17x16: The Car Crash That Saved My Life

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER_00] This podcast contains adult language and content. The stories shared in this podcast are told from the perspective of the authors. Their accounts and opinions are personal and do not reflect the stance of the production team. If you have a story to share, send it to letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com. Enjoy the show.

[00:00:43] [SPEAKER_00] Back in late 2014, around October or November, I was 18 years old and very much enjoying my new freedom from the confines of my childhood. At the time, I had just got my driver's license and drove a 98 Chevy sports van. I did everything in this van, and because I had a hangout spot on wheels, I started making a lot of new friends.

[00:01:12] [SPEAKER_00] One night, it was late when I decided to drive some 25 odd miles to see these friends. Between my town and theirs are just quiet, dark country roads. Every once in a while, you'd pass a driveway with the street light on the property. But that was it. Now, ever since I was a kid, there had always been one road around the county that people liked to talk about. They called it Swamp Road.

[00:01:42] [SPEAKER_00] The road is located right past the local high school in the county closest to my town. This school is in the middle of nowhere, and it's very eerie at night. The road itself is dark and quiet, located right in the middle of a large patch of woods. So at night, it's even more terrifying. And you guessed it. I had to take it to get to my friends. As I pulled onto the road, nothing seemed off.

[00:02:13] [SPEAKER_00] Swamp Road is a commonly used shortcut to where I was going, and I typically had no issue driving down it. The road has several hills, then comes to an opening out of the woods, then banks right, then left again before hitting more hills, and finally, a stop sign. I was hitting the last hill before the opening, at the edge of the woods, and my eyes locked onto a bright white sheet on the side of the road.

[00:02:44] [SPEAKER_00] It was so distractingly bright, I almost ran off the road. I drove past this white sheet and continued on. But I started to think about it. Seeing things like bags on the side of the road always makes me wonder. What if it's money, or someone threw out a dog that they didn't want, or something worse? Well, my curiosity got the best of me, and once I hit the stop sign, I decided to turn back and see what it really was.

[00:03:14] [SPEAKER_00] Right before this turn is a small field entryway that I parked at, and for some reason, I decided to shut off the van and turn off the headlights. I guess it was my teen bravado of not being afraid. The walk back to the edge of the woods was kind of long. The only reason I didn't want to park closer is because a car could potentially come over the hill and get freaked out and crash because of the van being parked there.

[00:03:41] [SPEAKER_00] So I parked a little ways back and walked towards the edge of the woods. The moon was pretty bright so it wasn't too scary. But once I got closer to the woods, some of the trees, that were not quite dead yet, covered up my light, making it nearly impossible to see. I pulled out my phone and turned on the flashlight. The sheet was completely gone. Nothing was there.

[00:04:08] [SPEAKER_00] My heart sank at first, but I thought that maybe it hadn't been on this hill. Perhaps it had been on the next hill up. So as I was walking up that hill, I heard a rustling in the woods. I didn't even get time to think. And I didn't know if this sound was going away or coming towards me. But all I remember was hearing something running fast in the woods and sounding like it was dragging something along the ground.

[00:04:38] [SPEAKER_00] I booked it back to the van and started it up, then immediately got out of there. During the drive to my friends, I tried to tell myself that whatever I just witnessed was completely understandable and rational. Maybe it was a sheet full of trash and an animal had come and dragged it away, but got scared when it heard me walking towards it. I arrived at the park that I usually met my friends at and waited for them to get there.

[00:05:08] [SPEAKER_00] I got out of the van to throw something away near the bathrooms when I saw wet handprints on the rear and side of the van. It had not been an animal. To this day, this is the scariest thing that has ever happened to me.

[00:05:44] [SPEAKER_00] I moved into a new apartment a couple of months ago. After a painful divorce and a six-month-long stint of staying with my parents again, I finally managed to scrape together enough for the first and last month's rent, along with the security deposit. The complex was small and situated just outside of town. And being on the second story made moving a little bit more complicated than I had hoped.

[00:06:13] [SPEAKER_00] A friend and I had lugged all my stuff up the stairs and into the apartment. And that was that. Everything was pretty much normal for the first week or two. However, after the second week, an extremely unsettling event started happening. Remember how I said my apartment was on the second story? Imagine my surprise when a tight rhythmic rapping would come echoing from my window almost every single night.

[00:06:43] [SPEAKER_00] The first few times it happened, I attempted to rationalize it by telling myself that it was just some sort of weird noise coming from one of my neighbors. Or maybe the sound of the building settling. However, that rationalization quickly diminished when the knocking would come every night at the exact same time. Every night at 10.47 on the dot, here came the knocking.

[00:07:10] [SPEAKER_00] A quick series of bangs that would jolt me awake nearly every single time. For a week, I let this happen before one night, when it all came to a head. You see, each night, when the knocking came, I would check my window and find nothing. No bird, bat, or critter. Just the dark, open night sky. This night, however, there was 100% something at that window.

[00:07:39] [SPEAKER_00] I stood there directly by it, waiting for 10.47 to come around. And when it did, just like clockwork, so did the first knock. I quickly pulled my curtains open, revealing an elderly man, hollowly staring at me. His eyes were bloodshot and beady, and his mouth curled into a sickening smile the moment that he laid eyes on me. He began knocking again, harder this time. Loud bangs.

[00:08:10] [SPEAKER_00] I was completely frozen. Then, I nearly tore the curtain off the wall, pulling them closed before immediately calling the cops. When they arrived, they did an extensive search of the property including my apartment, just to be completely sure. Go figure. They found no trace of the old man. But they told me that they would keep their units in the area just in case he decided to come back.

[00:08:39] [SPEAKER_00] I didn't sleep a single minute that night. The sight of the old man's face was completely seared into my memory. The next morning, I found that multiple overlapping fingerprints had been smudged across the window. The sight of it made me absolutely sick to my stomach. It hasn't happened since that night, which is the only reason I'm still in the apartment to begin with,

[00:09:05] [SPEAKER_00] but this was by far the most terrifying and surreal thing that has ever happened to me. This story took place in the fall of my senior year of high school. I was 17, and I'm a female.

[00:09:34] [SPEAKER_00] I was in my high school marching band, and because I was one of the only ones in my friend group to have a driver's license, I would take my friend home so her family didn't have to come get her. She lived a couple of minutes away from me, so I would drop her off, and then most of the time, we would sit in the car for an hour or two. Just talking about teenage girl stuff, drama, life experiences. An important detail to note, because it was the fall,

[00:10:04] [SPEAKER_00] probably October, and band practice would get done at 8, it would be completely dark by the time we got to her house. On this night, I took my friend home, and we were sitting in the car outside her house, probably around 9 or 10 p.m. She lived in a cul-de-sac street with maybe 10 to 12 houses on it. While we were chatting, a yellow Jeep turned onto her street and parked in a driveway three houses down.

[00:10:32] [SPEAKER_00] My friend had previously had bad experiences on her street, so she knew everyone's cars. But she turned to me and said, No one living there has a yellow Jeep. I had a bad gut feeling, so I suggested that we take a quick drive around another street to give the guy time to leave or get out of his car. She agreed, and we drove around for a minute or two before coming up on her street again.

[00:11:01] [SPEAKER_00] Just as I was about to make the right turn back onto her street, we saw that the Jeep had pulled out of the driveway and was parked in the middle of the road. As soon as the driver saw our car, he started to drive toward us. I quickly backed up and drove us the long way around, which took about 5 to 10 minutes. As we were driving, we passed an elk lodge with a bar. In the parking lot was the yellow Jeep.

[00:11:30] [SPEAKER_00] It was sitting between two parking lanes, almost like it was trying to see what cars were passing by. I quickly drove back to my friend's house and dropped her off, and her brother agreed to keep a lookout. After that, I drove home, which took me past the elk lodge again. And when I looked into the parking lot, the Jeep was gone. It hadn't even been two minutes. I thought this was the end of the story.

[00:12:00] [SPEAKER_00] But the next day, I was talking to the same friend about how bizarre and creepy that whole experience was, and she had even more to add. She had been telling her aunt about what happened, and her aunt revealed that her sister had seen a yellow Jeep outside their house, just sitting and watching the kids play in the front yard. When the sister had walked up to the car to get a look at the guy's face, he drove off.

[00:12:29] [SPEAKER_00] Because of these two encounters, my friend and her aunt went to the police to report it. After the police investigated a bit, they told my friend there were only two registered yellow Jeeps in our small town, and one of them belonged to a guy who had previously been investigated for following three girls walking to a store. Unfortunately, not much came from filing the police report, but the experience stayed with me as one of the creepier things that I have been through.

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[00:14:37] [SPEAKER_00] My boyfriend at the time and I were on a road trip and we took a day to visit the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. For anyone who hasn't been there, you drive down a long road that winds through the landscape and you can exit at various stops along the way to view different points of interest. We were only at our second or maybe third stop when we encountered the creep.

[00:15:05] [SPEAKER_00] This particular stop had a wide parking lot with a handful of large educational signs at either end and a path that led up to a historic site and various vantage points. As we made our way up the path to the main site, a man was coming down towards the parking lot. He looked pretty much exactly like Mr. Clean, except in a red t-shirt and jeans.

[00:15:32] [SPEAKER_00] He was tall, upwards of six foot two. As we passed each other, he muttered something odd under his breath, but it was clearly intended to get our attention. My boyfriend turned around and asked him what he said. The man looked at us for a moment, almost stunned. Then, it was like he decided to come up with something else to say, because he pointed into the distance and said, What's that over there?

[00:16:03] [SPEAKER_00] The only thing over there was some kind of utility box. The road through the park and the desert. We brushed him off, saying that we didn't know, and we turned to continue up the path when he called out, See you later, pretty girl. There's hardly a woman alive who hasn't had something like this said to her ten thousand times before,

[00:16:29] [SPEAKER_00] but this felt unusually sinister, and it set my nerves on edge. We both decided to ignore him though, and we headed up to the rest of the site. After fifteen or twenty minutes of looking around, I finally had to admit to my boyfriend that I felt like we were being watched. He nodded and said, That guy hasn't left yet. He's just been watching us the entire time.

[00:16:58] [SPEAKER_00] From where we were standing up on the hill, I could see the parking lot. I noticed our creep standing near an educational sign that was off on its own at the far edge of the parking lot, but he was clearly positioned so that he could see us up on the hill. We were both bugged by it. But we resolved to not let it ruin our time, or to get too bent out of shape about it.

[00:17:25] [SPEAKER_00] We took our time at the shop, shook off our nerves, and by the time we went back to the parking lot he had gone. We drove another mile or two to the next vantage point, which included a number of petroglyphs on a cliff wall that you can see using binoculars. You have to take a narrow road into the parking lot, which creates a bit of a bottleneck. As we were about to enter, a blue RAV4 pulled up in front of us and blocked us from going in.

[00:17:55] [SPEAKER_00] It was the same creep. After a few moments of intense eye contact with my boyfriend, who would later say, without a trace of exaggeration, that he felt like the guy wanted to kill him, the guy slowly pulled away and let us enter the lot. He left, so we told ourselves we were overthinking it. But we still decided to spend a good long time where we were.

[00:18:20] [SPEAKER_00] That way, he would be well ahead of us, and we'd stop running into each other. Our next stop, a mile loop hike, was, if I remember, about three and a half miles away. We figured we'd spent long enough at the petroglyphs. Even if the guy was at our destination, he'd either be close to done with the hike or would be leaving by now. Unfortunately, we were wrong. He had waited for us.

[00:18:49] [SPEAKER_00] About two miles up the road, we spotted the blue RAV4. It was pulled over onto the shoulder. The man was standing next to the car, sort of looking vaguely into the distance. The landscape is beautiful in the park, even though there was nothing especially spectacular about this spot. Maybe he was just taking it all in. As we drove by, however, I craned my neck to look out our back window.

[00:19:17] [SPEAKER_00] He turned to watch us and stared at our car as we drove away, until we rounded a corner and couldn't see him anymore. When we got to the parking lot and got out to take the hike, we were both feeling rattled. My boyfriend, who normally tolerated creepiness, and others to a fault,

[00:19:37] [SPEAKER_00] was so shaken by the vibes that this guy gave off that he actually stashed a little window-breaking hammer from his car's safety kit in his hoodie pocket, just in case we needed something for self-defense. The hike itself is down at the bottom of the valley. You walk down this steep, winding path to the bottom, where the path then splits and forms a circuit

[00:20:02] [SPEAKER_00] at an area that includes cool, painted rocks dotted with petrified wood. We made it all the way down to the beginning of the loop when we noticed the guy up at the top of the cliff off the parking lot looking down our way. We were about halfway around the loop when we saw the guy was at the base of the hill about to start. We were actually relieved, because we knew that we would be out of there before him this time,

[00:20:31] [SPEAKER_00] and we felt like we could finally shake him and stop feeling weirded out. For most of the loop, you can see the whole path and the whole hill up to the parking lot. But for the middle section of the walk, you're shielded from view behind the little hills in different topography. When we emerged near the end of the loop, we were still feeling good, but took a quick look to place our creep before heading back up.

[00:21:01] [SPEAKER_00] We didn't see him anywhere. Maybe he decided not to do the walk. Maybe he was behind one of those little hills. As we made our way back up the steep path, we noticed him up at the top, just waiting by this informational sign. Even as we went up, switchback after switchback, he stayed put, apparently intently reading the sign. As we got closer, we noticed that he was now holding something.

[00:21:30] [SPEAKER_00] As we got to the top of the path, where we knew we would have to pass within inches of him again, we tightened up, locked our arms, and prepared to march right past him as quickly as we could. Even though a lot of people were walking by him, coming and going, he waited for us to cross his path. It turned out that in his hands, he was holding a window-washing squeegee and a spray bottle with something in it.

[00:21:59] [SPEAKER_00] As we tried to walk past him, he turned to us and said, Hey, can you help me? I'm running out of time. For what, he didn't say. He started to hold up the spray bottle and squeegee. My boyfriend wasn't in the mood and said, No, leave us alone. As we kept walking. The guy smiled and replied, Well, fuck you too. Nice ass though, both of you. He then started following us, determined.

[00:22:29] [SPEAKER_00] He was gaining on us by the time we got to the car, and I had barely made it inside and locked the door before he was right next to my window staring in at me. Even though I was freaked the hell out, and my instinct was to just keep my head down, I didn't want to give him the upper hand and let him make me cower. So I looked up and stared right into his eyes. He was right up next to my window staring in, unblinking.

[00:22:57] [SPEAKER_00] His hand was held up in a frozen wave and he was smiling. When I looked into his eyes, the first thought I had was that he wanted to skin me alive. It sounds completely insane to say, but I think anyone who's had an encounter with someone like this will relate. When someone means you harm, there's something that kicks in and you feel it in this deep, strange way.

[00:23:24] [SPEAKER_00] My boyfriend had the presence of mind to start snapping pictures of the guy, who then moved around our car to try and keep us from driving away. My boyfriend started revving the engine, trying to get him to move, but it didn't work. He just kept blocking us. So we started inching the car forward. He still wouldn't move. We tapped him. He stumbled back a little, but kept standing there.

[00:23:53] [SPEAKER_00] Then we noticed a family sitting in the car nearby, staring at us. The creep noticed too, smiled that nasty smile, and gave us just enough room to get out of our parking spot. As we passed the family, the man in the front seat gave us an encouraging nod. It was sort of like, We saw that, we're watching him, and we've got your back. I immediately called the park office and told them what was going on and they sent a ranger out to check on the guy.

[00:24:25] [SPEAKER_00] We headed to Winslow, Arizona, and we stopped at a bar to have a drink and try to chill out. We were so freaked out that we actually checked the car for some kind of tracking device. Later that night, we got a call from the ranger who told us they ended up having to arrest the guy for disorderly conduct, and asked us to provide a statement for our experience. I've tried to find out more about him, or what happened after we left, but haven't been successful.

[00:24:55] [SPEAKER_00] I'm curious if this guy sounds familiar to anyone else, especially the weird window-washing ploy. We, in all our adrenaline, had all kinds of wacky theories that maybe there was poison in the bottle, or the squeegee had a knife hidden inside or something. I'm sure we were overblowing it, but I've never been able to stop feeling like we dodged a bullet with that guy.

[00:25:30] [SPEAKER_00] When I was around six years old, and my brother was nine, we went to sleepover at our friend's house. The whole day was normal, playing at the park, riding bikes around the neighborhood. You get the idea. Our friend lived in a bungalow. The kitchen and the living room faced the street, and the two bedrooms looked over the back of the house. For context, in order to enter the house from the street, you had to go through a gate on the left-hand side,

[00:26:00] [SPEAKER_00] which had a path running all the way around to the back garden, and there was no other way to get to the back garden other than that gate, and there was no reason for someone to ever be in the garden unless they were invited. There were four of us sleeping in the same room that night. My friend and I were on a mattress on the floor, and my brother and our other friend, whose house it was, were in the bed next to us.

[00:26:27] [SPEAKER_00] Both my brother and I were sleeping in the same direction, where we could see out of the window. At some point during the night, I woke up and immediately saw the silhouettes of what I assumed to be a man and a woman standing at the window, staring at us. I remember my first instinct being that it must be my friend's parents, since this was their house.

[00:26:54] [SPEAKER_00] But then, I heard his dad snoring from the room next door. I was scared. I didn't move or make a noise. Not knowing what else to do, I closed my eyes as tightly as I could, and I eventually must have fallen back to sleep. In the morning, I didn't mention anything. We ate breakfast, and then my brother and I left the walk home.

[00:27:21] [SPEAKER_00] After a few minutes of walking quietly, my brother stopped walking and said, I didn't say anything because I was really scared, but last night I woke up and saw a man and a woman looking at us through the window. I recently spoke to our friend, whose house it was, and he said nothing like that had ever happened before. I have no idea what those people's intentions were,

[00:27:48] [SPEAKER_00] but I'm glad that we never had to find out. I'm a 25-year-old woman, and I live alone. This happened a while ago.

[00:28:17] [SPEAKER_00] I still think about it, and how weird and honestly unsettling it was. I ordered Uber Eats to my apartment. I live in a gated complex, so when the driver arrives, I buzz them in, and once they leave, I close the gate behind them. Everything seemed normal at first. I let the driver in, he dropped the order at my door, and I opened the gate again so that he could leave. When I grabbed my food, the drink was missing.

[00:28:47] [SPEAKER_00] I was annoyed, but mistakes happen. I figured the restaurant forgot it, and assumed the driver never even had it, so I just ate and moved on. After finishing, I opened the app to report the missing drink so that I could have it refunded. And that was when I noticed I had missed calls and multiple voicemails from the driver. The first voicemail felt off immediately. He said,

[00:29:16] [SPEAKER_00] Hello? Are you there? Girl? I... And then trailed off, sounding oddly stressed. The second one was somehow stranger. There was about a nine-second delay. It was just complete silence before he quietly said, almost to himself, I just don't know what to do anymore, man. By then, I thought, okay, maybe he forgot the drink and was panicking about getting in trouble. But then his third voicemail,

[00:29:46] [SPEAKER_00] and the tone, was entirely different. After a pause, with noticeable irritation, he said, Okay, I guess I'm going to assume you just don't want your drink. This made me uncomfortable, but I just brushed it off. An hour and a half later, I was on the phone with a friend, telling them about the voicemails, when suddenly, there were three aggressive bangs at my door. The pounding was so hard, it shook me. This wasn't a normal knock.

[00:30:16] [SPEAKER_00] It was the kind of banging that instantly makes your stomach drop. I froze. As I said, I live alone. And I'm a woman. Having somebody pound on your door that aggressively immediately puts you on edge. Before I could even process what was happening, I heard another round of three aggressive bangs. I didn't understand what was going on. I walked toward the door as quietly as I could, and I called out, Hello?

[00:30:46] [SPEAKER_00] without opening it. Then, in a strange, timid voice, the person on the other side of the door said, It's your Uber Eats driver. I've got your drink. The sudden switch from aggressive pounding to a strangely timid tone honestly creeped me out even more. I was genuinely scared. I told them through the door that I had already purported the drink missing, and I didn't think I could undo it.

[00:31:16] [SPEAKER_00] I asked him to just leave it outside because I wasn't comfortable opening the door. So, he just left it there. What really bothered me was this. I live in a gated complex, and I had already closed the gate after he left the first time. I even made sure to watch him leave through the gate to make sure that he was actually gone. But somehow, over an hour later, he had gotten back into my gated complex and found his way to my apartment door. And no,

[00:31:46] [SPEAKER_00] I didn't drink the smoothie. I threw it away. Now, maybe this sounds paranoid, but after the voicemails, the weird energy, the sudden irritation, and the fact that he came back over an hour later seemingly determined to hand me this drink banging on the door, I couldn't shake the feeling that something about the whole situation was wrong. Even now, months later, I still don't fully know what to make of it. Maybe there's some

[00:32:15] [SPEAKER_00] innocent explanation, but the combination of talking to himself and voicemails, sounding annoyed with me, somehow getting back into the complex, then pounding on the door, just felt deeply off. I never reported him because honestly, I was scared. He knew where I lived and had already somehow gotten back into the locked complex once. Even posting this online makes me feel uneasy.

[00:32:57] [SPEAKER_00] A few years ago, I went out to brunch with a few of my friends on a Sunday. I'm a 29-year-old woman. Now, what started as brunch turned into a Sunday fun day full of drinking until the small town bar closed at 8 p.m. Towards the end of the evening, this man, who had been looking in my direction since he entered the bar, came up to me and my friends. He introduced himself.

[00:33:28] [SPEAKER_00] For the purposes of the story, we'll call him Justin Smith. He told us that he lives a couple of towns over. We made all the small talk for a few minutes, and then it came time for the bar to close. I got up from my seat, and he moved closer to talk to me. He told me that he found me really attractive and wondered if he could get my number. As I'm sure you could guess, I was pretty tipsy, so I agreed.

[00:33:57] [SPEAKER_00] He said that he could just put his contact info in my phone, which I let him do, and then he handed me my phone back. It said it was calling Justin Smith. The normal move when you're exchanging numbers. I lived right next to the bar, so I walked back home. Just as I got inside my house, my phone rang, and it was Justin. I answered, and he told me that he wanted to take me for a ride in his car

[00:34:26] [SPEAKER_00] because he had just finished restoring it. It was a project. He was proud of how it turned out. Now, I had copious amounts of bush light, and my judgment wasn't sound, so I texted a friend who I had been at the bar with, asking her if I should go with him. She gave me the green light. I guess he had watched me walk home because he was sitting outside my house in his car already.

[00:34:57] [SPEAKER_00] I got in the car, and he started off down the road. I had only been in the car for about three minutes when something very unexpected happened. We ended up crashing into another car. That other car had a stop sign but apparently hadn't seen us coming, so everyone got out of the cars, and I could not believe my eyes. We had crashed into my friend's car.

[00:35:26] [SPEAKER_00] The friend who was driving hadn't been drinking, and she swore up and down that she didn't see the lights of this guy's car. He started freaking out and begging them not to call the cops. My friend insisted that it was her fault, and she needed to call because both cars were in really bad shape. But he kept saying that it was no big deal, everyone was okay, etc. Now I was confused why he wasn't more upset

[00:35:54] [SPEAKER_00] that his prized car that he had just restored was so messed up, and why he was more focused on the cops not being involved. Then, the friend that I had texted earlier about the guy looked at me with shock, asking me why I was there. I told her that I had asked her if I should hang out with the guy, and she suddenly looked terrified. She had thought that I was talking about a completely different person.

[00:36:23] [SPEAKER_00] She had no idea that this guy got my number. In the meantime, the guy started getting more and more angry about the driver wanting to call the police. For context, DUIs are extremely rare in that county, and he seemed sober, so that didn't seem to be the reason why he was freaking out. Well, my friend called anyway, and he threw his hands up, completely livid.

[00:36:53] [SPEAKER_00] When the police got there, it started to make sense why he hadn't wanted them there. When they started his interview, they asked him for his name. Well, you guessed it, it was a completely different name than the one he had told me and put in my phone. Oh, and the town that he lived in? He did live nearby, but not in the town he said he did. I started to sober up with all of this information, and I'll never forget the dread I felt

[00:37:22] [SPEAKER_00] realizing how close I'd come to being alone with a guy not knowing anything about him. I personally believe that the car accident either saved me from some massive trauma or straight up saved my life. And by the way, this is one of the situations that prompted me to choose sobriety. Zero regrets.

[00:37:59] [SPEAKER_00] This happened seven years ago. I was 16, but I had forgotten it until about a week ago when my mom brought it up. I grew up in a rural town in Australia. My house was 30 minutes out of town with 20 acres of thick bushland behind it. Our driveway was about a five-minute drive on its own. Our neighbor's house shared the driveway, but was surrounded by five acres. So,

[00:38:29] [SPEAKER_00] we were incredibly isolated. It always felt like a really safe place because it was so far away from other humans. But of course, that comes with its own downsides. No one can hear you scream. In 2012, my brother graduated high school and my folks got sick of being so far out, so they decided to rent the house out and move closer to town. But by then, my mom was so used to not having neighbors that it annoyed

[00:38:58] [SPEAKER_00] the shit out of her. We once heard a neighbor sneezing, and that was the last straw. So later that year, at the end of our lease, we moved back, just without my brother this time, since he was settled in at uni. When we went back, we moved into our original rooms and put all the furniture back how it was, more or less. My room was the only one on the left side of the house. I chose it for the view

[00:39:28] [SPEAKER_00] of the shed, which used to have chickens, ducks, and alpacas roaming around it. But the room felt different somehow. It felt like it wasn't mine anymore. Instead of swapping rooms and having to do all my posters and stuff again, I just started sleeping with the light on. The only other thing that really was different was the renters had left a horse float and a caravan

[00:39:58] [SPEAKER_00] in the paddock next to the shed. I couldn't have cared less, but mom was calling the renters every other week to move them as soon as possible. At this time, my dad was working with a mining company and installing pipeline to an island off the east coast. He was away for four weeks at a time, then home for two, etc. One night when my dad was away at work and it was just me and my mom at home,

[00:40:28] [SPEAKER_00] I was exhausted and went to bed early. I ended up having the absolute worst dream of my life. I was a little shit at the time, being a 16-year-old girl, but I barely spoke for the next few days. It had truly shaken me to my core. The dream had started with my dog barking, as she would for the entire five minutes anyone was coming down the driveway. I went out to get her. It was pitch black.

[00:40:58] [SPEAKER_00] I could only just see her standing at the edge of the grass by the driveway, and she was standing really aggressively in a way I'd only ever seen her do to kangaroos and the neighbor's dog. I started hearing footsteps crunching on the pebbles, then male voices coming from either side of the house. The dog was now running from left to right, going absolutely crazy, and getting gradually closer to me like they were closing

[00:41:28] [SPEAKER_00] in, and she was trying her hardest to protect me. I was trying to scream, but the only sound that I could make was that of a labored breath, and I was completely paralyzed with fear. I couldn't make out what they were saying, but they were laughing to each other and whispering. This kept going on for what felt like an eternity. The mysterious male voices getting closer and closer, but never coming out of the shadows enough for me to know who they were. Eventually, I woke up.

[00:41:59] [SPEAKER_00] It wasn't like a movie where I jumped up and was out of breath. I was lying in bed like a dead pharaoh, my eyes just opened like I had never been asleep, only blinked. After a few days of acting weird, my mom finally asked what was up. She's not a talkative person, so she asked it offhandedly. She wasn't looking at me. As I told her, she stopped what she was

[00:42:28] [SPEAKER_00] doing and then looked at me like I had just spoken in tongues. It turned out that on the night that I had the dream, shortly after I went to bed and just before sunset, two men came up to the house saying they were there to collect the horse float. The dog went bananas at them, which was only strange because normally, as soon as you were close to her, she would fall on the ground and demand belly scratches. Mom didn't recognize these

[00:42:58] [SPEAKER_00] guys as anyone in the group or family that had rented from us, but they knew about all the stuff and my mom wanted it gone, so she put the dog in her lockup and took them up to it. One of them took it upon himself to take a walk around to the back of the house, then came back and pointed out that there was only one car in the driveway and that he had noticed there was a van before. Whose van was it? He even

[00:43:28] [SPEAKER_00] said something like, husband not home tonight? While looking at my window where light was coming through the curtains. To say the least, my mom was freaked out. How did he know how many cars we have when she's never met either of them before? In an instant, she knew that they must have come around before, seen two cars, and gone away. Following the man's gaze to my room, she let out a relaxed laugh and said that dad was cleaning

[00:43:58] [SPEAKER_00] his guns. But he's probably done now, and she'll go get him so that he can help with the float. The most intense weapon my dad ever owned was a rusty machete, so I have no idea where that came from on my mom's end, but I'm glad for it. They protested and said that they could manage. But she bolted inside, locked all the doors, and then stood by the front window with a kitchen knife and watched them drive away

[00:44:26] [SPEAKER_00] without the horse float. When my dad got home a week or so later, he called the renters up in a fit of rage and found out that they hadn't sent anyone to come get the horse float for them, but all of their friends knew it was there because they had been trying to organize help to get both items in one day. Purely because I was sleeping with the light on at the time, and because I went to bed early that night, my mom and I escaped a potentially

[00:44:56] [SPEAKER_00] seriously horrific situation. I'm a 24-year-old male. About a year ago, I was fresh out of college and had just moved into an apartment with my middle school best friend, a 23-year-old female, and her fiancé, a 25-year-old male. The three of us moved in

[00:45:26] [SPEAKER_00] together after my best friend and I had spent a long period of time not seeing each other in person. My best friend and I have had a long and great relationship with a few rocky periods. I didn't know her fiancé too well, but I had met him a couple of times. He came off as sort of rude and loud, but he was mostly nice enough. I let a lot of his little annoying behaviors slide, because she was so in love with him.

[00:45:56] [SPEAKER_00] I honestly was more concerned with just spending time with her than anything else. Over the course of the next few months, I slowly discovered that she was trapped in an abusive relationship with the most classic example of a malignant narcissist imaginable. Their quote-unquote fights, which were really just him raging at her while she cried, escalated to the point where he was completely thrashing the apartment.

[00:46:26] [SPEAKER_00] He also broke her phone and laptop, hid her car keys, blocked the door, and grabbed her arms so hard it had bruises, all while hurling the worst insults he could fathom at the top of his lungs for hours on end. This man was about a foot taller and 100 pounds heavier than me, so there was nothing I could do other than give her a ride elsewhere to get away from him until the next day. He never liked it when I

[00:46:56] [SPEAKER_00] did that. Once, it reached the point of more physical harm against her and I put my foot down and demanded that he move out or I would call the cops. He wasn't technically signed onto the lease, so I could have easily had him kicked out, but he begged for time to find a new place. He was extremely high and drunk on the night that he hurt her, so he promised to stay sober until he moved out. Not wanting to escalate

[00:47:26] [SPEAKER_00] things, I agreed to this on the condition that he must never cause her physical harm like that ever again. My friend broke up with her fiancé soon after that. Three weeks had passed and everything was going great. My best friend's ex-fiancé hadn't moved out quite yet, but he found a new place. He was also in training for a new job, and while still loud and inconsiderate, he hadn't caused any additional problems. That is,

[00:47:56] [SPEAKER_00] until one evening when I was getting ready for bed early. I had an important meeting early the next day. I put on some comfy pajamas, and I locked my door before I changed out of habit. My friend wasn't home since she was working, so it was just me upstairs in bed when her ex-fiancé was downstairs yelling on the phone about something. I tuned him out. I tried to sleep, but my

[00:48:26] [SPEAKER_00] chest rattled from the booming footfalls. My eyes snapped open to see my bedroom doorknob rattling back and forth, but it was locked. He let out this yell of pure malice while banging on my door. He screamed my name, and his voice was slurring so much that he sounded like he was trying to impersonate a lizard man. I watched the door as he continued banging on it. The hinges weren't looking so good. We lived in a crappy, cheap

[00:48:55] [SPEAKER_00] apartment with thin doors, so I had to do something before he broke it down. I said the only thing I could think of, which was what the fuck? Suddenly the banging and screaming stopped. My doorknob fell silent. After a terrifying moment of silence, he flatly said, Open the door, bud. Just come and open the door. I still kind of laugh at that one. Like after all that, I would just walk over and open up the door.

[00:49:27] [SPEAKER_00] Instead, I grabbed my essentials and jumped out the window. I was on the second floor, but we lived on a hill, so the fall from my window wasn't that high. That being said, I still managed to fall incorrectly and hurt myself. I hobbled as quickly as I could to my car and peeled away. I called my best friend to warn her not to come home. We made plans for us to stay with a friend after she got off work. I made it to the friend's

[00:49:56] [SPEAKER_00] house and then passed out for a few hours, but I woke up to a call from my best friend. Her ex-fiance traveled all the way to her workplace and broke in with a knife. He assaulted her and held a knife up to her special needs client's throat and said that he'd kill her client right in front of her. Thank God a coworker overheard everything from another room and was able to call the police in time for everyone to walk away

[00:50:26] [SPEAKER_00] from the situation alive. My friend said that he was on the phone with her while he was banging on my bedroom door. He said he was going to kill me and make her listen over the phone. I was totally alone in the apartment with him sleeping upstairs in my bed. If I hadn't locked my door that night, would I even still be alive? If I hadn't left my keys downstairs, would I have been able to get away? When I returned to

[00:50:56] [SPEAKER_00] our apartment the next day, my bedroom door was completely kicked in, my belongings were scattered everywhere, and the largest knives were missing. If you want to skip the ads and get access

[00:51:26] [SPEAKER_00] to bonus material, head over to patreon.com forward slash let's not meet podcast to sign up and support the show today. You'll get ad-free versions of all of the episodes at a higher bit rate, plus stories you won't hear anywhere else in our extensions at the ends of these episodes. If you do have a story to share, make sure you send it to letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com and be sure to check out my other podcast, the old-time radio cast at crypticcountypodcasts.com or wherever you get your podcasts, and follow me

[00:51:55] [SPEAKER_00] on Twitch at twitch.tv slash crypticcounty. This week you have heard I'm Still Not Sure What Happened That Night by Just Zaya, The Man At My Window by Donovan, My Creepy Encounter with a Yellow Jeep by I Heart Raven X-Men, Petrified Forest Window Washer by LDB, The Couple At The Window by Benward, Forgetting to Unlock My

[00:52:25] [SPEAKER_00] Bedroom Door Saved Me by Square Ad 262, My Returning Uber Driver by Similar Raspberry 970, The Car Crash That Saved My Life by Substantial Award 337, and finally Two Strangers by Three Blind Mice and One Mouse. All of the stories you've heard this week were narrated and produced with the permission of their respective authors. Let's Not Meet a true horror podcast is not associated with Reddit or any other

[00:52:54] [SPEAKER_00] message boards online. We'll see you next week. Stay safe.

[00:52:58] [SPEAKER_00] Story takes place

[00:53:28] [SPEAKER_00] in the summer.