When I was about thirteen, my parents and I moved to an old house.
It was at least ninety years old.
It was large and it was in pretty good condition for a house that old.
I was an only child.
I got the second biggest room on the second floor.
And that room was huge.
Sometimes my parents left me at home by myself for a few hours.
Whether they were going shopping or on a date..
I always asked to stay at home.
I didn't mind staying at home, because I liked to think of myself as responsible and trustworthy.
It made me feel special.
One night, at around 6:00pm, or so, my parents had to go run some errands.
They were the kind of people who spent long hours out shopping for the best deals, and
they used a lot of coupons on whatever they could.
And I did not want to be involved in this at all.
So I decided not to come.
I stayed in my room and watched some TV.
Then at around 8:00pm, I got hungry and decided to get a snack.
Now at this point the house is very dark, so I grab my cellphone and use it as best
as I can to light up the hallway, since the hallway didn't have a light.
Now this was before cellphones had built in flashlights, so I just used all the light
my screen could give, until I made it to the kitchen.
The kitchen light had been left on by my parents.
I put my phone on the counter.
As I was walking to the pantry, I saw a man hunched down in the corner, by the back door.
He was wearing black and red clothing, and he had long, greasy unkept hair.
I didn't see his face, because his head was facing the wall.
He was holding a large knife.
He didn't notice that I had spotted him.
I wanted to scream, but I just covered my mouth and walked back upstairs, leaving my
cellphone down there.
I was not walking over to get it.
We didn't have any phones upstairs, so I walked into my room, locked the door, and hid in
my closet.
I start crying silently and start thinking the worst.
He was going to find me and kill me.
I just knew it.
Then I heard someone coming up the stairs.
Heavy footsteps.
I felt sick and I had never been so afraid in my life.
Then I heard someone open the door to my parents room, which was two rooms away from mine.
I then hear police sirens outside and I hear the door being knocked on.
I breathe a sigh of relief.
I hear the man running back down the stairs quickly and he's trying to open our back door.
Then I hear our front door being pushed down and I hear footsteps of two people coming
upstairs and they start searching our home.
The police come to my room and let me know it's safe.
I opened the door.
I later found out that our neighbors saw this man unlocking our back door with a key and
saw that he had a knife and called the police.
My parents arrived a few minutes later and my mom started hugging me and crying.
The man unfortunately escaped.
I cried and cried and I got no sleep that night.
Because the man had a key, we got the lock changed, but we eventually moved way out of
state.
I'm 23 now.
I have moved past it, but there are several questions I still have.
How did he get a key?
Why did he want to come to our house?
And what would he have done if the police showed up any later?
I am a 25 year old female and have been living with my boyfriend for the last 6 years.
This happened about 4 years ago.
I was online a lot (and still am) and I met a lot of cool people.
Many of them had rough backstories, but I always offered a listening ear and tried to
support them.
I'm going to mention that I have autism and can be pretty naive, so don't recognise certain
bad situations right away.
I ended up meeting a 24 year old guy from Australia who had just broken up with his
girlfriend, that he said was emotionally unstable, and it ended with her wanting to kill herself
and him not being able to handle it anymore.
I talked to him about it a lot and tried to help him cope with the situation.
We started to game together online and I started to see him as a friend.
But after a while, I started to notice that he was kind of acting like I was his girlfriend.
I shrugged it off, because he knew I had a boyfriend and it might've just been kindness
that I mistook.
I'm famous for being oblivious to that kind of stuff.
He started to tell me that I should break up with my boyfriend, going on long tangents
and writing me emails how my boyfriend was like his ex-girlfriend, that he abused me
mentally and physically, that he was raping me, was making my life a living hell, and
that he was going to kill me one day.
Which was all completely absurd, and I kept explaining that to him.
After a while, it was obvious that he indeed thought of me as his new girlfriend.
He made it clear we were going to spend the rest of our lives together and that he would
make sure of it.
He was convinced that me telling him to stop and leave me alone was all orchestrated by
my boyfriend, and that I was actually being held hostage.
Luckily, he didn't know my full name (or so I thought), or where I lived.
I started getting messages from random accounts with pictures of people bloodied up, saying
"this is going to happen", all with his name on the pages itself.
This went on for a while.
I begged him to stop, but he kept pushing.
I had blocked him, but he kept making new accounts to get in contact with me.
I decided to just delete my account on that site all together and not go on there anymore,
and I hoped it would go away.
But then I suddenly started to get messages on Facebook.
I never even told him my full name, and even then, I made sure my facebook is extremely
private.
I used a family nickname and I only had other family members on there.
My boyfriend didnt even HAVE a facebook account.
And like I said before: I kept my full name and location to myself.
He made about 150 pages and profiles and completely directed to me, with pictures of people killing
themselves, telling me HE was going to kill himself, complete with the overlays and banners
of "THIS IS YOUR FAULT".
It seemed like he made it his full time day-job to send me messages on different platforms.
He even found stuff like my youtube account and followed me around there.
Eventually, he started sending receipts of his schoolbooks that he had sold (of his current
school year), and later, 1 plane ticket to the airport where I actually lived close to,
and 2 back to Australia.
He kept sending "proof", like of him moving out of his apartment and putting stuff into
storage.
He told me he was coming to save me from my boyfriend who had kept me hostage, and that
he was going to kill him and take me back to Australia, so I could be save.
He had gotten rid of all ties he had, quit school, quit his job, so that we could have
a blank slate, telling me we'd have to live under the radar for a while, all the while
he kept sending pictures as "proof" of doing these things "because he loved me and wanted
to show it".
By now, I had blocked every Facebook account with his -unfortunately, extremely common-
name, and basically deleted every other online account I had.
Even though a lot were under different names, he found me everywhere.
Eventually the day came where he was taking pictures at the airport, which he was then
posting to facebook, and I immediately recognized the logos as my country's official airline.
He began talking about the actual house I lived in.
Keep in mind, I don't live in some normal place.
I lived on a industrial area in a maintenance apartment inside a huge, empty building with
only 1 other office.
The whole building was open to me and there weren't any people living remotely nearby.
He definitely couldn't have known I lived there.
He started messaging about how perfect that whole setup was for his 'plans'.
My boyfriend was aware of everything that had happened by then, and thought it was best
if maybe we'd sought out the help of police to give us some advice, but of course they
couldn't do anything and suggested that if we were scared, we'd better just go somewhere
else, and we decided to go stay at my parents's.
We went back the next day, since we had both school and work, but we saw police cars in
front of the building.
The owner informed us that someone had broken in.
This person had tried to go into the office next to our apartment, and they had an alarm
system that went off and alerted the cops.
At that point I wanted to know what the hell was going on and if he had tried to break
in, since that was our first guess.
It wasn't hard contacting him since he already send me multiple messages again on Facebook
from several different accounts.
My boyfriend contacted him and the guy agreed to have a webcam chat, and when he turned
his cam on, I immediately recognized a hallmark of our city from the window behind him.
I silently freaked out, not letting him know I was present.
My boyfriend then spend more than 7 hours talking to him.
The guy was furious and still certain my boyfriend was going to kill me, and nothing could change
his mind.
After more than 7 hours with my normally monk-calm boyfriend getting pretty annoyed at this point
because of the most stupid reasoning (the guy copy pasted whole chat conversations and
spinned them in crazy ways) the guy then started saying he was disgusted and started to throw
out profanities towards him about me, basically saying that if I was so adamant on staying
with him, I deserved what my boyfriend was going to do to me and he wouldn't mourn me,
because I had apparently ruined his, my own, our kids's lives together.
I only heard from him 1 more time after that.
A short video of him being in the hospital saying he had tried to kill himself, it was
all my fault, and I was going to bring darkness over the earth, instead of light, "like I
promised".
He said stuff like that often, and other weird spiritual promises he said I made.
I got scared again for a while, but it got silent after that.
Even though it was years ago, I'm still afraid the guy isn't over me and that he'll come
after me.
But as far as I know, his parents had him locked in a nursing home for the mentally
ill.
(I got this info a year later, when his older brother FINALLY responded to my facebook messages
to him telling him to please speak to his brother, because he was not ok.
Anyways, that's my story, and I hope I never hear from the guy, again.
My husband was almost abducted.
I think about this exact moment when he and I get in a disagreement and immediately stop
being mad at him.
The idea that I almost lost him and NEVER would have know what happened is enough to
calm even my most justified anger.
This happened about three years ago.
I was twenty-four and he was twenty-five.
It had pretty much been just me and him since we were seventeen and eighteen, so my whole
world was almost snatched away.
It was late at night and I'd just picked him up from work and we'd stopped at a Harris
Teeter for a bottle of wine and a pizza.
I had both of our cellphones in my purse because that's just how we did it when we were out
together.
He didn't like having it in his back pocket.
Also there's no way to say this without sounding weird, but, my husband is very...pretty?
I mean he's handsome but he's got long, curly black hair and a slight build.
And we both look way younger than we actually are.
It's made us targets for more than a few weirdos.
So, we're in line about to pay and he realizes he left his wallet in the car.
The store is pretty much empty and there was no one behind us so he said "he'll be right
back" and ran out into the dark parking lot.
Now, I'm anxious anyway, so when he was gone for literally 4 minutes I ran outside to look
for him.
I saw a black truck with a topper on it, driving away under the single street light and my
husband no where in sight....my knees felt like jelly.
I never understood that saying until that moment.
I ran to our car praying he was in there....thank God or whoever...he was.
He was sitting in our locked car, staring after the truck until I, very loudly, smacked
the passenger window.
He looked at me with giant terrified eyes and yelled for me to "Get in!"
He leaned over and unlocked my door and yelled at me to lock it back when I sat down.
He was shaking and freaking out and hugging me.
I finally just squeezed him and asked him "What the fuck happened?"
He asked for his phone and called 911.
I heard the story as he was telling it to the operator and it still makes me want to
throw up when I think about it.
He had walked out to the car and noticed the black truck a lane over.
We both worked in stores in that shopping center and had never been afraid of the parking
lot but, luckily, it sent up a red flag and he hurried.
As he fumbled with the keys, he heard the truck start up and figured it was leaving.
In the time it took for him to grab his wallet out of the seat and turn around, the truck
was behind him and a big man had opened the trunk.
As the man turned around to face him, my husband just fell back into our car and slammed the
door.
The man didn't try the door right away, instead he hit the window in anger and that's what
saved my husband because he managed in that moment to lock the doors.
The man just stood there for a whole minute looking around and tried opening the door
twice.
Then he paced for a few seconds then went back to the front of his truck and dug around.
The whole time my husband sat in horror without his phone.
I WISH he'd thought to honk the horn or something to scare the guy or get someone's attention
but he was too scared to think.
Finally the man just climbed I the cab and sat until I guess he saw me running out of
the store and zoomed off.
The police arrived and my husband gave a description of the truck and the man.
He was Tall, big, white, balding, dressed in all black, like a sweat suit.
The truck either didn't have a license plate or he'd covered it.
From what we know, they didn't find him and we've since moved out of the state.
So...that's how my husband was almost kidnapped for what I refuse to imagine.
I stayed awake for nights just holding him and feeling him breath.
I almost lost him.
After the shock wore away, he became rather serious about working out because the fact
that he wouldn't have been able to fight the man off haunts him.
Fuck that guy for making my husband a victim.