2x03: Tanya (feat. Olive Hill)

[00:00:00] Andrew Tate My name is Andrew Tate and this is Season 2, Episode 3 of Lets Not Meet, a true horror podcast. My guests this week are Brooke Jeanette, Bridget Howard, and Brian Burkhardt, all of the Olive Hill Podcast. Check out their show at OliveHillPodcast.com. Enjoy the show.

[00:00:45] This has been ongoing these past five months and was finally concluded today. I'm sorry for the long story, but there's a lot of detail leading up to the climax as this has terrorized me through the entire semester.

[00:01:04] To set this up, I have to tell you how my university dorms are arranged. My room is located at the end of the hall on the top floor. Each room is a single, meaning only one person, no roommates, and every two rooms are connected by a shared bathroom.

[00:01:20] Room A, Bathroom, Room B. I had room A and was pleasantly surprised to find that room B would be unoccupied for the semester, meaning that I get the entire bathroom to myself as well as my single dorm room. I felt spoiled. It was amazing.

[00:01:38] Since room B was unoccupied, that means that it stays closed and locked all semester. No one has access to it except for the RAs with the master key. It's just an empty room to be left alone.

[00:01:52] So, first week in the dorms and our RAs want to do an icebreaker thing. We all meet in the common area and go around and introduce ourselves. I'm an 18 year old female. I look around and all the kids are anywhere between 18 and 20 years old at best, but there's

[00:02:09] a seemingly middle-aged man, a tall, skinny, kind of balding white guy. He gave me the creeps and I have no idea why he was there. It gets to be his turn and he introduces himself and gives some speech like, yes, I know I'm

[00:02:24] older than most, but it's never too late to go back to college and get your education. I agree with all of that, of course, but I'll admit having a middle-aged man in my dorm building made me slightly uncomfortable.

[00:02:37] The semester goes on and nothing too out of the ordinary happens. Sometimes I see the middle-aged man attempting to talk and make friends with other teen girls in the hall. Again, it creeps me out, but I tell myself that I'm just being paranoid.

[00:02:53] One day I decide to skip an afternoon class. It's a month into the semester so I have set an obvious schedule by now. I forgot to lock my dorm door after getting back from my morning class so I'm sitting in my bed with the door unlocked.

[00:03:07] I'm in the middle of some online homework when I hear a knock on my door. I figure it's my RA and decide not to respond considering that I'm usually at class during these times.

[00:03:19] After I don't respond, I hear the sound of my doorknob jiggling as if to test to see if it's unlocked. I again think that's odd but continue to do my work.

[00:03:29] When my door slowly opens and I look up to see the silhouette of a man in my door. He kind of resembled the middle-aged man that I saw during the icebreaker, but I wasn't sure since I had the lights dimmed.

[00:03:43] He looks up to see me and then quickly shuts my door and walks away. I started freaking out. I thought maybe whoever it was had been stalking me and knew my class schedule, like he chose that time because he knew that I was supposed to be in class.

[00:03:58] I went down to the front desk to report it. They told me to keep my doors locked and keep an eye out. Flash forward, nothing else seems to happen and I soon forget about that event. My boyfriend drives up to visit me and spend the night.

[00:04:14] Around 2am he gets up to go use the restroom. He comes back to my bed and very quietly says, I thought you said no one lives in the other room. I assured him that I don't have any suite mates and then he said, but I heard someone

[00:04:29] moving around in the room next to your bathroom. Now I'm a person who gets really scared and he knows that, so I thought he was playing a prank on me. I told him that's not funny and to go back to bed.

[00:04:44] He kept insisting that he heard something though. I really thought he was just pranking me. Again, sometime in the future, I'm in my dorm. It's around 12am and I'm trying to sleep. Every little noise is keeping me up and I start to think about what my boyfriend had

[00:05:01] said to me the night he stayed over. I listen closer to these odd noises I'm hearing and realize that they sound like they're coming from my bathroom. I look over at the crack under my door but it's pitch black. I can't see anything. It just sounds like rummaging.

[00:05:18] It's at this point I will note that I do have a paranoia disorder and sometimes if I think about something scary for too long, I can manifest it. Though I've been on medication for it for years now, I haven't had an incident in a long while.

[00:05:33] The next morning I go to my bathroom to get ready and all of my things seem to have been rearranged. Blue bottles on the sink instead of in the shower, toilet paper taken off the roll holder, stuff like that.

[00:05:46] I convince myself that that's just how I left it. I tell myself I'm just being paranoid. It's probably just my disorder. From that point on, I decide to leave my bathroom light on when I sleep.

[00:05:59] One night I fall asleep and I'm woken in the middle of the night and I turn to see my bathroom and a shadow moving in there. I again convince myself that it's my paranoia and I go back to sleep.

[00:06:10] In the morning, I wake up and my bathroom light is turned off. I assumed that maybe I'd done it in the middle of the night after a bathroom trip and had just forgotten. Finally, one night, I'm up around 11 watching YouTube.

[00:06:26] My bathroom light is on as I left it and I realize I need to pee. I get up with my phone still in hand, eyes glued to the video screen. I took a seat on the toilet and continued watching the video.

[00:06:39] Suddenly I get an awful feeling that someone is watching me. It felt so intense, I thought I was going to throw up. My body shivers and I look in front of me and realize that the door to the empty room is cracked open.

[00:06:52] All I see is pitch black. I freaked but decide the best course of action is to pretend that I didn't notice. I continued watching YouTube. As I flush the toilet and get some hand sanitizer then exit the bathroom back into my room,

[00:07:09] I close and lock the door to my side. Then I completely freak out. I stuff my backpack full of my valuables, grab my keys, my wallet and run out of my dorm. I go down to the front desk visibly shaking and explain what's been happening.

[00:07:25] My RA says that he will go search the room. He turns to grab the room key only to find that it's missing from behind the front desk. They contact campus security and some police officers arrive.

[00:07:38] They go to search the room, all the while I'm sitting in the lobby wondering if I've made some mistake and if it was just my paranoia. Campus security went through my room into the bathroom.

[00:07:50] They said the door was closed when they got in and my lights were off. When they opened the door to the other room they found the middle aged man who lived in my dorm hall. He was sitting cross legged on the bed frame, staring towards the bathroom.

[00:08:05] They took him off campus and confiscated his keys. They told me they suspect that he was casing to rob my dorm, that it was smart for me to report it when I felt unsafe.

[00:08:15] I can't help but think that he was doing something more than just casing to rob me. Maybe I'm wrong. All I know is I don't know where I'd be right now if I had convinced myself that I was just being paranoid and shouldn't report it to my RA.

[00:08:30] Today's the last day of the semester and I'm moving out. So finally after months of being terrified to shut my eyes and go to sleep, I'll be able to rest peacefully. So middle aged college student, let's not meet again. This story takes place some time ago.

[00:09:01] I was around 13 years old. At the time I was staying with my mom and older sister at my late great grandfather's cabin in the middle of the woods. It was a dark night around mid-August and we had been spending the summer there.

[00:09:17] Now this cabin has always had its distinct personality. My great grandfather had built it himself after he finished fighting the war during World War II. The interior is made up of entirely dark wood.

[00:09:34] The furniture still has that old pre-war Nordic and Eastern European feel to it where my family is from. Carillion style hand woven carpets lined up the floors and the walls are all decorated with old worn out framed photographs of unknown but serious looking relatives of my family

[00:09:56] from the past. The house has always had a somehow mysterious, a little offsetting but still calming feel to it. Me and my sister being curious kids had just on the previous day looked through some old

[00:10:11] photo albums belonging to our great grandparents that we had found in the library. A decision which we had both regretted. As it turns out, it was customary back in the day to photograph the dead.

[00:10:27] The albums dated after the war were filled with photos of dead bodies sitting or laying next to their relatives. We went through the album and there were tons of them. From full grown adults to little dead kids to actual babies in tiny coffins.

[00:10:46] What made it worse was almost all of the photos were taken unmistakably right in front of this cabin on the yard. We shivered and wondered if the bodies had been buried here too, but decided that in that moment together we would never ask about it.

[00:11:07] I mention this photo album detail because it's relevant for understanding why I was already feeling creeped out that night. That evening my sister and I had decided to sit in the candlelit living room and read horror books together. Because why not?

[00:11:24] We were staying in an old cabin after all and it felt atmospherically appropriate. My mom being a night owl and insomniac had decided to go for a sauna and a shower in the middle of the night.

[00:11:37] The cabin's wood sauna is located in the stone basement of the cabin. Another important detail to note is that this cabin is quite in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a forest.

[00:11:50] There are a handful of quote unquote neighbors who all live at least a kilometer or about a half a mile away. The whole community has lived there for generations and everybody knows everybody so as a rule

[00:12:03] we never had a habit of locking the front doors when staying there. The only person that has ever locked the front door to that cabin was me and I always did it accidentally by slamming the door too hard so it locked automatically.

[00:12:19] So it was midnight, my mom was down in the basement and my sister and I were reading horror stories in the living room. We were in a mostly light mood despite both of us feeling a bit creeped out when suddenly

[00:12:33] out of nowhere we hear a faint knock on the door. We both jump up, we barely ever had visitors during the day and nobody has ever showed up unannounced during the night to this place.

[00:12:47] We decide in that moment that we are probably mistaken and feeling spooked by the stories and it must be the wind that was making the noise. But no, the faint calm knocking came again. Then louder knocking followed.

[00:13:05] We realized that undeniably there had to be somebody out there and that they wanted to get in. In horror we both ran to the kitchen to grab something to defend ourselves with.

[00:13:18] I grabbed the biggest kitchen knife that I could find and had a quick chat with my sister on whether we should go to the basement to get our mom. The knocking continues and this time whoever it was wasn't knocking on the door anymore

[00:13:33] but they had moved to the curtain covered window next to the door to knock on it instead. My adrenaline kicked in and I was feeling a little braver so we decided to walk slowly towards the front door and I decided to take a peek out the window.

[00:13:51] I move the curtain slightly to the side and take a look. However I see nothing but darkness out there. I close the curtain and turn to my sister when suddenly that somebody tries to pull the door open aggressively.

[00:14:10] We both flinch but thankfully as I was the last person to enter the cabin that evening the door was locked. At this point in time it's just us, two kids with kitchen knives and some strange person

[00:14:23] trying to get into our cabin in the middle of the night and the only thing separating us is an old wooden door. At this point we've had enough spooks so my sister runs down to get my mom from the

[00:14:36] basement as I stand there shaking by the door holding a big ass knife. I hear footsteps on the front porch but no more knocking or attempts to open the door. My mom comes upstairs and she seems to be in disbelief that anyone would be trying to

[00:14:52] get in at this hour. We all stay in the living room waiting for more sound but an hour passes by and we hear nothing until suddenly we hear loud panicked knocking on the front door.

[00:15:08] We all jump up at the sound and my mom goes rapidly to the window to open the curtain and check out who it is. Suddenly upon seeing who it is she mutters, what the? and slowly opens the door.

[00:15:22] We hear her exchange a conversation with the woman whose voice is familiar. We walk over to check out who it is and realize that it's our aunt, my mother's sister who lives on the other side of the country standing on our front porch in the middle

[00:15:39] of the night. She looks scared and panicked and my mom keeps apologizing to her, no sorry you can't stay here I'll order you a taxi somewhere safe and closes the door. After some time we see a taxi arrive and watch her leave with it.

[00:15:58] My mom double checks that the door is locked and comes over to us looking worried. We ask about what happened and she tells us that her sister had told her that there had

[00:16:11] been some dispute and now she's being chased by a handful of dangerous and angry men that want to kill her and are trying to track her down. She's been trying to run and hide from them for two days straight now.

[00:16:25] She's always lived a kind of wild life but this was something new. The part of this story that really brought me the chills is that my aunt claims she had just arrived to our front porch that very moment when we all heard the panicked knocking on the door.

[00:16:45] She certainly had not been standing there quietly for an hour or been knocking on the windows meaning that whoever this person was that was faintly knocking on the door about an hour before her arrival was not her.

[00:16:59] We have no idea who it was or what their intentions were but I know that given the extraordinary circumstances I would reckon it was likely one of the men that were trying to track her. I still keep thinking back to that night.

[00:17:15] Whatever could have happened had that door not been locked. And for those of you who are a little more superstitious, there's another supernatural explanation for the knocking if you're curious. There is a mythology in my country that before something unusual or potentially dangerous

[00:17:33] is about to happen, ghosts may appear to warn you about it subtly. The old superstition claims that these mainly harmless ghosts tend to reside all around us but they are often found living in wooden cabins.

[00:17:46] These ghosts will often show themselves by mimicking an event or a person before it happens. So if you hear a loud thump in the kitchen seemingly out of the blue, it may be warning you that someone is about to fall there.

[00:17:58] Or if you see a shadow figure standing by the door when there's nobody there, they are telling you that someone is about to arrive. These ghosts are essentially insights that allow us to see or hear an event in the future before it takes place.

[00:18:13] Said to normally show themselves only under extraordinary circumstances. Now I'm not much of a superstitious person myself but on some level I must admit, it's somehow more comforting to believe that it was a ghost out there instead of a potential murderer.

[00:18:29] I work as a dancer at a pretty safe club. There are cameras everywhere being monitored heavily. The bouncers have eyes like hawks and they walk you to your car at the end of the night.

[00:18:51] I might have dealt with a few douchebags but never once have I felt unsafe until this lady came in one Wednesday night. We were about an hour from closing and we were all ready to go home since it had been a slow night and we were tired.

[00:19:08] This awesome lesbian couple walked in from the club next door and they were tipping us pretty well. We were stoked that we had paying customers after an hour or two of nothing.

[00:19:18] Shortly after one of my last stage sets for the evening, this older lady had made her way into our club. I could tell the couple immediately got uncomfortable. I asked what was wrong and they said she followed them from the club next door.

[00:19:32] She was wearing somewhat baggy mom clothes. Think about those ugly patterned blouses you see in department stores. And she had messy, what I think was ginger or strawberry blonde hair. I'm not really sure because my club has red lights and you can't tell what most hair colors are.

[00:19:50] She had a long thin neck and a small round head and dark beady eyes. Something immediately seemed off about her. This lady was mad that the couple had left her alone in there. And the couple, our only paying customers for that hour, go figure, promptly got up

[00:20:10] and left, understandably not wanting to give her another chance to interact with them. She kept staring at me with this unsettling look and she sat at my stage saying she wasn't going to be here all by herself.

[00:20:25] She kept saying I was so pretty, like a Barbie doll, and she wasn't giving me a single dollar and making me super uncomfortable. It felt like I was being fetishized, and I mean in a really scary, creepy, I want to wear your skin kind of way.

[00:20:42] We were all trying to hide from her in the dressing room unless we had to go on stage. And she would literally be standing right by the door, almost waiting for us to come out there.

[00:20:53] When it was time for us to close, I felt relieved and figured she would be gone. And of course, as I'm leaving with the bouncer to go to my car, she's sitting right on the curb next to the entrance.

[00:21:08] She immediately gets up as soon as I walk out the door and she tries to talk to us. The bouncer is trying really hard to make space between the two of us. He starts walking me to my car, and she actually tried to follow me to my car.

[00:21:23] The bouncer said he had no time for her bullshit and made her go back to the curb. And I was thankfully able to get to my car safely. I sped off feeling deeply unsettled.

[00:21:34] I've seen her two other times in my club, though she stayed far away from me for the most part. She was still a bit of a nuisance because she would be all over our male customers, trying to talk to them and stealing the attention away from us.

[00:21:47] The bouncer finally kicked her out for good after he kept trying to get her to leave us alone while we were talking. Haven't seen her since, and I really hope it doesn't happen again.

[00:21:57] I worry this might seem like overreacting, but I was definitely shaken by my first interaction with this woman. As a dancer, you never know what people are truly intending for you. You're perceived as less than, or people think it's okay to say or do awful things to you

[00:22:13] because of your occupation. So I was super freaked out and wanted to share. This whole situation started in 2009 and continues to cause me a great deal of anxiety. Some of this information is jumbled. Honestly, I try not to dwell on it.

[00:22:42] In order to write this out, it took several days of consulting my husband to remember exactly what happened. So this is the story of Tanya. For a little bit of backstory though, I'm not much for making friends.

[00:22:56] I didn't have many while I was in school and until this day, I had a tendency to avoid people in general. In the effort of not being a complete recluse, I created a Facebook account and went surfing

[00:23:10] through there one day just to see if I could find someone to mindlessly IM while I was at work. While scoping through the many mutual friends of high school friends, I happened upon Tanya. This isn't a situation where I decided to talk to a random person.

[00:23:29] No, this was someone I actually used to go to school dances with and talk on the phone with. After losing contact with her in college, I figured it wouldn't hurt to shoot her a friend request and a quick message.

[00:23:43] I should have been worried when she instantly accepted and messaged me back. After messaging for a while, we decided to meet up and get coffee when my shift at the restaurant was over. The first time we hung out, there were no red flags whatsoever. Typical bitter 20-something.

[00:24:02] So we decided to hang out the next night after I was done with my waitress gig. Second time around, I really should have paid more attention. The night before, she was single. Tonight however, she had a fiancé, Michael who was a Navy Seaman from Virginia.

[00:24:22] They had been living together prior to her moving home and they were going to get married on February 2010 and she wanted to make a date to hang out so that we could go shopping and get her a wedding ring.

[00:24:35] When we started talking about my love life and how I was dating someone from high school, she got kind of pissy and stated that she hated him. Which I guess to each their own. For some reason, I ignored this. Just happy to finally have a female friend.

[00:24:53] Weeks preceding up to her fiancé coming were spent with her dragging my boyfriend through the dirt and pushing me to talk to her brother David, a soldier in the army. All through high school, she had never mentioned him. There were no pictures of him at all.

[00:25:09] At home, on her phone, on her Facebook profile, random messages from her AIM account would pop up in the middle of the night claiming to be from David. So I would exchange messages from this phantom and leave it be. When her fiancé arrived that February, the messages stopped.

[00:25:29] Finally the night came to go pick up her fiancé from the airport and she asked me to go with her. I said sure because navigating the SFO is not always easy. However, I thought it odd because they hadn't seen each other in a while.

[00:25:45] Wouldn't they want to be alone? When the flight landed and the passengers were getting off the plane, a random man came up to me and started talking. Tanya's fiancé. He seemed startled when I said that I wasn't Tanya.

[00:26:00] After that bump in the road, they got along like a normal couple and were married within the next few weeks. Then the crazy came out. Once he left to go back to base, Tanya seemed to unravel. I would get calls from her all hours.

[00:26:16] She would drag me out of my house and refuse to take me home. But that was the tame stuff. She would get violently mad, screaming and causing scenes if I told her that I didn't want to hang out.

[00:26:28] On the occasion that I didn't hang out with her, she would try to get me drunk so that I would not be able to get myself home and had to stay at her house. This happened on a few occasions.

[00:26:39] One night while I was staying there, I woke up around 2 and she was just sitting by the bed lit up by the light of the phone, staring at me. Thankfully not long after that, she moved to be with Michael in Virginia.

[00:26:55] Due to the invention of cell phones however, that led to non-stop calls about how her husband was horrible. Repeatedly he would beat her and scream for hours. She was absolutely hysterical.

[00:27:09] She even went as far as accusing him of putting sand and sugar into her gas tank so that she couldn't leave the house. Finally after maybe 2 months, she decided to leave her husband and come back to California. When she moved home, everything came to a head.

[00:27:26] While I did welcome her back and agreed to hang out from time to time, I didn't trust her at all and started looking into some of the things that were going on around me. First there was the whole David thing. I was stupid to trust these random messages.

[00:27:41] So I did a google search on the pictures that he sent me and they were stock photos. Yep, time to cut ties there. When those messages were unanswered by me, my boyfriend started getting messages from a random Myspace account. They were from someone that neither of us knew.

[00:27:59] She didn't even live in the same area as us and she was in none of the groups that either of us were in. When she started actively hitting on him, I decided to take a closer look into it. Sure enough, her background info was Tanya's.

[00:28:15] The pictures that she posted were stock as well and the one scenery picture that she uploaded was of Tanya's neighborhood. She was trying to catfish both of us. While all of this was going on, my husband, then boyfriend, was attending regular PT sessions

[00:28:33] so that he and his buddy could finally enlist in the military. Tanya was thrilled that he was finally going away. However, his friend was a special interest of hers. She had a thing for him all through high school and after her divorce, she zeroed in on him

[00:28:50] again and was not happy with the intel she received. He was separated from his wife and dating a girl on the side. While this is frowned upon, the office that the guys were going through to enlist really

[00:29:05] disapproved and would boot not only one of the people that were participating in the infidelity but anyone else that knew. So when it was discovered that she could not get rid of the girlfriend, she reported the couple to the recruiting office.

[00:29:22] Thankfully, no one was dropped from the program. However, they were able to talk their way out of it and the couple has now been married for 5 years. The situation not only put the future of the couple on the line but because my boyfriend

[00:29:38] knew, it was detrimental to us as well. Enough was enough. I decided that I couldn't put up with the chaos and the crazy anymore and separated myself from her. When my husband left for boot camp in April that year, she tried to get a hold of me.

[00:29:55] I declined the calls and generally went into hiding. When she couldn't get a hold of me through those means, emails from David started back up. At this point, since I knew he was a figment of a sick girl's imagination, I ignored the emails and various IMs.

[00:30:12] However, that didn't stop the multiple false orders that she sent to the restaurant trying to get my attention and get me in trouble with my boss. It only took two of the fake orders before I learned the pattern and was able to avoid the orders altogether.

[00:30:32] For a while, Tanya disappeared. Upset with my unwillingness to return her calls, she went into hiding. After I got married in 2012, however, she resurfaced. I started noticing her car driving slowly through our area and at times even park across

[00:30:50] from the house, leaving a mass of cigarette butts in her wake. After one of these nights, my parents received a notice from the city stating that they were contacted because we were abusing our dogs and that someone was going to come out the

[00:31:04] next day to talk to us regarding the situation. We've never even had any dogs. When the city employee came out to talk to my mother, we were told that the tip was fishy

[00:31:14] and it sounded like it was just someone that had issues with me and they left the initials TMC for record. When I was told this, I apologized for bringing this monster into our lives and that it would probably stop as soon as I moved to North Carolina.

[00:31:31] This statement was particularly correct. It stopped for them. However, it did not stop for me. She wasn't done with me. About six months after moving, I got a call from Tanya's ex-husband, Michael, and I had stayed in touch after their divorce and bonded through torture.

[00:31:51] He was warning me that she had been up to Virginia the day before, screaming at the gate to his base wanting him to come out. When he refused, she started screaming that she knew I was in North Carolina and she was going to find me.

[00:32:08] The following week, I hid. I made sure that my husband and I stayed close to home. I didn't want to risk running into her. Apparently though, that didn't stop her. When she couldn't get me, she went after my husband.

[00:32:21] Within the next week, my husband got called in the battalion office because someone had called stating that he had raped them. No police report was ever filed by this woman and I was able to verify my husband's activity

[00:32:34] for the time that was specified so the base stopped the investigation. I, however, was terrified that she would find out where I lived. I spent many days hiding under the kitchen table so that I could be out of sight of windows. Then the phone calls started.

[00:32:51] That following summer, I began to get phone calls from companies back home in the Bay Area responding to my resume posts on Craigslist. I got roughly seven calls, each of them stating that they were impressed by the conversations that we were having via email.

[00:33:10] Finally, I figured out that this could all be a fluke and asked what email they were contacting and I was provided with one of Tanya's that she had created for me when I worked with her years prior.

[00:33:25] After thanking this poor, confused HR person, I started scoping through Craigslist and found that not only had she posted that resume multiple times, but that she had been posting on dating and single forms with it as well. First chance I got, I changed my phone number.

[00:33:43] From 2013 to 2015, nothing happened. At least nothing that I had noticed. It's like she forgot about my existence altogether. I thought that I was finally free, but then Michael called. By this time, we stopped having regular conversations, only really sending a message on each other's birthdays.

[00:34:04] So it was weird when he called me in the middle of November in 2016. He wanted to know if I had heard anything from her. When I said no, he responded with, Well, she is coming to see you.

[00:34:19] I had become thoughtless, thinking that I was safe, so I started posting pictures on Facebook again, nothing specific, but like the welcome sign to the town that I lived in and just some stuff from where I worked. Understandably, I freaked.

[00:34:36] Michael told me that she called him and told him that she was in my area. He wanted to give me a heads up. Later in the week though, I thought that maybe she was bluffing and that I was okay, but I went to Walmart.

[00:34:50] I was just running there after work one day. The one in town is not far from the freeway, so it's easily accessible. And there she was. Tanya, standing at the other end of the parking lot, lost by that horrible little car that raced through my nightmares.

[00:35:08] Upon seeing her, I ducked down and hid behind the steering wheel while I frantically tried to turn the car on. Once my hands decided to work, I peeled out of the parking lot, called my husband, and

[00:35:20] drove frantically back to work where it was safe because you had to have a keycard to enter. I hid in the break room for an hour while I waited for a friend to get off of work so I had someone to protect me.

[00:35:33] Since that moment, nothing else has happened. Every time that I let my guard down, however, she comes back. So for this moment, the only thing I can do is wait. This is my first post on here, but I'm hoping for the best. Okay, so this happened last night.

[00:36:05] My friends and I were all hanging out. And it had already been a hectic afternoon, without going into too much detail. We'll save that for later. So it was a relatively warm evening, and we were going for a walk around the town the

[00:36:20] majority of us lived in, which is something we do often enough that we would have felt safe doing it individually, let alone in the group of seven people we were in now. There were two 15-year-olds and four 16-year-olds, one of which is a month away from 17.

[00:36:38] So we had been walking for over an hour now. We always walk to this ice cream shop, which is the furthest point from the house we meet at before we turn around and head back.

[00:36:48] We were already halfway home from there, at this four-way intersection by a Dunkin' Donuts. We're approaching the intersection, laughing about something stupid, when this lady across the street starts screaming. She was borderline old, late 40s to mid 50s. Wait, wait, stop, wait!

[00:37:09] She runs across the intersection through traffic to get to us. Now at this point, all instincts were telling us to turn around. The problem was, to get home, we had to go in the direction this woman is running from.

[00:37:27] So we approach the intersection just as she reaches us. Oh good, you're all teenagers. Will you come to our concert later? We have four bands, it's teenager music. We've got free pizza and snacks like brownies and cookies. We've even got a popcorn machine.

[00:37:46] Needless to say, we were a little disconcerted. We tried to politely decline, saying that it was getting dark and we were on our way home. However, she would not let us get a word in edgewise.

[00:38:01] My friend tried to tell this lady that she didn't like that type of music, but the woman quickly changed her original statement. It's all kinds of music. Come on, you'll love it. If you don't like it, you can just walk right back out.

[00:38:15] It's just a mile up that street, right over there. Come on, you'll fit right in. She then tries to force us in the direction of the concert, trying to get us to follow her.

[00:38:26] As if there hadn't already been multiple red flags, this was the first of the more significant ones. All of us were extremely uncomfortable now, but trying to laugh it off. My cousin was smart. She held up her phone to her ear as if she was calling someone.

[00:38:43] Although she wasn't, there's terrible cell service in my town, which is something that made everyone even more nervous. Hello? Yeah, we're on our way back. We'll be there in a few minutes. Sorry, my dad is calling. Now, the crazy lady takes practically no notice of this.

[00:39:02] She just keeps trying to convince us. By now, the sun was almost completely set. We are all itching just to get out of there and go home. So my friend says, we have to go ask our parents first.

[00:39:16] And here's the most scary and unsettling part of the whole conversation, in my opinion. No, don't tell your parents. It's only a half mile up that road. You all have cell phones, don't you? You can call them on the way there.

[00:39:33] Now, we are all more than a little nervous. Everyone is looking at Dunkin' Donuts as though if we looked hard enough, we'd teleport. Nobody really says anything at this point. We don't know what else to say. Don't worry. It's in a church. Nothing bad can happen to you.

[00:39:53] Cue nervous laughter and muffled disagreements. It's on until nine. We'll be there in half an hour. She gestures across the street to this other lady and two kids in matching yellow t-shirts. They come running across immediately.

[00:40:10] And as we get a closer look, it's obvious that the kids are extremely uncomfortable and would rather be anywhere else in the world. The other lady is definitely older, as she has white hair. These guys are coming to our concert. They don't know anybody but...

[00:40:27] The old lady interjects as the kids hand out a few flyers. They don't know anybody? Perfect! At this point, we're all done with this conversation. We have no intentions of being kidnapped ten minutes from our destination. We start walking across the crosswalk to Dunkin' Donuts.

[00:40:46] They want assurance that we'll go later, and we give it to them. Falsely, of course. We went into Dunks because there were more people in there, and we felt safer since there hadn't been anyone on the street. Going to be telling this story for months, honestly.

[00:41:02] All I can say is, to the crazy lady and her friends who tried to kidnap a bunch of teenagers off of an empty street, let's not meet again. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Let's Not Meet, and a special thanks

[00:41:19] to all of my Patreon subscribers that joined in the last week since I've started doing these bonus episodes. I'm putting bonus episodes out every other week, so if you're interested in getting access to those, head over to patreon.com forward slash let's not meet podcast.

[00:41:35] This week you have heard The Middle-Aged Man in My Dorm Bathroom by Kirster SJ Strange and Frightening Midnight Encounter at My Late Great Grandfather's Old Cabin by Alien Ale Creepy Older Lady in the Strip Club by Slime Goth The Story Tanya Submitted by Warpole Bunny

[00:41:57] And Finally Crazy Church Lady Tried to Kidnap Me and My Friends by JMLacey99 Thanks again to Brooke Jeanette, Bridget Howard, and Brian Burkhart of Olive Hill. Olive Hill is a 7 episode audio drama podcast about a journalist that heads to her hometown

[00:42:13] to investigate the disappearance of two girls one summer in Olive Hill. Check it out at olivehillpodcast.com I'll see you next week for a brand new episode of Let's Not Meet.