Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
I don't talk about this much anymore because people tend
to react in two ways. They either don't believe me,
or they get uncomfortable and try to change the subject.
But the truth is, for almost a year of my life,
I had a stalker, a real one, and I still
don't fully understand how he found me so easily. This
(00:26):
all started about seven years ago, when I was twenty
three and living alone for the first time. I just
moved into a new city, one of those places that
just feels big enough to get lost in, but small
enough they recognized local faces pretty quickly. I worked at
a grocery store, lived in a studio apartment, and figured
my life wasn't interesting enough for anyone to pay attention to.
(00:51):
First time I noticed him was at work. I was
stocking shelves in the middle of a weekday, and he
kept pacing the same aisle, no cart, no basket, just
walking past, stopping, staring out all the products like he
was pretending to shop. He wasn't threatening or weird looking,
just playing forgettable late thirties maybe light beard, glasses, average clothes,
(01:17):
the kind of guy you would never remember in a lineup.
I didn't think anything of it. At first, a lot
of people past when they're trying to find something. It
wasn't until a few days later that everything clicked. I
saw him again, this time at a coffee shop I
went to before work. It's not a chain, not a
busy place, just a corner spot run by an older couple.
(01:42):
He was sitting by the window, same clothes, same posture,
same blank look. He didn't look at me when he
walked in, but he didn't need to. My stomach dropped
the second I recognized him. Still, I told myself it
was a coincidence. People overlapped in cities, it happens. But
(02:02):
then I started seeing him everywhere, at a bus stop,
on my walk to the store, standing across the street
from my building, like he was waiting for someone. He
never approached me, never spoke, never tried to hide, He
just watched. Every time I glanced over, he simply looked away,
almost lazily, like I was the one invading his space.
(02:27):
There's something uniquely terrifying about realizing someone had been studying
your routine long before you ever noticed them. I tried
to trick myself into brushing it off. I was young, anxious,
and trying to be logical, but the truth was unavoidable.
No matter where I went, he'd appear eventually. Some days
(02:48):
he would show up twice three times, maybe, always quiet,
always a good distance away, always pretending to do something else.
I kept telling myself I was overreacting until the night
he followed me home. I had closed this door, walked
about fifteen minutes to my apartment and felt that prickly
(03:08):
sensation on my back the entire time. Then, when you
get when someone's behind you but you're too afraid to check.
I forced myself not to look until I reached my
stairs to my building. When I turned around, he was
standing at the end of the street, not walking, not
pretending now, just standing by the stop sign, looking in
(03:29):
my direction. My froze. He didn't move, didn't wave or gesture,
just stood there staring. I backed up the stairs, unlocked
my door, and locked it so fast. That was the
first night I've ever slept with the lights on. I
tried reporting him to the police, but without a name,
(03:52):
without proof of threats, without him technically doing anything, there
wasn't much that they could do. They told me to
keep track of the encounters. If he ever approaches you,
then we can step in. They said, it felt like
they told me to wait until something horrible happened. I
mentioned it to a coworker in the moment, I tried
(04:13):
to explain it out loud. I felt insane. He never
touched me, hadn't spoken to me. Half of his stocking
is psychological, and that makes it harder to justify or
even describe. But one day he made it real. I
came home to find several pebbles arranged neatly on my
door mat, not dumped or scattered, arranged in a circle.
(04:38):
Every stone was similar in size and shape. I don't
know why that broke me more than anything else, but
it did something about the quietness of it, the time
it would have taken. That night, I packed my bag
and stayed with my coworker for a week. I didn't
go home except once, and that was to grab some
(04:58):
more clothes. He wasn't there, no stones, nothing disturbed. My
mind was racing. I wondered if I had imagined everything.
But then one night, when my coroker and I got
off the ship at the same time, he was walking
me to the bus stop. We sat on the bench
talking and then I saw the glasses. First, he was
(05:22):
leaning against the wall of a pharmacy across the street,
half hidden behind a vending machine. I don't know if
he saw me first or he had been waiting there,
but the second my eyes locked onto him, he stepped
back into the shadows. It disappeared. I literally dry heaved
in fear. That's when I decided I wasn't going back
to that apartment. I used my next two paychecks to
(05:46):
break my lease early and crashed out a friend across
town until I found a new place further away. I
changed my commute, my routes, everything. The move wiped me
out financially, but honestly I didn't care. For a while,
things went quiet. Then about three weeks into living at
my new place, I spotted him again at a bus
(06:08):
stop two neighborhoods away. He didn't look at me, but
it was him, same glasses, same haircut. He was reading
a newspaper, like someone who had nowhere else to be.
That was the moment I realized switching apartments wouldn't fix this.
I had something he wanted, or maybe I was what
(06:28):
he wanted, and he was willing to follow me everywhere.
I didn't know what else to do except changing my
entire life. Luckily I was able to transfer stores, moving
with my sister across the state. I cut off certain
social media accounts and changed my number. I didn't tell
(06:49):
many people the reason. I felt stupid, dramatic, paranoid, but
deep down I knew. I knew if I didn't disappear,
he never would. And it worked because after the move,
after a toll upheaval, after six months of me waiting
for him to appear behind my car, he never showed up.
(07:12):
It's been years now. I rebuilt my life. I feel
normal in most days, but my brain messes with me
every now and then. If I catch a glimpse of
someone in a hoodie or someone with some glasses, my
heart still jumps into my throat for a second. Stalkers
don't just follow you around in real life, they follow
(07:33):
you in your memory too. Unfortunately, stalking laws are the
way they are. You basically have to be harmed before
something can happen. And I'll never stop looking over my shoulder.
I was in high school and I had to walk
to and from school every day because I lived too
(07:55):
far to catch the bus. There is an alley I
usually took as a shortcut, so I wouldn't have to
walk all the way around the block. It saved time.
I never felt unsafe, but I had to stop using
it for a while. My mom had recently been stopped
by a man while she was alone. He asked for directions,
(08:18):
then asked for her to get into the car to
help him find the street he needed. She didn't, and
he came home safe. But the whole thing rattled me,
so I avoided the alley until one day I was
tired and didn't feel like taking the long way home.
It was a short alley, just passed through between a
couple houses. Nothing had ever happened before. I thought I
(08:40):
would be fine. I barely entered the alley when I
noticed the car behind me on the street. Something in
me just knew to look back. There's a van, an
older guy inside flowing his vehicle down, and he was
staring straight at me. I kept walking, trying to act normal,
(09:01):
but something was off. My gut was screaming for me
to turn around, go back the long way and somewhere
public where people could see me. But I didn't. I
didn't want to look paranoid or dramatic. Maybe he'd just
drive by. Maybe I was just overthinking it still, the
(09:21):
way his eyes followed me made my skin crawl, something
screaming in me that something was about to go down.
That's what I thought. Get your phone out, Pretend you're
on a call. So I did. I held it up
to my ear and started fake talking. My phone didn't
have minutes. I couldn't actually call anyone. That made me
(09:43):
panic even more. But if something happened. I was still walking,
pretending to talk when I heard a car coming from
the alley. It was that van. He had turned into
the alley. I felt my stomach drop. All they could
think about was my mom story, how the guy tried
to lure her into his car, the weird vibe, the
(10:05):
wrongness of it all. Now I was living in it,
and I was alone, a child. The van crept up
next to me and slowed down. He stopped right beside me,
looked me up and down, then asked if I could
help him find a street. I said I don't know
street names, and he just stared at me, silent, like
(10:27):
he was thinking, measuring, calculating that he was weighing the
pros and cons. He was looking at me, looking at
my phone. I was frozen. Every part of me was screaming,
don't run, don't blink, don't even breathe. I was frozen solid,
my mind completely blank. Maybe the cons outweighed the pros,
(10:52):
because finally he just drove away. As soon as he
turned out of the alley, I ran all the way
home without stopping. I looked over my shoulder the whole way.
I told my mom what happened. She accused me of
making up a story for attention. The next day, she
had her boyfriend walked me to school. When nothing happened,
(11:14):
she doubled down and called me attention seeking liar. She
said I was trying to copy her. She had no
idea how scared I was as a teenage little girl.
She never believed me. Later on, after I moved away,
I kept hearing stories women and kids taking off the
street in broad daylight, just gone, and I doubt if
(11:37):
I hadn't pulled out my phone and made it look
like I had a witness, I would have been one
of them. To this day, I still wonder what would
have happened if I hadn't pretended to make that call.
And no matter how long it's been, thinking about it
still makes me feel cold. I think it always will.
(12:02):
I just have to share the story because I keep
trying to come up with my own answers as to
what happened in the situation and has been confusing me.
Just yesterday, I was walking at my local park, which
I do fairly often, probably about three or four times
a week. I've had situations happen here, but nothing to
this extent. The park has two separate tracks. The track
(12:28):
I was on goes around the soccer fields, and the
curve around the track has one hill on one side
that leads up to the soccer fields and woods on
the other side. I'm very aware of my surroundings when
I'm walking the backside, because if you go back there,
nobody would be able to see if anything happened. I
(12:48):
had just come from the parking lot and was walking
back down to the backside. I noticed a man about
five hundred feet in front of me that I didn't
pay much attention to because it's a walk track. The
only thing that caught my eye about him was that
he was dressing all black, black hoodie, black jeans when
the weather was sunny and sixty five. Anyways, I walked
(13:13):
down the hill and went around the corner that brings
you back up to the parking lot, and I quickly
noticed he was no longer in front of me. There
is no way he could have completely made it out
of my sight by the time I went around the corner.
I started looking to my left to see if he
had gone up the hill towards the soccer fields, but
didn't see him. When I looked to my right, I
(13:37):
noticed he was standing behind a tree in the shallow
part of the woods. At this point, he was probably
only ten feet away from me. My stomach dropped. I
turned around and started running. The first thing I thought
to do was to call my boyfriend, who was fairly
close by working. I ran all the way back to
the track and the only person I saw was the
(13:58):
older man who had quickly told what happened, and he
pretty much laughed at me. When I turned around to
point where he was, the man was about four hundred
feet behind me, so I kept brinning. I ran back
to my car, got in, unlocked the doors, and noticed
a car leaved the parking lot, circle around and park
about four spots next to me. I could feel the
(14:22):
man in the car just staring at me. Shortly after
my boyfriend arrived and I was a biding calling for
help because I wasn't sure if I was just being paranoid.
There's a pavilion area in the middle of all the
baseball fields where I saw him standing for about five
minutes until he started going back and forth on his
(14:42):
phone on a nearby sidewalk. My boyfriend was standing at
my car window, and I was telling him everything that
had happened. When the man started walking towards my car,
I panicked and told my boyfriend we needed to go now,
but he said nothing was going to happen with him
at my window. He walked by my car with his
(15:04):
phone in his ear, almost as if he was recording me,
because a second he turned onto the next sidewalk. He
was off the phone slowly after that, I left and
my boyfriend followed me home. I called the police and
followed a report. There was lots of people at the
park it was ten forty five am, but unfortunately, no
(15:26):
one was walking around the track at the time that
this happened. There was no reason for him to be
standing in the woods right there at all. I keep
thinking about the what ifs, what could have happened if
I wasn't paying close enough attention and kept walking. I
have no idea what the intention was, but it definitely
(15:47):
did not feel right at all. This entire situation was
wake up call for me to never feel weird for
paying close attention to my surroundings, as you never really
know what people are capable of. I would have never
considered myself a target for anything this situation could have
led to, but unfortunately it can happen to anyone. I'm
(16:16):
a woman and was nineteen at the time. I was
listening to a creepy pasta and there's this scene where
a guy was looking closely at something in the dark,
trying to understand what it was, and suddenly realized that
he was looking into someone's eye the whole time. So
it reminded me of the situation about four years ago.
(16:38):
We were mushroom picking with the friend in the woods.
I thought I saw some mushrooms. I was walking towards them,
looking attentively and trying to understand if there's mushrooms there
or not. Sullenly, my eyes shifted and I realized this
whole time, I was walking towards a man who was
just standing there looking at me. He was staring and
(17:01):
smiling doing the come closer gesture. I had no idea
how long this had been going on, and this whole
time I was coming right towards him, but somehow I
didn't notice him until the last moment. I got scared
and ran to my friend. We laughed about it and
continued mushroom picking. We didn't even go away too far
(17:21):
from there. At the time, it just seemed like a
funny story. But the more I think about it, the
more creeped out I get. What was he doing? Did
he see me walking there and instantly decided to do
the come closer thing? Was it supposed to be a prank?
I'm so confused. Anyone got any theories on what his
(17:42):
motivation was? I still have no idea. I moved to
East of LA this summer after high school. My parents
bought a house from my aunt and uncle who just
moved out. We already had family in that area, so
(18:04):
it felt familiar. The neighborhood was nice and quiet. The
plan for me was to live with my parents save
some money while I figured out what I wanted to
do next. I was getting ready to start community college
and applied to a medical assistant program. Back then, everyone
had an opinion of East LA. People loved to describe
(18:28):
it as dangerous, even though most of them had never
been there. I grew up visiting my cousins in the
same area, and it was never as dramatic as people
made it sound. These places are not scary to me.
They're just neighborhoods where people live. I met Michael at
my cousin's house party that summer. He had tattoos and
(18:50):
looked edgy. When he asked me out, I said yes.
I was flattered and curious of what he would be like.
He told me anew a place I had the best
guava nectar in town, and that we could go to
a drive in movie afterwards. I actually laughed. I like
guava nectar, but I've never heard anyone hype it up
(19:11):
like that. But like I said, I was curious and
I agreed. He parked in the drive in first. He
said he could leave the car there, walk to the restaurant,
and come back for the movie. We even asked the
employees and they said it was okay. Something about the
plan felt strange. The restaurant was a twenty minute walk
(19:34):
away and the movie started at nine pm. It was
close to eight. I asked if it was smart for
us to walk by herself so late. He smiled a
said he thought I wasn't afraid of the neighborhoods like
that since I spent so much time in East la.
He said, it's like a challenge. I remember mentioning that earlier,
(19:55):
and he used my own words to keep me from
saying no, so along with it. Very few people were
on the street and it was dark. As we got
closer to the restaurant, he stopped a few times to
show me videos on his phone. They were silly clips
they thought were funny. I wasn't easy about the walk.
(20:18):
I felt like Michael wanted it to last longer than
it should have. Something was off looking back, I think
Michael was stalling. Then a car pulled up beside us.
A masked man got out and walked towards us. For
a second, I thought it might be a prank, like
for a YouTube video. Then I heard his voice and
(20:40):
he said, I need your phone and wallet. I remember
thinking he sounded young, maybe high school age. He also
sounded nervous and out of breath. I can't prove this,
but I could tell it was not something he had
done before. That was the only time I've ever been mugged.
And I don't know what muggers usually sound like, but
I just know this guy had never done it before.
(21:03):
I think he was hesitating. At one point I can
even remember. The driver yelled hurry up. Man yelled back,
I'm hurrying, bro, She's right here. He kept looking at Michael.
Michael looked back. I could not see their faces. Something
in the moment told me that they knew each other.
(21:24):
He took my wallet and phone, ran back to the
car and drove away. Michael stood still. He did not help,
but to be fair, I don't know what he could
have done. You never know what someone with a gun
might do if you make the wrong move. I was
in shock, trying to make sense of what just happened.
(21:44):
I told Michael we should go to the police. He
kept insisting we should still go get guav nectar so
I could calm down. I had just been robbed and
he was offering me jews. I had no phone, no
way to call anyone, and somehow we were still walking
to get juice. We got it and then walked back.
(22:06):
We finally got to the car. I told him again
that I wanted to go to the police this time.
I said that if he refused, I would ask someone
else in the parking lot to call. He finally said okay.
At the station, we gave our statements and he got
even stranger. I said the car was gray because I
(22:27):
knew what I saw. Michael said it was white. I
said that there had been a driver who yelled, hurry up, man.
Michael said there was no driver, that it was the
same person who got back into the driver's seat and
drove off. He kept adding little changes. The officers were polite,
but I could feel their patience thinking. When he realized
(22:50):
we were giving two different stories, one of them sighed.
She said that she could not really investigate if two
people who were both there could not agree on what happened.
I never did that. They were not going to investigate
any further. Michael drove me home. My parents found out
what happened. They were furious. My mom told me that
(23:10):
I was never to talk to Michael again. She did
not need to repeat herself. Thankfully, I did not lose much.
My wallet was easy to replace, and I needed a
new phone. Anyway. I have lived in East La ever
since that summer. Eight years later, I've never had another
bad experience here. The more I think about that night,
(23:33):
the more I'm convinced that Michael planned it. I can
still remember how he stalled to give them more time
to come mug me. I can still remember how calm
he stayed through all of it. I can still remember
him giving completely different information from what really happened. No way,
that was all an accident. Since then, I've seen Michael
(23:56):
a few times at different things. He always wants to
make small and invite me to things. I keep my
guard up and don't agree to anything. When I was
eleven and my brother was seven, our family moved to
a different city that we had never been to, hundreds
(24:18):
of miles away. My dad was transferred through work and
we were given a very narrow window to move, so
we just happened to go as soon as possible. One
side of our backyard face an open field outside of
a retirement home, and if you walked along the fence
line through the field, you could cross one road and
(24:38):
be at this beautiful park about two blocks away. Our
first day moving into our new house, my brother and
I just walked to the park to play at the
playgrounds and feed the docks. The second day, we had
to to the park around ten am. Just as we
came over the hill to the road separating us from
(24:59):
the park, about twenty feet from the road itself, a
busted ass primer lacked nineteen sixty six Mustang slammed on
his brakes and skidd it to a stop directly in
front of us, and the passenger door, the one facing us,
flung open so hard that it swung back and the
guy in the passenger seat had to deflect it, and
(25:19):
he began to get out fast, with both hands out
towards us. I'll never forget his face, oily, dirty, scraggly,
greasy beard, bald but with a few little hairs on top,
brushed back, and those beady green eyes. I've never seen
(25:40):
a look in a person's eyes like that. It was
instantly clear that he was a predator, and we were pray.
He looked like a starving man seeing Thanksgiving dinner. I
immediately grabbed my brother around the waist and dove headfirst
into the backyard where we were walking parallel to not
realizing that because of the hill we had been walking up,
(26:02):
it's a good ten feet drop. As soon as we
hit the ground. I scrambled up, grabbed my brother's hand,
and ran to the back door of the house, banging
on the sliding glass door. Then ran as fast as
I could, dragging my brother before I put him on
my shoulders, and kept running through the backyard towards our house,
hitting every window or door of every house we passed,
(26:24):
screaming help help. We made it home and bolted it
in my bedroom. We frantically told my mom what happened,
and although she commended me for thinking quickly and protected
my little brother, she was obviously skeptical that it happened
the way I was describing it. Many years later, I
(26:47):
mentioned that incident to my mom and she said she
knew it had to be true because my brother and
I refused to leave the house for about a month
after that, except for school, and we always ran home
from the bus stop. In hindsight, it's very clear that
the people in the car saw us and meant to
take us, And now thinking of what they might have
(27:08):
intended for us is truly terrifying. The man's eyes, his
weird smile, It's burned in my mind forever, and there's
no questioning we escape something beyond horror. I've never posted,
(27:29):
and I read it before, normally just lurking, but I
feel I need to share this as it's something that
has stuck with me for a long time. This took
place when I was around eight. For a bit of context,
I grew up in a small village where everyone knew everyone,
and most of the time I was trusted to go
wherever I wanted, which was the same for the majority
(27:52):
of the children that lived in my village. It was
a summer day and everything seemed normal. I was an
active kid who hated to be stuck inside, so I
usually walked to the local shops. I was well aware
of stranger danger and always came straight home, never striking
up conversations with strangers because I've always been shy, especially
(28:14):
with new people. However, on this day, I had no
choice but to talk to a stranger. As I walked
back home, a car started following me slowly until it
pulled up beside me, and the driver gestured for me
to stop. I thought it was odd since I've never
seen this man or woman before, but I stopped anyway.
(28:37):
He calmly asked for directions to the hospital, which can
be tricky to fine, since it's down a dead end,
since it could have been a medical emergency. I tried
to give directions, but he didn't let me finish before
asking me to get in the car and show them
the way. I refused, but he pleaded about five more
(28:57):
times until I walked away. It wasn't just the man's
pleading that I remember. It was a woman who sat
there expressionless, like a statue. And that's not even the
main thing that stuck with me. It was the way
she gave me an apologetic look as I walked away,
and when I look back, the car was still there,
(29:19):
just watching me. I never forgot my mom's face when
I told her what happened. She seemed overwhelmed with the
terrible thoughts that no mother should have, and she's been
much more overprotective ever since. I hope the intentions of
these two strangers who pleaded with me to get into
their car was good, but I'll never forget the pure
(29:40):
and utter fear I felt that day. Not a super
extreme story, but it still disgusts me every time I
think about it because it happened very recently. I was
at a supermarket with my sister. She was somewhere else
(30:02):
in the store. I was reading ingredients on the soda
when I suddenly noticed a man, probably in his thirties
or older, standing way too close to me. It startled
me because I hadn't noticed him walk up. He smiled
and said hi, and I said hi back, thinking he
was just being polite after scaring me. I kept focusing
(30:26):
on the label, but he stayed beside me, pretending to
read the same thing. When he realized I wasn't reacting,
he slowly walked away, then came back and said smile, smile,
while laughing. I just looked at him, confused and said
I'm good, thank you. He looked like a total creep.
(30:47):
It was very obvious. I really wish I was more
rude to him. All I could think of was he
probably thought I was a miner because I get told
I looked like a teenager a lot when I'm actually
twenty five. He thought he could easily approach me and
that I would be responsive and friendly with him, but
got disappointed when I barely gave him any attention and
(31:08):
then told me to smile. Where do these creeps get
the confidence to do this? I also can't imagine the
danger underage girls must be going through by creeping men
like this. Please stay safe girls. When I was a kid,
(31:29):
my aunt and uncle moved into this old farmhouse in Pennsylvania.
Whenever I went there, I always felt like something was off,
and my aunt and uncle admitted that they felt it too.
One night, me and my cousins were sleeping in the
guest room, which was at the end of the hallway.
Just off the stairs from where we were. We could
(31:50):
see his brother's bedroom with his brother asleep in it.
That's when we noticed a shadow figure coming down the hall.
Here's the creepy We could hear my aunt and uncle
snoring in their room. They both were out cold. No
chance it was them. The shadow disappeared before we could
really see it, but we both knew we saw it.
(32:14):
That room also had a crawl space in it. It
wasn't dangerous or anything, just empty, but my uncle was
adamant that we were never to go in there because
it was unsafe. Not physically unsafe, just not safe. Apparently
a lot of other weird stuff happened in the house too.
Pictures would just fall off the wall, but the nail
(32:38):
holding them up would still be in place. Coffee cups
would disappear, only to reappear on a different counter later
when no one had even been in that room, and
me and my cousins always felt like we were being watched.
Mind you, this place was a couple hundred years old,
a very old farmhouse. Who knows how many people have
(33:00):
been died there before It got to the point where
my uncle, who was a pastor, had to call another
pastor to bless the place. Creepiest sleepover of my life.