heavy, labored breaths as I waited for the

door to open. The silence was broken by a metallic snap of the door unlocking before hurried footfall sounded on the other side. Someone had unlocked the door then scampered away from it as if they were overtly skittish about visitors. Um, hello? I got your pizza order here. I remember asking, feeling the tension rise as silence once again engulfed the scene. Come inside, mister. A childish voice came from the other side. I wouldn't just turn tail and run at this point, but returning to the pizza place without the money for the pizzas would definitely mean a verbal or written warning from my manager. I already had one for turning up late, I couldn't afford another. So reluctantly, I took hold of the door handle, turned it, and walked inside. The interior of the house was bathed in darkness, only a handful of weak

oil lamps to give me any sense of the layout. A figure was crouched on a nearby sofa, the old violin laying next to it. There's fifteen on the table there, mister. The person sounded like a child, but they looked bigger than they should have. On the small dusty coffee table in front of the couch, there's a pile of change in little piles. Normally I'd have taken issue with this, but to be honest, I was desperate to get out of there at that point. I'd have taken any form of currency. As I stooped down to start sliding the little piles of coins into my cupped palm, I started to hear the kid's labored breathing again, but I dared not look towards him. I could see its legs in my peripheral vision, and even then, I could see how unnaturally

long they were. This person was not a child. Sorry about the coins, mister. I saved them up. I saved them all up to afford this treat for myself. It's all I have. I told the person not to worry in the sunniest disposition I could muster. The last thing I wanted to do at this point was upset them. I pocketed the coins, barely having counted them. I'd come up with a difference myself if I needed to. Like I said, I just wanted to get out of there. But as I turned to leave, hastily thanking the person, I caught a glimpse of the person's face in the low light of the oil lamps. They were burned, horribly burned up and down their arms and chest. The scarred flesh extended all the way up their face and head,

only the person's features were obscured by a small rubber mask. The mask didn't even cover up their entire face, only a small central portion that concealed their eyes, nose, and mouth. The only thing I could really make out was that the mask had a long wooden nose, kind of like the puppet Pinocchio, whose nose would grow whenever he told lies. The small carved eyes were blank. I averted my gaze from the mask and was unable to return it. It was one of the most hideously sad and scary things I'd ever laid eyes on. Just as I had reached the front door, I heard that same childlike voice emanating behind me.

Want to hear me play a song, mister? Before I even had the chance to answer, to tell them I was too busy with deliveries to hang out, they had grabbed the old violin next to them and began to whine at a tune. Although the strings were almost totally out of tune, I started to make out the tune they were trying for. You know the one. If you go down in the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise. If you go down in the woods today, you better go in disguise, for every bear that ever there was will gather there for certain, because today's the day the teddy bears have their picnic. I was in the back of the driver's seat of my car before you could say nope, I'm out, scrambling to start the engine so I could make a quick getaway. I don't think they had any intention of hurting me.

I certainly wasn't as in much danger as when those idiot crip and blood wannabes decided to shoot it out like right in front of my car. But something about that place still creeps back into my mind while I lay there in darkness trying to sleep. Something that means I'll never, ever make another delivery there. I'll quit before I go back. About ten years ago I used to deliver pizzas for this small independent pizza place near Beacon Hill in Boston. If you live anywhere near Charles Street you might know which one I'm talking about. Anyway, it was a pretty good job. The place was almost consistently busy and the boss was an awesome guy.

So we ended up getting paid a living wage on top of the tips we made. One evening shift stuff got weird. Really weird. So although my job title was just delivery driver, the other drivers and I justified our somewhat inflated wage packet by helping out around the shop during quiet periods. We helped out with cleaning, aided the kitchen staff in prepping their ingredients and occasionally we helped answer the phone to take delivery orders. So this one shift the phone starts going when I'm helping cleaning out one of the pizza ovens. No one rushes to answer so I wipe my hands off and rush over to the counter to take the call. When I pick up I can barely understand the guy on the other end.

He sounds very old and has this raspy, gravelly voice that sounded like he'd been the subject of some kind of throat operation at some point in his life. I tried my best to make out what he was saying, I really did, going so far as turning the volume on the handset up high and sticking a finger to the ear free of the phone. But I got nothing. Absolutely nothing. I ended up giving the guy a heartfelt apology before telling him I'd pass him along to the manager. When I handed the phone to my manager I hung around just to make sure it wasn't just me who couldn't understand the elderly guy on the other end. My boss greets him before this confused expression comes over his face as the guy starts talking. Excuse me, sir? I think the line is bad. Could you repeat that? He maintained his politeness at first, but like me, soon lost his patience with the poor old guy. Sir, sir, I'm sorry, but I can't really understand you. Let me take you into the office where it's a little quieter.

He placed his hand over the receiver so the guy couldn't hear, then made some comment about how this dude needed meals on wheels and not a pizza delivery. He heads off into his office with a grin while I carry on with the daily cleaning checklist. About 15 minutes go by when the boss emerges from his office. I think he's about to tell me how he hung up on the dude after battling to understand him, but he's still on the phone. Yes sir, of course. Sir, right away sir. We'll keep you updated. Thank you. Thank you for your business. Goodbye. Different phone call, I figured.

Absolutely no way could that be the same guy who had called with the raspy voice. Taking an order doesn't take 15 whole minutes. I asked my boss what the deal was with the old guy who called, if he'd managed to make sense of anything he was saying. He doesn't answer. He just puts his jacket on, tells me I need to watch the business while he heads downtown. I ask where he's going. He just replies, Chinatown. Won't be long. There's only one reason my boss would have driven down to Chinatown so late. Ingredients. There are a couple of late night grocery stores in that area, some of which sell cheap quality produce. Only, I'd been helping prep all the toppings and whatnot myself along with the chef.

I knew well enough we weren't lacking anything. When he returns, he has one of those airtight coolers in his hand. The same kind we use to pick up fresh anchovies and shrimp from the fish market. He then asks us to make a basic cheese pizza and to bring it to his office when we're done. We ask no questions. Bossman usually gets a pizza in his office during the latter part of the shift and he usually asks for different things each night. So we thought absolutely nothing of his request. I box the pizza up, take it to his office, and knock on the door.

When he opens, this disgusting smell hit me. I mean, it was honestly the most gag-inducing stench I'd ever, ever smelled. Before I even get a chance to ask, he grabbed the pizza box from my hands and shut the office door in my face. Whatever it was reeked that bad that it crept throughout the entire back of the house, to the point the chefs were hollering and asking who just crapped their pants. I mean, they weren't far off. The smell reminded me of when my apartment building's septic tank got backed up. It really did smell like raw sewage or something, just this rotten smell. I really wanted to know just what that smell was, but I also had no intentions of going anywhere near the boss's office again, lest I get another hit of that stench.

But when he comes out of the office, that smell starts wafting around the back of the house again, and with this pained look on his face, he asks the two drivers on duty, myself included, which one of us wants a delivery. It's clear at this point that whatever stinks so bad, it's now on the pizza. The other driver just refuses. He delivers in his car and knew well that it'd take days, maybe a whole week to get that smell out of the furnishings. My boss is kind of panicking at this point. We have a sit down restaurant too and we're in danger of the smell wafting into that area. He promises me a huge nightly bonus if I deliver the pizza but I demand to know exactly what's on that thing before I ride it over to

the guy's house on my scooter. He takes me all back into the alley behind the pizza place then breaks it down for me. Apparently the guy had ordered durian on his pizza. Yeah, I needed that explained to me too. So turns out the durian fruit originates in Southeast Asia hence why my boss had to visit Chinatown to get one. They're massive, with a spiky texture to the skin, but pieces of the inner flesh can be bought pre-prepped from certain Asian grocery stores. I read that some people find the smell of the fruit to be sweet and fragrant, but I am not one of those, not by a long shot. But I did need the money so I took the pizza around front to my scooter, threw it in the luggage compartment at the rear, then drove out to the address I'd been given.

When I knocked on the house, the door was answered by a decrepit looking elderly man with the small plastic tubes of an oxygen tank running from his nostrils. I had my suspicions for a moment but then he spoke and I knew. It was the old guy that had been calling up about an hour before, the one I had barely been able to understand. He smiled wide when I handed him the box and instead of the usual fold of bills I'm usually handed, he passes me this thick envelope, obviously full of cash. No, change, please. He wheezed, holding his finger to his throat. Dip is included.

I open my mouth to thank the guy, but my words caught in my throat. I was fighting off the stench of that durian pizza already but seeing that guy begin to salivate and drool when the smell of that thing hit him, I couldn't remember a time I'd been as creeped out as that. Thanks, enjoy. I managed to blurt out anymore and I think I'd have gagged right in front of the guy. It was weird, but I didn't want to insult him, not when he tipped so generously. It was a generous tip. Not long after I handed the envelope to my boss in his office, he emerged with three crisp hundred dollar bills. They were mine. It felt pretty good having been tipped so handsomely, but one feeling overrode it. I ended up knocking on my boss's door for a serious talk. I told him in no uncertain terms that I wouldn't be delivering that kind of pizza again.

The stench was clinging to the storage compartment on the rear of my scooter and being summertime almost every person I rode past slow enough complained about smelling something rotten. $300 was a sweet tip but I'd be spending a third of that on cleaning products for every delivery of durian. Thankfully my boss relented. He told me he too had found the whole thing pretty harrowing but the guy had basically made him an offer he couldn't refuse. We hit our weekly target three days earlier because of this guy. My boss explained. But he did promise me that we'd be making no more trips to Chinatown to buy durian just for one customer with too much money.

So nothing more was said about it and we received no more calls from the guy. That was until about three months later. It was pretty much the same setup as the night he originally called. Slow business, helping out with cleaning tasks and food prep when the phone goes again. I answer, only to hear the familiar raspy voice on the other end. I instantly knew who it was. This time, without listening to so much of a word he said, I just politely informed him that I'd be handing him over to the manager and thanked him for his patience. Knocking on the

bossman's door, I hold my hand over the phone's receiver and whisper the words, Hey, it's Durian Guy, at my boss, who in turn rolls his eyes and nods as if to say I'll handle it. I walk back to my cleaning tasks with a grin, thanking all that is holy that I wouldn't have to drive halfway across Boston smelling like a port-a-potty. Only you can see where this goes, right? Boss man comes out of his office with a pained look on his face giving it the old, yes sir, no, no sir, right away sir. Routine again. My stomach drops, I know what's coming. I remember shaking my head before he'd even asked, just listing off a thousand ways of saying no, cutting him off from even asking the question. No, no way, nope, no chance,

not today, I ain't the one. He doubled the amount. My boss replied. What am I supposed to do? I couldn't believe it. If what he said was true, I'd be getting a $600 tip from this guy. $600. That was just over my monthly rent costs with about 20 minutes of work. I'd be covering like three quarters of my living costs. Bossman had a point. Just what were we supposed to do? So yet again, Bossman drives down to the late night grocery store over in Boston's Chinatown to pick up this mystery durian fruit that I'd been reading so much about. While I waited, I grabbed a fistful of the air fresheners we normally handle in the bathroom and started to pretty much decorate the rear of my scooter with them. I also took a full can of Febreze with me from our cleaning supplies, planning on spraying it tactically whenever I came to a red light.

Last time an open topped convertible caught the smell of the durian on the breeze, the girl passenger almost puked right into her footwell. I actually start prepping the whole affair myself too, getting the pizza base ready, opening up the back door and turning up the kitchen's extractor fans way high to maximize the chances of the stench wafting through the store again. But this time, when I get to the delivery address, curiosity got the better of me. I had to peek at this guy's pizza, if only to see what durian looked like. This was in the street like a block away from the address, nice open space, so I didn't expect the smell to be as intensely bad. Long story short, whatever was on that pizza was not durian like i said i mentioned i googled the fruit when i got home to read up on just what exactly durian fruit is all about what was on

that pizza was some kind of meat not the yellowy creamy looking flesh from inside the fruit this stuff was brown blackening around the edges and and was clearly some kind of aged or decaying meat. I shut the box and tried not to think about what I saw, delivering it to the old guy, watching him start to drool again as he passed me the envelope, even thicker this time with bundles of dollar bills. As soon as I got back to the pizza place I banged on my boss's door he answers with an irritated look on his face since I pounded his door so hard but I didn't care I had questions a lot of them durian huh yeah we talked about this it stinks but we're making a buttload of money from this guy's order I looked at the pizza. My boss didn't say anything. He just stares back at me for a moment or two, then invites me inside of his office to talk in

private. I don't know what you think you saw, but there was nothing more than durian fruit on that pizza. I told him I knew that was a bunch of nonsense, that I'd googled durian fruit that same night I'd first delivered to that guy, that I knew well what it looked like and whatever was on that pizza certainly was not durian flesh. He sighed, breaking eye contact. What was on that pizza, man? He didn't answer. I asked him if it was legal. He didn't answer.

Without a word, he took my $600 from the envelope and held it out to me. I took it, but only after giving him a week's notice that I'd be quitting. If he couldn't be honest with me, I couldn't continue to work there. We barely said another word to each other for the rest of my time working there. The final few days he reeked of booze whenever we passed each other in the back. Whatever it was took a serious toll on boss man's mental health. Now about a year later I'm working this decent little office job downtown. Nothing to shout about but it was way better pay for essentially just being a copy machine mule. That and the worst smell I had to encounter was printer toner and my co-worker's coffee breath. But one balmy summer evening I'm driving home to my apartment

with my car's windows down. A scent catches my nostrils, something so hideous it makes me cough and gag as I'm sat at a red light I look around seeing a guy riding a small scooter The rear storage compartment has the logo of the pizza place I used to work at The stench is horribly familiar to me It's the stench I once thought was durian fruit And the same stench I came to learn was definitely not durian. I took a gap year before I started university, and I would highly recommend one to all those who have doubts over higher education or are second guessing their choice of course. Getting a job and suffering the daily grind was something that really helped me grow as an individual. In other words, working for

minimum wage sucks and I had absolutely no intention of getting stuck in a dead end job like that. The whole experience made me hungry for the chance to earn a better place in society. But what do you expect as a pizza delivery driver? I know for a fact it's one of the most soul-destroying jobs that a person can be, filled with all kinds of employment pitfalls such as paying for your own gas, getting your wages docked for late delivery, and generally being treated like a criminal by your taskmaster turned manager. I honestly can't complain though. My dad helped me out with the finance on a cheap second-hand car. He even gave me a hand getting the rusty old thing back into working order.

I may or might not have picked the delivery driver to put him in that position in the first place but that's another story. So the owner who'd given me the job in the first place was a top fellow. A Kurdish fellow who escaped Sodom's Iraq in the early 90s. He'd come here with no more than a hundred quid to his name but by the time I came to work for him, he was definitely worth more than a million. Alright, most of his money would have been tied up in various takeaway businesses, but the spanking new white BMW he drove around said it all. The guy stayed humble though, he always greeted you warmly, he remembered your name, asked after your family. Like I said, he was a top bloke. But the English bloke he'd hired as a manager for the pizza shop wasn't so nice. In fact, I go so far as to say he was a complete wanker.

Good at his job, don't get me wrong. The place ran like clockwork. But the man had next to no social skills and really rubbed the staff up the wrong way sometimes. Like this one time when he found out that one of the drivers had been losing pizzas, he did a little investigating and found out he was losing these pizzas to the exact same address over and over again. He'd come up with a different story every time. He dropped the box, some teenager stole the pizza, whatever it was, but it turned out he'd just been dropping them off at a mate's house. Proper scummy behavior.

Anyway, he gets the sack, but it was us, the drivers that remained, that really bore the brunt of it. He instituted a policy whereby anyone who failed to deliver or lost their orders would have the sale amount docked from their wages. Not the cost of the business would have the sale amount docked from their wages. Not the cost of the business but the sale amount, so considerably more than the sum of any pizza's parts. We were mad but I don't know, it was understandable. The pizza thief had really let the side down and it was hard not to sympathize with the owner who just wanted staff we could trust. So this is how I ended up almost breaking into someone's house one night trying to deliver their pizza. I drove out to the delivery address in my

beat up old Vauxhall, listening to the newly fitted engine purring like a dream. It was one of my last deliveries of the night, with cut off time being 11pm, so I had that kind of second wind excitement that comes with knowing you're off of work soon. Still singing along with the car radio, I pull up outside this old Victorian three-story, grab the thermal bag from off of the passenger seat, then stroll up to the front door. This is about the time of night that tips get pretty big too. People can be very happy to receive hot food at this hour, especially when they've been partaking in a certain variety of tobacco, if you catch my drift. Anyway, I'm whistling away to myself, banging on the front door of this big old house.

Banging, knocking, banging again. About a minute goes by and it dawns on me that no one is answering. Must be some sort of mistake, I think to myself, and head back to the car to check the delivery notes to make sure I've got the right address. This is where the problem arises. I really can't tell if the person who's written the address has put down a 1 or a 7. This is one of the few things that Europeans really get right. They always whack a little line through the sevens to make sure they're recognizable. Who'd ever written this hadn't given me the same courtesy. I decided it had to be a one.

Thing about the UK is we don't really get those crazy long house numbers like people in the States do. Like the Simpsons live on 742 Evergreen Terrace. I have that memorized, fight me. Whereas in the UK, I'm not even sure we even have 742 roads in total. I jest, but you get the point. So with me being 90% sure that this is the right house, but being 100% worried that I'm about to have 20 quid docked from my already meager wage packet, I set about trying to get this pizza delivered. I legged it back to the front door, hammered on it once more just in case, then decide to take things a step further. I start shouting hello through the rectangular brass letterbox, but the only thing I hear in response is all this meowing from cats. Lots of cats. I also get this

absolutely horrendous whiff of something truly disgusting but lots of cats means lots of full litter boxes. Gross but true. So the living room window is just feet away from the front door and there's this little crack in the curtain I figured I can peek through to see if anyone is actually home. You'd be surprised the amount of people that call for pizza when they're not even home, thinking they'll be fast enough to get home before it arrives. Newsflash, you aren't and you suck. But when I peer through the crack in the window I see something that I still see when I close my eyes sometimes. The room was dimly lit, only the flickering grey light of TV static illuminating the interior, so it took me a few seconds to realize what I was actually looking at.

All I could see was this one couch teeming with felines. I mean like every square inch was covered in cats, with a veritable legion of the little furballs surrounding the couch trying to leap up and join their feasting friends. That's right, feasting. On the couch lay the dead body of their former owner, an elderly woman who had died just a day or so before. Her cats had barely waited until she was cold before they scrambled over her body,

plucking out her eyes and chewing her lips off. They tore away at the soft parts. Anywhere not covered up with clothing was a mess of clotting blood and torn flesh. Her own cats were eating her. I call the police when I get back to the shop, actually giving the idiot manager the finger when he tried to interrupt me giving a full account to the dispatcher on the other end of the phone. They thanked me informing them and I actually read about the whole thing on a local news site the next morning. My manager did actually try and dock my wages for the non-delivery when he told me I just quit then and there. Big twist, the Kurdish owner calls me up the day after

I quit to ask if I was okay and more importantly to offer me my job back. He'd had it with the manager himself over him trying to unfairly dock me. He supported the policy to an extent, but not in a case such as this. I took the job back, but I did have a favor to ask. I'd be looking for a better job, but I needed a good reference. I was 18 and hadn't ever been employed before. Getting references was a nightmare. He said he'd give me a glowing one. Get this, I ended up getting an interview for a law firm to work as a legal apprentice. Low pay, but not no pay. This was pretty much exactly what I needed to secure myself a place on a law course at Newcastle University. During the interview, the quietly attractive 30-something clerk seems really impressed and did actually end up

offering me the job but it was what she said about my reference that made my heart swell. I can't remember it word for word but it was something like this. We're very happy to have such a promising young personality here at Stanley and Doherty. Once we heard you were fluent in Kurdish that pretty much sealed it. The way you saved your pizza place thousands of pounds a year with that new filing system, that colored us impressed. Um, yeah, I... the owner of the shop is Kurdish, so, you know, you pick it up here and there. The guy had talked me up to be some kind of prodigy. I got my uni place by the way. I graduate next year and I'm still pretty sure I have Mosen,

the shop owner, to thank for it. And what I thought was a one did turn out to be a seven. Mind your handwriting people. Seriously. You never know what we might stumble across. August 28th, 2003. Brian Douglas Wells, a pizza delivery driver from Erie, Pennsylvania, begins his day like any other. Despite having worked as a delivery driver for coming up on 10 years, he hates the job, but as a high school dropout, he has few other options to pay rent. Just before 11am, he drives over to Kearsarge Plaza, just a short walk from Lake Erie. This is where his place of work is located, a small pizza place known as Mamma Mia Pizzeria. He delivers pies during the lunch rush, returning to Mamma Mia's in time to receive one more delivery order in the afternoon.

The order is two pizzas, to be delivered to 8631 Peach Street, an address a few miles from the pizzeria. Brian has never delivered to this address before, but he knows Peach Street well. It's home to a handful of car dealerships and a family-owned landscaping service. Brian figures he'll be delivering to one of these. But what Brian doesn't know is that this is the last delivery he will ever make. When Brian arrives on Peach Street, he discovers the delivery address is down a dirt road, just near a BMW showroom. But at the end of the dusty unpaved pathway is nothing but a radio tower. Brian gets out of his car, pizzas in hand, and looks around for the recipients. What happened next is unclear and has been the subject of years worth of debate between professional law enforcement and amateur

sleuths alike, but the most likely explanation is what follows. As Brian waited for his potential customers to appear, a group of masked people emerged from the nearby woods. They were armed, keeping the terrified Brian at gunpoint while they produced a series of items from a rucksack. One of which was something that resembled a slave collar, three rings of stainless steel with some kind of weird device attached. The masked individuals then attached the collar to Brian's neck, handed him a sophisticated homemade shotgun as well as nine pages of handwritten notes. As the masked assailants fled the area, Brian began to read the instructions written on the pieces of paper he was given. They are addressed to Bomb Hostage. Brian realizes in utter horror

that the device around his neck is a remotely detonated bomb collar. The notepaper in his hand details a series of strictly timed tasks involving collecting keys that will delay the detonation of the bomb collar locked around his neck. When he finds the final key, he will be able to defuse the bomb. The notes are also warning Brian Wells that he would be under constant surveillance and scrutiny, that any attempt to contact emergency services or to remove the bomb collar would result in instant detonation and therefore his own death. Scrawled on the bottom of the handwritten instructions was a terrifying warning, act now, think later, or you will die. It must have been a living nightmare, a hellishly surreal

ordeal. What happened to Brian Wells that day is something that most of us have never even experienced in our nightmares, but for Brian, it was a brutal, mind-bending reality. The first task Brian was given by his masked captors was to calmly and quietly enter the PNC bank branch on the very same street he found himself on. He was to hand the teller a pre-written note included in his bundle of notes. Upon inspection, he saw it was a demand for a quarter of a million dollars in cash. The note instructed him to use his homemade shotgun to threaten and intimidate anyone who refused to cooperate. Brian had no choice.

He entered the bank branch around 2.30 that afternoon, following the instructions to the letter as he handed the teller the demand note. The teller's face must have turned white as a sheet. The note also stated that Brian's bomb collar would explode if the full cash amount was not handed over. Unable to access the bank's vault in such a short period of time, the teller gave Brian Wells a bag of cash amounting to just short of $9,000. Brian departed the bank as quickly as he'd entered, hurrying back to his car to continue his tasks. It is then that authorities received their first 911 call relating to the twisted events. A witness described a male leaving the bank with a bomb or something wrapped around his neck.

Fifteen minutes after police received that first 911 call, a patrol car spotted him standing near his Suzuki Geo Metro hatchback. He was promptly arrested with police putting him in cuffs and forcing him to sit on the tarmac of the parking lot. Wells told police that three masked people had placed the bomb collar around his neck and instructed him to rob the bank. Failure to comply would result in his own explosive demise. Police must have been flabbergasted. It's not every day that such a bizarre, convoluted crime occurs before their very eyes. Whatever they felt, responding officers did nothing in the way of attempting to disarm the explosive device. Instead, once it was clear that Wells had no means of detonating the device

himself, they waited for Erie Bomb Squad while they focused on evacuating the area of civilians. But time was running out, and Brian Wells knew it. If he was indeed being constantly monitored by his captors, they would know their plan was falling apart. At 3.18pm, just three minutes before the arrival of the bomb squad, Brian's captors detonated the bomb collar and blasted a huge, fist-sized hole in Brian's chest. There he lay, disoriented and bleeding to death, until finally his life slipped away from him. The horrifying event was actually captured on camera by local news crews, but thanks to a technical fault at a local TV station, Brian's death was never actually televised. However, thanks to a leak somewhere between the local station, WJET-TV, and the FBI,

the video somehow found its way onto numerous video-sharing websites and, at present, is actually still available to watch. Perhaps most disturbingly, police investigators later traveled the route given to Wells on the notepaper and discovered they could not complete it given the allotted time. Essentially, however successful Brian would have completed his given tasks, his captors were always planning to detonate the bomb caller to silence the only man capable of identifying them. When the truth surrounding the incident finally came out, the world reeled in horror at the greed and malice of the perpetrators.

The plot was hatched by a woman by the name of Marjorie Deal Armstrong, a college-educated woman with a master's degree from Gannon College, PA. Deal Armstrong required $250 in order to pay for the contract killing of her own father, whose estate had once been valued at almost $2 dollars. In an interview conducted before his death, Harold Deal reported that he had cut off financial support for his daughter decades earlier due to her criminal behavior and failure to hold a steady job. This was obviously enough of an insult to his daughter that she decided he had to die. But what's so tragic and evil is that Deal Armstrong chose to rag others down into the hole that she was in. It wasn't

enough that her own life was a mess. She was so selfish that she would choose to murder an innocent pizza delivery driver who had no idea what he was driving towards that day on Peach Street, Pennsylvania. The following rather embarrassing story took place when I was around 19 years old. I'm a male who lives in Australia and this was in the mid 2000s. It was Boxing Day, the day after Christmas for those of you in America, and there were plenty of good sales on at the local shopping center. Loaded with a wallet fat with cash, I got into my car and made the journey to the mall. Unfortunately, it seemed everybody else had the same idea. The car parks were chockers and there seemed very

little movement and plenty of cars circling with the same idea as me To my left, a man middle-aged and slightly overweight and wearing too many clothes for the height of summer was gesturing to me I ignored him and did a loop On my return, he was still there While I was stuck behind stop cars ahead of me, he approached the passenger side window He did not give me a good vibe. Shaved head, odd tattoos, an unkempt fake leather jacket and gloves in the middle of summer. Afterwards, I could not for the life of me understand why I took the course of action I did.

Hey, mate. He said. Merry Christmas. Reckon you could do me a favor and drive me to the Cash Converters. Cash Converters was a combined pawn shop, quick loan outlet, a couple of streets from the mall. Because I was full of Christmas spirit, or perhaps thinking I could take this gent if need be, or frustrated with trying to find a park and grateful for the interlude, I leaned over and opened the door.

Why not? I said. He got in. We left the mall and he began to talk. I just liquidated my business, he said. It had been, apparently, an electronic goods shop. I didn't believe it. His appearance and demeanor did not speak to a successful or even unsuccessful businessman. The hackles on my neck were raising, but I realized my first mistake had already been made. I can sell you a cheap laptop, he said, or a DVD player. I've got to get rid of them. That's why I need to go to Cashy's, stop on my business. It's close. I'll get you a cheap laptop.

Now, cheers though. I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage. I noticed that he had never put on a seatbelt. Come on, he said. It'll be brand new. Here's the place. It did not seem like the place., just seemed like any old place. Grateful to stop, I pulled over adjacent to an Asian grocer. My old stop is behind the grocer, he said.

I'll get you something nice. Nah, man, I repeated. And I think I'll leave you here. What are you saying? He said. I'd like you to get out of the car, thanks. Are you threatening me? No. I said and realized I was still seat belted in. He turned his whole body to face me. I carry a knife for people like you try to threaten me. My mouth went dry. Thinking on the spot,

I raised both hands as non-confrontationally as possible. I'm not threatening you. Then he took a knife out of his jean pocket. It was a kitchen knife, nothing fancy but big enough to chill me to the bone. How about you give me whatever cash you have in your wallet and I'll bring you back a laptop like I said. You're robbing me? I said and my hands shook as I reached for the wallet. I had to push my hips to reach into my back pocket and all I could think was that if he wanted to, now was the time he could stab me cleanly and take the car too if he wanted. Not robbing you, he replied and took

the yellow $50 notes out of my pocket, pinching them as I held it open for him. You'll have a dell in two minutes. He put the knife back, opened the car door and sauntered into the grocer. Calming myself, I locked the doors, reached for my mobile phone and called triple zero, the emergency number here. I told the operator what had happened. The police station was one street over on the corner so I assumed they would be on the scene quickly. I'm going into the shop, I said,

and I can't remember whether they approved of this plan or not. I walked into the grocer and asked if a guy had just walked through. They shook their heads and made as if though they spoke no English. I assumed he'd gone out the back. Long story short, the guy got away. The police attended in about ten minutes, and once they had finished shaking their heads about how stupid I had been to accept a shifty-looking bloke for a a ride, took my statement back at the station. That was more

or less the end of it and I'd lost several hundred dollars for being a would-be good if foolish Samaritan. A few weeks later, the constable who took my statement called me. Some girls had been robbed by a fellow who matched the description that I'd given. He had sat down at a food court table with them in the same mall and told them that he had had a knife under the table and to hand over their money. The police said they'd call me back if they needed me to view footage or come in but I never heard back a second time. The total failure of my instincts which are usually quite good bothered me for a long time afterwards and I felt so bad about being such an easy mark I didn't tell anyone about it for a

couple of weeks. Yet the thing that stayed with me was the odd psychological approach taken by this guy. He tried to convince me that by robbing me he was doing me a favor and that he was acting in self-defense by pulling out a knife. I am not sure if that was for his benefit or mine but either way, even when pumped with the Christmas spirit, I was very careful about who I helped from that point on. This happened in the late 90s in a medium-sized town in New England. It was the end of summer, I'd just turned 9. I'd gotten a Nintendo 64 for my birthday and I was logging some serious hours of GoldenEye and Mario 64 on this beautiful summer day turned evening. My friend had gotten 120 stars and met

Yoshi already and here I hadn't even breached 70 when my mom came down the stairs. It was time to go pick up my younger brother from camp and since my dad wasn't home from work yet I'd had to go with her. I was mid-star here. I pleaded with her to let me stay home. No, you can't pause it. I won't answer the door. If someone calls you're in the shower, you'll call them right back. I'm not a baby. My mom had let me stay home alone during the day a couple of times. I knew all the rules, but it was dark out and she didn't want to let me stay home alone all night. I pleaded with her.

Finally knowing my dad would be home in the next 30 minutes or so she relented. Score. She must have ran into my dad in the driveway because it couldn't have been more than a minute before I heard the garage door open and my dad walk in. It was time to go pick up my older brother from football practice. I paused my game. There was a 0% chance I could convince my dad to let me stay home, even for the 20-30 minutes it would take to scoop my brother.

We drove to the field and watched the last 15 minutes of practice under the lights. It would have been nearing 9pm by the time we reached the driveway. Light poured out from the garage as the door went up. Whoa, did you guys see that? My brother exclaimed. Some guy just ran through our backyard. Our house was set back from the road and surrounded by woods, so there definitely shouldn't be anyone in the backyard. I thought my brother was trying to scare me and presumably so did my dad because he told him to pipe down It was just a shadow

We live in a typical colonial house the garage opened into a finished basement. That was our game room My dad and my brother went upstairs as I quickly shuffled back to my game I flipped on the lights and immediately I noticed that the window pane on the door to the backyard had a big hole smashed through it. I called for my dad to come back downstairs. He went and checked the door. It was still closed and locked. He checked the rest of the basement. Another window that opened underneath our deck had a hole in it and a brick was laying on the floor.

My brother and I were in shock as my dad grabbed a bat and checked the first and second floors. No other doors or windows were broken. Nothing was missing. My dad called the police and they showed up a couple of minutes later. They checked around outside. Then they led us out to the back patio and showed us what had happened. Someone had punched a hole through the door pane so they could reach in and unlock the door. They hadn't anticipated that it was actually a key, only deadbolt, meaning you needed a key to open the door from the inside as well. These used to be commonplace but are no longer allowed because of the risk of trapping you in a fire. Next he tried to kick

the door in. There were clear footprints all over the door, but it held strong. After that didn't work, he had taken the screen out of the door under the deck, thrown a brick through the glass, undone the latch, and opened the window an inch or two. We must have interrupted him when we pulled into the driveway. My brother had actually seen a man run into the woods in our backyard. Two more minutes and he would have been in. The really scary part is that all of our doors going in and out of the house were key only deadbolts. If he would have gotten in and gone upstairs, if we gotten home five minutes later, he would have essentially been trapped in the house. He would have had to get past us to

leave. We would have inevitably come face to face with the intruder as we went upstairs. Worse yet, he might have hidden somewhere in the house and tried to sneak out later, or do God knows what. Imagine checking your closet as a nine-year-old and actually finding someone. My mom and younger brother got home just as the police were finishing up. She told the cop that in the early afternoon she had seen a guy that looked out of place walking down the street. He was a youngish white guy with long sandy blonde hair and a scruffy beard. The cops gave each other a look. There had been a string of burglaries one town over. In the last one, a young girl had been home alone and caught him trying to break in.

She came face to face with him through a window. She ran and hid in a closet while she called 911. The guy actually still broke into the house and left muddy footprints all over. He didn't take anything. They thought maybe he was looking for the girl because it looked like he had checked under the beds. They believe he had fled in a truck stolen from a neighboring house that was burglarized the same day. The girl had described him as a young white male with a beard and long sandy blonde hair tucked up in a ponytail. Sure enough, the police came back the next morning. They had found the stolen truck, abandoned and out of gas a couple

of streets over. It had some stolen electronics in the back and apparently it also had a bunch of woman's clothing that must have been taken from the houses as well. They didn't say underwear but I assume that's what they meant. They took pictures and lifted fingerprints. The cop told us he had most likely been scoping out the neighborhood when my mom saw him. He chose our house because there were woods all around it. He had probably waited in the woods and watched the cars leave before trying to break in. That was when it all started to dawn on me that if my dad hadn't gotten home right when he did or if he had let me stay home while he picked up my brother, I would have probably

been home alone when the guy tried to break in. This guy who had already broken into one house when he knew a little girl was home. Needless to say, I didn't want to stay home alone for a little while after that. A couple of days later I was playing outside with the neighborhood kids. We went to hang out in the fort we built in the woods that overlooked my backyard and found 20 cigarette butts inside. The guy must have hidden out in my fort and watched our house all afternoon and evening until we saw both cars leave. If I hadn't gotten that Nintendo 64 for my birthday a few days earlier, I would have almost definitely been playing in the woods that day. I also wouldn't have wanted to stay home alone though. So my Nintendo both saved my life and nearly got me killed.

This is another story about how my usual spot on instincts concerning people failed me spectacularly. It starts with an innocent night on the town with my co-worker and friend Georgia, or as I always called her G. She's a teensy pocket-sized elf of a girl who bears a close resemblance to a young Claire Danes, so not altogether unfortunate looking. This was during a period when my boyfriend and I were separated. She was single too, so we went out to the local watering holes together quite often. It was that period of our lives where a night on the town meant dressing to the nines and then drinking, dancing, and flirting all night long. Now as for myself, I very rarely drink. I get inebriated even less often. My limit is usually one mixed drink or two beers.

I just don't like to put myself into a state where I am not in control. Especially in a bar type of setting where you really need to be on your guard. For this reason, I usually drove whenever we went to the local watering holes. But that night there was something wrong with my car. If I remember correctly there was an exhaust leak. It wasn't something that would keep the car from running but could possibly cause us to be pulled over, not a scenario that someone who was a drunk passenger and potentially a drink or two in their system wants to invite.

Since we didn't want to run the risk of having any run-ins with the law, we decided that G would drive. To make a long story short, G got spectacularly drunk and decided to leave with an ex that she happened to run into during that night. Don't worry though, she says, James said he would take you home. James was the nice looking guy that she had introduced me to during the night. She told me that they went to the same church and she had known him since she was a kid and he was a really nice guy. James and I had been talking and dancing and yes, even flirting a little as the night progressed. Because I felt like we had gotten to know each other a little

bit and because he came with G's stamp of approval, not something she gave readily to anyone, I felt fairly comfortable accepting a ride home. Also, I was kind of put on the spot since G had already asked James and told me about it in front of him. I didn't want to insult a guy I potentially wanted to go out with. Looking back, I wish to whatever you worship that I just called a cab. On the way to my place, James dropped a lot of hints. I'm not ready to call it a night, I'd like to hang out a bit more. I could use another beer, etc. I casually told him that I was tired and ready for bed and thanked him for the ride. He asked for a kiss and I gave him a playful peck on the cheek, patted him on the arm and shut the car door. The next day I go out to run errands and the phone rings as I'm walking in the door. It's James wanting to hang out. I'm tired so I

say he can come over and we'll watch a movie and hang out for a short while. When I hang up I see he's left a couple of messages while I was out. Hmm, a little pushy but okay I guess. Maybe he just really likes me. We're sitting on the couch watching a movie and he goes from friendly companion to full-on makeout mode in 0.2 seconds. I mean one second we're sitting on the couch at a comfortable distance not holding hands or even touching each other. The next he's practically on top of me ramming his tongue down my throat. Oh no dude homegirl don't play that. So I'm telling him no and he's acting like he doesn't get it. He's getting slightly more and more aggressively affectionate and I'm starting to low-key panic. I don't remember what

I said exactly but I did eventually manage to get him out the door. Relatively unscathed I thought save for a copious amount of unwanted slobber. When I went to change for bed later I found finger marks on my upper arms from where he'd gripped me so hard. The next night I got approximately 10 calls from James. I didn't answer. He left voicemails. Every single time. This was before everyone had electronic leashes aka cell phones. I myself only had a landline so it was a lot easier to ghost someone back then. I figured I'd just not answer the phone and he'd eventually give up. Like most sensible people, right? Wrong. My phone rings at 4am.

Now, we know nothing good happens at that hour of the night. People don't call you up to chat, so when I was jolted out of sleep, I answered the phone automatically without even pausing to think or look at caller ID. It's James. What are you doing? Are you kidding me? I'm sleeping. No, you're not. Yes, I am. That's what most people do at 4 a.m. on a work night. Why is your living room light on then? You know that old saying, my blood ran cold? Well, I always thought it was a dramatic phrase to describe sudden fear, but

you don't fully understand it until you experience it the way I did. He was calling me from right outside my front door. I was single, lived alone, and had no weapon. I was in the habit of leaving certain lights on at all times because, quite honestly, I'm afraid of the dark. I feel safer with lights on and even sleep with a bedside lamp on. I always have since I was a child. I don't remember what I said back except that it involved lots of swearing and it ended with him pounding on my door and calling me repeatedly for about a half hour or so. I eventually had to call the police to get rid of him. The next day I

sarcastically thanked G for the setup and she was furious when she saw the bruises on my arms. She ended up admitting that she didn't really know James all that well but they had been acquainted for a long time and he seemed like a nice guy. He kept up the psycho dialing for a while but finally quit when G confronted him about my bruises and threatened to expose his behavior to their church community, and worse, his mother. I'd like to share a story about a once good friend turned horrible ex with you all. We met back in high school by chance.

I was sitting in the library one early morning doodling a little in a notebook when Tim came up to me. We shared a lot of common interests and I was deeply impressed by his drawing skills as he sketched a few draws for me. For the first few years things were fine. We were great friends and got to know one another very well. He was the oldest of three children and the only boy in his family that was fairly religious. Not the say grace and hail Mary religious but definitely the say grace over the meal for five minutes in church every Sunday religious. I'm not really religious myself but I wouldn't say I'm an atheist. I believe there is something greater than all of us but I don't believe whatever it is demands we only talk to him in churches or over food.

Now Tim was a nice guy, and I did develop a crush on him, but I always felt whenever I made a move he would back off and avoid it, so I never assumed it would ever evolve into anything more. Things, however, changed at the end of my junior year. At the time my family's visa in the US had been misfiled and we were told we had two options. Leave the US for a year and reapply or fight it and risk being deported. At the same time my dad had been fired from his job for some BS reason and my maternal grandmother was not doing well. This in turn affected my mom very badly because this was her last living parent and she hadn't had the chance to help her father during his last few years. This left her with a lot of guilt and

what-ifs and could-haves that plagued her endlessly. At the same time I was entering my senior year, three credits short of graduation early and my sister was in the second year of college. There was also the fact that the United States was pretty much the only home I had ever known so it was a question of when and not if. So my dad does the only thing he can think of. He asks some of his co-workers and family friends if they would take my sis and me in for a year so that I could finish high school at least. The family I ended up living for that year was absolutely wonderful. They had only a son who we were friends with and they treated me like family from day one. The mom was Catholic but she was one of the really great

ones that wouldn't preach her faith into others or judge you by it. They had sort of adopted a lot of their son's friends who didn't have a nice home life and when one of them came out as gay she just smiled and said to him, God doesn't make mistakes, you're exactly as you're supposed to be. I started to call the mom and dad version 2.0 really fast because I felt they deserved those titles too for everything they helped me with. They took me into their home and let me live with them absolutely free. All they asked was that I studied hard in school, did a few chores when they asked and respected that there's no alcohol or anything illicit in their house. Easy. It was here though that Tim started to show a side

that none of us liked. At first it was just minor stuff. He would call almost daily to ask what I was doing and to hang out and if I said I couldn't because of something, studying, wanting to spend time with other friends, then he would call my other parents to ask if it was true. I wasn't new to relationships but because I was technically an illegal immigrant in the states at the time, I'd had so many things on my plate I didn't notice the signs. Things got even more stressful as my other father got prostate cancer and needed help getting to and from the hospital. I had to prioritize my school, other family and then boyfriend and friend with other responsibilities. For whatever reason Tim didn't like that. He started demanding I spend

more time with him than whenever I was free to go over to his house and spend the day. I liked his family, they were nice people but I am also an introvert and if I don't have at least a little bit of solo time I can't recharge proper. Soon the pressuring started. It was strange. It was to go to church. His church. He kept saying how it was important and how I'd feel great going there and love it and it was a Christian duty. This is right when the whole Muhammad drawing controversy happened and I've never found comfort in religions, much less the kind where they pressure you on Christian duties. I avoided it for a while until I finally got the courage to tell him I wasn't comfortable

with the idea of going to church and given everything I need to ensure to graduate as well, my other family's own problems, I didn't feel I had time to add church to it. You would think it was okay but not for Tim. He got super offended and started demanding that I give a better reason as to why not. He even went as far as to go to my other mother and talk to her about the idea of us going to church. She thankfully told him that was my choice and regardless of his feelings about it he needed to respect that. Then the creep factor went up a notch. He started showing up uninvited both at my home and school. He had graduated at the time and was in college. It was easy for him to get into school grounds since he had gone there too. He would go looking for me all over campus,

try to guess which classes I would take him to find me. Both my other parents and even other brother even caught him once trying to peek into my room through the blinds to see if I was home after asking if I was really there or not. My other mother told him that was inappropriate while my other father told him to never do that again because it was unacceptable. My brother at first made a few jokes about him calling him ogles for trying to peep in but after he caught him doing it again at two in the morning while I was asleep he told him he was officially going into creepers territory and that he would beat him down if he didn't stop. I stopped laughing whenever Tim was around.

I became more and more reserved to the point where everyone but Tim commented that I didn't seem happy in the relationship at all. And it was weird too because the furthest that we'd ever even really gone was holding hands. He wouldn't even let me kiss him on the cheek in private. The final straw came when I was over at his place trying to figure out how to tell him I wanted to go back to being friends when his mom suddenly said that it was so nice that we were following tradition. I asked her what she meant and she told me that she and her husband had been high school sweethearts and married right after high school and that Tim was doing the same. I full-on panicked. We hadn't dated long. We barely did anything that could be called

being a couple and I was heading back to Denmark after I graduated. I was only 18 and nowhere near the age where I felt ready to marry, not to mention how conflicted I was feeling about the relationship. I couldn't see this ever working out. I was starting to see that our relationship as a couple was more toxic rather than healthy. The first chance I had I told him in private that I didn't feel like this was working out. I still wanted to be kind and not embarrass him in front of his family. I have never felt breakups should be public displays. Tim did not take this well. He pleaded and begged, saying if I just tried to go to church

with him I would see the light. Not sure how, since he knew I didn't want to. Then I was ruining his family's tradition. He tried to argue that if we married I could stay in the States, but I didn't want to marry for a green card. In the end, we both parted in tears and with other things unresolved. A few weeks pass in silence as I focus on school and just recharging. I'm getting ready to graduate and dealing with the reality that my biological parents won't get to see it because of our finances weren't very good at the time and try to focus that my other family and sister will at least see me get my diploma. Then joy upon joy as my mom wrote to me to say she's going family and sister will at least see me get my diploma. Then joy upon joy as my mom wrote to me to say she's going to visit for a week to see my graduation.

I wanted both of them there but was so thankful that at least one of them would be there. I happily told my friends about it and we all started talking about who we'd be giving our graduation tickets to. I can't remember how many we had but I remember I had a few left over after inviting my mom, other parents and two brothers and one of my friends asked if Tim was coming. I wasn't sure if I wanted him there after what had happened but at the same time I had been to his back when we were friends and like an idiot I reached out and asked him if he wanted to come as a friend. Tim became irate, ranting how I was being selfish. His anger was so explosive that it shocked me and he finished it by saying to me, there are five priorities in life. God, family, health, school and friends. Not order but you don't seem to get that. Your order is family, friends, school, health, and then God. You need to sort yourself out.

At the time I was too shocked to react at first because I muttered a small, but that is how I see things. They are what matters, before walking away. I gave my extra tickets to a classmate who needed them more because he had one of those massive close-knit families. Graduation comes and I received my diploma with cheers and pride knowing that which high school diploma doesn't mean a whole lot, it is my first set of proof that I can dedicate the time needed to learn something. I toss my cap, look for it after and immediately go off to get the real thing. Our school kept them hostage so we would have to behave during the ceremony and look for family. When I found them I can instantly tell you that something was off. They smile at me but clearly something is bothering them. I ask what was wrong but they

just brush it off making an excuse that someone had one of those stupid annoying horns with them. I didn't believe them and in the end my mom told me that Tim had shown up. She knew a little bit about the drama going on and figured he was just there to say congratulations. Well, spoiler, he wasn't. He said he needed to talk to her about me and how I needed to be saved, that I was destined for eternal torment because I wasn't embracing the church or what my womanly duties were meant to be. She asked him what he meant and he said to obey her future husband. She lost it and I did too when she told me. We were not engaged and even if he was I am not some dog that's meant to follow

orders. In the words of a pastor I once had, God made Eve from Adam's rib, not from his head, for she was not above him, not his foot, for she is not behind him, but his side, for she is equal and so that he can place his arm around her to protect her when needed. I'm not religious, but I've always liked the way of explaining Adam and Eve. So to hear that Tim thought I was his to order around made me furious. The last I spoke with him I let him have it. I yelled and threatened telling him if he ever thought he had any rights to decide what I deemed important in my life that he had another thing coming. He tried to argue that I needed to be saved and finally I just screamed. I screamed that I didn't need to be saved, that I didn't want to be saved and I'm happy as I am. He stared at

me saying that I didn't mean it. I said I did and that if he kept pushing as he was then I didn't want to speak with him again. I told him it was making our friendship unbearable and if he didn't learn to respect people's opinions on religion, the next relationship he would be in wouldn't work either. He got angry and said that I was destined for hell and in a fit of rage I told him our relationship is hell, you've made it that way. To which I left immediately. I lived in the states for a month after that and we didn't talk about

it. His family tried to plead for me to apologize to Tim for what I had said but I told them that I had meant it because of his constant bullying. After that I wasn't welcomed at their house anymore, not that I ever even wanted back. Tim tried to reach out to me again a few years later with some sort of over religious story and how I was like the main character. I told him I would like it if we could be friends, but if he was going to send me religious texts like before, he needed to delete my contact info. We haven't spoken since. He ended up dating a dear friend of mine a few years later, only to mess it up the same way he had ours. My friend had asked if I was okay with them dating to which I told her honestly that that wasn't for me to decide. Just because

he was my ex didn't give me any right to say that he could or couldn't date but reminded her to not let him bully her about religion. She had just left the Mormon church. To this day I think he's still single and trying to find some girl that he can save with religion. And while I wish for him to find his special someone someday that meets his needs willing I will say this Tim I'm glad we'll never meet again

as an ocean is now between us. So I was walking through the town center with my husband. We were just talking about what bills needed paying etc. I looked over for me and straight in front of me was a man. This is no ordinary man. This is a man whose face is etched into my brain and my memory. A memory I locked away many, many years ago. When I was around eight, my aunt, who had a few learning disabilities, lived on her own. She was not very clean, lived in a one-bedroom flat with around five cats. It stunk, it was dirty, but I used to go by to help her tidy up and look after the cats. There was a man who lived in the upstairs flat, we'll call

him C. C also had cats and his cats had kittens. C had befriended my aunt and used to come talk to her. They seemed like good friends but I didn't like him too much. One day while I was there C turned up. He had been up feeding kittens for most of the night as the mum cat was rejecting them. He said he was tired and if he fell asleep to wake him in two hours to feed the kittens. Two hours went by and my aunt said we need to wake up C so he can feed them. My aunt tried to wake him, shaking. All he did was grumble and tell us to get away from him while he was sleeping. My aunt started to laugh, thinking he was joking and started pulling at his foot. She hit down on his foot and shouted, C, you need to get up and go feed your kittens.

All of a sudden he jumps up, no emotion on his face, looks straight towards me and starts to march his way across the room. I try to run for the door but he managed to catch me, around my neck, his hands went tighter and tighter. I wanted to scream and cry, I wanted my mum. I thought I was going to die as he raised me off the floor with his hands still around my neck, slowly creeping up the wall. I was 8, around 56 pounds, so was not big at all and very petite. I could feel the life being drained

from me. All of a sudden I felt my body sliding quickly down the wall. I felt a very sharp pain at the top of my legs where it meets your bum and realized that he had slammed me down on a radiator that was on the wall and with that he let go, straightened himself out and said I'm going to feed the kittens and left. I was crying so hard I just wanted my mother. My aunt just stood there with her mouth open. She didn't try to help but just stood there screaming while he did it. Funny thing is that I knew she was screaming but in that few minutes that it took to happen it was like silence for me. Pure silence. All I remember is just looking C in the eyes thinking I'm never going to see my mom or brother and

sisters again. My aunt rang my mom. She got a taxi straight to her house. My stepdad came and went to find C. He had disappeared. No one knew where he was. For two weeks my stepdad waited outside the flats but he didn't come back. Some cat protective people came and got the cats and kittens and took them away. The police showed up as my mom was ringing them and a neighbor had heard the commotion and rang them as well. They took statements and took us home. I also had to have photos taken of my injuries around my neck and just under my bum where I had a big gash from the side of the radiator. I had to have it dressed by a nurse for a while but it was okay and fortunately just left a scar. She went to court and luckily I

didn't have to attend because of my age. All he got was one year conditional discharge. I was told this means if he did anything within a year, he would have this charge too, put onto whatever the charge was. That was not justice, it was a joke. I was scared to leave my home, didn't want to play out with friends. My aunt went on not to talk with family and actually marry that man. Only lasted about six months. I wanted so much to wreck the wedding. I hated him. I hated her. I hated them. I hated them to the point I cried. Why should they be happy when they stole my light? My light was now dark, it divided a lot of the family.

It took a long time for nightmares to stop and the anxiety he was going to come finish what he started. I put it away in a box never wanting to open it again and there he was stood right in front of me, right there. I wanted to go slap, beat him, but also wanted my husband to just hug me tight and tell me I was okay. As I look back, he looked at me, but I don't even think he knew who I was. But I certainly knew who he was. As quick as I saw him, he was gone. I stood on my feelings for a few days, but I think it's time to put them back in the box where they belong. This was a few years ago.

I was 23 and I'd just graduated university with my journalism degree. I graduated a semester later than my friends and as a result was still slinging beers at a restaurant while most others had bagged internships or were working their 9-5s. I was frankly feeling a little lost and desperate to be doing something for my career. Enter my series of poor life choices. I was working a day shift at the restaurant so bartending and serving all the lounge tables. It was a really quiet afternoon and this stout old man, probably between 70 and 80 years old, was brought up to my section with two menus. I took his drink order and he told me he had a friend coming soon so he would wait to get food.

After a half hour no one shows. I started to feel bad for him and I still had my managerial access even though I was bartending so I offered him an appetizer on the house while he waited but he looked dejected and refused. At this point he was the only customer so I sat with him to keep him company. He told me about how his friend was a photographer and she had offered to take his photo as reference for him to draw a self-portrait from. He said that his neighbor always calls him the thinker and she had painted his deck for him so he wanted to give her the drawing of himself in the pose as a gift. But he sighed and said he didn't think his photographer friend would be

joining him after all. He got this sad look on his face and said, didn't think his photographer friend would be joining him after all. He got this sad look on his face and said, It's hard to find people to help with this. Once you get to my age, all your friends are dead. Immediately I jumped up and said, I'm actually a photographer. I just graduated with a degree majoring in photojournalism. I can take your photo.

Do you have a camera? We can take it right now. He said he wanted the photo to be realistic though with a background of trees so he refused and here's where I get stupid. I tell him that we can meet the next day. It's my day off. We can go to a nearby park and I'll bring a professional camera. In my head I'm thinking that this is great. I have a reason to use my expertise to help someone instead of hate watching the Kardashians all day while everyone else is at an office. We agree to meet at a cafe by the park first to have a coffee and talk. Then we go take the photos. I went home ecstatic thinking I did a good deed and I made a new

old man friend who can share his wisdom or whatever. We met at the cafe and talked for a while. He kept insisting that he would pay me $300 but I told him I just wanted to help him. He was getting increasingly sheepish though and saying he didn't want to get embarrassed. Alarm bells were ringing in my head but I couldn't figure out why. He was acting really strange and fidgety but I chalked it up to him not liking being photographed. As we were finishing the coffee he admitted that the neighbor didn't really paint his deck but she actually gave him a topless photo of herself, which was why he wanted to give her the portrait. He had a weird look in his eye and I was immediately uncomfortable and put off by his demeanor and the sudden story change. At this point, I just wanted this whole thing over with, so I said something stupid like,

Oh wow, well that's nice. Anyway, let's get going. I had walked to the cafe since it and the park are only about two kilometers away from my house. But he said he couldn't walk to the park so we can take his car. So, I... got into his car? I know. When we're inside, he takes out a photo album and says, The top of this picture she gave me is in here, do you want to see it? So I said nope, not at all and I proceeded to not get out of his car. I truly cannot explain myself. He starts driving and we're looping through this giant park. I keep pointing out

places where he can perch to do the thinker pose but he says it's not secluded enough. He says he doesn't want to be embarrassed. At this point I finally realized what a ridiculously insane situation I put myself in. I'm a young defenseless woman in a car with a man I don't know who is looking for secluded places in the woods. Great. I wondered what photo of me they'd use in my obituary. I finally convinced him to pull over next to a bench. I had my body half out the door before he said, Wait, how should we do this? I gave him a confused look and asked what he meant. Well, should I take my clothes off in the car or out on the bench?

If I was a cartoon, my jaw would have been on the floor. I kept the door open and my foot outside and asked what he meant and he said, I told you I wanted to be realistic. In the sculpture, the thinker is naked. I thought you understood. Sir, please. At no point was that a discussion and I have already basically invited myself to be ended here. I say as much in nicer terms since I still don't want that to come to fruition. So he tried this sad act and said that this is why he didn't want to be embarrassed. He offered to pay me $500. I say a series of no, nope and never but I'm still trying to get out of here alive so I tell him that if he stays fully clothed I will take a photo of him on the bench in the post and email it to him.

He can imagine the rest. He put the sad act on again but agreed. As I'm leaving he insists on giving me a $100 bill for my trouble, even though I continue to say no, but he puts it in my hand. I half ran the entire way to the university bar and spent the day drinking and feeling violated and awful and confused and upset with myself and with him. I spent the dirty money on fancy whiskey for my boyfriend because I didn't want it. I never sent him the photos. But wait,

there's more. Months later I went on a trip to the mountains with some friends, two of whom I worked with at the restaurant. I had moved SD cards around and put an old one in my point and shoot camera, honestly forgetting about those photos because I never even looked at them. One of my co-workers was scrolling through the photos we'd taken while we were eating and she scrolled all the way to the beginning and said, I recognize that man. Turns out he did the exact same thing to her five months prior to my idiocy at the same restaurant, only she did let him get down to a skivvies. A week and a half ago, my friend Mary and I were chilling at my apartment around 11pm,

not doing much, and so we decided to go play pool at a local smaller than average bar about 5 miles at most from my place. I'd been there before and it was never really busy most nights and it was more my type of bar because the setting was much more intimate and you could actually have a conversation with the person next to you. We met this one bald guy who was playing pool when we got there and we asked if we could join him. He seemed like good company and we were having fun playing pool. I want to note this guy was not at all creepy, he seemed like a pal. Fast forward to a cigarette break outside. An average looking guy approaches the three of us and starts striking up a convo

with me. Honestly I had quite a bit to drink so I really don't remember much but my friend Mary said that he seemed into me. He seemed harmless so I gave him my Facebook info. Why not? Long story short we exchanged texts over a period of like five days. I learned that he had previously worked as a vet tech. That's what I do currently. He asked me out. I was a little skeptical because I had just gotten out of something not too long ago but I've never really had the chance yet to date someone who loves animals as much as me so I thought it might be cool to see how things sort of align. On Saturday evening he picked me up to take me out for some food. We had an okay time but I wasn't super feeling his energy. I got this weird gut feeling and my mama always told me to follow my gut.

My gut has never been wrong and I'm so glad I listened to it this time. This guy is 32 and I'm 23. I've dated a few older men. I don't go looking for older guys but it just panned out that way and he just gave me this predatory vibe the whole time. I can't really explain it but it's similar to how someone would look at a meal after not eating for a long time and it gave me chills. I bailed early that night so I could work the next day at 9am. He sent me about 20 messages overnight up until about 4 in the morning via Facebook that evening about how he was so happy to meet me, yada yada. 20 messages. It freaked me out so I blocked him. I thought that that was the

end of it, but no. Fast forward to last night I was just minding my business. Playing some Mass Effect Andromeda. Romancing some blue alien chicks. Hanging out with my dog. I just so happened to walk out of my room. I wanted to note that it was extremely hard to hear people knocking my door when I'm in my room with the door closed. It's all the way across my apartment so I walked out and heard knocking. I was expecting no one as I was planning on lounging under a rock my entire day off but I peeked through the hole in the door and guess who was knocking? I have no idea when he got there.

I sprinted into my room, adrenaline pumping and pantless, trying not to have a panic attack. I didn't know this guy, why was he at my door? Bad news too was I had broken my phone recently and my roommate had moved out the same weekend to move in with her boyfriend so I legit thought I'm gonna die here tonight, covered in cheeto dust with hairy legs. This was about 9pm at night. I called my friend Mary, the girl who had been in the bar with me, who booked it over to my apartment from her place which was about 15 miles from mine. He had been knocking on my door for about 45 minutes when she showed up. She filmed him so we have his face on camera and eventually she convinced him to leave,

mainly because she threatened to call the cops. Once she got to my door I opened it and found a bag of kiwis, which was kind of random, and a small bouquet of flowers hung on my doorknob. Oh, and he also tried to give my friend some dank, if you know what I mean, in exchange for talking to me. What the heck? I mean, you really can't barter when it comes to me. A living, breathing human. It all started when I was living in Boston as a student attending UMass. I go to log into my university email account one morning, hoping that my request for a term paper extension had been approved of. There's nothing about the extension, but there is a little notification from Gmail saying that I had been logged in at a different location. This was kind

of confusing since I only log into my Gmail account via my phone, my laptop, or the computer labs on campus. It was a Monday morning too. I hadn't been to campus all weekend, so just how I was logged in at a different location was beyond me. I put it down to a glitch or something and just carried on with my day. Only these notifications didn't stop. I kept getting little banners on my phone popping up informing me that a login attempt had been made from an IP I didn't recognize at all. It only stopped when I changed my password to one of those overly complicated series of letters and numbers. That's when things got really weird.

For nine months out of the year, Boston is pretty much a rainy, miserable, sodded mess. So to aid in my mental health maintenance, I used to keep the blinds in my apartment closed pretty much all the time. Who wants to gaze out of their window at ceaseless drizzle? So you can imagine how strange it was that I'd come home day after day to find the blinds open. At first, I furiously contacted the landlord and demanded to know why they were entering my apartment without permission. They flat out denied this, of course, and told me they always gave me 48 hours written warning when they needed to enter the property. I was getting pretty scared at this point so I flat out asked the landlord who could be entering my apartment when I wasn't there. He paused for way too long, told me to call

the cops immediately then hung up. After the landlord phone call all the weird stuff just dropped off for a while. I mean I was convinced that I'd caught the landlord phone call, all the weird stuff just dropped off for a while. I mean, I was convinced that I'd caught the landlord sneaking around my apartment. The fact his solution was to just call the cops told me everything I needed to know. Besides, you confront someone, the thing stops. That's as good an indication of guilt as anything, right? Wrong. So wrong.

I get a text one morning from an unknown number. Look outside was all it said. I figured it's one of my friends with a new number or something, nothing to freak out over, so I just head downstairs to the front doors of the apartment building to see who's there. There's no one. Instead, there's a box of chocolates and a dozen roses soaking up the rain. That's when I realized just what had been happening the past month or so. I was being stalked. Stalked day and night by some creepy social moron who had selfishly made me feel like I was the one going nuts. I was furious, way angrier than I'd mistakenly been with my landlord, who I ended up apologizing profusely to when the time came. I took their advice too.

I did finally call the cops who, despite my skepticism, took my complaints very seriously. Turns out the Boston Strangler still haunts the cops around Boston. Violence against women is something they abhor almost out of genetic memory. Now long story short, the guy who was stalking me was the head of the IT department at UMass and therefore had access to all kinds of digitized files on the attending students. This included email addresses, phone numbers, term time addresses, and a plethora of other information. No wonder they had been able to run rings around me and they knew me almost as well as I knew myself. He was arrested, charged, and I got a restraining order against him.

He was also subsequently fired from UMass and was barred from holding a job with any kind of educational institution for the rest of his life. This happened back when I used to get on Grindr, but it always reminds me of how glad I am that I'm no longer doing the online dating thing. For those unfamiliar with Grindr, it's a gay dating app that shows guys nearby. It makes you use your location while using the app, but it doesn't give your exact location unless you send it to the person directly. I got a message from a blank profile. No name, no pic, and no bio. The only thing that popped up was how close he was, less than a mile away. This happens a lot because there are a lot of closeted guys out there, especially back then. Being an overweight guy in the gay community, I had to take anything I could, because most gay guys in my community wouldn't even give me the time of day.

He started off nice enough, introduced himself as Jesus and asked how I was doing and all of that sort of small talk. He told me he was into chubbier guys and after exchanging pics we both agreed that we found the other one attractive. He asked me if I'd like to come over to play video games and maybe have some fun. I'd only met a couple of guys off of Grindr and although we had some good times, it ultimately didn't pan out. However, I had met them somewhere public first, so I'd never met anyone at their place or had anyone come over to mine. I figured it'd have been long enough and some casual fun might be nice.

Plus, he was really cute and actually my type. He agrees to come pick me up since I'm only a few blocks away. Apparently he lived in the nearby trailer park. I decide I'd like to shower first and he says I'll head over. Then he says he's really embarrassed to ask but wonders if I'd be willing to lend him $20. Supposedly he lived with his mom and she had left I'd be willing to lend him $20. Supposedly he lived with his mom and she had left for the weekend without any food money for him. I know it was really stupid in hindsight but I felt kind of bad for him. I tell him I don't have any cash but he says that's okay I can just send him some money through an app. I don't remember what it's called but it was something like Venmo. I go ahead and send it, take my shower and then let him know I'm ready. He says he's heading out

but can't find his keys. I say it's okay I'll just wait outside for him. I hadn't given him my address yet but I was almost ready to. However when I asked if he had found them he had never responded. Minutes went by then an hour. I messaged him again to ask if he was still coming and I could see him going on and offline so I know he read my messages. I finally just accepted he was ghosting me and probably just wanted money. I messaged him one last time and told him that it was pretty messed up as well as explained that had he just asked

I would have given him the money without having to go through all of that. What can I say I can be a softy sometimes. Fast forward a couple of weeks I never heard back from him so I just blocked him. I get another message from someone on Grindr relatively close to me. His profile is also blank which raises my suspicions. He tells me he's also into chubby guys which really makes me suspicious because it's highly unlikely two chubby chasers live so close to me. We trade pics again and it's a different guy. However, he suddenly asks for money again. In Grindr you can create as many accounts as you'd like. All you need is an email address. There were tons of spam accounts on there that were automated. It was a real pain.

Anyways, I call him out because I was like 95% sure it was Jesus. At first he acts like he doesn't know what I'm talking about, calls me crazy and then blocks me. I felt a little bad because I thought maybe I had made a mistake and just chased off a guy for nothing. Then again his sudden offensive reaction made me have doubts. Weeks go by and every so often this same guy tries to fool me even though I don't fall for it. Eventually I blow up on him and ask him what his problem is. We start going at it and eventually he says, you won't say that to my face. I tell him that I would gladly tell him this in person, not that I expected him to actually show up this time. He responded with, alright,

we'll see about that. Be there soon. Now I was a little worried at this point because it crossed my mind that he may not actually be gay and might be some homophobe looking to bash some gay guys. My mind always goes back to those men who have lost their lives after meeting up with someone on Grindr. However, I realized I never gave him my address. Now this is the conversation we had. I say, Nice try, but I never gave you my address. Yes, you did, stupid. You just didn't know it was me. Be ready, I'm on the way. At this point my anxiety starts setting off because I did give my address to a guy who had to cancel last minute but I didn't think anything of it because it was

before Jesus had messaged me a second time. I tried to think about what to do so I decided to try and document his threats. I respond, I know I didn't give you my address. Besides, what do you want with me anyway? You'll see, I've got something for you. Now the trailer park is always having police go by there and my neighborhood is separated from theirs by a bayou. At night, I always heard gunshots out there so I began to panic. What if he had a gun? What if he brought friends with him? I say, oh yeah? And what's that?

Something that'll shut you up. I'm outside. I started freaking out because I couldn't tell if he was just trying to mess with me or if he really was outside. I started freaking out because I couldn't tell if he was just trying to mess with me or if he really was outside. I had been screenshotting everything and sent it to the grinder admins to report him for credible threats of violence. I wasn't sure if I should call the cops or not because if he was lying I didn't want to look stupid. Plus I wasn't sure if it was even enough for them to do anything. I decided to peek outside from the upstairs window and see if I could spot him.

If I could get the make and model of his car, maybe I could at least have something to give the police. I live in the middle of a cul-de-sac, so when I look out the window, I can see all the way to the end of the street. When I looked out, I saw a car I'd never seen before parked on the side of the road at the end. My heart was pounding because I just knew it was him but a part of me was hoping it wasn't. I decided I'd test him and see if he really was out there. He says, I'm waiting. I'm outside already, where are you? Of course I wasn't, but if that was him, and he did know my address, then why wouldn't he just park outside my house? Sure enough, I was right. I see you. You're gonna get it now. Then give it to me, I'm right here. Just you wait.

I knew he couldn't see me from his car because I was peeking out discreetly and our windows have a privacy shade on them where people only see a black screen from the outside. A few more minutes go by and the car takes off. I have a feeling that he used Grindr to triangulate the area of where my neighborhood was, but of course he couldn't find my exact house because it hadn't been him who I'd given my address to. Grinder later sent me a message saying that he'd been banned from the app and they'd contacted the local authorities. I never heard anything else after that, so I don't know what became of it. The cops never contacted me if they did pay him a visit and I never heard from him again. Now I'm married so I don't use Grindr anymore, thankfully. Still, it took a while before I was able to sleep soundly after that. I rarely left the house

and when I did, I always made sure his car wasn't around, anywhere. The following is one of the darkest chapters in my life so far. It's the story of how my first real boyfriend stalked me for about five years after I broke up with him. The reason I broke up with him is because I noticed him becoming increasingly possessive and controlling. This worried me a lot and I was a few years younger than he was so I decided to get out. The breakup itself was so heart-wrenching he cried and screamed and begged for me not to leave but that just gave me all the reason to do so. He threw a full-on tantrum and it only cemented that I'd made the right decision. Initially after the breakup, his behavior seemed like the harmless melancholy of a bitter ex. Constant texting and phone calls,

sending gifts to my workplace, asking my friends to try to convince me to get back with him, the usual sort of thing. After about six months, this hadn't died down at all. It was this ongoing saga of drama and misery that I really started to get depressed about. I started bumping into him on my way home from work or if I was out shopping. I had to move back in with my parents just so he'd stop hanging around outside my apartment. I couldn't leave my job immediately but moving back in with my parents didn't make a difference anyways. This behavior continued for a few years, becoming increasingly worse and the police were very reluctant to do anything since

they obviously classed it as some kind of domestic dispute. I ended up moving out of my parents and into a new place after a few months. I even changed jobs twice and somehow he always managed to track me down, no matter how careful I seemed to be. I didn't use social media and even insisted friends of mine not take any pictures of me in case they posted them on their own social media accounts. I kept my phone number within my circle of friends but somehow he always managed to get my new number. I ended up a paranoid wreck thinking that one of my friends had betrayed me. We had a serious falling out with me accusing him of prolonging the whole nightmarish situation by showing more loyalty to my abusive ex than he had me. I called him things that no friend should

call another. He hung up on me after a medley of curse words spilled from my lips. I ended up crying myself to sleep that night, unable to eat a single thing out of pure stress. At this stage I could barely sleep. I had no appetite. I couldn't concentrate at work and spent most evenings drinking myself into a stupor. I was a shadow of my former self. Then another year passed and as our encounters got worse I decided to report him to the police again. Only this time I had comprehensive documentation of his stalking, printouts of text messages, etc. At long last, having already done the bulk of their jobs all on my own, the police finally took action on my behalf. A couple of months go by after I reported him to the police. I wake up one morning to a story in the Globe about staff in the state tax office were using resources improperly. My stalker ex was the main perpetrator, using his job to access all of my information.

In his job he had access to my tax records which meant every time I changed job, address or phone number he had access to the most up-to-date information. What's more he'd been using his position to swindle thousands of dollars in tax revenue into his own personal bank account. Before the court case began he ended his own life and I'm not ashamed to say I cried with relief. They were the worst years of my adult life and I was just so, so glad that they were finally over. I met Lucy for the first time when she fell asleep on my arm on the bus. When she woke up, she gave me a really weird look before shambling off the bus. I figured she was weirded out that I didn't wake her sooner, so I kicked myself for being a creep and went on with my day.

Can't win them all. I was thrown for quite a loop when her whole friend group was sitting by my usual spot on the bus the next day. Being an awkward teen, I wasn't about to turn down any kind of positive attention. I got to know her friends and ended up on good terms with her before I realized I hadn't asked her name. I'm hard of hearing, so I didn't hear her when she said her name. Lucy, right? Yeah. Lucy and I had your typical high school courting process. This is to say she was overwhelmingly forward and after a few weeks I got the hint. As we were getting close Lucy would

fixate on learning about past heartbreaks and finding out about my personal life. I'm a serial over sharer so I didn't really mind talking about myself but she would constantly butt in by saying how messed up things were and that she'd kick my friend's butt for hurting me. I was weirded out. Even at 16 I knew that was cringy and I was going through my emo phase. The thing that really bugged me at the time was that she asked so much about me and she would never say anything about herself. It made me feel terrible always venting and never helping her out. During this time she missed a few days and I let another girl sit by me since it was an overcrowded bus and I didn't

think it mattered. When Lucy came back and saw me with another girl you'd think she was shot. She just about ran to the seat behind us and started going off. I can't remember what exactly Lucy said but the other girl never talked to me again after that. Once her arrival was gone Lucy reclaimed her spot next to me and was all sunshine and rainbows. Nobody ever asked to sit in Lucy's spot after that. Lucy always had a crude sense of humor but after a while things started getting hurtful. She would take jabs at my insecurities and anytime I got upset about it she would just continue to prod just because I wasn't able to take a joke. These jokes usually stopped just

shy of outright insulting me. When Lucy wasn't breaking me down she was super affectionate. She would sleep on my chest while we rode home on the bus and she'd even talk about herself from time to time. I don't remember the first time she hit me. It seems like something that would be burned into my memory, some kind of cinematic moment in my life. Honestly, it all just blended together after a while. I know it started off small though, flicking me and playful slapping, but by the end of it, she would elbow me in the ribs for telling a bad joke. It didn't register as anything abusive until she slammed me into a wall while we were walking through the hallway after class.

She told a terrible joke and she shoved me hard into the wall. She laughed because of the sound i made before shoving me again people were going through the halls with us but they didn't do anything sometimes i wonder what they thought of me i didn't dump her after the hallway incident but i did start standing up for myself we started getting into a lot of fights after that. Of course they only ever ended in one of two ways. She was right or it was an honest mistake. I tried to break things off a few times around that time but every time I did she had a new sob story I hadn't heard before that made her actions totally understandable. I let it get in my head that she was some tragic soul

and that I could help her. I convinced myself there was something noble about taking the abuse and nobody I knew tried to step in and stop me. I finally got the nerve to dump her after three major things happened within a three week span. First I found out she was taking pictures of me while I wasn't looking and posting them online. The weird thing was I only found out because she showed me. It felt gross seeing a bunch of nearly identical pictures of me not facing the camera. The way she showed me was worse. She seemed excited like I'd be happy she invaded my privacy. The second weird thing happened when I tried to wake her on the bus. After about a half hour on my chest not saying anything I nudged her shoulders since we were at The second weird thing happened when I tried to wake her on the bus.

After about a half hour on my chest not saying anything I nudged her shoulders since we were at our stop and she just got up, looked me in the eye and told me she wasn't asleep. Combined with the pictures this seemed really weird to me. She didn't try to be cute or romantic about it or anything just, I pretend to sleep on you sometimes. That just really weirded me out. The breaking point came when she was showing off some awards she got from school. There was something off about the award. It didn't have her name on it. Oh no, it had a name. It even had a

picture of her smiling on it. The problem is it wasn't addressed to Lucy. You can imagine what I felt when I found out I didn't know my girlfriend's name. A few days later, we got into one of our usual fights and I broke things off. Lucy always was the persistent type. She would sit a few rows behind me on the bus and stare at me while I went to my car after getting off the bus. Looking at her wouldn't make her stop. It felt like she wanted me to know she was watching me. One day when she got on the bus she looked me right in the eyes for a solid 20 seconds while she walked past me to her new seat.

I'm pretty sure she was expecting me to say something to her. The next year I graduated and got a retail job. End of story, right? I thought so too. It was the start of Christmas season and I was working cashier that night. Lucy, or so I thought her name was, came into the store I was working at, random chance. It had been a year and a half since we broke up at this point so I wasn't happy to see her but surely we could pretend it wasn't weird. She gave me the look the squirrel in ice age gives his nut. She grabbed something from the front and went right into my line. She didn't say a word to me but she wouldn't break eye contact and she was swaying like an excited toddler. It hurt to look at her. I rang her up silently and waited for her to leave. Then I looked at the other cashiers for support and he told me she was

giving her weird vibes. I got this really bad gut feeling after she left. Lucy became a regular at her little shop. She would come in and creep out my co-workers. Lucy never really tried to hide what she was doing. One of the cashiers mentioned how often she came while ringing her out and she said she was visiting me. She didn't say my name but she described me. After that whenever she showed up someone would make a note of it on the radio. She was usually in one of the areas bordering my workspace. I heard about her a lot more than I saw her, so I think she was hiding from me. She never got banned from the store, despite complaints because the managers were

penny pinchers who would sell any one of us out to get sales up. I know Lucy was responsible for at least one resignation from my workplace. Someone who looked like me caught her staring a few times and heard how often she came. After a while I guess the stress just wasn't worth minimum wage. The last time I saw Lucy at the store was a little over a year ago. I was hanging out with one of the girls in the back while we were loading up carts with stuff we had to stock. We were right by the back entrance so you could see right in from the store proper. I left to put up the stuff in my cart and when I came back, I saw her.

She was standing about 40 feet from the back entrance, still as a statue. I froze when I saw her. I watched her stare into the back for what felt like hours before she suddenly turned and walked briskly away. The girl I was talking to was still in't have anything to do with Lucy, but I'll never know. I left the store not too long after that and got a job that didn't involve customer service. That wasn't the last time I saw her, though. Over the summer, after taking my new job, I had a mental breakdown. I convinced myself that I was unlovable and that Lucy was really the only person I could possibly be with. I left the house without any conceivable plan to find her.

With stars in the sky, lit by street lamps, I saw her. She was with another girl. I got so close I could almost touch her before I snapped to my senses. I thought about her stalking me at the store and I realized I was becoming her. I ran home. I cried that night. The last time I saw Lucy was last week. I was walking home from work and decided to stop for dinner. I thought I saw her in line but convinced myself it was someone else. I ordered and sat down to eat. I was looking out the window while I ate and she took the table between me and the window I was looking out. She was with some guy that looked vaguely familiar, maybe a school friend. She was set an angle so she was half looking at him and every few seconds

she would look right at me. I knew it was her. She changed her hair. It looks an awful lot like mine now. After I finished, I went to the bathroom because I felt sick. After washing my hands, I looked in the mirror and I felt like I could die. It hadn't occurred to me before, but I was wearing my work uniform, complete with company name on my hat in big letters. She was reading my hat. Lucy hasn't been to my current job yet, but I'm sure she'll turn my hat. Lucy hasn't been in my current job yet but I'm sure she'll turn up eventually. I'm moving soon so I'm just hoping I'm not here anymore when Lucy turns up. Lucy has

been a part of my life for the last four years. We dated for four months in high school and she just keeps turning up. I wasn't a paragon of mental health before I met her, but I feel like she broke me as a person, and I'll never forgive her for what she did to me. Since her abuse and her stalking, I've developed serious trust issues. I get painfully nervous leaving my house, and people who show interest in me immediately put me on edge. I've tried to date since everything happened, but I just can't.

I'm too much work at this point, so I've decided that I'll stay single until I can work through my issues. But I'm begging you, Lucy, or whatever your name is, please leave me alone. I remember my first summer after my boyfriend and I moved into a small one-bedroom apartment together. It was almost heaven. It didn't matter if the kitchen was too small or that the neighbors were too noisy. We finally had a place we all could call home. One morning, I decided to sleep in while my boyfriend got ready and left for work. But due to it being a sweltering summer morning, I had the bedroom window open to allow for a bit of fresh air to get into the apartment. As I tried to drift back to sleep, I was startled awake by our doorbell going.

I tried to ignore it, hoping whoever it was would just go away, but it kept ringing. I figured it could have been a package that I needed to sign for, so grumbling away to myself, I pulled some clothes on and went to look out of the peephole. Nothing. No one there. I cursed myself for delaying. I gave up on sleeping and decided to hop in the shower. At about midday, I went to go open the sliding glass door that leads to the concrete slab that serves as our patio. We had cats and keeping it closed was super important so, as you can imagine, it was very odd that when I opened up the glass door, I noticed that the screen door was slightly ajar. I promptly closed it,

making a mental note to chastise my boyfriend before opting to soak up some sun. My boyfriend finished work around 4. I was taking a break from sunbathing, sitting on my iMac at a desk with a window that faces the building parking lot. As I said it was really hot that day and I had the bedroom window wide open so when he pulled into the parking lot I heard him and another female voice start to have a conversation. I didn't think anything of it at the time. I'm hardly the jealous type and we're pretty friendly with the neighbors even the loud ones. So I just stayed in place and waited for him to walk up to the apartment.

When he did, he was very upset. His psycho ex-girlfriend had been waiting for him in the parking lot. I had no idea this girl even existed. He'd failed to ever mention her for as long as we'd been together. I came to find out this wasn't him being deceptive, he just didn't want to bring up such painful memories. But the really creepy part is that she tried to invite herself inside. When he told her no, she started off on some frenzied rant about how it was because there was another girl living there, how she knew he was seeing someone else, and how wrong that was.

I hadn't answered the door, I hadn't done anything all day but wake up, take a shower, sunbathe and sit on the computer, all in an area with window blinds. But if you were to get really really close to the bedroom window, you can kind of see through the blinds. I'm convinced that she was snooping around the apartment that day. It seems way too much of a coincidence that the screen door was open after the doorbell rang so many times. Then she just shows up and somehow knows that I'm living here all within a few hours. No way. She was in our apartment while I was sleeping. I just can't prove that beyond all doubt. I'm glad I didn't answer the door that day, but that feeling is dwarfed by how relieved I was when I heard she'd moved a few states over for work. Now we might actually find some peace together in our little

slice of heaven. Unless, of course, she comes back. I went to Paris on my gap year back in 2017. I was there for about four days and it was April, around the time of the Champs-Élysées attack where three policemen were shot. I happened to witness this from inside a store when it happened and had to walk back to my hostel after. I was 19. Anyway, my second dare there I think, I had tickets to the Louvre. I set off in the morning extremely excited and not at all daunted by anything. It was my first time traveling alone out of the country in general. I'm British. I loved it.

I had Google Maps out. Walking the whole way there was about 45 minutes but I didn't mind. About 15 minutes in I'm walking and a guy notices me. Calls out a whistle and smiles at me. Okay. I would be annoyed but I'm in Paris. Who cares? Carry on walking.

A few minutes later he appears next to me, smiling and saying hi. He's about early mid-twenties, very tan skin. I say hi back, surprised, thinking he must have been following me. Strange. We begin a talk and I tell him I'm here traveling and going to the Louvre today. He asks me a lot of questions, can't remember exactly what about, but we have a general conversation in my very, very poor French. I ask him why he's following me. Doesn't he have somewhere to be? This doesn't faze him.

He smiles and carries on talking, saying he doesn't have anywhere to be. Okay. He starts saying I should go to dinner with him tonight. I say great. In my head that's not going to happen so I decide to start playing around with the conversation. I ask do you smoke? He looks surprised and says yes do you? Keep in mind his English is really poor too which I thought was odd because why would you attempt to talk to someone in English and find out about them if you know you can't that well. Oh well. I look up smoke in Google French and say do you smoke ganja? He looks slightly confused but laughs and says oh yes. You come with me and we can smoke later he says.

I laugh too thinking righty mate. I don't smoke. This was funny to throw him off a bit. He also doesn't know his way around which was odd. Had no idea where the Louvre was. I didn't bother to ask him his life story so never found out where he came from. I told him I have tickets already. I'm going straight in. I don't know why you're following me. He doesn't mind this and continues and says he'll wait for me. We can go for dinner later. You can come back to my apartment and meet my friends. We can smoke. Okay. We get there. My heart is beating a little faster at this point. I'm alone, in a different country. What do I do? Well, the entrance to the Louvre has a big open space full of people, which was slightly comforting. I finally see you get your tickets at a kiosk.

This is the first time I straight up walk away, ignoring him and go there. There's an older guy who speaks English there, for tourists obviously, and I say hello, I'd like my ticket, blah blah blah. He could have been English for all I know, but my mind was going too fast a pace to notice. The guy now stood at a distance, watching me. I look the man straight in the eye as he asks me a question and I say, There's a man following me. His expression changes and we keep eye contact the entire time. He says where? I say to the far right. He glances and looks back at me. He asks a few questions.

I say, well, I'm going there straight away, so what's he doing? He tells me to go straight in, don't talk to him, and walk away. I agree. The guy suddenly comes right up to me and says, what's going on? Or something. We don't break eye contact and the man says, hey, are you going to be okay? I change tone and say yes, thank you so much. The guy continues to follow me but at this point I'm over it and I leave him behind. Going down an escalator I see him watching me and looking around. The weird and kind of sad thing is I try to tell all the security they had, which was a lot, down to the entrance there's a man following me, what do

I do? A French lady behind the desk who stamps my ticket says, ticket please, make your way downstairs. Fine. With no one listening to me, I go to a security desk in the Louvre itself and say the same. This lady talks to me, asks my information, then proceeds to tell me he was probably trying to rob me. Hmm, in broad daylight? Following me for over 30 minutes? Come on, there's a cold feeling all over my body at this point but I'm safe and sound inside. They had numerous soldiers with guns walking around the place and outside too so to an extent I wasn't in serious danger. But once again being alone, young, my hostel far away. If I told him where I was staying, which he continuously asked for but I didn't tell him, something else could have happened entirely and I'm so glad I got to enjoy the rest of the trip, save for the shooting, without much hassle.

I still haven't told my parents. My mother would freak. I live in a relatively small town in the country. When I was younger, around 13 to 14, I used to be obsessed with anything secret related. I would spend hours looking up conspiracy theories, watching documentaries about foreign affairs, reading articles about secret wars. I would tell everything I learned to my friends and family, but all I would really get is a, that's nice, or I doubt that ever happened from them. No one seemed to be interested, except for one friend of mine named Craig.

We would hang out every now and then and all we would talk about is conspiracies. Occasionally we would have a sleepover and instead of playing video games or watching movies, we would get out our laptops and do as much research as we could, writing down websites we deemed creepy and writing in notebooks filled with information that we had gathered. It was quite exciting for both of us. We felt like

we knew things we weren't meant to know and that gave us a rush. So one night Craig was over at mine for a sleepover and we were doing our usual secret work and I came across this website deep within Google on something like page 79 in the search engine. It had a list of Russian statesmen and politicians from a former branch of the Russian space program. I knew that because I recognized the intercosmos symbol on the top left hand corner of the page. The page was all in Russian, and I just randomly started clicking around. I eventually got to a page that looked like contact information. It had what looked like an email address at the bottom. So dumb naive me thought it would be a good idea to send them an email using my own personal email address.

At the time my email was just my full name. I wrote an email consisting something along the lines of, hello, my name is blank and I was wondering if you would be willing to answer some questions I have about your space program. I then proceed to list conspiracy theories about the Russian space program and demand an answer from them. Craig and I thought this was very clever as we were hoping to at least get a response. In our heads, if they denied what we had asked, then they were just covering up the evidence and therefore we had real proof. To our surprise, the email actually sent.

We thought it would have been unable to send due to how old we thought the email address was. Weeks passed and we eventually forgot about the email. We just got along with our daily lives of going to school and doing dumb young teenage stuff. One weekend I was sitting at the dinner table with my family and my sister started asking my father if he had any Russian friends. My father said no but he had worked in Russia for a few years in the past. My sister goes on to say that her friend's mother was stopped in the street while walking home from work by two men with Russian accents in a dark green car. They asked if she knew where they could find my family's last name, House. My dad said that was weird, and he would call my sister's friend's mom later.

I immediately thought back to that email that I had sent. My young head started spinning with ideas of spies trying to get to me and my family. I actually thought it was rather exciting. After dinner my father called my sister's friend's mom and I listened in from upstairs. I couldn't really hear much out of my father's end of the conversation but as soon as my father hung up he called the family down to have a talk. He told us that what my sister said was true and he was worried that maybe some thieves were trying to scope the house out. He told us to keep a lookout for a big dark green car with dark windows. If we saw something

suspicious we were to immediately find him and tell him. It was at this point I thought to tell my dad about the email but I thought I would be getting in trouble so I decided against it. The next day I was asked by my mother to take the trash out to the front to be collected tomorrow. We lived at the bottom of a long path in the countryside so it takes about five minutes to walk up to the top of the driveway. As I was near the top of the path I noticed a car parked up just off the side of our driveway entrance about 50 feet away. When I got closer I realized it was the same car my father had described to me. A dark green car with blacked out windows just sitting there. I pretended not to notice it and just dumped the trash.

I turned around and got out my phone and called my dad's mobile. He picked up and I told him that the car he had described was at the top of the driveway. He told me to come back to the house and he would be straight out. I slowly started to walk back home, keeping the car in my peripheral vision. Not a minute later my dad was jogging up the driveway and asked me where the car was. I turned around and pointed at it. He began to run up to the driver's side towards the car. Suddenly, the car's engine turned on and it peeled away and sped down the road. Stunned by what had just happened, me and my father just looked at each other.

We both ran back home. He told me to promise not to tell my mother or sister as it may scare them. When we got back home he took me into his home office then he called the police. The police said there isn't much that they could do as they hadn't done anything illegal but to call back if they kept showing up. Well they did show up again. Every time it was me or my dad that would notice them and the same route would happen. One of us would see the car, try to get close or flag it down. It would speed off, call the police, then repeat. My mother even saw

it once when coming home from shopping. The police eventually sent a car to patrol our area but they never saw the dark green car. My dad was getting noticeably paranoid and even considered buying a rifle. This whole time I genuinely thought it was my fault and if I had never sent that email then none of this would happen but I just didn't want to get in trouble. Once I got actually quite close to the car as it stalled while trying to drive off, I tried to read the license plate but the car was side on to me. By the time I got any closer it was too far down the road. At that point I wasn't scared anymore, just angry and I wanted the people in that car just to leave

us alone. The worst part for me happened when I was alone at home. Both my mother and father were at work and my sister was at one of her after school programs. My dad told me to keep the door locked at all times and if anything were to happen to call the police. I was watching TV in the living room when I heard the gravel in our driveway move. This was the distinctive sound of a car coming down the driveway. I got up to see which one of my parents was home from work, but it wasn't either of them. The dark green car was now in the driveway. I felt so helpless and scared. It just stayed, parked there, engine still running. I jumped up to grab the home phone, but as soon as as I got up the car turned around and drove off. I immediately called my dad.

He told me he would be home soon and just to keep the door locked. When I got home I told him what happened. He didn't see the car when driving back but again he called the police. This continued for at least two weeks. Every day we felt like more and more like we were being watched, stalked, even hunted. We would see the car at all hours of the day, even noticing them around midnight, just sitting there at the top of our driveway. However, one day they didn't turn up, and then finally the car just stopped showing up altogether. We never saw it again or the people who drove it,

but it left the family scared for a good few months. After this experience, I stopped my research. Craig and I drifted apart, and I got into what I deemed safer hobbies. I cannot be sure what started these events, and I don't know if this had anything to do with my email. It may have just been a coincidence in timing. It did however feel sinister in nature and that fear has stuck. That feeling of knowing you were being watched and not feeling safe in your own home has lasted So like a lot of people, I have a Discord account. It's got my first name on it and a picture of myself there.

Mostly because I only used it to talk to IRL friends, so I didn't care about my face being there or anything. Recently I decided to try Minecraft for the first time in four years because my friends were talking about an upcoming update and they wanted us all to play it. I figured I would hop on early and get familiar with some of the new mechanics and stuff. I found a server and was playing on there for about four days before I got told that they give you in-game rewards for linking your Discord account to their server. So, blinded by shiny stuff, I joined their Discord server. It had about 400 online users, so I wasn't really worried about people seeing me at all, and I was pretty low down the list alphabetically.

As I got more used to the player base, I got more comfortable talking in the server via text chat. They had a side channel that's supposed to make selling in-game items a little easier so I made a message saying I was buying something. About four hours later some guy added me with I will give you for free handsome and a winky face. I didn't really know what to say to this so I just said, thanks. No problem, winky face was his response. Shortly after this interaction, this person kept requesting to teleport to me in game, and when I'd ask why, he'd say, I just want to hang out with you, or it'd be some kind of variation of that. He did this pretty much every time I was online, and he'd just follow me around my base for

like an hour, asking me questions about random things, then he'd go away. I'm not usually the type of player to speak to people at all when I'm in an in-game or something. I just keep quiet and get on with my own stuff so it was really uncomfortable having this guy doing this. After maybe three days of this behavior he stopped calling me handsome and decided to kick it up a notch and called me sexy in-game via PMs. I politely asked him if he'd just stop calling me these things like that and he didn't respond back. Two hours later, he messages me asking how old I am. I hesitant really reply 21. No response again.

I decided to get off for the night because I was tired. I boot up my PC about two days later and open discord to see someone has PM me on there and it's this guy again. He said hello and asked me to call him next time I'm online. I didn't. I just ignored his message then closed the conversation. By this point, the guy was really freaking me out. I have really bad anxiety problems when it comes to people giving me attention, so I decided to just turn off my PC and I watched some YouTube in bed on my phone. The next day, I opened Discord because a friend wanted me to watch him play Hearthstone and give him advice. We do that for about an hour, then he gets off.

About 40 minutes later the guy who was being weird to me tried to call me and I had a complete brain fart and thought it was my friend calling so I accepted it. I realize my mistake almost immediately so I mute my mic. The guy is eating some potato chips from the sound of it and after about four seconds of loud eating he says, Oh don't mute your mic, I'm curious to hear you speak. Then lets out a small giggle. The guy was German and had a very weird and creepy tone of voice. It was like all high and quivery. He starts to talk about how attractive he thinks I am. By the way, I should have stressed this earlier, I really am not overly attractive like this guy was making out. I'm just a normal looking dude. And then he talks about how I haven't

been on in a few days. Then he puts a picture in the chat and says, what do you think about that? And it's a picture of his junk in a fleshlight or something. I immediately end the call and close discord and was just freaking out internally. About 5 days go by and I finally get back on the minecraft server and as soon as I get on this guy messages me a smiley face. So I tab out and get the thought to open discord and block this weirdo for good. When I open up the conversation there's 8 unread messages from him and like 5 of them were quote unquote thinking of you. I just quickly block him then quit Discord. I alt tab back in the game and luckily enough there's a slash ignore command which is basically the same as blocking him so I do that as well.

This was just so weird and crazy and it's my first experience like this ever. Even though it happened just under two weeks ago I only fully got over it a few days ago. Like I said earlier I get horrible anxiety when I get a lot of attention like that. What made it worse is that I was on an account that had my face on it and my first name and the fact I've never been in a situation where I've gotten attention from the same gender like that before. At the time I just didn't know what to do because I was so anxious, but thinking back I should have just blocked this idiot immediately after he was making me uncomfortable. Because of this, I've enabled the setting on Discord where it doesn't

automatically show images. I also message one of the admins of the Minecraft server telling them what happened, and they said they'll take action. What's worse is that this guy is actually a regular member of the server and a high rank, so it makes me wonder if I'm the only victim this weirdo has harassed like this. He could have done this before, to a younger person. I'm a 19-year-old female with a gym-going boyfriend. Typically, I attended our local gym with him, but sometimes his work schedule makes it so that I have to go there by myself, which is normally not an issue until this one night. I entered the gym and immediately was welcomed by a man I've seen there before smiling at

me. Being the polite person I am, I smiled back. I've never taken notice to him before until tonight. Little did I know smiling back at him would be a mistake. I carried on with my workout but the whole time I felt eyes on the back of me. Each time I looked around I would catch his eyes meeting mine with the biggest smile on his face. I'm not talking about a cute little shy smile, I'm talking about a full blown creepy grin. It was already late at night and I wasn't in the mood at all.

So I quickly finished my workout routine, which I would add this dude was picking up every machine next to me and trying to get my attention but I just cold shouldered him. Once I was finished I ran to the ladies locker room, grabbed my keys and ran as fast as I could to my car. Now my car is older so when you start you're supposed to wait for the engine to heat up a little bit but not tonight. I threw it in reverse and could hear the guy shouting, Hey ma'am, hey! Next thing I knew he was at my window smiling at me with the most crazed look in his eyes

I've ever seen in a person. In a stern voice I asked what his problem was and what he said sent shivers through me. I know you have a boyfriend. I see you here with him and I don't want you to think I'm following you at all. My name is David and I promise I have no sinister intentions but I just want you to know that I see that sadness behind your eyes and every night I pray for you. At this point I was shaking and I just honestly wanted to run him over. I'm used to guys complimenting my looks but never have I ever heard anything like that. I quickly said, uh, thanks and drove away. I caught my mom in a panic

and she teased me saying, oh, he likes you, but I had a very bad gut feeling about this guy. I had to Walmart after to grab something quick and guess who was there basically waiting for me? David. He followed me from the gym to Walmart. I was in the self-checkout line and called my mom up again. This time she told me to stay on the phone with her and pretend that she's my boyfriend. So I told her what time I should be home and that I loved her and couldn't wait to see her when I got home. But this didn't throw this guy off.

He approached me and kept saying, I need to tell you something. Over and over again until I snapped and yelled what? He then told me, I would love it for you and your boyfriend to have coffee with me and hear my testimony. I had never been so scared in my life. He may not have followed me home, to my knowledge, but the fact that he followed me around the gym and to Walmart had scared me lifeless.

My boyfriend and I went back to the gym to get his information and the worker that night already had his information pulled up. She said she saw that I looked very uncomfortable and that he was eyeing me up the entire time and knew I would be back to report him. They cancelled his membership, but I never filed a police report due to some bad encounters with the police in the past. My boyfriend ended up making a Facebook status to warn other young women going to the gym and I thought it ended there but David saw the post and ended up sending my boyfriend basically his whole life story, claiming he didn't have any romantic interest in me and other nonsense to get him to take the post down. We looked at his profile and his bio box said, I am not good, but he is.

And that completely freaked me out even more. Like what does that even mean? To make matters worse, he confessed to my boyfriend that he doesn't even live or work in our city, so it makes me wonder if he got kicked out of his local gym for doing this to other women. A month or so after, he messaged my boyfriend claiming we would never see him again as he's going overseas. His intentions are still unknown to me because who tells a stranger that you'd pray for them every night? It makes me wonder how many times I went to that gym alone while he was there watching me. David, if you're reading this, I hope I never see your creepy self again and that you should stop approaching women who are alone like that. I still look over my shoulder every time I go home

and I make sure you're not at my gym anymore before proceeding to work out. I also hope you're still not praying for me every night, especially after what happened. I'm very pale, tall and thin, with brown eyes and shoulder-length black hair. I look so vulnerable and weak when you see me, which is really true, often the reason why I always get stalked, touched, and catcalled. In our country, all public schools wear uniforms,

which made people easily figure out if you're a student or not. If you're wearing a school uniform and it's weekdays, you're not allowed to enter any malls until about 5.30 in the afternoon. That's the reason why I was waiting for my uncle to pick me up from school and not hanging out somewhere else. My friends have also gone home that time. This particular day, well, I just lost a competition. A writing competition. I'm a campus journalist and I'm in 9th grade, which you might say is lame, but us campus journalists are all required to join this competition. Annually I'd always win and get on stage but this year I lost

which made me really upset. The competition ended very early so I texted my mom to say to my uncle to pick me up. Then I got out of school with my friends and we went our separate ways. They all go the same way to their houses and I'm the only one separated for them to walk the other way. My uncle said to always wait at the end of the school because there he can always easily park. I walked there, really upset and waiting. Ten minutes went by and my uncle wasn't there yet, so I checked my phone. My uncle just texted me he's going to be late because it's really heavy traffic and the road is getting renovated. Great. I was just standing there waiting for another five minutes when two guys walked by. Then they saw me just standing there.

I saw them just whispering to one another then they giggled then came to walk back. They walked further away from me about 15 feet but you can still really see them. I was already upset and getting annoyed so I didn't really say anything to them. I could have just told them to go away or walk further but I was really tired and annoyed so I just continued standing there waiting. They started calling me. Psst, psst, what's your name girl? From far away. I didn't answer and snob them but they still kept insisting and calling me they started saying, hey what's your name? Always snobbing us. What are you feeling famous huh? By this time I started getting both creeped out and annoyed. You gotta understand though,

when I'm scared, I couldn't move or speak. I don't know, it's just my body doing that, and I just stood there, not even looking in their way as if I didn't even hear them. When they kept insisting on my name, they started asking me what time it was. I still just stood them up and pretended I didn't hear them. Then they started walking towards me and stopped about 5 feet away from me and started whispering and laughing. Now I was starting to get scared. Mind you, I was the only one in that spot with two creepy students stalking and catcalling me. I felt so helpless but I didn't even do anything. At the time I was leaning my back against a yellow bar they used to block roads when

they wanted that road closed. I was leaning on it and the other guy sat on the bar and started shaking it madly. I still ignored them but I stopped leaning against the yellow bar. I kept insisting what time it was. Hey, what time is it? Then they laugh. Other guy responds, Well, it's time for you to die then.

Then both of the guys started laughing. I couldn't believe what they said. I'm on the verge of bawling and I've been waiting for my uncle for 20 minutes with these two creepy guys beside me. That's when I started texting my best friend, told him everything that happened and he was so infuriated at the situation and at the guys, he wanted to pick me up but he was on vacation in another country with his family so he had no choice but just to give me advice. Then when I was in the middle of texting the guy walked in front of me and asked, Can I ask what time it is?

While looking down, 4.30, it's 4.30. I responded out of panic. That's when I realized he was looking at my ID that I was wearing. Good thing though my ID was on its back and you couldn't see my name in class section. I was so relieved when my ID was on its back then the guys started walking further away again. They started walking away again when they noticed a car driving near me and it being my uncle. They walked away from me and looked the other way so they couldn't see me and they just pretended like nothing happened.

I quickly jumped in the car, scared to death and upset. This day had to have been the worst. I lost a competition and got catcalled by a bunch of creepy guys. My uncle drove away and after a few minutes I told my uncle what had happened. He was angry at the guys and wanted to come back to beat them but I didn't want to go back there. I was already having the worst day and these guys might not have been there anymore and who knows what they would have done in response. I know this isn't quite as scary but when you're in this situation and you just can't You're scared and want to cry, but I felt helpless and numb.

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