3x02: Sam

[00:00:03] My name is Andrew Tate and this is Season 3, Episode 2 of Lets Not Meet, A True Horror Podcast. I'll start with a little backstory. I'm a 24 year old female and I fell in love with national parks, so much so that I decided

[00:00:29] to work full time at one for about three years. This experience allowed me to meet some great people, but it also welcomed some sketchy individuals. This particular story starts with a man that we'll call Sam. Sam was a tall man with a shaved head and glasses.

[00:00:48] He was the kind of co-worker that would always linger awkwardly. He made everyone feel uncomfortable, but not enough to warrant any concern. The only issue that I really noticed was that he seemed like he had a drinking problem.

[00:01:04] He would show up to work still drunk and be sent home somewhat regularly. He seemed innocent though, in a socially awkward way. I only worked with him for a few months before I was transferred to another location and offered a pay raise.

[00:01:20] A few months after starting the position, I was in the employee break room browsing my news feed when I received five messages within a three minute time span. I didn't even realize people could type that fast.

[00:01:34] The messages were from Sam, something that caught me off guard because I had never spoken to him outside of my last position. The messages consisted of vague threats regarding my friends and myself.

[00:01:47] He seemed upset to find that I had gay friends and thought that I was quote unquote tainted from association. I was less upset at his foul perception of me and more pissed that he had targeted my friends who were truly lovely people.

[00:02:05] I'm bad when it comes to taking the high road and decided to give this man a piece of my mind. We weren't friends, hardly acquaintances, so I didn't feel that his behavior was appropriate and quite frankly I was angry.

[00:02:20] Through our exchange, the original rude context of the messages became obviously threatening. He told me that I should die along with my gay friends and that he'd be more than happy to end our misery. I was shocked.

[00:02:34] His anger didn't make sense to me and I realized that I wasn't going to reason with this lunatic so I decided to get HR involved. We worked with the same company so I thought this would be the best route to prevent any further harassment.

[00:02:51] HR advised me to block the contact from him while they investigated but also to alert the authorities in case he decided to act out his threats. Authorities were involved but didn't seem too phased by the messages that I showed them.

[00:03:07] They almost seemed annoyed that I had bothered calling them in the first place. I filled out a statement and was told to contact them if anything progressed. The next day I woke up to find trash all over my front steps. Odd but not too strange.

[00:03:23] I actually thought it was a raccoon since I was in a national park. Then I saw a piece of paper with the words, Watch your back, bitch. scribbled onto it. I looked around the other neighboring cabins to see if anyone was watching but I didn't see anyone.

[00:03:43] I cleaned up the mess but I saved the note. I wanted to show my sister who lived with me. When she got back home later that morning, I caught her up on the previous night's events. She didn't even know Sam because like I said, we weren't friends.

[00:03:59] Why would I mention him in my personal life? I gave her a brief description of him in case she saw him lurking around and headed to work. Halfway through my shift, I get a phone call from Alexa.

[00:04:15] She sounds shaken when she tells me that a man matching Sam's description came to our cabin and asked about me and where I was. She played dumb and pretended to not know who I was.

[00:04:28] After an awkward silence, he said, I'll be back for her later and walked away. She said he sounded and acted as if he had been heavily drinking and had an intense coldness to him. I'm not messing around at this point.

[00:04:46] I've watched enough crime shows to know that I shouldn't underestimate people. So I called the company's security team and asked them to have someone check on my sister and to be escorted home immediately. I'm home within 20 minutes of a phone call.

[00:05:03] She gave security some more information and they were able to find out which cabin he resided in. Apparently, he only lived about 2 minutes of a walk down our street, which was very unnerving. Park rangers are called again and they get more statements from both of us and decide

[00:05:23] to pay him a visit. They seem to be taking the situation a bit more seriously now that he knows where I live. They come back after talking to his roommate. It's confirmed that he lives there but hasn't been home since the night before.

[00:05:38] Authorities put a word out to keep an eye out for Sam. They offer to have a unit keep an eye on us that night, which we gladly accept and we go to bed. I wake up to 34 messages from an unknown number. It was Sam again.

[00:05:55] He was very angry that I got HR and rangers involved. He said, You're going to pay for this, bitch. You fucked with the wrong person and I'll fucking end you. I email HR and present them with screenshots of the message and texts.

[00:06:12] I demand that they resolve this immediately and want to set up a meeting with the director to discuss termination. See, in national parks, when you're hired, the company provides cheap housing on site and when you're fired, you have to leave the national park boundary within 24 hours.

[00:06:29] So I thought that this would solve the majority of my issues. They seem to agree with me and try to locate Sam for a meeting. No one has seen him since the first message began two days prior. So the park is on a manhunt.

[00:06:43] The park is huge and it's easy to hide if you don't want to be found. Thankfully his roommate alerted officials when Sam stumbled home drunk the next day. They're able to speak with him and sober him up enough to take him to the HR building

[00:06:58] a couple of hours later. After the meeting, I'm notified that he has been given a first and final write-up and will continue to work and live on my street. He apparently gave a sob story about his personal issues and promises to leave me alone.

[00:07:13] I was baffled that even with him threatening to kill me, they weren't going to fire him. Thankfully the rangers were equally as surprised and still offered to provide surveillance just in case. It was quiet for three days.

[00:07:28] I thought it was actually over and started to feel bad for Sam, actually. I thought maybe he was going through some shit and I was his mental punching bag. I didn't agree with it but I no longer felt as threatened if that makes any sense.

[00:07:47] That was until I received a knock on my door and opened it to find two park rangers wanting to speak with me. According to the rangers and a few people from the HR department, Sam's roommate had

[00:07:59] to call the emergency line when Sam started acting bizarre after the meeting and tried to convince him to lure me into a secluded place so that Sam could take care of me. Thankfully, his roommate wasn't a psycho and reported the situation immediately once Sam went to the bathroom.

[00:08:18] Rangers were on site within minutes and had restrained Sam in order to search their cabin for evidence. They ended up finding a loaded firearm and a suspected suicide note that stated he was going to kill me and then take his own life.

[00:08:34] There was plenty of evidence for a case and he was successfully banned from all national parks in the US. I have since moved to a different state and have changed my contact information. He has since contacted me once to brag about how much I helped him secure unemployment

[00:08:51] benefits, which I quickly shared with the officials. According to officials, he is restricted to a southern Arizona county due to other crimes that he later committed and that I shouldn't worry about him finding me.

[00:09:06] As for HR, the director actually had to deal with harassment from Sam after the banning and asked me to testify on her behalf if it turned into something more sinister. I haven't heard anything else, so I'm assuming she found another way to stop the assault.

[00:09:22] I don't understand why he targeted me. He hadn't had very many interactions, even at work. I've tried to dig through memories to find a single time that I may have invited this kind of behavior, but I'm convinced it was due to many factors including his instability and alcoholism.

[00:09:41] Sam, if you're watching me, let's not meet. First off, this story happened almost 10 years ago. I'll jump right in because it's a bit long. I got home from work one day, logged into Facebook to find a message from someone that I didn't know.

[00:10:11] It was too long to remember verbatim what was said, but it was along the lines of, Hey, I know you have no idea who I am, but I've been trying to decide what to do for

[00:10:23] a few days and I figured I had to let you know what's been going on. Someone has been catfishing me using your identity for over two years, and I just found out about it last week.

[00:10:38] The sender of the email was clearly pretty shaken up and understandably was experiencing a mix of emotions. According to her, she had met the imposter online a little over two years prior to her writing this, and that they had been engaged in a pretty intimate long-distance relationship

[00:10:58] for the majority of that time. The imposter had created a Facebook and had over time reposted almost all of my photos with their own captions to them, including a good amount of the art that I had drawn that they took credit for.

[00:11:16] They created fake profiles for a good amount of my close family and friends so that they could comment on the photos of quote-unquote themselves to make the profiles seem legit. Now although most things in my real life seemed to be mirrored in this fake profile, I, a

[00:11:34] straight male, was instead portrayed as trans. I think the main reason for this was that the sender of the email and the imposter would actually speak on the phone and the imposter turned out to be female in the end

[00:11:49] and therefore needed a reason to justify her more feminine sounding voice. The sender of the email was justifiably both angry and creeped out and wanted to find the catfish. She started asking me a lot of questions about my life, but phrasing them like, Is your sister's name?

[00:12:10] And then said my sister's actual name. And then, Did you go to so-and-so's high school? Some of them were clearly information that anyone could glean from a quick browse of my profile, but then she asked, Is your best friend so-and-so?

[00:12:28] Which struck me as odd since despite this person actually being my closest friend and who I'd spend most of my time with, we have barely any Facebook photos together and most of them are from a long time ago.

[00:12:43] Then she asked, Were you adopted and are you half-siblings with so-and-so and so-and-so? Which sealed the deal for me since I knew for a fact I'd never posted anything about being adopted online.

[00:12:59] The sender of the email already had an idea that this person had known me in real life, but this confirmed it for me. The sender of the email had contacted me shortly after confronting the imposter for the first time.

[00:13:13] I guess after two years they'd finally become suspicious of the fact that the imposter wouldn't show their face. I have no idea how it took this long for them to figure out that they were being played,

[00:13:24] but I'm glad they finally decided to give the ultimatum of show your face or I'm cutting you off. I'm pretty sure this is the point where the imposter admitted to being a catfish and

[00:13:36] that she'd been using the identity of someone she had a crush on in high school before hanging up. I was given the URL so that I could look through the profile myself, which was up for about two days after I saw it before it was all removed.

[00:13:51] It was definitely bizarre. The imposter had posted more than I ever had on Facebook and it genuinely seemed like they lived a pretty involved double life online as me. Almost everyone I'd posted photos with on my real profile would then have their own fake

[00:14:09] profiles created that had enough content to be genuinely convincing so they could be tagged in and validated by these new photos. Some of these profiles seemed to have gone on to make their own real friends as well,

[00:14:27] and I wondered if any of those were used to facilitate even more online dating deceptions. Either way, the amount of time that this person spent fabricating their alter egos online was very shocking. The whole time I'd been crawling down this Facebook rabbit hole, the sender of the email

[00:14:46] was looking through my real profile. After a while, she sent me a message saying, did you take these photographs? And showed me what I remember as a black and white photo of a barn or something.

[00:15:01] I hadn't, which was weird since everything else on the fake profile originated with me and she'd noticed the discrepancy. We both tried reverse image searching with no luck. Then either through a stroke of genius or somewhat suspiciously, I really couldn't tell,

[00:15:20] she thought to flip the fake number imposter had written on the fake Facebook profile around in reverse. And the Google search came up with a landline that belonged to the home address of a girl that I'd gone to high school with.

[00:15:38] Real me was Facebook friends with real imposter's profile, so we both went snooping around and found the photo that she claimed I had taken, which pretty much confirmed to me that this was the imposter.

[00:15:53] I'm pretty sure there were more indicators to the sender as well, but I can't remember. I thought about messaging her for a while, but decided that it probably wouldn't lead to anything good. At the time, my thoughts were definitely let's not meet.

[00:16:11] I talked a few times with the sender of the email just to try and decompress a bit, but honestly I just wanted to distance myself from the whole situation and also had my suspicions about the sender as well.

[00:16:25] I figured maybe it was the imposter's one last ditch effort to try and talk to me, although when it was all over, the sender seemed to be eager to leave this all behind as well, so maybe not. Either way, it was a very strange experience.

[00:16:40] I felt almost freaked out and violated, but I guess there was a small part of me that was flattered by it. I had a lot of mixed emotions. The weirdest part for me is that I'm really approachable as a person and I would definitely

[00:16:57] have been willing to talk and probably be friends if this person had just approached me instead. Although I'm still not sure if this was done out of an obsession for me or if this person

[00:17:08] felt like I was just a suitable image to base this fabricated persona off of. I remember talking to her probably twice throughout high school and really didn't have a very good idea of who she was other than a quiet hipster girl.

[00:17:25] If either person involved reads this, I definitely would be happy to talk now. It's been years, but I've gone from being very put off to always wondering why this person chose me over a myriad of other more attractive and more interesting people online

[00:17:44] to base their life off of. According to the sender who contacted me, she probably spent more time online pretending to be me than she actually did about her own life. I have a tumultuous history of addiction and have had plenty of my own escapes, you could

[00:18:03] say, which is why it's always fascinated me that someone would want to pretend to live someone else's life as a means of doing that. Because at the end of the day, the person pretending to be me had no idea that I spent

[00:18:18] my time daydreaming of being a different person as well. I guess that goes to show that no matter how much you wish you were someone else, chances are that person has plenty of their own reasons to want to escape their own demons for their own reasons.

[00:18:32] Thanks for listening. This encounter was not too long ago and solidified in my mind why I always close the blinds at night and why, even in a quiet suburban neighborhood, you should always lock your door.

[00:19:01] I've been reading creepy stories online since I was about 12 when I first discovered Tumblr and Reddit. So I have long since taken to checking all the windows and locks before I go to bed and

[00:19:14] closing blinds and curtains for fear that I might look out to see some creep in a clown costume with a knife in my garden or a child with their head at an unnatural angle.

[00:19:25] I always sort of wished I had a creepy encounter so that I could write about it, but if I never have another experience like this for the rest of my life, it will be too soon.

[00:19:36] For context, this nice suburban neighborhood, as I say, is the home of my parents. Little town in Cheshire, England. Quiet streets where we all know each other. Low crime rate except one house which has been heavily burgled twice in about 10 years. Both opportunistic though.

[00:19:59] Once because the keys were near the front door and the invaders smashed a small pane to reach them and let themselves in, and the other they left their blinds open overnight, leaving their laptops, wallets, and both car's keys on full display.

[00:20:14] Anyway, I don't live with my parents anymore, but I was back in town and staying with them for a few days over the summer. I was sat in the kitchen which faces onto the street and working on my laptop, just

[00:20:27] glancing up occasionally to watch people pass by, walking dogs or strolling. I'd see something moving in my peripheral, so like every time, I looked up hoping to see a dog walker or one neighbor or her newborn grandson. Nope. Two people.

[00:20:46] A man in a semi-casual suit and a woman in plain jeans and a blouse, but they were moving weirdly. The woman had her head craned over to one of her shoulders and her arm on that side was bent backwards and unnaturally upwards with her hand rhythmically flicking.

[00:21:04] Her other arm randomly but smoothly glided out, guided by her elbow. It was a bit like when you try to push two magnets together at the same point of polarity. That's how I'd describe it.

[00:21:19] I have friends with epilepsy and I've never seen them contort or flick like that. The man looked more like one of those dancing inflatables that you see at a used car dealership. That's the only way that I could describe his movements.

[00:21:33] They walked past my parents' house and I instinctively called to my cat, checking that he wasn't outside with those weirdos. I found him upstairs in my old room. He was looking out the window and as I followed his gaze, I see two of the kid neighbors and

[00:21:52] their double-burgled house waving across to me. Well, to my cat, but I waved back. All the same from their parents' upstairs bedroom window. I went downstairs to tell my parents about the strange moving people and my dad just

[00:22:08] furrowed his brow, asked if they were gone and said to double-check that the door was locked. I headed back to the kitchen to check our back door and make sure that it was locked.

[00:22:21] The door doesn't have any windows on it so you can understand that I jumped out of my skin when, as I put my hand on the door handle, it was pushed down from someone on the other side.

[00:22:34] I push on the door immediately before anyone can push from the outside. I also must scream because I hear my dad call back. I hear his footsteps coming through the house.

[00:22:45] Then I hear a loud gasp on the other side of the door and out of the kitchen window. Guess who I see making a retreat? The creepy moving people. By the time my dad's made it through the house, they're gone. He doesn't seem to believe me.

[00:23:06] Although that also doesn't seem doubting either. He's never seen them before and takes a free pop at me for being discriminatory against potential house guests with movement disorders. We make jokes like this because I had a movement disorder as a kid and one time, a parent wouldn't

[00:23:26] let me into their son's birthday party because they would be playing Simon Says and I would make it difficult for the other kids. I digress. These people were gone. I don't sleep well due to that movement disorder actually.

[00:23:41] And those scary stories I read meant I always listened to the excessive creaking in this house and the noises on the street outdoors at night. Like people walking home drunk or foxes mating. Most of the sounds are quiet though.

[00:23:57] So imagine my shock when my straining ears are suddenly attacked by a child's scream. It takes me a second to locate the sound and another to lurch from my bed into the window. Leading straight over to the upstairs window, the same one where not 12 hours ago my neighbor's

[00:24:17] children were waving to me from it. I scanned down the house and saw their front door was wide open. I shouted to my parents hoping to wake them up as I flew down the stairs in my PJs with

[00:24:31] 999 already dialed on my phone to report this likely home invasion before I do anything else. I'm remembering to scream, fire, not burglar as I stride across the road attempting to wake the other neighbors and gather their support.

[00:24:51] There are two kids and a teenager in that commonly burgled house. Kids who I babysit for 10 years. And one of them just screamed at 2am with their front door wide open. I make sure I say this out loud to the emergency responder on the phone.

[00:25:08] As I near the door, I can see a figure inside, moving frantically. So after telling the phone responder what is happening and answering their brief questions, I shout into the door from a safe distance some phrases the police gave me to say. The police are on their way!

[00:25:27] I'm outside with the family and we're getting help. Is anyone hurt? And I also told the intruders, we know you're there. Please don't hurt anyone. Police can help you. I get a response from the upstairs window and step back onto the road to see the mother

[00:25:44] holding all three kids in her arms. And she tells me that the middle child, who is 9, found the intruders on the stairs when she went to get a drink in the night. The girl, Imogen, tells me they're like clowns.

[00:25:59] This extra detail is the straw that broke the camel's back. And my vision darkens. Shit, I'm going to pass out. The last thing I hear is Emi telling her mom I said a bad word. I came to in the middle of the road with a foil blanket on.

[00:26:18] I could see lots of blue lights, three police cars and an ambulance. That one was for me. And I could see my neighbors out of the corner of my eye. My hearing returns as Emi tells me that her little brother volunteered his soft toy to

[00:26:32] put under my head because I hit it when I fainted. Suddenly I'm up and looking around to count all five of the family members and check for injury. Over the top of their heads, I can see an arm frantically waving in and out of view.

[00:26:51] The moving weirdos broke into my neighbor's house. I see the woman is standing still, her head still slumped to the side, just as she's lowered into the police car. I was later told that as I spoke to my neighbors out of their bedroom window, their dad had

[00:27:11] gone to fight the intruders and kick the woman down the stairs as she was climbing them. The man was the frantically moving shadow I had seen from the doorway. Police reckoned they'd been trying doors down our street and finally found one that was unlocked.

[00:27:28] I told them about the couple trying the door earlier in the afternoon. I'm guided to the ambulance and sat on the bed whilst the paramedics tend to a large cut on the back of my head from the fall.

[00:27:41] I vaguely feel them removing gravel, cleaning and gluing and dressing it, but I'm preoccupied watching two police try to contain the human dancing inflatable man. They can't catch both arms at the same time to cuff him, so eventually one policeman is

[00:28:00] cuffed to one of the man's hands, and thus his arm flung every which way as the man continues to move. I have no idea what they've been tried with, if they were on drugs or had a movement disorder.

[00:28:14] Me and my dad do have a small bet on this matter, or when the court hearing is yet, but as a key witness I'll be told when they need me in court.

[00:28:26] But I would happily go the rest of my life without hearing a kid scream at 2am and seeing those two weird moving creeps. So creepy dancing people let's not meet. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Let's Not Meet, a true horror podcast.

[00:29:05] This week you have heard Creepy Coworker Turns Into Something Vile by Reddit user FunkyDiscoball. Someone I went to high school with lived a fake life on the internet using my identity without me knowing for years by Reddit user LockWizardsDelight.

[00:29:22] And finally, Why You Should Always Lock Your Doors by Reddit user MollyDenison. Don't forget to send your stories in to letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com. And if you have any questions, email me at letsnotmeetpodcast at gmail.com.

[00:29:36] And as always, if you'd like to gain access to bonus episodes, visit patreon.com forward slash letsnotmeetpodcast to sign up for all the bonus material. I'll see you guys next week for a brand new episode of Let's Not Meet.