Number 15 My apologies for the length of this story. I've tried to cut it down some but... It is simply a long story. I'm hoping this is vague enough to remain anonymous because those involved are still out there somewhere... and I'd really prefer to not encounter them again. However... I will say that this story happened in the U·S·A. For reference, I was 20-years-old at the time, living in an apartment with my mom and little brother, while I attended community college. When we first moved in, the apartments were very well run but... within a short time the managers were transferred elsewhere, and his replacement did not have his skill at keeping undesirable types out. The police became a regular sight in our neighborhood, and it was rare a day would go by without seeing them. The woman who moved in downstairs from us began openly dealing drugs. People would come and go at all hours, and leave stuffing little bags of various substances into their pockets. Mostly weed, but definitely other stuff as well. They could not have been more obvious if they tried. And there was always a crowd of shady-looking men with large, unfriendly dogs hanging around the yard, or... even sitting on our stairs !!! They'd act like it was a personal insult if we interrupted them to walk up or down our stairs, and would be generally quite intimidating. The breaking point didn’t come until their customers started getting the wrong address and coming to our door instead. We’d be sitting in the living room and hear footsteps come up the stairs, and the doorknob would turn, and jiggle against the lock. We became religious about keeping the door locked tight. One night... I was home alone, and somebody started just beating on the door... not knocking, it was more like he thought it was a punching bag all the while screaming barely-comprehensible obscenities !!! I grabbed the biggest butcher knife out of the kitchen and shouted through the door that I was calling 911, and he ran away. In hindsight I probably should have actually called, but... I was just relieved he’d gone, and since I hadn’t seen what he looked like at all, I figured it wouldn’t be much use. After that though, I always pushed the couch in front of the door before I went to bed. My mom had had enough of this point ! She tried going to the manager first, and was met with a total lack of interest from her. So she decided there was nothing to be done but contact the police about it herself. So she called about it, and got off the phone looking happy, because theeeey, at least, seemed to take her seriously, and promised to investigate. The first sign of trouble came the next night. There was a lot of thumping and bumping downstairs, and a peek out the window showed people going in and out of the apartment, carrying cardboard boxes to a dented van on the street. Bright and early the next morning, the police raided the place and... you guessed it... clean as a whistle ! At first, we didn’t realize the implication of this. When it started back up again a few days later, Mom called the cops again and... the same thing happened ! At this point we realized it probably wasn’t a coincidence. Somebody in the local police department was most likely tipping them off. One of the curses of a small town. I was angry and disappointed, but... at least we’d tried, right? It never hurt to try… ah ! I wish... About a week later, I was getting ready for an evening class. I'd just gotten out of the shower, and I was in my bedroom in a bathrobe... picking out what I wanted to wear. I heard a loud banging on the front door but... I didn't think much of it; we'd been expecting a package and the UPS man always knocked loudly. My mom's footsteps went to answer it, and I hear her say something. I couldn't make out the words, but her tone caught my attention, and I felt like something was wrong. I reached for my door, but before I could open it it flew open in my face. All my shocked brain could grasp was : “huge man with a gun in my room”, before I was grabbed by the shoulders and flung to the floor. I honestly thought the druggies downstairs had come to get us once and for all. I thought I was about to be raped and murdered. At this point I should mention, I'd had an issue with one of my wrists for years due to a childhood injury. I'd had it operated on twice, and this was not more than a few months after the second operation. Naturally, I managed to land with my full weight on that wrist, and something crunched horribly. I did what any tough person would do, and immediately burst into tears and sat there clutching my wrist waiting to die. I guess I must not have looked very threatening like that, because he stepped back a bit. And that’s when I saw the "POLICE" on the front of his vest. The next few minutes were a bit of a blur. Somehow, I was herded out into my living room where my mom was, and the cop left without saying more than “Wait here!” I was completely dazed, Mom was pretty much having hysterics, and there was all kinds of shouting and activity going on outside. After a short while, the cop returned… and informed us, to paraphrase : “Sorry, wrong address.” “Shit happens, we can’t be perfect all the time.” “My name is Officer Shinken, here’s my card, you can call if you have any questions.” And then he just left! I went straight to the emergency room and spent the next two hours getting my wrist x-rayed and put into a splint, and then I went to math class, because, you know, I didn’t know what else to do, and I was terrified of being at home. Needless to say, I learned nothing whatsoever, but the support of my teacher and classmates was reassuring. The next morning, somebody knocked on the door. When my mom answered, it was Officer Shinken again. When I heard his voice I started hyperventilating and went and hid in the bathroom ! So I didn’t hear what was said, but I heard when Mom slammed the door. She was absolutely furious. I had never seen her look so angry. Apparently, good old Officer Shinken had brought along a carefully prepared document he wished for us to sign. It basically said we understood that it was all a terrible mistake, and that we would not be seeking legal action. She told him to go to hell and shut the door in his face. Ten minutes later, the phone rang. It was one of the nurses at the emergency room, saying somebody claiming to be law enforcement had just come by trying to get copies of my ER visit records, but they didn’t have permission to release those, and if I wanted him to have them I’d have to come and sign the forms… OH HELL NO !!! Further questions revealed that yes, the man matched Officer Shinken’s description, and furthermore, he had told the nurse that he was “NOT the officer involved” but was investigating the incident. I started to find that pretty much everyone that I told my story to would get a funny look on their face and say, “This cop...was his name Officer Shinken?” And then they would launch into their own horror story about him. My high school teacher said he shot one of her former students during a marijuana bust, and left him on the ground to bleed to death, but the other officer on the scene did first aid and saved his life. One of our neighbors said he dragged said neighbor’s disabled uncle down a flight of stairs by his feet, hitting his head on every concrete step. Another neighbor said Officer Schinken pulled him out of the shower by his hair and held a gun to his head, over a parole violation. And Google said he’d once been fired from Nearby City for shooting a handcuffed man in the head, killing him. He claimed it was somehow self-defense, and was fired but never charged with any crime. The medical bills for the ER visit and such ended up being over seven grand, and I didn’t have insurance, so I basically had no choice but to file a suit. I found myself a lawyer and submitted a claim. And that’s when the shit really hit the fan. We started getting disturbing phone calls at all hours of the night. Sometimes just silence at the other end, or the sound of somebody breathing, and sometimes graphically sexual comments. When we stopped answering the phone, they’d just let it ring until the machine picked up, then immediately hang up and do it again. My mom went to her car one morning and opened the door, only to discover the handle had been coated in some kind of caustic chemical. She washed it off quickly, but still ended up with burns and an emergency room visit. I’d just gotten my permit and was out for driving practice, when it began to rain as I went down the highway. I flipped on the windshield wipers and discovered they’d been coated with grimy motor oil -- it smeared across the windshield and completely obscured my vision. Fortunately the road was empty enough I was able to slam the brakes and pull to the side without getting in an accident. Other things started happening too -- less severe, but sinister given the context above. Somebody cut out a bunch of Metal Mulisha skull designs and tacked them to our wall or pushed them under the door at night; (“WTF? I still have no idea what that was supposed to accomplish”). Furniture was stolen off the porch, my boots vanished when I left them out there, and, oddly, several pounds of weed in a plastic sack appeared on our porch one morning. My mom called the manager to get it, without going outside. For once in her life the lady did something useful and actually fetched it and threw it in the dumpster. I have never felt so helpless in my life. What was I going to do...call the police? It was around this time that a friend who lived abroad suggested I come stay with him for a while for my own safety. I dropped out of school and left the country for six months while the lawsuit worked its way through the courts. My mother and brother moved in with family, and then to another town, without submitting a forwarding address. Eventually my tourist visa ran out and I had to come home. I was a complete nervous wreck, and I ended up settling out of court for a relatively small sum of money just to make it be over. My lawyer got a copy of the search warrant they’d used. It was riddled with grammatical errors and, and switched between my apartment number, 18, and the number of the unit down the street (25), at random. The ‘suspect’ was somebody with an entirely different name, who looked entirely different from any of us, and who had apparently sold some oxycontin pills. She lived in Unit 25. I saw a copy of her driver’s license. It said right on the front of it, in nice clear letters, “UNIT 25” as her address. I dunno, I have no proof. But it was obvious that somebody had been tipping off our drug-dealers downstairs, and I often wonder if the ‘wrong’ number on that warrant was not a mistake at all. Perhaps it was meant as retaliation for trying to get their friends in trouble. I've now regained full use of my hand, which my doctor had told me might never happen. I no longer have a heart attack at loud noises, and I only feel slightly uneasy when I see police uniforms, rather than having full-on panic attacks. It's six years later, and I'm only now beginning to reclaim my life, kick the PTSD, and going back to finish school. I feel like I lost the best part of my twenties to these jerks, and I'm still bitter about it. I currently live "with friends" in an informal situation. My real address is not on any documentation, and I get all my mail in a PO box in another town. Depending on which document you're looking at, I supposedly live in five different places scattered from one end of the county to the other. And I'm not going to change that until I move a lot further away from where this all happened. As far as I know, nobody involved ever faced any sort of consequences. Number 14 A few years ago, I was at one of the lowest points in my life. My wife had left me, so I was alone, heartbroken and depressed. I don't have many friends, so I had nowhere to go. I would just walk around stores for hours so I wouldn't have to be at home by myself thinking about how shitty my life was. I very nearly committed suicide on more than one occasion but somehow talked myself out of it. During this time, I happened across an adult webcam site that I would hang out on, not only for the obvious reason, but also because you could actually chat with people. Eventually I started broadcasting myself. If you've never been to one of these sites, think Twitch but with nudity. People can view your cam, tip you and subscribe to be notified when you're online. I didn't have many people in my room at first, but eventually I started to get a few anonymous viewers, and it was kind of exciting that someone was watching me. Before long, I was up to a dozens of viewers and some subscribers. I even started getting some tips and making a little money doing something that, let's face it, I was gonna do every evening anyway. It was mostly guys watching me of course, but even though I'm straight, it didn't bother me too much. It gave me people to talk to at least. For time to time, however, I would get females, or at least guys saying they were female. Eventually a girl named Brit started stopping by regularly. She was different than most of the people I met on the site because she actually seemed interested in talking to me and I, of course, enjoyed the attention. Whenever she'd stop by, the whole room would become a lot more fun. We started private messaging and I even made her a moderator for my room. She asked me if I had KiK, which at the time I'd never even heard of, but she explained it was a texting app that you don't have to give out your number to use. So we started chatting offline using it. We would talk for hours. I found out she lived halfway across the country, which I actually liked because there would be no pressure to meet in person right away. We sent pictures, (and she was very attractive), and at some point we began sexting with one another. Even though I doubted much would ever really come of it, it was great for me because it gave me someone to talk to and it was really helping me rebuild my shattered self esteem and confidence. This went on for a few months and eventually we started talking less and less. I had kind of expected that this wasn't going to go anywhere so it didn't bother me when she stopped responding altogether. I had never held any illusions that this was going to be a long term relationship. I figured she had found someone real near her and decided that someone she could actually be with was better than a long distance fling with someone she'd never met in person. It was fine, by this point I had met a few girls myself, so I wasn't too upset. I did miss chatting with her sometimes because I had really enjoyed talking to her and she'd been there for me during a pretty dark time. Anyway, I went on with my life and started dating someone and we ended up going on a trip to the beach together. A couple of days after I got back, I got a message from Brit asking if I was in Florida. What dafuq ? How would she even know I was in Florida? I said no, but I had been there last week. She said she was there now and we must've just missed each other. We talked for a bit, and she asked me where I had stayed and told me she was just down the street from that hotel. When I told her that I had been there with someone, she got pretty upset and then stopped messaging me again. I was a little confused, and more than a little weirded out that she had known where I had been, but I didn't think too much of it. I told myself it must've just been a strange coincidence and forgot about it. Then things took a turn for the worse. A few weeks later I get another message from Brit late at night after my girlfriend had gone to sleep. its said : “Dafuq is SHE?!” I had no idea how to respond. I asked her what dafuq she was talking about and she went on to describe my girlfriend and ask me why I thought I could get away with cheating on her. I was literally floored. Not only had I never been in an actual relationship with Brit, I had never even met her in person. On top of that, she had stopped speaking to me for months and now suddenly she knew what my girlfriend looked like and was accusing me of cheating on her. I expressed all this to her and then asked her how she knew what my girlfriend looked like, thinking she was facebook stalking me or something. Her reply made my jaw drop and felt like somebody had just tossed a brick into the pit of my stomach. “Because I can see her in your fucking bed.” I immediately closed the blinds and checked the house and made sure the doors and windows were locked. I told her that we had never been in a relationship and that we were most definitely not in one now. I asked her to please leave me alone and not contact me again. She just responded “LOL” and a smily face. It was at this point that I noticed the light on my webcam was on. She had, somehow, hacked into my computer and turned my fucking webcam on. I unplugged it and threw it in the closet. Brit then sent me another message : “Awww! You're not fun anymore.” I reiterated that this was unacceptable, I did not want to talk to her again and that if she didn't leave me alone I would contact the police. Then I blocked her from every form of communication I had ever used and uninstalled. The next day I had my cable company change my IP address and I haven't heard from her since, but I'm still paranoid that this isn't over. Number 13 To start out, this story sort of takes place on and off again throughout most of my life. It starts out as a typical “my parents got a divorce when I was young” situation, but it unfolded into so much more. In fact I'm still picking up pieces of everything that happened. Just a warning, there's a lot of backstory that I feel it's important to understanding what happened. As it stands now, my father is dead. It was ruled a suicide, but I think that was only half of what happened. I'll talk about everything that lead up to this, but more importantly, I believe that Mary definitely had a hand in what happened. My mother and father divorced when I was around four. Almost everyone I know has gone through some sort of similar situation. I have two brothers, one older and one younger. We saw him about every other weekend, he paid child support. You get the gist... One weekend visit, my father introduces us to a woman he's seeing, named Mary. Her eyes and hair are dark, and her skin is pale. She had an obsession with the color red. Something was immediately off to me, but I didn't really start to know what she was capable of... until later. My mother hated her, but she never bad-mouthed my father or Mary in front of my brothers and I. She felt that it was important for us to make judgments for ourselves, even if this woman was part of the reason her marriage was broken up. We continued to visit what was now "Dad and Mary's house" on our scheduled time with Dad. I always associated their house with red. Their house was always decorated with strawberries. Mary liked red sheets, and she had red sweaters and pants. It was weird ! Mary was just unnecessary drama for a while. Things like buying us toys that we could only keep at dad and Mary's house or saying that she and my father wanted to custody of us instead of my mom… I feel like these things were harmless in a way. Every divorcing couple probably has some sort of variation. Things carried on like this for a couple of years. We would have a special variation of Christmas or Easter or whatever aside from what we celebrated with my mom. I was about seven or eight when I remember the first incident that confirmed that I knew this wasn't right. My little brother was a super curious child, and he was about four. He had scooted a dining table chair to the fridge to get to a cereal box on top, and when he reached up, he pulled down a handgun instead of a box of cereal. I panicked and got my dad, who acted really funny about it. My memory is fuzzy, but I remember going home early that weekend. My dad didn't know the gun was there because it was Mary's. It was at this point that my mom started to have trouble with us going over there. My father got worse about being able to come pick us up. He was unreliable for the most part to begin with, but I know that he was ten times worse when he was around Mary. My mom told me later, when I was much older, that Mary called our house around the time of the gun incident and said, “I want your life.” My mother is a really tough lady. She grew up in East LA in California. And this scared her. She was going to get a restraining order soon. I guess what Mary meant was that she wanted my mom's stability. Even as a single mom with three kids, she was doing very well for herself, and even dating. But even so, how long had she obsessed with my mom before she and my father even got divorced ? What did that even mean? Not long after the phone call, my mom heard her car being smashed into one night. Someone had taken a brick and smashed the driver window. Nothing was taken. I know it was Mary ! We had no way to prove it, but I just know !!! My dad and Mary had a baby. Her name is Madison. I only remember holding or playing with her for so long. I can't imagine all the shit she's been through. My mom met and married my step-dad pretty soon after that, and they decided that it would be best to move to Florida. We had other family there, and there weren't many jobs where we were living in Tennessee. I don't remember any problems at all when we were so far from my dad and Mary. We stayed for about a year, and then we moved back to Tennessee. My step-dad was able to get a better job again, and we were closer to my mom's parents. This is when the phone calls start. As soon as we moved back, we would get phone calls where someone would just listen for a few minutes, and then hang up. The numbers were always blocked… but I'm sure it was her ! She always knew where we lived because we started seeing my dad again. The calls continued for years. It became like an inside joke. We all knew who it was, but there wasn't anything we could do. My father denied it. Any time I asked him about it, he took her side. We fell into this thing where my mom was the bad guy, and any time I questioned my dad and Mary's behavior, they were sure my mom was putting me up to it. Things escalated one night when my dad came to pick us up for a visit. My mom and Mary ended up getting into a fist fight, where Mary swung first, and my mom punched her so hard she fell backwards. My brothers and I watched from the apartment we were living in at the time. Mom went immediately to the police, but my dad and Mary never even called. My mom didn't press any charges and the whole incident sort of faded away. We ended up moving into a big house a while after that, where we still are today. Dad and Mary started to have problems and split up. I thought maybe she would be gone for good, or at least gone for the most part, but she never really went away. My dad started to become a person we could somewhat rely on again when she was gone. I got to know my little sister more, (the baby they had), and things were OK. She started coming around again, though. Whenever she was with my dad in front of us, she would whisper in his ear. My dad would drink more. He became physically ill-looking, and would start to gain weight. We could always tell when Mary was around because the difference was so drastick. He even officially divorced her at one point, but it was obvious that they still got together off and on. My brothers and I went on with our lives, and we became too old for visiting the way we were. Whole weekend visits became just going to see my dad for an evening. The whole time, however, the phone calls never stopped. They weren't as frequent, but they were there in the background. Like a reminder that she was always there lurking. When I got in the High School, visits from my dad just about stopped all together. We usually talked on the phone here and there, and I saw him when I had events like a marching band competition, a formal dance. Milestones... like graduating High School. It was pretty common to go awhile without hearing from him sometimes. Mary was only a thought. I hadn't seen her in years. I never saw her anywhere... at all. The phone calls had stopped, but only because we had gotten rid of the house phone. I was a freshman in college, and I remember it being right around Halloween of 2009. I was shopping with my aunt for some cheap decorations at the Wal-Mart by my house. I saw a woman walking slowly behind us, and my aunt and I both did a double take. It was Mary. She was totally following us around the store. She looked like she was maybe 50 years older than when I last saw her and her clothes were disheveled. My aunt kept elbowing me to go talk to her because we weren't exactly sure if this really was her. It could have been someone who just looked really similar. I worked up the nerve and went up to her. “Is your name Mary ?” I asked... “Yes it is ! Hi, Sam !!! How are you ?!!” Using my name like that really caught me off guard. She knew who I was, and wasn't bothered to talk to me. She didn't even act like she was being caught. I asked her if she had talked to my dad lately, because it had been awhile since I heard from. She swore up and down that she hadn't spoken to him for months, which I later found out was a lie ! This was the beginning of my dad going missing. After I saw her, something happened, and it's hard to pin down what, but he completely disappeared. His cell phone was shut off. And when I called his work at the casino, (where he had been working for over 15 years), they said that he was no longer working there, and couldn't tell me why. My mom and brothers and I called the police to file a missing persons report. We didn't have to wait because it had already been several weeks since we had heard from. And we looked and asked all over. Everything lead back to Mary most likely being the last one to see him. By the time we started talking to her, it was mid-November. My mom and I called Mary, and she would tell us that she, in fact, had seen my dad on the night after Halloween ! Mary told us that he was making a noose and this would be the last time anyone ever saw him. We honestly didn't know what to believe. My dad was an alcoholic. It wasn't uncommon for him to say drastick stuff. But we never considered suicide. When we told the detectives what Mary told us, they had her come in for questioning. She had told the detectives a completely different story, and her dates kept changing. There wasn't any evidence of anything, though, so there wasn't much they could do. The detectives did however tell us that we shouldn't talk to her any more. To quote them : “we don't know what she's capable of !” Things went on like this until they found him on January 4th; 2010. My dad was found dead in a storage unit. He had pulled his car in, shut the unit door, and let it run until he died. And he had been there for sixty-three days ! There were several suicide notes, all dated for November 2nd, one for my mom, one for each of his children. But there was an especially long note for Mary, where he doted on her and talked about what a wonderful woman she was. The suicide note even said for her to take any insurance money and use it on herself. The date on the notes was so close to the date where Mary said she had seen him. There are a million things that could have happened, but I know that she had something to do with it. Even if my father really did kill himself, I know that she helped push him over the edge. I'm not one to just blame someone. I know my father was a troubled man. He was an alcoholic, and he was a depressant most of the time; (usually because of Mary). But there's something so frustrating and horrendous about this woman, and there's zero evidence for me to prove anything against her. She wasn't allowed to come to the funeral. My mom and parts of his (father's) family put everything together. There wasn't anyone he knew that hadn't heard of her, and everyone felt that she was a bad woman ! I found a Facebook profile of hers months after they found my dad. There were only five or six photos of her and some guy obviously happy, and they were all dated for January 4th, 2010. The next year, on January 4th, 2011, she showed up at my family's house. We didn't let her in the house, and she kept saying something about having some stuff of my dad's in the car. We told her to leave or else we would call the police. That night, someone put red tissue paper in and around our mailbox. Even the next year, 2012, she called my mom and asked her to meet her in a Sonic Burger parking lot. She said she had a box of my dad’s stuff to give us. My mom made my step-dad go instead of her, but she never showed. I feel like she wanted to do something bad to my mom. The next year, we didn't hear from. I did some research, and it turns out that she was put in jail for making meth. It made a lot of sense for some of the things, but I still have so many questions and issues that are unanswered. Supposedly, she was let out sometime last year, (summer of 2014 I think). And it says that she was let out for good behavior and rehab. I found a different Facebook that showed her with some other family. God help them if she's pulling the same crap as she did with mine. Today, I have no idea where she is. Number 12 Former Air Force here. I was a munitions systems technician, and I worked in a very large storage facility, (called "a bomb dump"), in Europe. This place had dozens of buildings, including many earth-covered magazines called "igloos", housing thousands of bombs. This facility was pretty big. It was about nine square miles I think. An interesting thing about this "bomb dump" was that it was completely forested, and populated with wildlife. Most are deforested because of the fire hazards, but the country that this "bomb dump" was in required that the area be maintained as a natural preserve. Now, despite having a small deer population, this forest wasn't nice and clear. Most forests have a fire or two to clear them out every twenty years or so. This forest had played host to munitions storage since World War Two, and had no fires since. It was thick, dark, and dank. The trees were so overgrown that you would be hard pressed to see ten yards in a straight line. Anyway... it was a pretty creepy place at night; (hell : it was pretty creepy in the day time). Twice a day, we had to run a security check to make sure that no holes had been cut through the fence, and all of the buildings were closed and locked. However, this wasn't the job of the swing shifters. We were a skeleton crew. The checks were ran by the morning and afternoon crews, (unless of course they fucked up... ...which they did one afternoon). The one guy in Control doesn't realize that no PM security check was ran until about 1:00am. Since no one is working dispatch, he just walks down the hall to our office and asks us to run it. We had finished all of our work early, so we were playing split-screen Halo (which was the new at the time). Me and my friend Brian volunteered to take a truck out and run the check. We grabbed a walkie talkie and a flashlight and headed out.
