28 ANIMATED HORROR STORIES ( COMPILATION OF FEBRUARY 2021)

for a little background the events of the story took place when i was 21 years old i'm a male and have always been somewhat awkward i was never in the popular crowd and never really found my clique in high school i've also always been pretty bad at talking to girls and or asking them out it's not that i'm really overly nervous i just never really know the right thing to say or carry on the conversation i have a twin sister who is the exact opposite she was always popular had a ton of friends and was usually in a steady relationship she was a bit of a social butterfly and we used to joke around about how different we were from one another it never really bothered me and in fact some of my fondest memories of my childhood was goofing around and poking fun at each other with my sister fast forward to when i was 21 right around valentine's day i'm not sure if it was the constant cold weather or the fact that my sister was hanging out with her boyfriend but i was feeling especially lonely i asked my sister if she would help me set up a dating profile on one of the thousand dating websites that are out there we went through all of the criteria and gave it a few days to see if i got any responses i received a few messages but the conversations fizzled after a few exchanges back and forth the day before valentine's day i received a message from a girl who was extremely attractive and who wouldn't give me the time of day in high school her name was gwen which i very much liked because it reminded me of gwen stacy from the spider-man comics she made talking very easy which was awesome because i was never good at steering conversations she laughed at my dry sense of humor and always kept the conversation going thinking she was possibly not who she said she was or perhaps a catfish i asked her to video chat with me and she complied i was shocked when it was really her i mean i couldn't believe it we talked about a lot of things the things you ask someone when you're getting to know them and clearly interested in she eventually told me that i was one of the nicest people she had ever spoken to and that was different than the other guys she had talked to or been with in the past we eventually set up a plan for a date and to meet in person when the day came i picked her up but not from her house she said she had to work and i could pick her up downtown i didn't think anything of it so it didn't send off any red flags we had a few drinks and then went to dinner we had plans to go to the movies after dinner but as i was paying the checks he said let's go on an adventure confused what she meant by that i asked her to clarify she said in the bubbly voice i grew so accustomed and comfortable with let's go to blue lakes they have the trails there and the moonlight will be on the lake it'll be so romantic and way better than any movie nervous but excited i said of course but in my own mind i like the idea of the movies because i didn't have to worry about what to say and carry on a conversation we drove to blue lakes which is the name of this beautiful park in my hometown it's not actually called blue lakes but because the lake has a deep blue color everybody in town calls it blue lakes we got there at about 10 p.m and was starting to get nervous and felt like i was somehow going to mess things up i texted my sister and told her where i was and asked her to give me some kind of advice on what to do or what to say she didn't respond right away thanks sis there was a couple of cars in the parking lot which was weird for the time of night but i was trying to have fun she said oh don't be nervous about the cars it's probably just some couples still celebrating valentine's day she grabbed my hand and started walking toward one of the trails she could have said anything at this point and i would have went along with her she let go of my hand and walked on the trail beside the lake she said very loudly wow look how beautiful this place is i thought it was kind of weird how loud she said it but again i didn't really care while she was staring at the water i checked my phone to see if my sister texts me back and she did it just said get out of there now thoroughly freaked out and truly not sure why i looked up from my phone at gwen who was standing right there with a smile on her face what's wrong andrew she said in a soft voice i tried but i couldn't answer i had a hundred things running through my head right now she said in a flirtatious voice don't you want to kiss me andrew i finally had the courage to respond and said i need to leave gwen laughed at me and said don't be shy andrew we just got here i turned around and tried to walk out of the trail and there were two guys standing there i was frozen in fear not sure why they weren't moving out of the way gwen came up behind me and whispered in my ear andrew we're not leaving yet my friends just got here i tried to run but two more guys ran from the other side and tackled me i'm a pretty big guy but i couldn't hold my own against four guys they held me down taking turns punching and kicking me it hurt but the adrenaline from being scared kept me from being in intense pain they tied me to a tree stole my wallet took my car keys and hit me a couple more times before leaving gwen took my phone and threw it in the lake within minutes of being there tied to the tree i saw flashing lights turn into the park i screamed for help and the police found me tied to the tree they helped me down and began questioning me when my sister arrived apparently as soon as i texted her she had called the cops and rushed over herself she was at a party and a group of guys were there saying that they were going to jump some loser at blue lakes they had an entire plan to rob him and beat him up and leave him there my sister had exclaimed to them that they were lame and jerks and walked away not really thinking about it until a couple of hours later when i texted her not taking any chances she called the police they were able to find one of the four guys but the other three they couldn't find and they also couldn't find this gwen all of her information online was fake so they couldn't track her my car had some minor damage and looked to have been used for drug usage i only had minor injuries including a concussion a badly scraped arm and some soreness from where i'd been kicked the thing that still haunts me and bothers me to this day is the motivation for this event was it really worth all the effort to beat a broke college kid for his wallet in his car i had maybe a couple of hundred bucks on me and i cancelled my credit card immediately it just seemed like a lot of time for a small payoff four years later i still have nightmares of that night even though the incident could have been worse i still have mental scars from getting attacked by a group of strangers i'm thankful one of them did eventually come to justice but there was a strong honor amongst these thieves because the authorities were never able to gather any further information out of him and all the other individuals had sort of disappeared into obscurity i have since found an amazing girlfriend and no longer live in my hometown hopefully since this story happened dating websites have made an effort to authenticate their users so things like this don't happen again to all outside observers it appeared that dr john hamilton and his wife susan had the perfect loving marriage in the 14 years of blissful union john's passionate love for his spouse had led him to lavish her with expensive gifts and luxurious vacations a brand new porsche on their wedding day being just the beginning of a long list of romantically motivated purchases but john wasn't just generous with his money he was apparently generous of heart too and spent a great deal of time reminding susan just how much he loved her in a variety of heartwarming ways when susan professed a yearning for employment for a purpose outside of being a housewife john gave her a job at his highly esteemed obstetrics and gynecology clinic in oklahoma city he was there for her in every way and by all counts they were a textbook case of romantic longevity but that's what makes it all the more horrifying that on valentine's day of 2001 dr hamilton's arrival at the family home kicked off a chain of events that would turn their perfect little world into a living nightmare as you can imagine in a marriage as loving as john and susan's valentine's day was held in high esteem every single year they were married they exchanged gifts and cards often haven't planned some kind of romantic rendezvous be a dinner and a movie or a walk around a local park but on valentine's day of 2001 john was needed in the operating room of this clinic fairly early in the morning too any exchange of gifts would have to wait until his lunch break but just as he had promised john ducked out of the clinic as soon as he was able and drove home to spend a romantic half hour with his wife after which he would have to return to another surgery he called her name as he walked through the front door but she didn't answer john suspected that his wife might have some kind of surprise in store for him and he felt a ripple of excitement run through him as he walked up the stairs towards the master bedroom he called his wife's name again but still there was no answer and it was then that something caught john's eye lying on the floor of the second floor bathroom it was susan she was in a crumpled lifeless heap with blood pooling underneath her paramedics were called to the scene but susan couldn't be revived those in attendance noted that she appeared to have been strangled with two of her husband's expensive silk neckties but the blood on the bathroom floor was undoubtedly from the series of bloody head wounds she had due to repeated blunt force trauma the wounds being so severe that parts of her brain were exposed while her face was completely unrecognizable to his absolute horror dr john hamilton was the number one suspect in his wife's murder from the very beginning police have since publicly stated that there were many factors which led them to such a conclusion the first being that there was no sign of force entry to the home whoever killed susan had the keys to the residence it was also a crime in which nothing of value was stolen and one in which there were no bloody fingerprints left in the bathroom which had blood almost everywhere this meant that there was a distinct chance that whoever killed susan was extremely professional incredibly lucky or had the time and privacy to scrub the scene of incriminating evidence before the body was found on top of that while searching the home police got their hands on a valentine's day card that susan had written to john presumably that year and the message inside wasn't nearly as loving and cheerful as you might imagine i bought this two weeks ago so i guess maybe it doesn't seem as appropriate but i do love you have a great day susan the contents of the card raised a lot of questions concerning the state of the hamilton's marriage evidently it suggests that there had been some kind of incident or argument one that had caused a degree of turmoil and somewhat soured the valentine's feeling as it later turned out this incident involved susan catching john making phone calls to a woman employed as a topless dancer police actually found hundreds of calls to this person on john's cell phone during their investigation and heard from close friends of susan that she had confessed to considering a divorce to the cops the explanation seemed simple john had murdered his wife to prevent her from running off with half of his money but at his trial much of the local community came out in support of dr hamilton and refused to believe that the man was capable of such a horrific crime especially given that the victim was his own beloved wife but when the paramedics who attended the 9-1-1 call john made were questioned in court the jury began to notice some disturbing inconsistencies in the story hamilton testified in court that after he contacted emergency services he had gotten to work trying to perform cpr on his wife's bloody corpse and this appeared to be true as the paramedics confirmed that when they arrived john had been performing chest compressions but as people who perform cpr on an almost daily basis the paramedics noticed something peculiar about john's technique it was incredibly ineffective from a regular person with no first aid training that could be understandable but but john was so bad that it almost looked like he wasn't actually trying to revive susan at all which for a medical professional is very suspicious john also claimed that he had tried performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on his wife but the paramedics claim that jon had no blood on his mouth or face when they arrived there was so much blood around the victim's head that there was no way john could have performed mouth-to-mouth and not gotten any on him some of susan's blood was also found on the steering wheel of dr hamilton's car and despite his claim in court that he had simply moved the vehicle to make room for emergency vehicles a prosecutor was able to make use of the overall suspicion to claim that this was evidence that john had been considering an escape attempt at one point during the trial the prosecution's case against dr hamilton appeared to be floundering hamilton's defense attorney had brought a number of key character witnesses to testify in court and all had built a picture of john as nothing but a loving husband and he believed that the nail in the prosecution's coffin would be the testimony of a crime scene investigator named tom bevel an expert on blood splatter at crime scenes bevel was essentially brought in to confirm that the blood splatter on dr hamilton's shirt the same one he was wearing during his attempt at cpr was consistent with a man simply trying to revive his murdered wife while in a state of extreme panic and grief at first tom bevel did indeed testify that much of the blood splatter could well have been from the doctor's attempts at cpr but as it turned out bevel would notice something that other investigators had overlooked he had made note of the small flecks of blood that could be found on the inside of hamilton's right sleeve a pattern he had seen many times before on the clothing of people who had killed someone with a blunt object and the seconds that followed the courtroom was deathly silent an expert defense witness had testified against the person they were supposed to be defending and in just a few words tom bevel had condemned dr hamilton to prison when later asked why he had made the decision to essentially act as a witness for the prosecution bevel claimed he just had to tell the truth he said he had sworn on oath something that override any allegiance he may have had to his client after that it only took two hours for a jury of his peers to find john hamilton guilty on the charge of first degree murder or after a judge sentenced him to life in prison those that followed the case were highly disturbed by the sudden turn of events john had and still does maintain his innocence even to this day but more and more evidence points to the idea that he killed his wife in cold blood his defense team even floated the idea that he must have been innocent because the guilty timeline would mean that john went to work and performed flawless surgeries right after murdering the love of his life this might well be true but in the light of the guilty verdict it's all the more damning because it suggests that dr john hamilton was able to beat his wife scolin on valentine's day then remain calm and collected enough to go and perform complicated medical surgeries and if it's true then maybe a more fitting name for dr hamilton would be dr death on a rainy valentine's day evening in february of 1971 19 year old jesse mcbain drove over to meet his girlfriend patricia mann at her college dormitory in durham north carolina they had arranged to celebrate their most romantic day of the year by attending a valentine's dance at the nearby watts hospital patricia was studying nursing and her practical lessons took place at watts so as a potential future member of the nursing staff there she had managed to land an invitation to the dance at approximately 11 30 jesse and patricia had one last dance set their goodbyes and began to walk back to jesse's car they then drove over to a deserted housing development area that would later become the neighborhood of crossdale no house had been constructed yet but a few sections of road had been laid out in an area that was shrouded by a quarter miles worth of greenery those that ventured down there were likely to find collections of beer bottles cigarette butts strewn among the trees it was a place people went to screw around exactly the kind of private out of the way place the two young love birds might need to go to get a little alone time patricia's 1am curfew came and went and her friends back in the girls dorm assumed she'd sneak back in at some point on her tiptoes yet little did they know that they'd never see her or her boyfriend ever again the following morning patricia still hadn't returned from her date with jesse this was the first time the young woman had ever broken her dormitory curfew and those close to her were quickly beginning to worry they knew patricia to be a deeply mature and responsible young woman who always played by the rules and took authority seriously and to their knowledge jesse was an affectionate respectful boyfriend one that patricia seemed very much in love with but not even youthful romance would be able to make the young nursing student break curfew slowly but surely as the day progressed the concern of patricia's roommates went from mild to grave what started with a few questions turned to them calling around local hospitals in case they'd been in a car accident they then filed a missing persons report with the durham county sheriff's department but were still so anxious that they began to physically search for their missing roommate on foot they roamed the surrounding area canvassed her usual hangout spots around town and on campus until someone had the idea to go search the lovers lane over at the housing development it was here that the searchers would find jesse's empty car parked in one of the quieter spots on the development the car was locked and on the back seats there were two warm coats presumably belonging to jesse and patricia there was no damage to the car everything about the scene seemed perfectly in order except of course for the fact that the last two people to travel in it seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth by this point local police have informed both jesse and patricia's parents that their children are missing at first all involved had entertained the idea that the couple's disappearance was nothing more than a misguided but romantic attempt to elope to skip town get hitched and settle down somewhere new but investigating police quickly began to realize that there was something distinctly sinister about the case there had apparently been no attempt by either jesse or patricia to inform anyone of their plans not even close friends and the idea that neither would at least leave a note or letter to a relative seemed highly unlikely over time those closest to patricia began to assume the worst i just got the sickest feeling in my stomach said the cousin of patricia's i just knew something terrible had happened for two weeks after they were declared missing a team of police officers and local volunteers mounted an intensive search of the surrounding area combing through the wooded areas around lovers lane for any trace of the missing couple they followed up lead after lead and tip after tip but no one could find hide nor hair of jessie or patricia with frustration mounting police decided to widen the range of the search area and enlist the help of helicopter support and specifically train forensic divers but in the end it was the misfortune of a surveyor in nearby orange county that provided the police with their most important lead on february 25 1971 a full 12 days after jesse and patricia went missing robert kirby is walking along a dirt road in the backwoods of orange county north carolina when something catches his eye among the trees maybe 50 meters or so off the trail the surveyor thinks he sees what appears to be the limb of a mannequin lying among the fallen leaves curious he wanders over to check it out but the distinct shape of a human leg he sees is not that of a plastic mannequin it's real human flesh he rushes to a nearby roadside diner to have someone call the police and by the end of that forensic investigators discovered not one but two human corpses up in the woods of orange county and they turned out to belong to none other than jesse mcbain and patricia mann finding the young couple and decomposing was bad enough for the searchers but the manner in which they'd obviously been dispatched of was massively disturbing to them the couple had their hands tied and then were made to stand back against the trees so another larger rope could be wrapped around them once their killer had secured them in place he began to torture them jesse's ear and mouth were both found to have blood in them and a variety of large and small abrasions to his lips and forehead suggested he was beaten senseless before he was killed at some point jesse and patricia's killer had ripped their eyelashes off before continuing to savagely beat them then when whoever had tied them up had grown tired of beating them they wrapped rope collars around their necks using a kind of knot that could be repeatedly tightened over and over again we can only assume that the killer used these rope collars to slowly choke the life out of jesse and patricia gradually tightening the rope collars over a drawn-out period of time until neither was able to breathe each of the couple's bodies had all of their valuables intact too jesse was still wearing an expensive wrist watch and a class ring when his body was found patricia was also wearing jewelry and her purse was left back in the abandoned car their deaths were not part of some robbery their killer has absolutely no monetary gain in mind when he'd taken them neither were there any signs of indecent assault on patricia she had a great deal of bruising around her face and neck but nothing below the waistline there was no ulterior motive all their killer had wanted to do was torture and kill the investigation that followed was severely hampered by different agencies complete lack of collaboration for example the fbi seemed to consider the local sheriffs as frankly beneath them in a feeling of contempt quickly grew between the two groups everybody worked on the case as individuals as detective tom horn once put it not a lot of information was being shared by the various agencies and the rivalry was tremendous a lot of work was done but it was individual so there were definitely some missed opportunities yet even with the appalling level of disorganization that pervaded a number of likely suspects emerged as a result of some tip-top police work some had to be ruled out after taking polygraph tests which proved their innocence but one of the men who failed was actually a doctor at watts hospital who had previously worked with patricia mann when the police sought to question him again he completely refused to cooperate and would only release a statement through a defense attorney he began to keep on retainer this made him the number one suspect in the entire case and to this day there's never really been anyone else who's garnered such legitimate scrutiny but without the proper evidence to charge him very little action was taken against any of the supposed killers no one ever really zeroed in on anyone detective horn stated and as a result the case quickly went cold 43 years later in 2014 detective tim horn was still working for the orange county sheriff's department when a cousin of patricia's carolyn spivey contacted him with some fresh information regarding her cousin's murder along with his partner at the time detective horn opened up the previously closed case file pouring over old statements and boxes and evidence they reanalyzed the possibilities of former suspects considered new ones and began to condense as much of the multi-agency information as possible into the pursuit of one solid suspect and they succeeded detective horn then contacted almost every single one of the detectives who worked on the case back in nineteen seventy one and gathered them together for a presentation it was one which would show them how he'd piece together multiple pieces of the decades-long puzzle only to come to one solid conclusion that it was the watts doctor a man patricia had actually known that had murdered her and her boyfriend jessie when the presentation was finished what followed was a prolonged silence to all in attendance tom horn's hard work had presented them the best opportunity yet to end a mystery that had persisted for almost half a century they had their suspect they had evidence now it was time to make their move using what's known as mbac detective horn was able to extract a dna sample from the knotted ropes used to tie up and strangle jesse and patricia an mvac is basically a wet vacuum dna collection system that is designed to extract strands of dna from difficult to reach places places just like the fibrous folds in a length of rope what came back was a dna sample that didn't match either jessie or patricia and so in all likelihood it belonged to the killer detective horn then requested a dna sample from their number one suspect the watts doctor that patricia had worked with horn's argument was that after all this time the doctor would finally be able to clear his name and prove that it wasn't him that executed the young couple but the doctor refused having his defense attorney contact law enforcement to release a statement in legalese and that might just be the most suspicious thing about our doctor because it really does raise the question of what he has to hide yet despite such obvious suspicion this doctor has never been charged and whatever new evidence led to him being asked to provide a dna sample hasn't been shared with the public we can only assume the durham county sheriff's department are in the process of putting a serious case against the man and are trying to find some way of forcing him to give a sample of his dna and with that dna sample law enforcement might just be able to end this 40 year old mystery of who could be cold and cruel enough to wrench a loved-up young couple away from one of the happiest nights of their lives only to torture and eventually execute them in a secluded wooded area turning a romantic valentine's night into the very last that each of them would spend on earth [Music] this story happened a long time ago when i was about seven i don't think i have ever told it to anyone and it was a very short incident but it's been in the back of my mind ever since typically my cousins would babysit me and my sister during summer and winter breaks they were about 10 years older than us maybe 15 to 17 at the time one day about a week before christmas they took us to the mall to do some shopping this is one of the largest malls in my area and it was usually always very crowded even more so during christmas time the day went fine and they even bought me a small ball which i started playing around with by bouncing it on the floor and catching it as i walked because of this i was walking behind them distracted in my own world after we had finished shopping we exited through the main doors which were the most crowded and just as we were crossing the street to go into the parking lot some guy my guess would be about 40 plus years old grabbed me by the hand and started pulling me to a van right across the street i remember the van very clearly it was one of those conversion vans popular in the 90s with drapes on the window red with thin grey stripes running through the sides and van doors one of the back seat doors was open and you could see a woman sitting on the driver's seat she was about the same age as the guy and you can tell that the engine was running at the time i didn't really know what was going on i just thought it was weird in a sort of funny kind of way why is this guy grabbing me as i remembered i thought he just got confused and grabbed me by accident thinking i was his son or something so i shot in my cousin's name and she quickly looked my way she was just a few steps ahead and as soon as she sees me she runs to me quickly grabs my arm with both hands and starts shouting as loud as she can it wasn't until i saw her freak out face that i realized that something bad was happening as soon as she grabbed me the guy just lets go gets in the van and they drive away they didn't really tell the cop or call mall security they were teens so my guess is that they didn't really know what to do they were just happy nothing happened as i said this was a very crowded day as i got older and reflected more on what happened that day i would understand more and more the severity of the situation i wonder what would have happened if my cousin hadn't heard me calling her name within all that noise and multitude that was crossing the street with us i wasn't even shouting out at the top of my lungs i just called out her name rather calmly so i was very lucky that day but later that year a kid was kidnapped in a local park it was a very famous case that made headlines all around the county they never found the kid and i've always wondered if it could have been the same guy [Music] my grandfather suffered from alzheimer's disease and passed away two days before thanksgiving my grandmother is now living alone so my mom has spent a lot of time over there keeping her company and helping her out around the house she went to her house on christmas to go with my grandmother to church before the rest of the family got there and while my grandmother was getting ready my mom was in the kitchen on her phone checking facebook out of nowhere this old christmas music box in one of the bedrooms started playing by itself it was the very last part of the melody to silent night sleep and heavenly peace it played that one line at normal speed and just stopped before it could loop i'm a skeptic and no music boxes can do this for various reasons but hearing that it only played that one line makes me want to believe that it was my grandfather letting his family know that he was at peace and no longer suffering just wanted to share the story because even if it's just the mechanism becoming unjammed it gave my mom a feeling of peace and relief when it happened either way the story both touched and freaked me out at the same time hearing that would have given me goosebumps [Music] i'm currently 18 and my dad passed away in an accident when i was very little in 2005. a couple of years ago on chris was my brother mother and me were watching a corny christmas movie on netflix for the fun of it it was the 1998 version of jack frost where a father dies in an accident but comes back to life as a snowman to be with his kid in the other side of the room we were in my mom had an ipod that was hooked up to a speaker near the end of the film there was a scene where the dad acknowledges that he has to pass on and tells his family he loves them as he starts to melt during this exact scene the ipod somehow turned on by itself and started playing loud music which startled us a little we were kind of silent for a while after that and we never since talked about it i think i can only remember it happening one time other than that which was in the middle of the night while everyone was sleeping maybe it's a coincidence but it's pretty odd that it happened at that exact moment on christmas we've moved multiple times since his death too and that happened in a relatively new apartment if it was him it was a pretty sweet thing for him to do so this happened about a year ago i know it because it was around valentine's day and i'd spend the week leading up to it just dreading it stalking my ex on instagram and generally just felt pretty terrible about myself we'd split up a few months earlier and she kept the flat we'd lived in seeing as she did most of the work finding it her friend moved in and i moved out it was a simple but painful arrangement i ended up finding a flat for myself way out on pretty much the outskirts of the city i don't know if you've ever been to london but flat prices are stupidly high and if you want anywhere that's more than just a bed and a toilet you have to abandon any hope of living remotely central so the valentine's day season came around and one weekend i was feeling fairly sorry for myself working my way through a bottle of prosecco i should have really been sharing when i made a decision i changed the radius on all my dating apps to be as small as possible and tried to see if i could get a valentine's date lined up half the time you matched with someone and they'd revealed that they were on the other side of london to you and your attempt to organize a drink would fall through it's too far or i don't have time tonight maybe next week were phrases you'd hear all the time so i'm not the most attractive guy i think i'm honest enough with myself to say that and i have a pretty good gauge of when someone i've matched with seems too hot to be real usually my hunches confirm when they send me a message advertising some russian dating site in the first minute anyway i meet becca who seems lovely and very much in my league and who lives actually not too far from me we agreed to go for a drink at the crown the day before valentine's day so as not to have the awkward expectation of anything extra romantic which is pretty much the local for anyone who lives near my overground stop and i'm pretty excited to be honest she seems pretty funny maybe not wife material but we get along and for a while the thought of my ex off on her own valentine's day seems a lot less unpleasant so date night comes and i have my usual beer or two before for a bit of dutch courage and head off to the crown i send her a message to let her know that i'm on the way and she says cool she's almost there it's a little dark out and there's a thin mist of rain but i shrug it off it is london after all the walk to the pub doesn't usually take too long you have to navigate loads of little back streets that ends up slowing you down a whole bunch and i spend a little extra time to avoid some alloways just because i've heard stories about people getting mugged around here but i arrived to the crowd only a bit late and send her a message apologizing as i get in she replies pretty quickly instantly almost shoot she says didn't get a chance to message you there's a bunch of guys in there for someone's birthday and they're being really rowdy making me a little uncomfortable i've nipped over to a restaurant down the road to see if they might have space for us i mean she's not wrong there are a bunch of guys in here being loud and obnoxious and i guess if you were a small woman it would make you pretty uncomfortable not only that but a group are smoking outside and jeering and i could see how you wouldn't want to hang around outside for long she sends me the restaurant's name and tells me to hurry they'll save a table for us if i'm quick this is where i get a little concerned we never agreed to dinner not only that but when i put in google maps the location gives me two routes one is pretty quick and the other adds an extra 10 minutes onto your walk time easy the only issue is the shorter route goes right through this old estate that's semi-abandoned i say semi because although i'm sure people live there i'm not sure who and half the buildings are boarded up i take one look at it and decide that there's no way i'm going through there there are barely any street lights if any and i can barely make out much more than a few dark shapes i decided to take the longer way around and apologize to her but let her know that i'll be a little later she replies instantly again and tells me that i need to come now and i should just be as quick as possible i don't like her tone and tell her there's no way i'm walking through the old estate at night now i'm beginning to feel really uncomfortable and am aware of how alone i am on this route whilst it passes by several houses and shops there's no one actually on the street itself there aren't many people out on the night before valentine's day and come to think of it i've got no idea why the restaurant would be so full in the first place i get that funny feeling in my stomach where you know something's wrong but can't quite put your finger on it and for some reason i walk in the middle of the road for the last stretch i think maybe i felt a little safer there or at least in my head i think i'd be able to see anyone who came towards me thankfully no one did i did manage to freak myself out a little catching my reflection in shop fronts and car windows and have to make a conscious effort to not look at them because i know only freak myself out more i'd have turned right around but i realized that i was actually closer to the restaurant than the original pub and at this point i just wanted to see another friendly human face i sped up my walking slightly made sure to text a couple of friends just to be safe all this time i'm walking she's messaging me telling me just to hurry up and that the shortcut's fine she literally just took it but as soon as i mention i'm almost at the restaurant she stops replying just like that one moment she's telling me to hurry in the next as soon as it's clear i'm not going to use the shortcut at all she's gone well they're gone i suppose no way of knowing who it was i get inside and like i suspected the place is fairly empty it's definitely not booked out and when i asked if the waiter's seen any woman like becca asking about a table he shakes his head not tonight he tells me only a couple of families and an older couple i think about texting whoever was claiming to be becca but even opening the conversation gives me the creeps the idea that there's a couple of days worth of chatting there of whomever was on the other end pretending for whatever reason to be a normal person gives me the chills it's strangely weirder to think of someone that creepy pretending to be normal in a weird way i think about walking back using the road but i realize looking out the window of the restaurant that whoever was pretending to be becca knows my exact location they'll know i arrived and found out they were lying i think about the fact that they might be watching me from somewhere my silhouette in the window and i ask if i can have a table whilst i order an uber home even during the ride home i hate the idea of my face near the window and i try to lean into the middle seat i get the driver to drop me as close as possible to my house and my heart races the whole walk home i never told them my address exactly but the idea that they know the area i live in is enough to make me start looking at flats on the other side of the city i think as soon as i can i'm going to move it all started on the 7th of february the small independent coffee shop i was working at had decided to throw up a few decorations for valentine's day so myself and a few colleagues had spent pretty much our entire shift putting up pink and red bunting writing romantic quotations around the edges of our blackboard menu and other romantically themed stuff it was a fun way to spend a shift but as i clocked out and began the short walk back to my flat i began to feel a slight pang of loneliness knowing i'd be single and alone on the day itself i consider tinder or bumble to try and bag myself a date but the chances of securing myself a boy that i actually genuinely liked over the next seven days was slim to none so i resigned myself to another valentine's on my own but when i got home to find a pink envelope in my mailbox i must admit that it brought a little smile to my face a secret admirer like something right out of the cheap romance paperback might not be every girl's cup of tea but to be honest it really cheered me up even if it was from a friend or the nice lady that lived on the ground floor flat only when i open the thing up it just says seven days to go no romantic message no kisses or hearts just those three words scrawled hastily onto the paper inside it's then i realized there's nothing on the envelope or the paper it contained that confirmed it was actually addressed to me no name no address nothing i started to feel a tad silly like what if it wasn't meant for me at all what if someone had sent their little valentine's card to the wrong person i told myself i was just being silly but kept the envelope in card as i walked upstairs to my flat and got on with my evening i honestly think i'd forgotten the whole thing by the next morning when i got up and set off to work again but when i got home there was a stark reminder that this was no mistake arriving back at my flat i checked my mail to find yet another pink envelope inside not only that but a small brown paper package was stuffed inside too again i have to admit to being kind of excited about the whole thing there definitely hadn't been a mistake of a dress or anything i mean the person must have had to put all that stuff in there themselves maybe i really did have a secret admirer and that valentine's was about to become something out of a fairy tale but as soon as i opened the package i knew something wasn't quite right inside was a small brown teddy bear only it wasn't newly bought nor had it been looked after very well in what was obviously a long and grubby existence to be frank it was filthy the thing looked like it hadn't been washed in years decades even the fur was all grimy and matted together and one of its glasses was missing probably having been pulled out by a child some years before the note inside the envelope was pretty much the same as the last one only this time i read six days to go that's about the time that i realized that whoever was sending these wasn't exactly all there and what had previously been a kind of giddy excitement turned into nervous anticipation and the more i let my mind dwell on it the more and more frightened i became this wasn't going to be some dream romance in fact it was more likely to be the polar opposite i told a friend in work about the whole thing and they seem to take it much more seriously than i had they told me i obviously had a stalker that even if this person was doing this stuff out of affection it was still crossing a number of personal boundaries and i should consider contacting the police but to tell them exactly what that i had a note addressed to no one from no one with absolutely no other details than i'd found them in my mailbox all right it wasn't exactly the dream romantic gestures that i think all girls kind of crave but at the same time why cause someone the distress of calling the cops on them that felt kind of cruel but after returning home that evening to something else in my apartment i didn't feel so apprehensive about contacting them i arrived home again that evening to find exactly what i expected in my mailbox another note this time reading yep you guessed it five days to go i stormed up to my apartment grabbed a piece of note paper and a sharpie and wrote out something along the lines of whoever is leaving stuff in my mailbox please stop it was sweet at first but now it's kind of creepy no more or i call the police i made an effort not to come across as too rude or aggressive but i also needed to make it clear that i really really didn't appreciate their unwanted attention i taped the note to the front entrance of my apartment building before i went to bed hoping whoever it was would get the message and leave me alone so little side note i get a shower before bed every night every night without fail i'm almost sort of a clean freak i keep my bathroom pretty much spotless so as i finish getting washed something small catches my eye something that might not even gain the attention of most people but to me it stuck out like a sore thumb a flash of color in what is an otherwise pristine white bathroom on the windows ledge was a tiny glassy dome shape just sat there on its own i approached curiously peering down at it for a few moments before i completely freaked out and ran out of the bathroom to call the cops it was a small glass eye a minuscule amount of fabric woven into the back of it i recognized it almost instantly as the missing eye from the teddy bear that i'd found in my mailbox while i was on the phone to the police i realized a few things about my prospective valentine as i said i get a shower every evening before bed i like hot showers the steamier the better so naturally the bathroom windows spends a lot of time a jar to let out the moisture whoever managed to put that glass eye on the bathroom window ledge had known my evening routine they had obviously been watching me for long enough to work out the exact place to put something so that i'd see it but it was their method that really creeped me out the way they used the small teddy's eye to tell me in so many words that they were watching me i swapped the note out i'd written for one that simply read the police have been contacted leave me alone and leave me alone they did but the whole thing had a pretty serious effect on my psyche for a long time afterwards sometimes i'd find myself staring at someone in the coffee shop or someone walking past my flat wondering if it was them if one day one of them would look over and smile and i just know they'd not given up just yet [Music] since people have been posting a lot of valentine's related stories recently i thought i'd share a little story of my own it's not nearly as scary as some of the others posted here about people sending each other animal hearts and whatnot not on the surface anyway but i guess what scared me so much was how a seemingly normal and pleasant situation could turn so horrible so fast one minute you're commenting on how surreal or soap opera-ish something can be but when you realize the real and present danger it's too late you're already staring it in the face some things or some people have a way of just creeping up on you and this is how it happened to me so about this time last year i matched with a girl in tinder who like me was looking for someone to spend valentines with we hit it off almost straight away and it only took a week or so before we were hanging each other's apartments having little netflix and domino's dates and generally sinking into the comfort of being a couple we'd batted around the idea of making it official but we both agreed that the less we focused on what we referred to as relationship red tape the happier and comfier we were this is possibly where we made the first mistake so at one point myself and the girl were talking about how annoying it is when guys hit on her while she's at work she was working behind a bar at the time some tiki place that had her wearing hawaiian shirts as part of her uniform she always looks super cute in them which is why i couldn't really blame guys for hitting on her i mean i would this one guy had apparently asked her if she had a boyfriend to which she replied something along the lines of no i'm dating but nothing serious now i know this wasn't her trying to keep her options open as i'd been doing pretty much the same thing shrugging off the questions all chill like i'm some kind of player but it was all a front we really did like each other anyways we have that little conversation do some venting and then move on i really didn't pay it's any more thought that was until a few days later the girl stays over at my house on the sunday night intending to go straight to work from my place i get a text from an unknown number early in the afternoon saying it's her using a co-worker's phone to let me know she's left her own phone in my apartment so being gentlemanly i go drop it off say hi and arrange ourselves a little date for later on now i rode my bike down to the bar just like i ride my bike everywhere not because i'm a green-fingered hippie from the extinction rebellion more like i can't quite afford the payments on a decent car yet but as i'm riding back to my apartment i hear a car behind me start to hawk its horn angrily i assume it's because he wants me to let him pass so i edge over to the side of the road and motion for him to go ahead but he doesn't go ahead at all the driver just keeps honking angrily at me getting closer and closer until i'm actually pretty scared there's going to be an accident i make the decision to mount the curb just go get out of the city its way entirely only when i do the guy slows to a stop rolls down his window and begins smiling at me from his seat i ask him if there's a problem with my cycling and he just doesn't reply just keeps smiling as he rolls up his window and drives off now this isn't exactly unusual for a number of reasons drivers just seem to hate cyclists in my city i don't know if it's because traffic laws favor cyclists or whatever but let's just say it's not the first time i've run afoul of some angry motorists while i've been cycling around town so as annoying as it was i hadn't put two and two together at that point a few days pass and i'm doing some grocery shopping not too far from my apartment when i see a familiar face not just in passing either like two old acquaintances passing each other in a rush i was being straight up stared at eyeballed from down an aisle by someone i came to recognize as the crazy honker who was driving way too close behind me i'm not one for public confrontation so as much as i kind of wanted to at least give the guy a talking to this was definitely not the place to do it besides i'm not one to hold a grudge at least i think so anyway so i just tried to avoid eye contact get my groceries and get out of there only this guy seem to have other plans in every single io i walk down he's either already there or appears shortly after almost as if he was tracking or following me which as it turns out was exactly what he was doing i did a pretty good job of avoiding him just picking up the essentials before making a beeline for the cashier and then the door but just as i was about to mount my bike and take off i heard someone jogging to catch up with me it was the guy i don't remember exactly what was said between us my heart was pounding by the time i rode away but i'll try to paraphrase as best i can the other guy who likes honking is horn right any reason you were following me around the supermarket today leave her alone leave who alone you know who i'm talking about kid unless you're as dumb as you look i really don't man so please fill me in we both know and then he went on to name the girl i've been seeing wants nothing more to do with you if i hear about you bothering her again i'll kill you you threatening me i don't think the cops will be too pleased about that it's not a threat it's a promise i followed you that day i know where you live where you work where your parents sleep leave her alone or i'll take everything from you everything as i rode away he actually called after me called out the exact street address where my parents lived a little side note i went to visit them a day or two after the honking incident so it was completely feasible that the guy had actually been following me not just for a day or two but like an entire freaking week i talked to the girl i was seeing and slowly we pieced together the picture of how this guy had asked her if she was single on one day then it proceeded to follow her and then me until he built up a detailed picture of our entire lives fortunately for us nothing more came out of the guy's threats we each spotted him around town a few more times eyeballing us as we were out on dates etc but then he seemed to just drop off the map entirely and thank god too sometimes i think of how easy it would have been for that guy to just knock me off my bike and inflict life-changing injuries upon me or worse do something to my parents i have submitted this story anonymously the reason for doing so will become apparent to all who are listening i have had my eye on this channel for quite some time and i deliberately selected you to tell my story i like your voice and based on your past content i think you'll give this story your undivided attention if you're going to use my story for a video do not change a word i don't mind your audience thinking that i'm some kind of unhinged lunatic perhaps there's some truth to that but i ultimately view myself as a result of a very unbalanced equation i expect that this tale will not go over well with some folks allow me to respond to that by saying that i'm someone who truly does not care about the opinions of others most of you are naive and misguided and sometimes even downright stupid you can slap me with labels such as sociopath an [ __ ] incel whatever you wish but if i were to smash through your bedroom window at night and rush you with a knife would your little insults really matter then i'm guessing not now for the setup i grew up in a very unassuming suburban environment with white picket fences and family barbecues from a very young age i was aware that i've always had a capacity for violence at the drop of a hat i would have no problem bludgeoning someone to death with a fire poker not that i've ever done such a thing but you get the point however this affliction of mine was always methodical it served a purpose and was never beyond my control there was a boy in middle school we'll call him kyle who made the mistake of targeting me for his bullying antics calling me disparaging names throwing stuff at me and even spitting on me during bus rides i was only 14 at the time but as soon as his saliva made contact with my skin for the first time i began to plot my revenge you see kyle happened to live in the same neighborhood as me so finding out where he lived was a simple task most of the houses between mine and his were still under construction i spent about a month staking out his place from a nearby hiding spot and observing the routine of kyle's family kyle was an only child and both of his parents worked long hours which might explain why he was such an [ __ ] i figured out that on friday nights kyle was left alone he would almost always have a pizza delivered to his house around eight o'clock and would always order from the same place kyle was a creature of habit during all this time he would continue to pick on me during bus rides but i took it in stride because i knew what was coming his way everything about my plan seemed to line up quite nicely you see the front porch of kyle's home was undergoing some kind of remodeling the contractors that kyle's parents hired were careless enough to leave behind a very large crowbar lying on a bench right next to the front door during one of my stakeouts i swiped the object from the front porch before making my way back to my house two streets over i think you know where this is going on one friday night i made my way back to kyle's place and rang the doorbell at around 7 45 i stepped off to the side in case kyle looked through the peephole i was wearing a mask to conceal my identity but i didn't want to be seen because not even kyle would be dumb enough to open a door with a masked person standing on the other side fortunately for me kyle opened the door and wasn't even paying attention to what was in front of him he was looking at what i believe to be a game boy color which was very popular at the time he stood in the doorway for a few moments fiddling with the game boy before finally looking up i wonder what went through his mind as the metal handle of the bar smashed into his face kyle collapsed onto the floor and i stood on the front porch and watched him as he flailed around cupping his hands over his nose i wish i would have had time to give him a couple more whacks but i knew that the pizza man would show up any minute and of course kyle's whales of pain would soon attract a neighbor so i made my escape darting between houses and making it back to my place without being seen by anyone it was perfect of course the community was in an uproar not even our children are safe oh no the overweight police chief even made a few appearances on local television stations vowing that he would do everything in his power to capture whoever did this horrible crime they brought the entire school into the gym to explain to us that one of our classmates was violently attacked but to be honest nobody really gave a [ __ ] about kyle kyle's nose had to be surgically reconstructed and when he finally returned to school he didn't seem to have any interest in picking on me or anyone else for that matter aside from seeing the occasional patrol car cruising around my neighborhood not much changed i wasn't planning on making an encore even at 14 i knew that luck had a lot to do with my plan playing out the way it did and i was smart enough not to push it no one even looked my way i was never questioned by the police and they never found out who viciously attacked kyle i have absolutely no regrets about what i did kyle got exactly what he deserved back when i was living on the streets well technically in my car i would always post up about fast food restaurants because people would always give me their change or some of the food that they had recently purchased one day i posted at the entrance of a plaza and in that plaza the busiest place was the chick-fil-a throughout the day i received a few bucks and a lot of chicken nuggets after being out there for a few hours i noticed a car that left a few times and came back to park in chick-fil-a parking lot with covered license plates but the person never got out of the car of course i thought it was weird but i didn't think anything of it throughout the day i take my food to my car and not eat around 8 pm most of the plaza was closing up and the traffic started to slow down finally when chick-fil-a slowed down for a few minutes a man in the car got out and he walked up to the door of the restaurant and took a picture of the inside a few seconds later what looks like the manager came outside and it looked like she was arguing with the guy she went back inside and the man got back in his car got on his phone and left about five minutes later fyi i was parked about 25 feet away from the chick-fil-a parking lot it could see everything that was going on so a few hours go by and the place was closed from not and some available car and some people left the only person i saw inside was the woman that he was talking to earlier i saw the man get out of his car at this point he was wearing dark colors and with gloves on and i saw the lights get turned off inside of chick-fil-a the man was standing on the side of the building by a dumpster but in a way where he can't be seen he was in the shadows at that point i leaned my seat all the way back so no one could see me the woman walked out turned around and began to lock the door as soon as she turned around that man sprinted toward her yanked her hair and started to yell at her as he took her back inside i leaned up a little bit to get a better look but i couldn't see anything there was nothing for about 10 minutes until the man walked back outside he went straight to his car but instead of driving away he drove up to the door and went back in with his trunk left open a few minutes later i saw something that i would never forget the man was dragging the woman's body but there was no head he struggled to get her in the trunk but eventually he got her there he went back in there and came out with a chick-fil-a bag full of something and threw it in his trunk he went back inside again for what seemed like 20 minutes he came back out blocked up chick-fil-a and drove away someone else came back for the other car in the parking lot a few days later i went to a starbucks to use the restroom and on the news was a story about a missing woman that showed the picture and it was the woman who worked at chick-fil-a they were interviewing her husband who was crying during the whole interview what creeped me out is that her husband was the man that i saw with her that fateful night i know he killed her but he was on the news as if he didn't have anything to do with it and like he doesn't know seeing that lady that night has haunted me since [Music] this story happened to my brother and is told from his perspective on halloween of 2017 i went trick-or-treating with my friends who all called harvey michael and daniel we were all around 14 to 15 years old and really just wanted to make the most of halloween as we had so much homework starting the 10th grade and we probably would never be able to trick or treat again anyway we were all walking down this random street at like 9 30. when we saw one house with insane over-the-top halloween decorations that looked like it cost up to about five hundred dollars the four of us walked up to the house and rang the bell some 50 year old looking man opened the door and said no need to yell just come on in and you'll get your sweets daniel told the guy well ask the guy can you just bring the candy out here the guy didn't even answer and so the four of us just walked away not saying a single word but of course this story wouldn't be scary if it didn't end here we were walking down my street when harvey pointed out guys that man is following us we all looked out behind us and saw the same 50 year old looking man walking about 25 feet behind us the four of us bolted all the way to the house we ran to my house we thrust open the front door entered my house and locked the door the four of us were just hyperventilating as if we just ran an ultra marathon i was starting to settle down when jason said look at the window we all looked and there he was the old man looking through one of my windows my parents were on a vacation and my brother was at his friend's halloween party so we couldn't tell them but what really made this horrifying was that i could see this guy holding the gun in his hand i yelled at my friends and we ran upstairs to call the police the officers arrived in about 10 minutes the man wasn't on my property anymore but we remembered the house so that's where we went the cops went there searched the whole place and came out with the man in chains it turned out the house was vacant and the man was a serial killer who escaped from prison a month ago if my friends and i are able to go trick-or-treating again we're avoiding the street that this house was on and who knows what that guy was really going to do if we went in i'm glad this happened when we were teenagers and not when we were 9 years old all i can say is if you're trick-or-treating make sure that the house owner is completely normal it was my 11th birthday on march 2nd 2012. i was a big fan of selena gomez and i wanted one of her cds for the radio my grandpa had bought me a few months prior anyways my grandpa took my sister and i to target after he got out of work to buy me a selena gomez cd i've been begging for at this time target in my area had a small food court with a snack bar with pizza hut in it which i always got when i went shopping there my grandpa and sister and i we all ordered our miniature pizzas you know the personal pans then we sat down at the table with our food which happened to be right by the register after the worker gave us our pizzas they headed to the back to clean up i assume so it was just my grandpa my sister and i in a food court everything was good for about five to ten minutes while we were eating but then i noticed my grandpa who was sitting across from my sister and i looked behind me he moved his eyes side to side as if he was watching somebody i with my heart racing because i was so confused turned around and that's when i seen the most disgusting and creepy looking man i've ever seen in my life he was tall maybe about six foot two to six foot four he was partially bald had dirty stain closed and he smelled like pee he was right behind me going back and forth eyeing my grandpa and that's when my grandpa started to yell at the guy telling him to get away my grandpa then stood up and said if you don't get away from my granddaughters i'm gonna make you get away and that's when the guy backed up and he just stared my sister and i then got up and we quickly rushed over to the other side of the table where my grandpa was we started to walk away and that's when i heard the guy say you're very beautiful where are you from you must be from the islands like fiji or something like that i turned around and he was looking straight at me then he pointed and said yeah you pretty girl that's when my eyes got wide and my grandpa rushed my sister and i down the aisle to get away from this guy he was following right behind us saying his name along with his address telling me that i could come visit him sometime my grandpa kept a hold of my sister and i making us go down different aisles to lose him when we finally did we quickly purchased the cd and went out to the car when we got into the car my grandpa was driving out of the parking lot and we saw the guy walk out of the store looking around like he was looking for us or specifically looking for me he didn't see us as we were already driving away but i was completely terrified because that was something i've never experienced in my life before i wish i could say that was the end of it but i seen that guy one more time after that two years later when i was 13 again i was with my grandpa but it was just him and i we were leaving my grandparents house and we got into the car to head to the mall as we were at the end of our street we seen the guy again walking down the street i stared at him wide-eyed and we made eye contact which made my heart drop in fear he then immediately started to scream as soon as he saw me and tried to run after the car as my grandpa drove off but of course he didn't catch us later on we got back to my grandparents house i had found out there was an insane asylum right down the street from my grandparents house at the time which is where we believed he lived since the address he gave matched address to the place i'm 19 now and i never saw that guy after the last time when i was 13 and i'm really glad i didn't because he was seriously ill [Music] story happened to me about eight years ago when i was in the second grade i was around six or seven years old at the time and i wasn't really popular with other second graders i was always i went out with about one to three friends or sometimes less this man i was usually on my own after and during school this one incident happened at the end of the day when everyone was starting to go home what i would do is i would wait inside the gate at my school until i saw my mom's car pull up then i would walk over to her car and she would take me home on this day though this car that looked exactly like my mom's pulled up in front of the school so i walked up to it and almost opened the door but then i saw the driver and realized that it wasn't my mom's car at all there was a bald hispanic-looking man inside the car average height with jeans on with a brown tank top who appeared to be in his mid-30s he saw me and apologized for almost getting into his car and started walking back to the school when he said hey i can take you home if you want i said no thank you that my mom would come soon but he just didn't let up he kept insisting that i go with him but i said no over and over again he also said that he notices that my mom usually shows up late so he must have been watching me for a while eventually he just got so fed up he just decided to reach out of his car window and grab me i don't know why but for some reason i didn't cry or scream i just sort of silently freaked out and started scratching the man's arm the moment i drew blood he gave up let go and drove off i never told anyone about the man for some reason i really don't know why when i finally told my mom about this story a few days ago she said i could have saved some other poor child from potentially being kidnapped molested or killed had i spoken up and now i feel terrible needless to say i never saw him again after that my mind kind of repressed this memory for the longest time until i just remembered it recently and now that it's fresh in my mind i can't stop thinking about it and what he could have done to me that i got in his car i always wondered how long he was actually watching me my name is brad and this story happened about two years ago i recently started a new job and made a few casual friends quite quickly one day at work my friend george said he was having a house party on the weekend and invited me to come along i accepted his invitation that weekend i drove to georgia's house party i recognized a few faces but most of the people that were there were his friends outside of work i wasn't drinking alcohol at night as i was driving and also i'm not much of a drinker anyway so i was drinking soft drinks all night at one point a man approached me he was wearing a scruffy leather coat had a shaved head bad teeth and was quite small he looked a lot older than most of the people at the party he introduced himself as a jerry and said he was afraid of george's we talked for a little bit but the conversation was quite awkward for the most part i finished my cup and said excuse me as i was going to get another refill jerry offered to get it for me so i accepted his offer and gave me another drink he came back and we carried on talking however it wasn't long until i started to feel sick and dizzy and it was getting quite late so i thought i would head home i say goodnight to george and headed outside to my car as i approached my car jerry called my name and jogged over to me he asked if i could give him a lift home i said sure and jerry got in the back seat i found it weird that he sat in the back seat and not in the front but i was more focused on going home after driving for about two minutes i started to feel worse more dizzy and lightheaded i heard jerry unbuckle his seatbelt and unzipped his pants i saw him in the mirror when he was leaning forward towards me i was about to ask him what he was about to do but i heard a police siren behind me signaling for me to pull over as soon as i stopped the car i opened the door and threw up on the side of the road a police officer approached me and told me he pulled me over because he suspected that i was driving under the influence he also asked why my friend exited the vehicle and ran off i asked the officer what he meant he told me as soon as i stopped the car the man in the back seat opened the door and ran off into the night i was feeling like crap to think too much about it but the officer wanted to give me a breathalyzer i accepted it as i knew for a fact that i hadn't been drinking and the results came back negative the officer asked why i was driving that way swaying back and forth i told him i had just come from a party and i didn't feel well so i wanted to head home the officer looked at me for a moment and then asked how well i knew the person that was in my car i told him i didn't really know him i just met him that night and was giving him a lift home the officer then said he suspected that the man had spiked my drink it was probably about to assault me it made sense and i told him that before i pulled over he unbuckled his seat belt and pants and was leaning forward the officer said he will sent out of patrol looking for the man who was in my car he was very kind and trusted me when i told him that i felt fine and i can drive home so he let me go the next day i told george what had happened to me and asked if he knew jerry george told me he didn't know anyone named jerry but he said he would ask around if anyone knew jerry or recognized my description of him unsurprisingly no one knew him i often think how lucky i am that the police officer was there and caused jared to flee from my car proving that jerry had malicious intentions otherwise who knows what might have happened to me that night be careful who you pick up be careful when you drive around at night about two years ago i had trouble sleeping and would get these really bad headaches i spoke to a friend of mine about it and he suggested that i should go for a night drive as it helped him when he was stressed out i started going night drives whenever i was having trouble going to sleep one night i was driving and it was very foggy and lightly raining i looked in my mirror and in the distance i could see headlights it was a bit unusual to see a car at the time of night but it wasn't anything suspicious the headlights faded away and i couldn't see them anymore about a minute later all of a sudden the headlights were back and right behind me driving very aggressively beeping their horn i slowed down to let them pass me but they didn't they kept tailgating me so i decided to pull over and see what their problem was but when i stopped the car they drove straight past me and disappeared down the road into the fog i took a breath and then carried on driving about five minutes went by and i saw headlights in my mirror again i didn't think it would be the same car as they had just passed me but when the headlights sped up and were right behind me once again beeping their horn and tailgating me aggressively i knew it was the same car as before i didn't understand why they were acting this way and how they were now behind me even though they drove past me i didn't pull over this time instead i carried on driving the driver of the car carried on tailgating me and beeping their horn constantly just like before but it wasn't long before the car lost control then swerved off the road and crashed into a tree after seeing the car crash behind me i stopped my car abruptly i hesitated whether or not to get out and check to see if the person was okay they seemed to be out to cause harm caused me harm specifically but i couldn't leave the area knowing someone might be hurt i turned my car around and drove up to the tree where the car crashed when my headlights reached the tree there was nothing there there was no car no tire tracks nothing i started to think i was losing my mind and not getting enough sleep i headed home after finding nothing the following day i told my friend where i was driving and what i experienced he laughed and said i might have seen a ghost i thought he was joking but he told me the road i was driving on was known as death road i asked him why it was called that and he told me apparently years ago a drunk driver was aggressively trying to knock a car off the road until he lost control and crashed he died at the scene i'm not a person to believe in ghost or supernatural stuff but what i witnessed was so real and the fact that i could hear the car right behind mine in here the crash makes me believe i did experience something paranormal that night my name is ken and the other day i was watching videos on youtube and one of them was why people experience paranormal activity or feel like they live in a haunted house one of the reasons that people experience things supernatural or paranormal is for a punishment of an action you did or didn't do i found it interesting because about four years ago i had a very strange and frightening experience the job that i worked for was changing things around and it asked me to work later so for a short period of time i was driving home late night every night one night when i was driving it was cold raining and i was very tired i wasn't used to the late nights just yet as i was driving i noticed a hitchhiker on the side of the road with his hand out asking for a ride i never picked up a hitchhiker and didn't plan to then in my mind it was too dangerous so i drove past them i didn't look back at all a few miles down the road i saw another hitchhiker it was like it was the same person that i drove past but this time they weren't holding out their hand i was having trouble keeping my eyes open so i stopped at the next gas station i found to get an energy drink i went inside the gas station grabbed an energy drink and sit at the counter waiting for the cashier to come back wherever he was as i was waiting i looked outside and it looked like the hitchhiker was standing in the parking lot looking towards the gas station at that point the cashier came to the counter and when i looked back outside the hitchhiker was gone i thought i just needed some sleep i got in my car and carried on driving home about five minutes passed when i saw the same hitchhiker standing on the side of the road i looked in the mirror and briefly saw a man in the back seat watching me this scared me and made me jump so much i nearly lost control of the car i stopped the car got out and checked the back seat and saw no one i stood there trying to calm down and catch my breath after calming down i got back in my car and continued driving the whole ride home i was afraid to look in my mirror even though i didn't see that man again i still felt him sitting there watching me i never came up with a logical explanation of what i experienced that night before watching that video about paranormal crap i always thought it was my lack of sleep that caused me to see things but now i think what i was seeing was that man on the road and in my car was some kind of punishment for not picking him up [Music] so this happened about a year ago i know it because it was around valentine's day and i'd spend the week leading up to it just dreading it stalking my ex on instagram and generally just felt pretty terrible about myself we'd split up a few months earlier and she kept the flat we'd lived in seeing as she did most of the work finding it her friend moved in and i moved out it was a simple but painful arrangement i ended up finding a flat for myself way out on pretty much the outskirts of the city i don't know if you've ever been to london but flat prices are stupidly high and if you want anywhere that's more than just a bed and a toilet you have to abandon any hope of living remotely central so the valentine's day season came around and one weekend i was feeling fairly sorry for myself working my way through a bottle of prosecco i should have really been sharing when i made a decision i changed the radius on all my dating apps to be as small as possible and tried to see if i could get a valentine's date lined up half the time you matched with someone and they'd revealed that they were on the other side of london to you and your attempt to organize a drink would fall through it's too far or i don't have time tonight maybe next week where phrases you'd hear all the time so i'm not the most attractive guy i think i'm honest enough with myself to say that and i have a pretty good gauge of when someone i've matched with seems too hot to be real usually my hunches confirm when they send me a message advertising some russian dating site in the first minute anyway i meet becca who seems lovely and very much in my league and who lives actually not too far from me we agreed to go for a drink at the crown the day before valentine's day so as not to have the awkward expectation of anything extra romantic which is pretty much the local for anyone who lives near my overground stop and i'm pretty excited to be honest she seems pretty funny maybe not wife material but we get along and for a while the thought of my ex off on her own valentine's day seems a lot less unpleasant so date night comes and i have my usual beer or two before for a bit of dutch courage and head off to the crown i send her a message to let her know that i'm on the way and she says cool she's almost there it's a little dark out and there's a thin mist of rain but i shrug it off it is london after all the walk to the pub doesn't usually take too long you have to navigate loads of little back streets that ends up slowing you down a whole bunch and i spend a little extra time to avoid some alloys just because i've heard stories about people getting mugged around here but i arrive to the crowd only a bit late and send her a message apologizing as i get in she replies pretty quickly instantly almost shoot she says didn't get a chance to message you there's a bunch of guys in there for someone's birthday and they're being really rowdy making me a little uncomfortable i've nipped over to a restaurant down the road to see if they might have space for us i mean she's not wrong there are a bunch of guys in here being loud and obnoxious and i guess if you were a small woman it would make you pretty uncomfortable not only that but a group are smoking outside and jeering and i could see how you wouldn't want to hang around outside for long she sends me the restaurant's name and tells me to hurry they'll save a table for us if i'm quick this is where i get a little concerned we never agreed to dinner not only that but when i put in google maps the location gives me two routes one is pretty quick and the other adds an extra 10 minutes onto your walk time easy the only issue is the shorter route goes right through this old estate that's semi-abandoned i say semi because although i'm sure people live there i'm not sure who and half the buildings are boarded up i take one look at it and decide that there's no way i'm going through there there are barely any street lights if any and i can barely make out much more than a few dark shapes i decided to take the longer way around and apologize to her but let her know that i'll be a little later she replies instantly again and tells me that i need to come now and i should just be as quick as possible i don't like her tone and tell her there's no way i'm walking through the old estate at night now i'm beginning to feel really uncomfortable and am aware of how alone i am on this route whilst it passes by several houses and shops there's no one actually on the street itself there aren't many people out on the night before valentine's day and come to think of it i've got no idea why the restaurant would be so full in the first place i get that funny feeling in my stomach where you know something's wrong but can't quite put your finger on it and for some reason i walk in the middle of the road for the last stretch i think maybe i felt a little safer there or at least in my head i think i'd be able to see anyone who came towards me thankfully no one did i did manage to freak myself out a little catching my reflection in shop fronts and car windows and have to make a conscious effort to not look at them because i know only freak myself out more i'd have turned right around but i realized that i was actually closer to the restaurant than the original pub and at this point i just wanted to see another friendly human face i sped up my walking slightly made sure to text a couple of friends just to be safe all this time i'm walking she's messaging me telling me just to hurry up and that the shortcut's fine she literally just took it but as soon as i mentioned i'm almost at the restaurant she stops replying just like that one moment she's telling me to hurry and the next as soon as it's clear i'm not going to use the shortcut at all she's gone well they're gone i suppose no way of knowing who it was i get inside and like i suspected the place is fairly empty it's definitely not booked out and when i ask if the waiter seen any woman like becca asking about a table he shakes his head not tonight he tells me only a couple of families and an older couple i think about texting whoever was claiming to be becca but even opening the conversation gives me the creeps the idea that there's a couple of days worth of chatting there of whomever was on the other end pretending for whatever reason to be a normal person gives me the chills it's strangely weirder to think of someone that creepy pretending to be normal in a weird way i think about walking back using the road but i realize looking out the window of the restaurant that whoever was pretending to be becca knows my exact location they'll know i arrived and found out they were lying i think about the fact that they might be watching me from somewhere my silhouette in the window and i ask if i can have a table whilst i order an uber home even during the ride home i hate the idea of my face near the window and i try to lean into the middle seat i get the driver to drop me as close as possible to my house and my heart races the whole walk home i never told them my address exactly but the idea that they know the area i live in is enough to make me start looking at flats on the other side of the city i think as soon as i can i'm going to move christmas of 2016 was the most horrifying and worst day of my life my cousin was hosting a huge house party really a christmas party to celebrate the holiday on christmas eve all of his friends some of my friends and almost the whole family were there it was the biggest and most insane party i've ever seen we were all above 21 with the exception of a few kids so a lot of us were just drinking our asses off and becoming more drunk there were so many of us just yelling and constantly crashing into things and others were already passed out on the couches i went upstairs to play video games with some of my friends and then i got more drunk while playing so drunk i had to stop on one of my friends recommendation i personally was so drunk i didn't realize this random girl was sitting in the living room who i didn't know i eventually did realize after i sobered up the next morning i do remember her walking up to me and telling me things i don't remember at all but whatever she did tell me led to her grabbing my arm and pulling me outside the house toward a white van i got in the passenger seat and she got in the driver's seat i passed out in the van a few minutes after getting in i woke up to find myself in the van but on an unfamiliar road i asked her where are we going she told me that we were going to her house because she wanted to spend a night with me i looked through the back window and saw my cousin's bmw telling behind us i quickly realized what was happening and asked the girl to pull over and i told her that i had to throw up i jumped outside the van and ran to my cousin's car i made sure to take a picture of the girl's van to get the license plate before getting in we both spared away and my cousin explained everything he said he wanted me to join him for a drinking session in his backyard with some of his friends so he wasn't looking for me when the sister told him that i walked out with some random girl he ran outside and saw a white van taking off with me in the passenger seat passed out so he got in his bmw and started telling the vin the fact that this happened to me and assumed safety of my cousin's house party and that it actually worked on me a 23 year old guy is what scares me the most we called the police and showed them the picture of the van's license plate i took they tracked the van to some abandoned subway station five cops went there and my cousin and i followed we waited outside the station entrance and the officers went inside only ten minutes later the officers came out with the girl and three other large men in cuffs they placed them in the cars and one officer searched the white van and the other four searched the whole station what they found still disturbed me to this day in the van they found a bloody axe chains and duct tape in the station they found four bodies and seven kidnapped young adults those two men were the killers i still wanted to this day what would i be now if my cousin had not saved me [Music] i remember this was a few days into summer break i was going away to florida to be with my grandpa the week following so my friends and i decided to hang out until it was time for me to leave it was about five of us three girls two boys for this story i'll call them miguel denise maria and eric miguel and denise were twins and the oldest of us being 15. maria and eric were both 14 while i was the youngest at the time being 12. they baby me a lot since i was the only one still in middle school while the others were freshmen in high school i remember it was a thursday afternoon around 3 or 4. we were sitting on eric's couch and we've been playing fifa since school let out around 205 and eric suggested that we go to the park we all agreed bringing our baseball mitts bats and ball the park was only about two blocks away from eric's backyard it had a nice sized playground surrounded by climbable trees there was a softball field just a few yards from the playground their small graveyard in a dense patch of woods scary thing is that there are three small private cemeteries along the side of the park separated by a metal gate we tend to ignore it a lot since you can't really see it unless you try to we start our little game we played about two innings going into another one with maria being the most daring says with an evil smirk on her face let's hop the fence to the graveyard miguel and denise looked at her like she was out of her mind miguel asked are you crazy what if an undertaker is walking around and we get caught maria said we're not going to get caught just play it cool we all were on the same boat for a few minutes the sky was starting to get dark at this time we dropped our bats and gloves and walked over some big sticks to the tall gate eric was the first one over being the tallest then it was maria the miguel then denise as mentioned before i was the youngest and i was the smallest i was also terrified of heights when all the others hopped over i squeezed in through an opening of the bottom of the fence we started to wander around and not five minutes later fireflies started to blink around us and the air got sticky and muggy the street lights on the block started to come on though no lights shined in the graveyard but we still played around catching the bugs and putting them on each other i being the daring idiotic kid i was i would do front flips off the gravestones i know it was wrong but we were considered troublemakers in our neighborhood we laughed and joked around until maria suddenly stopped look she says out in the far distance behind a big tree was something protruding from a small pile of leaves it looked too weird to be a stick or an old log i glance on my friends seeing the curiosity on their faces maria starts toward the mysterious object with determination in her steps we stayed behind letting the girl explore as she got closer i could feel my nerves suddenly getting bad like something was wrong about the whole situation everyone watched as she slows the bed then stops abruptly right in front of the tree she stays still for a few seconds then proceeded with caution i look over at my friends who are also watching attentively i started telling them that we should go then all of a sudden i was suddenly interrupted by a loud blood-curdling scream coming from maria eric immediately starts running full speed toward her and we follow right behind him my adrenaline was so high i could hear nothing but the faintness of our crunching footsteps and my loud heartbeat my calves started burning as we approached the steel screaming girl eric reaches her looking at what she was looking at and backed up his eyes were wide and utter fear while we stared at the scene the others and i stopped before getting too close groaning and covering our noses once an unbelievable smell reaches our sense miguel asked what it was air slowly looks at us body trembling no no no no it's not real maria said maria had turned her body away from whatever she was staring at holding her stomach and wretching loudly i pushed past the other kids keeping my eyes to the ground and i made my way to the frightened pair what i saw still hunts me to this day the smell was stronger almost making me throw up but once my eyes processed what i was seeing it's like i forgot how to function completely it was the body of a white male nude with his body mangled he was laying in an awkward position i tried my best to describe it but his leg was bent at an unnatural angle and his arms were broken through the skin folded behind his head his face was covered in deep cuts infested with maggots and his whole body was drenched i stood frozen watching his maggots crawled on him and flies buzzing around his corpse honestly i don't remember if i was breathing or not before i knew it i felt a strong tug on my arm eric told me that we had to go i thought that others had already taken off miguel picking up maria and running with her before i could even think to move eric does the same to me throwing me over his shoulder and running as fast as he could we ran along the gate finding the opening that i had crawled through earlier everyone was already on the other side the next hour after that was a blur but i do remember getting home mute and shaking no one knows but us i haven't spoken to any of them in years i'm sure this story has been suppressed in their minds like mine that night gave me nightmares for years and now at 22 i still remember that smell [Music] this happened in 2019 my aunt uncle and my cousin were driving up to my town to have thanksgiving with me and my family they arrived three days early so we could just hang out and see each other since it's been a while on the first day i was hanging out with my cousin who i'll call anthony who was 14 and four years younger than that when i got a text from my friend who i would call logan who suggested that we go hang out the night before thanksgiving at around 2am since anthony and his parents have been staying with us i invited anthony to come along and we snuck out of the house at about 1 30. for a little background when logan would invite me to hang out with him at 2 am it would typically mean we would explore a abandoned hospital we had been in the hospital three times and would often go up to the roof and smoke anthony and i walked over to logan's house which was about two miles away and we got in his car and drove over to the hospital we would usually sneak in through an open window but after we saw it was blocked by a large heavy box we all had to climb up nearby a tree and leap through one of the windows which logan kept open from time to time i thought it was strange that the window we usually went in was blocked off but logan assured me that it was probably some city officials trying to prevent kids like us from getting inside we used our phone flashlights to navigate anthony to me and logan's designated hangout spot the roof where we had brought a few folding chairs we sat down and smoked when logan told me and anthony that he was going to invite his girlfriend lucy over and that he was going to go downstairs about her front of the hospital and wait logan went downstairs and about five minutes later anthony realized he forgot his phone probably because he was high i looked down from the roof towards the front entrance and didn't see logan i suggested that we both go downstairs to give him back his phone but anthony wanted to keep smoking so i went down alone as soon as i got into the stairwell i heard heavy footsteps rush up the stairwell i assumed it was logan but when i heard grunts from a runner i realized that it could not have been logan this man's voice sounded a lot deeper than logan and why would logan be running i immediately ran out of the stairwell and shut the door and pressed against it there were three loud bangs at the door as i heard the stranger yell open the door he continued to bang and scream anthony snapped out of his day's state and pulled out a switchblade that he carried on him the door was then opened knocking me on the ground and that's when i saw the man he was fat had horrible breathing was wearing a stained white t-shirt and tore jeans with deranged red eyes like tyrone bigum's he got on top of me and started strangling me telling me it's time to die about five seconds to him choking me anthony stabbed a man in the back with his blade he screamed in agony and let go of me anthony grabbed my hand and we ran down the stairs as we got into the hallway we heard ups come from behind us we shined our flashlights to see logan in the bathroom looking extremely pale and had a cut on his arm we all got into the bathroom and shut off our lights hiding in a one shared stall logan explained to us in the whisper that when he was walking down the hallway the man emerged from the bathroom and grabbed him chasing him around the hospital lobbying small circles like a cartoon until logan lost him and hid in the bathroom he was in directly after logan finished his story we heard the man run down the stairs into the hallway screaming like he was insane his words were incoherent but i remember him yelling the words murder and die we hid in the bathroom for a little while as the man ran around the room but he had stopped screaming we just sat in silence as we heard his footsteps go from hallway to hallway i worship it to logan and anthony that we should call the cops but they demanded i didn't because we did break into the hospital which was against the law finally after one hour of waiting at exactly 3 43 am we all heard the bathroom door open his light poured into the room i shut my phone and i looked over beside anthony and logan who had tears in her eyes we saw the man's bare feet walk over to one of the sinks standing there for a couple of moments and then collapse we got out of the stall and saw the man was not moving none of us dared to check and see if this guy was okay we hauled ass back through the window and ran back to logan's car where we saw his girlfriend lucy waiting logan explained everything to her into his frustration she said that she was going to call the police not wanting to get in trouble logan left lucy and drove me and anthony back home we had thanksgiving the next morning though me and anthony were still shaking over the entire thing logan didn't answer my text until the night it was black friday where he explained that he hasn't heard from lucy and doesn't know if she called the cops or not after one week logan finally told the cops the story logan took the blame and admitted to the police that he explored the abandoned building alone but he didn't tell the police about me and anthony's involvement the cops checked out the hospital and found nothing but a destroyed pink iphone lucy's phone logan led the police into the bathroom where a bloody handprint was found on the sink which he assumed belonged to the man i don't talk much with logan anymore he stopped going to school because the situation and according to some of our shared friends they say logan once attempted suicide it's been one year since the incident and with anthony now coming back to town we have been texting a lot about the whole situation anthony thinks the man is crazy a crazy homeless man who lives in a hospital i try not to think about the whole story because it cost me a long-lasting friendship with logan who i hope is doing better so this is a story that happened to me a few days ago i was at my friend's house for a birthday party she invited me and three other friends so that was a total of five of us for this story i'll name them carrie trina kalani and jojo carrie was the one who was throwing the party and she was turning 13. trina was also 13 and kalani was 14 and the youngest jojo was 12. i was the oldest being 15. i didn't really know trina and kalani but they were cool people when we got to the party we sat and talked for a bit the normal things girls talk about like boys we ate food and began to get bored so we asked carrie's mom if we could go and walk around the neighborhood and she agreed we went to another part of the neighborhood that had a tennis court and while we were there we made tick tocks as we got bored we ended up going back to the other direction of carrie's house and saw that the end of the street had a house that had police tape over the trees it also had a for-sale sign so we thought that there was no one living there at the time so we came to the conclusion that it was abandoned the house also had a lock on the door we thought of this crazy idea to go up to the door to see if we could pick the lot and get inside so we could explore the house had a new window on the left side of the door it was tall enough to look out through to see if someone was at your house they told me and jojo to go up to the door to see because we were the only ones who would accept any dare as we began to go up to the door i stated to jojo that i was afraid of doing this because of the thought of getting in trouble even though i was really brave i was also nervous but still did it because i didn't want to disappoint others she had said something i can't quite remember and after that i remember saying what if we go up to the door and there's someone standing at the window and this is the part where i would never understand as soon as i said that someone very skinny in a santa claus suit started walking up to the window and i'm not kidding i mean as soon as i said that someone started walking up to the window this was strange because although it was getting close to christmas it was still in november and we hadn't even endured thanksgiving yet me and jojo ran away screaming that so did everyone else we told the other girls what had happened and they asked us what the person looked like that was the moment where me and jojo looked at each other and remembered that you didn't see the face on this person i didn't even remember seeing the hands but jojo said the hands were white we went inside our house just to calm down and 30 minutes later we went back outside just to take a look at the house again and i kid you not when we got to the window that the blinds were in it looked as if someone was peeking their head looking at us the other girls thought it was a sticker but the blinds were also moving at the same time so i wasn't sure we went back into the house just to try to put everything behind us later that night we were playing hide-and-go-seek in a dark blindfolded and when it was me and jojo's turn to seek we both felt that something was off kind of like a feeling that someone was watching us and we couldn't shake that feeling off the other girls don't believe me and jojo about what we saw and they think it was a prank but i know what we saw and it'll forever be buried in my mind why was this person in a santa claus suit why didn't we see a face how did they know we were coming so many questions go through my head just thinking about it although this might not be your typical scary true horror story this was terrifying to experience and i would never forget it nor will i ever go to that house again when i was a little girl nine years old or so i was playing at the school down the street from my house it was the middle of the summer myself and my friend were hanging around watching the boys play street hockey one of the boys called my name and said a man in a parking lot was looking for me the parking lot was mostly obscured by the building but i could see an old 70s style van that hadn't been there earlier i was walking over to the van when the mother of one of the other kids showed up looking for her son asked me what i was doing when i told her someone in the van was looking for me she took my hand and started to walk with me and the van pulled out and sped away my friend's mom walked me home and i wasn't allowed out of my yard without my parents for the rest of the summer i was so upset and didn't understand why i was being punished it was only years later that i understood that i was likely being targeted by some scumbag for who knows what thanks mrs gibson wherever you are [Music] this story happened two years ago when i was 25. i'm a home repair man and i often do work around the wealthy neighborhoods in new jersey which is where i live i used to do some home repairs for a retired rich couple their names were rod and dorothy they often went on vacations and allowed their children to rent their summer beach house but before they would stay there rod and dorothy would hire me to do repairs this would have been the third time that i fixed the house up rod requested that i'll clean the gutters fix the chimney and make sure the beachside furniture would stay dry in the shed in case it rained rod and dorothy allowed me to stay at night in the house in case of the thunderstorm which had happened once before i arrived at the beach house around 3 pm it took me about three hours to do my normal routine when it started pouring rain because the roads would often flood i knew it would be unsafe to drive so i called dorothy and told her i would be staying tonight she said that was okay and that i could help myself to anything in the kitchen at around 7am i got hungry and went to the fridge to make myself a sandwich when i heard the sound of a glass breaking from the living room i grabbed a butter knife and tiptoed to the living room where i saw a broken window and a rock on the ground rain water started to pour into the living room before i could even react to what just happened i heard a large pound on her front door i ran to the door and looked through the peephole and saw a man with long wet red hair wearing nothing but shorts and a large muddy green t-shirt the man looked deranged and was breathing heavily for whatever reason i yelled out to the man what do you want the man reacted looking through the peephole he actually smiled at me showing his stained brown teeth the man said in a very deep voice open the door i screamed i'm calling 9-1-1 i ran to the house phone in the kitchen and dialed for the police but the weather interfered with the service so i couldn't call for help i ran back to the door and looked in the peephole and saw the man holding a flower pot over his head i jumped back from the door as the man threw the flower pot at the door and he screamed like a maniac open the door with the knife in hand and pushed the man down with my shoulder he fell down the small steps i held the knife up and yelled get out of here the man took off running down the road and was laughing like a madman i went back inside and locked every door window after about an hour of panicking i noticed the storm settled down so i took the opportunity to call the police informing them of the situation the operator sent an officer to the house along with the sketch artist i gave my description and they left the house i didn't sleep much that night rod and dorothy sent their oldest son harry to the house the following morning so i was off the hook i got paid an extra 50 for what i experienced which was a nice bonus but not worth it i have no idea who or what that man's intentions were but i like to think he's locked up somewhere away from people [Music] this happened to me as a kid maybe around two or three my mom and i lived in a cheap single wide trailer in the real crappy trailer park i stayed with my aunts overnight a lot because my mom would work graveyard shifts anyway she picked me up from my aunt's house around 7am one day and we went back to our trailer i remember immediately not wanting to go inside begging to ride my bike but my exhausted mother just wanted to go to sleep so we went inside she laid in bed and being the annoying toddler that i was i kept waking my mom up asking to go outside and ride my bike which we usually kept in my room because if we left it outside it would get stolen i told my mom i didn't want to go play in my room so i asked to lay with her while we were laying there for some reason i told my mom that there was someone in my closet and he wanted to hurt me i don't know why i said it she got up to show me that no one was there and when she walked in my room the folding closet door started to open and it got stuck on something turns out a previously convicted child molester had skipped bail in a new trial watch my mom's coming and goings for a few days and broke into our house while she was at work he took my bike in the closet with him hoping i would come home looking for it the only thing that kept him from jumping out attacking my mom was when the spokes got caught in the bottom of the door needless to say we ran like hell out of the house and got in the car and drove away unfortunately the guy got out of the house before the cops showed up there's really nothing to follow up with i'm just glad we got away a couple of years ago me and my girlfriend now wife were selling some of our old stuff after moving into another apartment and one of these items happened to be our big old tv we put one ad up on ebay and another on that facebook marketplace thing since it was kind of new at the time and just decided to wait and see what kind of offers we got my wife was pretty sure she found a decent enough buyer who'd come pick the tv up from our apartment and save us a job but i've gotten a message from someone who although they couldn't quite afford our asking price made us an offer we couldn't refuse it was from an older guy who seemed to be living on his own with his dog whose tv had recently broken and he couldn't afford a new one he said that he could pay about 70 of her asking price and would make the rest of it up to us in plumbing services should we ever need it i ended up getting into a long touching discussion with a guy it kind of reminded me of an old uncle of mine and i just instantly liked him he'd fallen on hard times and through no fault of his own if anyone deserved a little kindness it was him after a brief discussion with my wife we decided that we just go drop it off at his house for free however we also knew that there's no way this guy would accept our charity right off the bat or at least very little chance of that happening anyway so when he politely asked us to wait three weeks to drop it off at his house since it had taken him a little time to get the cash together we were only too happy to oblige him but still we make a note of his address and whatnot then tell him we'll call in a few weeks a few weeks goes by and we decide we'll drive the tv over to the guy on a saturday morning before we leave we give the guy a call to tell him we're on our way but there's no answer we try once or twice more but still the guy isn't answering his phone now this might sound kind of selfish but the tv was all boxed up and just taking up space in our hallway so even though the guy wasn't picking up his phone we decided to drive over anyway and possibly leave the tv with a neighbor of his i mean that method seemed kind of preferable to us too if we left it with a neighbor we wouldn't have to go through all the potential awkwardness of refusing to take the guy's money anyway so we drive over to the guy's address keeping the tv in the car while we ensure that there's definitely no one home i get out of the car walk up this guy's driveway and knock on the door which gets no answer right then is when i lean back and look into the guy's front room you know to check if there are any lights on or anything god knows the guy might have been a little deaf and just couldn't hear his phone or the door but as i look at his front windows i see all these little black spots all over the blinds and on the windowsill i'm like what is those thinking they might be bits of dirt or something then one of the little dirt pieces just straight up moves and that lightning quick stop start way that insects do and that's when it hits me i'm looking at about 50 house flies big fat ones too that are grouped together on his window it's weird how we can see one house fly on a window pane or a window ledge and be like that's a fly but when we see so many in one place it's like our brains just don't quite compute what our eyes are seeing that kind of brittle sense of perception that humans have never fails to creep me out like most people reading this i instantly knew what was wrong and this horrific sense of dread came over me i think i might have involuntarily let out a oh god oh no when the penny dropped you only ever get a concentration of flies like that when there's either a massive buildup of garbage or something had died and in that case someone had died and horrifically it was the older guy we'd grown so attached to throughout the saga of getting rid of our old tv the whole thing was just horrifying from having to call the cops to the fire department showing up with them to bash the guy's door down when they did the smell started to drift out into the street and it was just about the most stomach churning thing i'd ever experienced i know the guy wasn't exactly my best friend but i feel like even though we only swapped a few texts and calls with the guy we got to know him pretty well he was good-natured independent i'm pretty sure he was a veteran too and the whole thing really shook me up those flies man those fat carrying flies that were so big and engorged that i barely even recognized them for what they were they'd been breeding and feeding and the rotting flesh of the same guy i've been having heart to hearts with just weeks before it's just scary to me how death is sometimes like yeah the prospect of what happens to us when we die is daunting enough but it's how sudden and seemingly random death can be with all its grim little details like i couldn't shake the image of those flies on the window like they were his ghost or something maybe we do leave a little something of ourselves behind when we die but that thing happens to be so very very ugly [Music] okay so back in 2016 the xbox one s came out which was basically just an xbox that was 4k capable now this isn't to be confused with the xbox series x and s that just came out last year this is a couple of years ago when that facebook marketplace had just started i picked up one of the newer editions of the console so i was looking to get rid of my outdated one facebook marketplace seemed like the easiest place to do that since i didn't have an ebay account at the time so yeah long story short that's how i opened myself up to one of the creepiest experiences my entire life so i post an ad for my vanilla xbox one set a reasonable enough price for it at about a hundred dollars then just sit back and wait for the inquiries to come in as you can imagine the internet didn't fail to bring out all the anonymously abusive weirdos who told me thirty dollars would be more than a reasonable price and could i drop the console off at their house which in one specific case happened to be in the next state over basically no one made any serious inquiries which i figured it was a four-year-old console at that point i was going to be pretty lucky if i could manage to sell it at all which is why when i got a message from a kid's mom saying their kid was really sick and could i perhaps work in a discount for them i just thought sure why not the first message from the kid's mom was incredibly long and was basically this big sob story about how their 10 year old had this rare disease that they only had a slim chance of surviving i forget the name of the disease but i copy posted the word into google and it was actually a legit disease which has some pretty grim sounding symptoms too i probably shouldn't have called it a sob story but that's exactly what i thought it was at first but when i messaged back and forth with the lady then i realized how something that was a throwaway thing for me might actually make her entire family's life so much happier i went from weirdly indifferent to being seriously invested in this kid having a christmas he'd never forget so after a couple of days of talking back and forth at this lady i decided screw it i'm just gonna give it to her for free i didn't really need the money and besides i could just sit pretty on all the good karma i'd earn it's kind of embarrassing to admit how far down the rabbit hole i was with the whole thing like i even went out and bought some bubble wrap and some upmarket cardboard packaging designed for shipping electricals i wanted to be that kid santa that year and it's crazy to admit but my charitable little scheme really did have me feeling good about myself which i suppose is why when it started to unravel i just didn't want to believe it when the time came for me to get this lady's mailing address there was a couple of inconsistencies that grabbed my attention but that still didn't raise my suspicion right away for example at first she gave me one address then she gave me another when i asked her to confirm i did actually confront her on it but she said she was living in an apartment complex where people would steal packages obviously neither of us wanted to risk the xbox being stolen so she'd given me an address for a friend of hers who could safely deliver it to them totally believable excuse right she was a single mom living in a rough neighborhood and i was lending her a helping hand maybe i should have seen the red flags right there but was just feeling way too saintly and smug to do so the thing that tripped it up was that the lady had mentioned her kids starting some kind of medical treatment for their illness she mentioned a particular date that it was starting and that turned out to be the very same day i was about to post the package i have the console all boxed up along with the controllers the wiring and a few games that'll be suitable for that kid's age i thought i figured it must have been a stressful time for her seeing her kid getting poked and prodded by all kinds of medical professionals was probably weighing on her mind i thought mailing the console in that particular day might really cheer her up i tried to keep the whole thing a surprise but i've never been very good at keeping my mouth shut and what can i say i wanted to bask in the glory of my own generosity a little so i send the single mom a facebook message like hey posting the package today just wanted to make sure i have the right address she then replies oh my god you've just absolutely made my day you're such a sweetheart cue some blushing for myself and i reply no problem hope it makes it over to you okay then she replies the timing is amazing because franklin starts his therapy next month next month i go back through the conversation to find the message where she said it was on the 25th of the month that same day we were texting obviously i'm pretty confused by this and i still don't have any major suspicions so i'm like oh i thought he was starting his therapy today she explains no it's next month almost like she hadn't told me the 25th at all only when i confront her about it is she like oh yeah we had to move some dates around my bad for not telling you but my spider senses are actually tingling at that point so i decide to ask her if there's anything she's not telling me she obviously responds no to that but i decided it'll be better to just talk to her on the phone so i insist on calling her she answers her phone so i know she's a real person and she sounded kind of busy and impatient so i figured i'd just gotten her out of bad time everything would have gone out without a hitch if she hadn't made one fatal mistake redis i'm about to hang up after apologizing for taking up her time she says freddie will be so happy with the xbox freddy she's been calling her kid franklin for a week now and suddenly it was freddy i'm not even sure she could like blame autocorrect it was a freaking phone call i called back and just straight up called her bluff i didn't know 100 at the time but i sure acted like i did i just told her that i knew she was a scammer and that i'd be reporting her to the police there was some mild resistance at first a few weak denials here and there but i could hear the thin veil of her wholesomeness beginning to slip with every accusation and eventually she snapped and when she did it was so vicious that it actually shut me up for a minute it was a complete jekyll and high transformation from this sweet single mom character she obviously just invented to the soulless fraud she really was even though i just figured her out she called me a gullible [ __ ] for believing her in the first place called me sad and pathetic and a bleeding heart for wanting to give away my stuff to a kid that probably wasn't going to live to enjoy it in this savage tirade she told me people like me would always be worthless and pathetic dumb saps that were nothing but marks i just tried to keep calm and told her i'd be reporting her to facebook along with sending a screenshot of her profile and display pictures to the police all before circulating her profile around some of the more populated facebook groups i was a member of to warn them of potential scams but of course it wasn't a real profile of course she had like 20 more at least that's what she said but my profile was real everything i told her about myself was true the psycho knew what i looked like she knew where i lived she knew all sorts of things about me and i knew absolutely nothing about her other than she was willing to stoop lower than low to get things she wanted and on top of that she wasn't above making some hideously graphic threats of violence against me and my family and stupidly enough this was back when i had my sister and my cousin listed in my profile as immediate family that's what got me the most that i'd been dumb enough to serve up some pretty intimate family connections on a silver platter a scammer told me i was truly stupid if i thought the cops would be able to do anything about her and on the off chance that she did hear from the police she'd send her boyfriend after my family now i don't know how genuine of a threat that was but just the fact that she had access to their profiles made me feel anxious and incredibly guilty if they ended up getting hurt because of something i did or didn't do i don't think i'd have been able to live with myself obviously the whole thing ended when i blocked the scammer and got in touch with my cousins and sister telling them to make their profiles private i was honest with them told them how i'd fallen victim to a scammer and that i was worried their personal information might be compromised after all the scammer had just assumed someone else's identity in terms of their profile pictures possibly even their name too and the idea of them using any of our pictures to set up a new scam profile made my skin crawl that whole thing was by far the worst experience i've ever had online and not only am i really really careful now when it comes to interacting with internet strangers but i seriously advise all of you to be too a little while ago i saw an ad on facebook marketplace where a woman claimed to be giving away free gerbils apparently the boy girl pair she owned had produced a huge litter of little gerbil babies and since there was way too much for her to handle she was just going to give them away to a handful of loving homes the ad didn't include the grim little factoid that the gerbil mom would probably eat her babies if she didn't think she could take care of them but i figured so i got in touch the woman turned out to be a widow who had originally bought the gerbils to keep her company i did think it was kind of unusual that she didn't just get herself a cat or dog if loneliness was the issue but hey different strokes for different folks right i'm not one to judge and she seemed so sweet when i called her to arrange a date and time to go pick up two of the gerbils needless to say i did not expect her to be living in the conditions she was because when me and my dad arrived at her home with a little straw bedded cage to take the dribbles home in the whole exchange took a turn for the worse so we called over the gerbil lady's place and at first there was no reply then when she finally answers the door we can see she's in quite a sorry state one of her eyes is swollen and bloodshot with some super gross looking yellow gunk collecting in the corner of the eye but we remain polite and just ignore it the last thing me and dad wanted to do was offend or upset the lady by pointing out what was an already obvious medical condition but when she invites us inside we get a clue as to how she got sick in the first place her little house wreaked like it was the single worst stench that ever graced my nostrils and there were gerbils everywhere and i mean everywhere and much like their owner they were not in good condition just from the gerbils that were skittering around the kitchen i could see that many of them were missing fur in patches or had painful looking growths around their legs or backs then when she invited us into our tv room for a cup of tea we could see it was even worse in there we had to make up some excuse about how we couldn't stay for long after me and my dad shot each other a telepathic look that basically said a giant nope and with the amount of gerbil poop that clogged up every little corner and skirting board it was absolutely no wonder that she had some kind of infection and when i caught sight of an actual tiny rodent skeleton behind one of her curtains i went into full improv mode to get us out of there i turned to my dad named some piece of important durable habitat that we hadn't picked up from the store yet wink wink but then agreed that oh we can't possibly bring home the gerbils without insert name of doodad here and we'll have to call by again in a couple of days i remember us both sitting in the car afterward just kind of been shocked at what we'd just seen the fact that someone could live like that was just depressing and terrifying to me she obviously had no one coming to check on her and anyone who thought it was okay to keep a home like that must have been losing their marbles it sucked having to make a decision like we did i felt really mean basically snitching but we just had to call animal rescue for her benefit more than anything else the aspca rep we spoke to said that they'd investigate and let us know what their call was going to be and in the end they got back in touch thanking us for the tip not only was the gerbil lady now in touch with a local charity that would help check up on her in her twilight years but her house was considerably cleaner and safer after they've cleared out almost 100 gerbils from her property they said the situation was so bad that the only thing that kept the infestation from spreading with the neighborhood cats i did remember seeing a bunch of strays hanging around outside but i figured it was just because she was the local animal lover who would routinely feed them treats or whatever turns out she was breeding treats for them just not in the way she might like to think the creepiest thing about it was that from standing outside her home you'd never have guessed at the horror show waiting for you on the inside and the whole thing just reminds me that we don't really know what's going on behind closed doors even the ones closest to us behind the facade of normalcy we have no idea what our friends and neighbors are up to or what nightmarish conditions they're living under [Music] my dad was a guitar player it was the only real skill he had but i suppose that suited him because music was his entire life he made his living playing in various bands all over kalamazoo and to this day i ain't ever seen no man pick bluegrass like my daddy you'll have to excuse my phrasing there but my dad grew up in kentucky and he brought all that southern up with him when he and my mom moved up here i was in the metal and stuff as a kid used to go to detroit to catch cannibal corpse shows but it was my dad that gave me a love of bluegrass but as you can imagine being a lifelong musician meant that my dad went through some pretty hard times financially and at one point it looked like we might actually lose the house we were saving every penny my mom was working double shifts and my dad even got a part-time job tending bar but it just wasn't enough now my dad's favorite guitar was this old martin that looked about as old as the hills like steaks and whiskey acoustic guitars are always better when you age them so to speak a kind of character or soul gets all up in the body something that gives the sound a richness it's kind of hard to describe but my dad's martin had it in spades i've never heard a guitar make as sweet as sound as that old martin and he adored it but the thing was nothing else we had would fetch as good a price as that guitar and as much as it broke his heart to do it it was either sell the guitar or put his family at risk so my dad being my dad he sells the martin case and all for like five grand after that things started looking up we managed to keep the house dad started getting gigs again mom got a promotion at work it took like two years before we were back on our feet but we managed it it was around this time that dad started getting these headaches that we just put down to stress he was working his butt off trying to put food on the table so it was no wonder he was beginning to feel the effects the headaches got so bad that he finally agreed to go see a doctor then right when we needed it the least right when things are actually looking up for the family boom my dad gets diagnosed with a brain tumor an aggressive one too doctor gave him two months to put his affairs in order and after he passed i missed him real bad so bad that i actually started pestering my mom for who he'd sold his old martin to i felt like getting the guitar back would bring me a little piece of dad back but to my disappointment mom had no idea who he'd sold the thing to it had been years and it wasn't like dad kept much in the way of records it sucked but eventually i just sort of resigned myself to never seeing it again and i suppose that was just part of the whole grieving process for me years after i'm living in detroit and trying to make a go of my own music career me and a few friends are out drinking just stumbling from dive bar when we come across this lady who claimed to be a psychic when i heard that i just took it to mean some old bar fly who'd thought of a novel way to talk her way into a free drink or two by tickling your palm and telling you you're gonna be rich but this lady wasn't some scam artist she seemed to genuinely believe she could read us as she put it she starts telling my friend how he's going to hurt a lot of people more than we'll ever be able to forgive him we just kind of make a joke out of the whole thing the guy was a pussycat the last person to ever get violent or whatever then to keep the joke kind of rolling along i asked her to read me instead she looks me up and down seems to study my hairline intently for a moment and says what you're looking for is in your pocket only things i had on me were my keys my phone and a pack of smokes that's it the only thing i was looking for about them was a lighter and i certainly didn't have one in my pocket next morning i had a hangover so bad it could have killed a small child i just lay in bed for like an hour scrolling through social media on my phone checking out the photos from the night before and trying not to hurl then as i'm scrolling i see the little tab for facebook marketplace and think huh i'll check it out then when i start browsing musical instruments for sale it only takes me about a minute before i come across something that almost knocks me out of bed a guy was selling a guitar that was the exact same make and model as my dad's old favorite i'm lying there looking at all the photos of it noticing all the little dents and details that are just screaming i'm your dad's guitar and then i see the case and i swear to god my freaking head just started spinning anyways the guy was selling it for way more than i could afford but it didn't take much to convince him to arrange a kind of payment plan with him given that it was a massive sentimental value getting it back was like having dad's ghost floating around whatever room you played it in and my mom burst into tears the first time i played her one of his old toons on his old martin but how is all of this creepy i'm probably hearing you asking the whole psychic lady thing is pure coincidence and besides she wasn't right anyway because your friend didn't turn out to be a serial killer right right well yes and no but it's this part that makes that old crazy lady's prediction seems so horribly prophetic about the same time i'm being reunited with my guitar my drinking buddy got into a little accident at work nothing too heavy but he did need to be prescribed some painkillers so he could get back to work before his comp ran out he was never quite the same after the accident but we figured that was down to the pain and being out of work for so long over the next six or seven months that followed he started losing weight taking random days off of work disappearing over the weekend money started going missing out of his and his wife's bank account then jewelry and electronics started vanishing we should have known what was happening but at the same time i'd never have pegged this guy to have that kind of personality and his wife actually had to catch him using for us to realize that he was addicted to opiates over the next few years my buddy fulfilled the crazy lady's prophecy by wronging or pushing away almost every important person in his life i let him stay on my couch for a couple of days after his wife finally kicked him out for emptying their savings account but after he stole from me too i just had to show him the door like everyone else had last i heard from him he was shacked up with his new junky girlfriend somewhere in chicago a couple of months later i hear from his ex-wife that he had a warrant out for his arrest cop said his girlfriend had od'd and he just dumped her outside of the hospital she died right there on the sidewalk when that crazy lady said what i was looking for was in my pocket there was no way she could have known about my dad's old martin guitar and there's no way she predicted i'd use facebook of all things to find it she was kind of wrong about my pockets that night but she was kind of right too but with regards to what she said about my buddy she was exactly spot on i'd only assume that she was wrong because i couldn't see him hurting anyone on purpose he was just too gentle of a dude i was fixated on deliberate physical violence to realize that he was playing out her predictions to the letter i don't believe in the paranormal i don't believe in psychics or ghosts heck i'm not even religious by any description but that night we were drinking a crazy old lady told us our future and whether i want to believe it or not her predictions came true [Music] so first of all i have to apologize for my english because it's not my first language but this is definitely one of the scariest and most horrible things i've ever heard a few years ago we had this big incident here in the philippines involving facebook this guy's wife was over in canada for her job and she got into an argument with the husband via facebook i think he wanted her to come home to caisson early because he missed her something and she refuses because her contract isn't finished yet i'm guessing the husband was being really nasty and unreasonable because for some reason the wife stops replying to his messages altogether now this couple had a seven-year-old daughter together one whose picture the media showed a lot in the days after the incident she was so cute and it breaks my heart that anything happened to her but it also makes my blood go cold that anyone could lay a finger on her especially the girl's own father because in response to his wife ignoring him on facebook maybe even threatening to leave him i don't know he actually kills their daughter he stabbed her in the neck and chest then took pictures of the body and uploaded them to facebook while tagging his wife in the pictures can you imagine how horrific that must have been to get a notification on your phone or laptop or whatever device seeing you'd been tagged in a picture only to then see it was your own dead child not only that but your husband the kid's dad the one other person in the world who's one job above all else is to protect them is the one that actually murdered them that's true horror to me like i can't even wrap my head around it there was video released of him in custody i think his name was mark and the police were showing him pictures of what he'd done to his daughter and this guy is just screaming and screaming not being able to believe he'd killed his own child i think he'd just gone temporarily insane or however you say it but the idea that human beings are capable of such horrific things like when they see red and just black out and then are able to kill someone so precious to them that's about the worst thing i can possibly think of it just makes it even more sick that something as supposedly harmless as facebook was involved that social media can enable us to make horrific things even worse i always think about this case whenever i hear about facebook i know the majority of the site is just candy crush invites and baby photos but it's tainted my opinion of the site forever i know facebook has people that remove all the bad content but they can't be everywhere all the time and i wonder how many people saw the pictures of that dead girl before they actually got taken down even one is too many if you ask me sometimes facebook just seems like a powder keg of trouble it had this weird ability to help exacerbate drama to the point where someone gets hurt a really good example of this is what happened back in 2012 in the town i live in here in holland so there were these two friends of about 15 or 16 years old who went to a new year's eve house party together they ended up getting pretty drunk and having an argument because one of the girls was like making out with guys and her friend didn't like it so the next day one friend basically calls the other a sleaze on facebook so the friend who got called sleazy complained to one of the guys she'd been making out with at the party who said it if she wanted to he could teach the judgmental friend a lesson i think it says a lot about how petty and spiteful teenage girls can be to each other but the girl who got accused of being sleazy says yes to this that she wanted her friend to regret saying mean things to her so instead of just sending over some rude messages or whatever this guy gets in touch with another friend of his who agrees to actually go over to this girl's house to beat her up or something yeah actual violence because of a few comments on freaking facebook only he doesn't just slap her around or whatever he takes a knife over to the girl's house rings on her door and then stabs her repeatedly with it that's when this girl's dad appears to try and defend her the kid then stabs him too the girl ended up dying a week or so later in the hospital and it was a huge news story here in holland but i think the really horrible thing is that the kid who did the actual stabbing only spent a year in juvenile detention with a few years of probation afterward the two kids who organized the killing ended up getting more time in prison than the actual murderer but even then it was only two years i know the prosecutor tried to get them more time in jail but that didn't work in the end and these kids basically got off super lightly for legit murdering someone and all because of an argument that unfolded over facebook that was the hardest part to swallow the dutch media even christened the whole thing facebook moored as like a nickname which basically just meant the facebook murder in dutch i'm not saying the whole murder wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for facebook but honestly there's no doubt that it made it easier to organize like i know for a fact that the older guy managed to get in touch with the guy who actually carried out the attack via facebook and maybe he wouldn't have been able to organize that without it stuff like facebook is supposedly there to bring us together right so it's just a terrible thought that people can then use it to rip each other's families apart [Music] i'm kind of weird about social media these days i used to be really into facebook when i first moved to college it kept me in touch with family and friends back home and it was a nice feeling like i wasn't so far away from them building up a collection of photos checking into places sharing every little detail in my life so that everyone could see how great i was doing my entire world was online for all to see and because i'm dumb i was pretty liberal about my privacy setting too so one day i get this message request from someone that i've never heard of before it just said hey i checked their profile to see if they were in the same class as me or something but it turned out we had no mutuals and they lived on the other side of the country so as you can imagine i'm pretty confused as to why they're messaging me but i'm also curious so i just reply hey man do we know each other i don't know what i was expecting him to say when i saw that he was typing a reply and i remember thinking that maybe he was looking for someone with the same name as me or something but then his response pops up and all it said was i'm going to kill you with the cowboy emoji on the end i stare at the message for a few seconds not scared at all just like what i mean the cowboy emoji was what made me take another look at this dude's profile seeing a bunch more pictures of him shooting guns and wielding knives in the woods somewhere i mean that was at least a little intimidating but what got me were all these rants that he'd posted about how much life sucked how unfair things were and how he'd love to take it out on someone who deserved it and then the videos that were unplayable because they'd been removed by facebook admins but still had captions like the chainsaw goes through his neck like butter and a crying laughing face emoji that's when i started to worry it didn't seem like this guy was just having fun playing a prank on a stranger by trying to scare them he seemed legit crazy and seriously angry that nutcase could have been studying every one of my statuses pictured posts and check-ins for weeks before he decided to message me he could have screenshotted all of my stuff too so it didn't matter if i blocked him or not he had my name my school where i hung out the names of my family and friends everything i thought maybe i was just making a big deal out of nothing at the time but later on i could barely sleep thinking about it how horrifying a thought it was that he could have been driving across the country as i lay there in bed having just picked a person at random to kill and being crazy or angry enough to actually do it you can call me paranoid all you like but i just couldn't get this guy out of my head like the idea of him hunting me down or whatever was unnerving enough i mean he had enough info on me to be able to ambush me at a dozen different places that i just couldn't avoid because they were school or grocery shopping or just my dorm but what had me freaked out is that creep might have been able to learn so much about me and i was dumb or vain enough to let it happen in the first place i knew the internet was full of crazies i just didn't expect it to reach and touch me in the way that it did if i didn't make it clear already i did actually block the guy but some weird grim curiosity had me unblocking his account one day so i could sort of check up on him and make sure he wasn't about to do something too nuts there were no rants no threatening statuses just a long series of photo posts that made me think that he'd taken up photography or something i'm scrolling through them when i start to get this familiar feeling from looking at the scenery i couldn't be 100 sure but i'd swear a lot of the pictures he'd taken were of things that were around the town i was living in there were no street signs or anything nothing actually confirmed he'd actually driven across the country but if he wasn't taking pictures in a town that looked remarkably similar to mine then i could have been in a whole lot of trouble i expected that guy to jump me for weeks after like i was a complete nervous wreck it messed with my sleep i lost a bunch of weight being an almost constant state of anxiety for the better part of the month he didn't find me nothing happened as a result thank god but just knowing he could pretty much come and get me anytime he liked got to me in ways i never even imagined it ever could we put ourselves on front street in a big way with social media and it could literally be anyone out there just lurking on her profiles so like i said no i'm kind of weird and cautious about social media i don't put too much out there and i don't use any real name i run the strictest privacy settings possible and i really recommend you do too [Music] i live here in a place called mountain city down here in tennessee so this is going back about 10 years after i graduated high school when this really messed up story started going around about one of the other kids that i graduated with it starts in the worst possible way too because first i heard of it was a buddy of mine texting me saying did you hear about billy payne i text back saying no and he then calls me all serious sounding to say that billy and his baby mom got shot just a few days before like someone rolled up to their house bust opened the door and just shot them both right there in front of the television they were legit executed some of the papers said it was a single shot to the head that killed both victims and how billy's throat had been slashed we got to wondering why someone might do something like that if it was a random psycho killer or if he was moving weight and managed to step on someone's toes i did remember hearing about billy messing around with drugs a few times so it wasn't totally out of the question but he must have done something serious to have whoever it was shoot his baby mama right there too like that's real cold-blooded you know but even saying that he just didn't seem like the kind of guy to get involved with serious gang bangers anyway the cops catch the two guys who committed the murder one of them is this vietnam vet who said in court that he was ex-cia too anyway they get charged go up in front of a judge and you know why they say they did it because the cia had told them that the two murder victims were part of some evil group that was planning on killing their daughter but in reality billy payne and his baby mom were shot dead because they unfriended one of the killer's daughters on facebook can you actually believe that that someone would take social media that seriously and actually kill somebody because of a friend request i mean i didn't i was convinced that there was more to it than that and as much as it made me feel like a gore hound i stayed interested in the trial to find out why they'd done something so horrendous like the cops found billy's baby alive in his mom's arms poor kid is going to grow up without a mother and a father but then yeah that's the only reason or motive established and the prosecutor brings up facebook messages detailing intense arguments between billy his girlfriend and the girl who got unfriended they'd argue about it back and forth for hours with some pretty harsh language exchange too and then the girl says that she's gonna tell her dad i don't know if the girl just didn't expect her dad to actually go kill them or that she knew he'd overreact but if it's the latter then she is blood on her hands too as far as i'm concerned like it's the way she told her dad too she just didn't tell him direct she invented some fake cia agent that got in touch with her dad over facebook to tell them all this messed up stuff about how their daughter was in grave danger i suppose it just scares me that people could take something like facebook that seriously but it's obvious that some people out there put so much belief in social media that they're willing to kill over perceived insults or whatever and that's why i keep my social media presence pretty small these days aside from all the ratchety drama that goes on in our timelines every so often it's just not a healthy place for some people and it kind of blows my mind that facebook could be the reason that anyone got shot [Music] on the morning of april 12 2018 27 year old renita williams of shreveport louisiana was at home minding her own business she lived at home with her mother anita and had just broken up with her long-term boyfriend jonathan robinson like many relationships the breakup had been a messy one and a great deal of drama had unfolded on social media websites mainly the most popular of them facebook apparently jonathan had moved on rather quickly from renita and had recently started dating a woman from houston texas named sharika taylor and although it's not entirely clear what the ins and outs of the social media drama were there had definitely been some exchange between the two women that had seriously enraged jonathan robinson as foolish as it often is men sometimes attempt to defend the honor of the women in their lives but no one could have expected jonathan to take such extreme measures in what amounted to little more than an exchange of harsh words because before jonathan pulled up to ranita's place on the morning of april 12th he had just driven by his aunt's house to retrieve something he'd previously hidden in the basement of her home a high caliber semi-automatic rifle he was so delirious with anger that he didn't even bother to turn off the engine of the vehicle he driven up in he simply grabbed the rifle from the passenger seat kicked in the dead bolted front door to the house and then started shooting it seems those first few shots were merely to terrify those in the home because no one was actually hurt during the first few minutes of the attack whilst her mother and younger brother escaped from the rear of the home jonathan quickly located a terrified renita who believed she was about to be immediately executed but apparently her ex-boyfriend had other plans for her first keeping her at gunpoint he told her to grab her cell phone and begin a facebook live broadcast at first renita had no idea why she would need to do something like that but all slowly became clear when jonathan began to demand she apologized to taylor his new girlfriend in a terrifying public display of humiliation jonathan could be seen pointing the barrel of his rifle at the mother of three's head while he made her apologize over and over again for the perceived offense she was terrified voice quivering as she complied meanwhile ronita's mother was hiding in the backyard having had the foresight to grab her cell phone before fleeing from the gunshots with shaking hands she hammered 911's touchscreen then begged the dispatcher to send helped in a hushed but terrified tone yet the police were far closer than she could have imagined because officer brittany mackey was actually within earshot of the gunfire as soon as she heard the shots she rolled up to saint vincent avenue at natalie street and got out of her vehicle with her pistol drawn jonathan robinson looked up to see the cops arrive mere minutes after he'd burst into the home and he was seething with rage he immediately executed renita as she kneeled on the floor below him then walked out of the busted front door and began shooting at officer mackey using trees and parked vehicles as cover jonathan sent round after round of high caliber rifle fire into the officer's patrol car forcing her into cover mackey immediately got onto her radio and began calling in backup with her colleagues actually hearing the sound of gunfire over the airwaves she then got as low behind the back wheel of her patrol car as she possibly could and prayed for swift just two minutes later that back up arrived in the form of corporals joshua pettigrew and greg walker they screeched up the street coming to a stop just short of officer mackey's patrol car the officers then jumped out of the vehicle took cover behind the open doors and sent a torrent of 45 caliber pistol bullets at jonathan's firing position the overwhelming firepower pushed him back into the house and the two corporals lost track of their target the next two cops on the scene were two special response team members corporals landry ducto and michael gerbine the pair took off running for the other side of the street but jonathan opened fire once again this time from a vantage point on the second floor of the house he was occupying the air around them cracked and whisked with 762 bullets ricocheting off the concrete as they narrowly missed their targets but luckily neither officer was wounded he's in a sniper position he's in a sniper position another officer can be heard screaming on a police cruiser's dash cam get down robinson had the supreme advantage of a concealed elevated position coupled with high caliber weaponry and for almost an hour he kept every officer pinned down and unable to approach his position they were so heavily outgunned that the only two shots that managed to fire were to disable the car robinson left running in the driveway when he barged into the williams home plus the police had no idea where he was even shooting from and couldn't risk civilian casualties by peppering the entire home with bullets to the officers pinned down at the scene waiting for a full special response team to arrive seemed like an eternity eventually a full police swat team was pushing up towards the house preparing to breach and clear the entire structure to locate and eliminate the active shooter yet just as the team was cleared to breach jonathan indicates to those on scene that he wished to surrender they hesitated and fell right into his trap he opened fire on them first and sent a bullet smashing through srt operative robert enterkin's right wrist i've been hit and chicken cried over his radio officer hit another torrent of bullets are exchanged for a few moments before a sudden lol in the volume of fire then to the surprise of the attending officers jonathan appeared to walk out of the busted front door again only this time he was unarmed and he proceeded to lie down on the front lawn of the house in a show of surrender the sr team rushed in putting cuffs on the shooter before dragging him away renita's mother and brother are led away from the scene safely but heartbreakingly renita had succumbed to her wounds before the emts could get to her at his murder trial jonathan robinson pled guilty to first-degree murder and admitted to investigators that he fired on police officers because he wanted to die he narrowly escaped the death penalty by agreeing to a plea deal presented to him by prosecutors and was later sentenced to life in prison a hundred years ago a person would have to drag another into a busy street to perform a public execution but nowadays all it takes is a few button clicks on a cell phone to have all your family and friends watching as you're executed in cold blood by some deranged killer and such incidents can happen so fast that there's simply no way of preemptively or actively censoring them no matter how hard facebook might try as long as there's a technology available that allows us to share all the intimate details of our lives humanity seems to relish in sharing not just the good and positive but also the darker more terrifying things too [Music] stephen nicholson's arrest as the main suspect in a violent indecent assault and murder sparked off one of the uk's biggest evidence searches which involved a trawl of thousands of hours of cctv footage he was the prime suspect in the murder of lucy mchugh and actually rented a room in her parents home at the time of her murder at one point it looked like the british police might actually have to let him go due to lack of evidence but in the end it was a facebook password that proved to be his ultimate undoing after he was arrested the police had just 96 hours to charge him with the murder or he would have to be released and given that would take four weeks to get a key piece of dna evidence analyzed and sent back to them the clock was ticking to find something concrete that they could use to charge him with murder the police subjected stephen to vigorous questioning and managed to get him to admit that lucy had sent him a facebook message on the night before she was killed when pressed as to what that message said he said she told him she was pregnant with his child he intended this to be evidence that it couldn't possibly have been him that killed her but when police asked him to hand over his facebook password so that they could verify his claims he refused to give it to them this was his one big mistake when asked why he refused to share the password with him stephen told officers that he was involved quite heavily with some narcotics dealers around his hometown and that revealing his messages would compromise them possibly even causing them to take reprisals against him but this didn't wash with investigating officers who became convinced that the information contained within the account could be used against him it also presented them with a marvelous opportunity there were two options available to them one being to seek the compliance of u.s federal courts to get facebook to hand over steven's passwords to them but that would have taken way longer than just 96 hours and by that time stephen would be freed but the other was to make use of some terrorism legislation what is known as section 53 of the regulation of investigatory powers act colloquially called ripa among police officers this means that anyone who seeks to withhold information such as computer passwords during a serious crime investigation can basically be charged with obstruction of justice right when it looked like steven was going to be bailed he was rearrested and after pleading guilty to withholding evidence at southampton crown court he was jailed for 14 months with that the police managed to buy themselves more time to find evidence of his involvement in lucy mchugh's murder however why there was plenty of circumstantial evidence that stephen had killed lucy there was nothing to physically link the spot where lucy's body was found in nicholson whatever weapon he used to kill her remain unaccounted for and police officers were unable to find any of his dna at the scene once again investigators were forced to focus on steven's so-called online footprint this time seeking help from an experienced cloud data analyst to try to link steven to the scene of the crime a cloud data analyst's job is to study various pieces of digital information sent from nicholson's phone to data servers which are owned by companies such as google and facebook while tracing the phones a route on the day of lucy's murder the analysts happen to notice a small blip in an area of southampton that the police had not yet searched it suggested that nicholson had for whatever reason deviated from his most direct route home the diversion took him to a place known as tanner's brook a stream which meanders through southampton weaving its way through some pretty dense woodland in the western portion of the city detective superintendent paul barton later said to journalists with the help of the analyst what we discovered was a slight deviation on his telephone which didn't match the story he'd given us you could say it had jumped a mast so to speak and therefore put steven at the place where we discovered some bloody discarded clothing it was a great bit of work from the analysts who pointed it out the subtle shift in the narrative given by the killer was enough for police to launch one of the largest ever fingertip searches which involved almost 200 officers from 12 other police forces by that point it had been four weeks since lucy's dead body was found but on the first day of the search police got the exact kind of breakthrough that they had been hoping for they found a discarded plastic bag containing a blue blood stain hoodie along with a number of other items that were described in court as nicholson's murder kit the blue hoodie contained nicholson's dna as well as lucy's blood with steven being thought to have dumped the clothing some of which had been partially burnt near the brook after getting changed on his return from the murder scene on july 25th prior to the discovery of the clothing felice had no other direct evidence of nichols involvement in her killing they attested fibers from every blood stained jacket and steven's clothes which suggested direct contact with the hoodie but that simply wasn't enough to actually charge him with a crime homicide detectives had already established that hoodies of the same type were sold to two people in the southampton area and that one of them was given a present to a man who knew a friend of stevens the dna evidence was the final nail in the coffin for nicholson according to detective superintendent barton during the course of the investigation police officers had studied 11 000 hours of cctv footage examined over 2000 pieces of physical evidence and taken more than 300 written reports a herculean amount of work had given them a strong circumstantial case but in the end genetic evidence was what the police really needed to prove that stephen was lucy's killer but had stephen not been jailed over refusing to hand over his facebook password the outcome could have been very very different the 14-month jail sentence not only bought the police a great deal of time but it also potentially stopped stephen from going back to tanner's brook to move the evidence he had dumped there and it's frankly astounding that the killer of a child might well be walking the streets right now if it wasn't for something as simple as a facebook password public prosecutors were eventually granted access to steven's facebook account on the first day of his murder trial but found that he had deleted most of his messages before he was arrested as it turned out it didn't matter in the least bit if stephen gave them the password he still wouldn't be able to be charged based on the absence of the messages if he'd only gone and given police the password he might still be free to walk the streets one of the prosecutors a mr montague criticized the protracted process saying that for him the personal side the human side as we have a 13 year old child that has been murdered under ferocious circumstances and for me it's somewhat frustrating that facebook seems so unwilling to help with our investigation by recovering deleted messages facebook said it had worked closely with the investigating officers but that they agree that this legal process can be far too slow we have actually lobbied for reforms to eu us and uk laws to allow us and others to directly and more quickly provide information to uk law enforcement authorities a spokeswoman for the company said but despite the slow process police have been able to build a case against an extremely narcissistic self-centered violent predator who had torn apart a family kind enough to put a roof over his head when they could have easily turned him away he prayed on their underage daughter and when it looked like she might actually tell on him he killed her but at no point could he have expected that something is seemingly insignificant as his facebook password would actually be the thing to put him behind bars

Channel: Martin Animations

Views: 1,056,719

Keywords: horror story, instagram horror story, mcdonalds horror story, animated story, horror stories animated, animated stories compilation, horror stories compilation, animated stories, creepy stories, horror stories, horror story animated, facebook horror story

Id: Mq1GoCfA8Pc

Length: 178min 40sec (10720 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021