True Horror Stories That Start Out Normal… Then Goes Terribly Wrong

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
This goes back to around twenty twenty two. I, fourteen
year old female, was a Valerie addict and would play
for hours. I wouldn't normally use a MIC because I
had social anxiety and also valerant gamers are really weird
with females. I ad met this guy who was pretty chill.

(00:25):
He invited me to queue up with his friends, one guy,
one girl, and I accepted. His friend was super sweet
and funny, and we got along pretty well. I decided
to add to him as a friend. We started playing
some matches from time to time and exchange discords. We
started talking more and more, and I did eventually get attached.

(00:50):
I could tell that he was really into me. Heughue
praise and text me a lot a few months past.
We then exchanged Instagrams and started dming each other. Throughout
all of this, we hadn't established if we were friends
or more. We would flirt occasionally, but it wouldn't go
further than that. One day he asked me for my Snapchat.

(01:15):
I agreed, even though I thought it was sort of suspicious.
Man on Snapchat. I know where that leads, but I
didn't really mind it since I did kind of like him.
Things did turn sexual after a few days, and he
would send me pictures and videos. I didn't send anything back,
but I would entertain it. Mistake number one. Maybe six

(01:40):
months a year after we initially met, so end of
twenty twenty three, I was fifteen and told him I
didn't want anything serious, no relationships, but we could be
friends with benefits. He enthusiastically agreed, and I ended up
sending in pictures. Mistake number two. I really thought I

(02:01):
was safe because it was on Snapchat. You could see
if the screenshot. A few weeks passed and I realized
I had never seen his face and I knew almost
nothing about him. I started asking more about him, found
out that his name was Joshua and he lives in Florida.
He showed me his face, has multiple mental illnesses and

(02:25):
has had trouble with the police before I realized how
deep and shit I was and started texting him less
and less, which infuriated him. At some point, I decided
to officially cut him off, tried to do it as
politely as I could, and blocked him. I thought that
was it. In the beginning of twenty twenty four, I

(02:49):
received a text from my sister Hey, who's Josh. I
felt my knees weakend, and my stomach drop. I asked
her why, and she told me that she would tell
me when she gets home. When she finally arrived, I
was waiting in the kitchen for her, and she just
gave me this look. I started crying and she hugged me.

(03:11):
He sent her my pictures and threatened to leak them.
I had no choice but to talk about it with
my mom, and she told me we should go to
the police. I agreed and went to the police station,
where they told me they would send officers at my
house and they would take my phone and talk to
me and my sister. It kind of dawned on me

(03:32):
that this was really serious, and I got scared. I
blocked out Mistake number three. Maybe a month or two later,
Josh's brother texted me asking me to unblock him. We
texted a bit, and he told me that Josh would
often sell news to pedos on telegram. I realized how

(03:53):
deep and shit I was, but I was too scared
to speak up. I really should have. Josh texted my
friend's boyfriend no idea how he found him and started
telling him how I was horrible and asking if he
wanted my nudes. A few months later, he texted my
then boyfriend telling him the same thing, but threatening just

(04:14):
said my nudes if I wouldn't talk to him, I
am blocked him. Mistake number four. I didn't lead him on.
I told him to back off and leave me alone,
that I'd go to the cops. He told me, and
I quote that would just show me how much you
loved me. I obviously reblocked him. I since then every

(04:37):
few months get a Snapchat or Instagram request from him.
I would sometimes accepted and telling him to back off,
telling him I don't love him. I tried to find
out his last name, and I remember his brother that
text me. I texted him asking him for Josh's last name.
He did not known me and knowing Josh, I send

(05:00):
them screenshots of our conversation a few months earlier, talking
about me and him, and he ignored me. I'm wondering
if there's anything I can do. I feel like I
can't escape him wherever I go. I've turned most of
my accounts private because of him, and I have trouble
trusting people now. I feel like I'm always just waiting

(05:21):
for him to reappear. I lived in the managed complex
that has two buildings, the main one with the lobby, mailroom, amenities, etc.
And the second one, which I currently live in. On

(05:43):
Sunday night, I added door Dash delivery dropped off. I
always tell them they can drop my orders off at
the secondary entrance in my building so that I don't
have to walk across over to the main building, but
I don't think they ever read my notes. No worries.
I read the notification from door Dash and saw I
got delivered to the lobby in the main building. Around

(06:05):
eleven PM. I made my way over, and I noticed
the dasher even left me a note saying there's a
suspicious man in the lobby and that he was worried
he might take my food. I figured he said that
because he was waiting until I got there. When I
came down, there really was a guy sitting there on

(06:26):
his phone but carefully watching my food. He saw me
approach and said you're here, to which I responded, thanks
for waiting, thinking it must be my doordasher. I pick
up my order and start to turn around, and he
also got up, except he started heading in the direction
of the elevators, not the exit. He starts chatting, I

(06:50):
actually live in this building. My name is Ryan, and
I live in building number three. What's your name? I
gave him a fake name and cut the conversation shore
The pieces came together in my head. This wasn't the
door dasher. It was a suspicious man pretending to be
a doordasher who had even waited for me to come

(07:10):
down as though he made my delivery. You can either
use the elevators in the main building to go to
the fourth floor and transfer to the secondary building, or
you can cut across the garage in the main building
to the second building. I noticed the key fob in
his hand and waited for him to click the elevator
and step inside. When I gathered he was taking the elevator,

(07:33):
and I knew I definitely didn't want to share an
elevator with him because he would know where I lived.
I decided that I would take a shortcut through the garage.
It's a straight line, maybe about a two minute walk
to the other side. After he stepped on the elevator,
I walked through both sts of the doors into the garage.
My senses heightened halfway through. I decided to look behind

(07:57):
me to verify I was alone, only to see his
body in the doorway. He hadn't taken the elevator. He
was following me. I booked at heart, racing through the
garage doors. I started jamming the elevator button, hoping it
would come quickly, but I could hear that the elevator
was still on its way down. In the split second,

(08:18):
I tried to think if I'd be strong enough to
hold down the door with a weight in my body
if he came pushing through. But that would mean we
would be stuck in the same area in the garage,
with probably little to no cameras, witnesses, or any cell service.
I was running out of time. I eyed the stairwell
and carried my food, booked it into two steps at

(08:41):
a time, up two floors. I was now on the
fourth floor, which is normally the floor you would transfer
to get to the other building. Although I was now
in the secondary building, I was worried that if he
indeed was still following me, he wouldn't know which building
I lived in. I needed to go back to the
main building. If he's still behind me, I would know

(09:03):
for sure that he was following me, because we just
made a circle. From the corner of my eye. In
the distance, I could see someone taking their trash out
from the reflection of the door at eleven pm. This
was the first person I had seen, and I needed
to be next to anyone. I cut through the courtyard,
through the conservatory, and into the hallway to the fourth

(09:25):
floor and the main building. Just as I stopped to
catch my breath, he burst through the conservatoror door and
caught up with me. Huffing and puffing. He accused me
of stealing his door dash, yelling, got in my face
and told me that I could be evicted and sent
to prison. I couldn't even look at him in his

(09:46):
eyes for longer than three seconds, but he looked bewildered.
At this point, the person that was taking their trash
out to the shoe was nowhere to be seen, and
this man kept coming closer, Me back looking up him,
inching closer. I tried talking loudly, hoping that if anything happened,
the residents in the unions behind me could hear. He

(10:10):
continued to raise his voice, claiming that one nineteen number
on the receipt stapled outside the bag was the real
person's apartment number and that I had stolen from them
taking a look. One nineteen was in fact the order number,
not the apartment number, but he was convinced it was
someone's apartment number. For a lot of reasons, this logic

(10:32):
didn't make sense even if I was taking someone else's order.
He was going to follow me to my apartment to
verify where I lived, which is scary, and ensure that
my apartment matched the number, which he assumed the apartment
number was one nineteen. He was able to catch up
to me relatively quickly, considering how springing and not a breath,

(10:54):
this means he was deliberately following and chasing me down,
which as a man, circumstances aside, but especially for stolen food,
I'm not sure why you would ever willingly chase a
woman by yourself at night, knowing how this would look
For him, he had to have studied the order in receipts,
because you had to have close proximity to the receipt

(11:15):
to see the fading ink that read one nineteen. It
was never about the order, because why did he pretend
to go to the elevator in the beginning only to
chase me across two buildings for an order when he
didn't even know which apartment number I was going to,
and it definitely dawned on him that up to that
point we were the only people around. As I was

(11:39):
standing there, him engine near me and poking at the receipt,
I heard someone coming through the hallway in the distance.
He clicked the elevator button, continuing his threats, and I
didn't even finish waiting for him to get on the elevator.
I sprinted through the conservatory, through the courtyard, and back
to my building, taking the elevator up to my floor.

(12:02):
I got to my apartment paralyzed and shaking. I was
so terrified that my breathing got labored in raspby. I
don't even have asthma, but I could barely catch my
breath for minutes, grasping onto anything I could so that
I could feel grounded and not choke from the lack
of air. I'll never forget that moment I looked back
in that garage and saw his body in the doorframe.

(12:26):
I wrote a long, detailed email to management with screenshots
from the door dash and exact accounts and locations of
where everything happened, so that they could collaborate my accounts
with their camera footage. It's now been four days, and
I'm awoken every morning by my heart racing, hot flashes
and paranoia with every drop of a sound. This is

(12:50):
a new kind of anxiety I've never felt before. In
my days are clauded with fear of bumping into him
in the common spaces, and how to play my days
with the highest likelihood of avoiding him, and how to
strategically order and pick up my mail where I can
know that I won't have to see him. I don't
know if these extreme symptoms are normal after this experience,

(13:13):
considering I know a lot of women who have had
more frightening, finally encounters with strangers than involved more than
what just happened to me that night. But this has
been consuming me for the past few days. I feel
unsafe in my own building at it everything that's happened
since that morning, my management and maintenance two men came

(13:36):
knocking on my door. Of course, I was already frazzled
from the events of that night, and although I opened
the door, they could see that I was visibly shaking.
They came to apologize about the events, saying they had
seen the footage and it was scary. I needed to
file police report immediately. The property manager was kind, saying

(13:58):
he would sit and call the least with me, so
I wouldn't have to do it alone. I asked if
they knew the resident and if they were aware. He
said they knew who it was and this wasn't the
first time he's been reported for bothering a resident. My
stomach sank. I quickly got ready and met the property

(14:19):
manager downstairs outside of the building, and we made the
call together. After I gave my account, the property manager
chimed in with his accounts of what happened. I was
the fourth or fifth female that he harassed. He has
harassed women in the complex before, but never followed them

(14:40):
at night. The property manager has managed multiple properties before,
but he's never seen a resident following another resident like
this before. He usually finds a woman by herself kind
of hones in on them. He does not approach men,
and he doesn't approach women when they are with men.

(15:03):
The people who live on his floor have complained numerous
times that he harasses them. He's been arrested for harassing women.
He's been sent to the hospital before for his mental
health issues. He was most recently booked and released two
weeks ago, and management wasn't aware that he was back.

(15:23):
The responder on the other line noted that this was
quite severe, so they sent an officer to the scene
to collect an official report. By this point, as we
were talking, I learned the resident's full name, birthday, union
number he lives in when he moved in. It's been
less than a half year, so assuming he has a

(15:43):
twelve month lease, he still has a ways to go.
The officer asked me if I could remember if he
had a tool or weapon in his hands, but I
said I couldn't remember, and not that I knew of.
I said there was camera footage, so couldn't we check
to see if he did. But the officer said, even
if I couldn't remember, and it turns out that perpetrator

(16:05):
did in fact have a weapon, I couldn't go back
on my word and say that there was a weapon
or I felt threatened. I was stunned, I told the officer,
but there's evidence of him following me a woman alone,
as well as threatening me across two buildings, one of
which he had no business being in. The officer asked

(16:26):
if he used the words I will kill you or
I will shoot you. I said no, but he was
still threatening me. The officer said, unfortunately, that only qualifies
as being a nuisance, but being a nuisance isn't against
the law or grounds for arrest. My heart dropped. On
top of that, my property manager said he's been trying

(16:47):
to evict him, but there isn't enough evidence and eviction
is a long process. There was nothing we could do.
The officer gave me his card with my case number,
informing me I should call him if if you ever
approached me again. Where I felt unsafe, I went back
to my apartment, stunned, trying to figure out my next steps.

(17:09):
I decided not to leave my apartment again out of safety,
but ordered additional self defense items, including an apartment doorbell camera.
Because he had been close enough to my receipt to
see the order number, the receipt also had my name.
I was worried he would put two and two together,
type my name in the directory outside our building and
figure out my unit number. I couldn't risk running into

(17:33):
him again, so I had to stay locked up until
my camera arrived. Given the information I had about him now,
I decided to do my own research and find his
public records. To my surprise, I learned that he actually
had six court cases since twenty eighteen, and the most
recent court record was from August twenty twenty four. His

(17:55):
cases have been for stalking, harassment, restraining orders, multiple reissued
anti harassment protection orders, domestic violence, and attempting to get
him to surrender his firearms, to which he refused, so
he still owns his guns. Different women have attempted to
serve in protection orders multiple times but failed because he

(18:19):
either tried to dodge it, never showed up to court,
or he's been hard to get a hold of. I
couldn't believe it. This man was able to freely move
about the common spaces in our complex, and management has
never mentioned anything to the residents nor regarded our safety.
Now I knew this was more than just an annoying neighbor,

(18:40):
or rather someone who could be dangerous. I was dealing
with a man with unresolved mental issues, who may still
be in possession of multiple firearms, who was angry with me.
Given his history of professional stalking, I was worried if
he saw me too soon again, he would remember our encounter,
fixate on me, and possibly escalate it. A few days

(19:05):
passed and I hadn't left my building, but I noted
that my camera had arrived, so I was trying to
arrange how I could get to the mail room, which
was in the building he lives in, and on the
flour he'son. I asked management for the footage of our encounter,
and after two days of dragging on the request, they
finally sent me clips of our encounters in different areas.

(19:27):
In one of the videos, you could see he folded
me into the garage a bit after I had already
gone in, after he supposed toly pretended to take the elevator.
In the clip that freaks me out the most, you
could see him enter the garage elevator lobby, click the
elevator button, frantically pace around back and forth, before I
realized I'm running out of time and ran through the stairwell.

(19:51):
A few minutes later, you could see him come in.
Look at all the pressed elevator buttons, then deduced I
must have taken the stairwell before falling. We sue if anything,
this showed intent. Oddly enough, the footage when he caught
up to me and poked the receipt on the bag
was missing, but management sent the footage after when I

(20:12):
was running back to my building anyway. A few days later,
around six pm, I was trying to figure out how
to pick up my mail. I have a married friend
who lives in his building three floors above him, and
had no idea about any of this, so I asked
if she had to be comfortable meeting me on the
fourth floor. Deep breaths. I got to the end of

(20:36):
the hallway, my friend on the phone the whole time,
and I opened the door to the courtyard, hyper vigilant.
I looked across and saw the man there. I squinted,
It couldn't be. It was indeed him standing in the conservatory.
He locked eyes with me, started mouthing things, smiling, then yelling.

(20:59):
I began shaking uncontrollably, crying and quickly ran back into
my building. Now we knew for sure I lived in
the second building. My friend was in the hallway behind me,
so she witnessed everything as he was yelling directly at me.
She wasn't with her husband either, but he had locked
eyes with me and was angry. Now there were some

(21:21):
people in the hallway frantically asking if I was okay,
but I couldn't speak. My friend, still on the line,
told me to go back to my apartment that she
meet me there with her husband. My friend and her
husband came up a few moments later, staying with me
as I frantically packed my bag. We decided it wasn't

(21:42):
safe for me to be alone in my apartment, so
I reached out to another friend who lives somewhere else
in the city, so I could crush out her place.
My friend and her husband escorted me through the hallway,
me physically breaking down as we neared the elevators, but
eventually leading me to my other friend car. As I

(22:03):
write this edit, I am in the living room of
her apartment for the third day, figuring out my next moves.
On my first day at my friend's house, I wrote
management and email explaining the incident with the resident. Again,
this is my second day with no response from them. Still,
my friend went to management with her husband to report

(22:23):
the incident since she was witnessed to him yelling, so
it could add to their complaints. She said Management was
aware of me and my complaints, but they couldn't do
anything because he's protected under the Fair Housing Act. Management
cannot deny housing to someone due to their disability, which
includes mental illness. For context, most buildings in the city

(22:46):
have MFTE units, basically reduced rent apartments that were reserved
as part of an affordable housing program in my city.
From what I can understand, people can qualify for MFTE
based on their income and sometimes it's combined with disability projections,
which is likely how he's able to stay here. So

(23:09):
seems my una is worried if they evict him, he
might be able to sue them. I don't have a
male partner, which seems to be the only deterrent from
the resident, so my sister and her husband are trying
to figure out when they can fly in and help
me pack up my place so I can get out
of there. I'm devastated because it's a beautiful complex with

(23:31):
incredible amenities, gorgeous interior, and pretty new, but all that
means nothing when my safety is at risk. I have
no plans, but I can't get back to my place
until I have protection at all times in the building.

(23:52):
I haven't told many people this story because it's pretty upsetting.
Bear in mind that I look younger. Most people said
at the time, ten years younger. And keep in mind
this man is older, probably mid fifties. When I was
twenty four years old, I had a route that I
took every day for work where a man selling newspapers

(24:14):
for a dollar on the side of the road. One day,
I decided to give him some money because he seemed
in need. I was aware enough to understand and to
be cautious of getting too clothes or familiar with people,
but it was only a dollar, so in my head
I didn't overthink it. Immediately, this guy hits on me,

(24:36):
telling me I'm so fine and ask me if he
could take me off for lunch. I left it off
and tell him I'm working so I can't, but he
insists and ask when I'm getting off work. I idiotically
said four p M. I don't know why I was
so naive at this age, but I digress. He said

(24:57):
he'd love to take me out for dinner. At that moment,
I drove off because the light changed to green. I
only saw this guy two more times, but he wasn't
able to say anything or stop my car because the
light was always green when I drove up. I didn't
acknowledge him because I realized in hindsight after he hit
on me, I shouldn't have even entertained it anyways. I

(25:21):
was walking into a store where he usually sets up
shop next to the light. I didn't see him in
his usual spot, and I just walked into the store
to do some shopping, then came out. About ten minutes later,
he was waiting for me at my car. So now
I'm thoroughly creeped out because I didn't even see him
and he suddenly at my car. He knew my car

(25:45):
from that one encounter. He wouldn't let me pass to
get to the driver's seat. All while he's hitting on
me again, asking if I wanted to go to dinner
this time. I tell him sorry, but no, I'm not
really trying to date anyone right now because I'm focused
on work. Surprisingly, he backed off a bit, but said,

(26:07):
don't tell your dad about me. I don't want to
get in trouble and walked off while I was still
creeped out. Nothing bad really happened, and I didn't see
him again in his usual spot for about two weeks,
so I didn't think much of it anymore. Then I
see him on the news. He was arrested for essay

(26:28):
of an underage girl. Then they found out he was
also violating his parole by being within two thousand feet
of a school. He had done this before. The light
I drove by every day was right across from middle school.
This freak assaulted the girl a day after he talked
to me in the parking lot. That's why I didn't

(26:50):
see him for two weeks. He took her to a
restaurant for lunch, then assaulted her in the bathroom there.
He was targeting me because he thought I would underage
that poor, actual underage girl. I don't understand how he
wasn't permanently in prison, and yet it was on parole.

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Episode Transcript

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