3x07: Hotel Basement

[00:00:04] My name is Andrew Tate and this is season 3 episode 7 of Let's Not Meet, A True Horror Podcast. So I've been wanting to post this for a while but a combination of technical difficulties and residual fear have been preventing me from doing so thus far.

[00:00:33] Now it's the middle of the night. I've got nothing better to do. So I'm going to try and get this off my chest. I grew up with my parents who were reasonable loving people, but who were also more than a little paranoid when it came to the internet.

[00:00:47] Anything that allowed anonymous communication in any form was banned point-blank from the household. Even Club Penguin, if you know what that is, wasn't allowed because you could chat in it. Naturally when I got my first laptop at 12, which was a piece of crap,

[00:01:06] the first thing I did was to start trying to talk to people online. I wasn't going into chat rooms or anything because my parents' warnings still resonated with me, but I wasn't avoiding contact either. I ended up making a deviant art account. I know it's cringy.

[00:01:25] Well, I didn't do much posting there as I lack artistic talent. In spite of this however, I was contacted via private message by a guy who we'll call Joker, because his profile picture was of the Joker. That should have been a warning sign in and of itself, honestly.

[00:01:44] Joker just started talking to me out of the blue. I think I had commented on one of his pieces or something and he reached out to me to thank me for my kind words. We started talking. It turned out we had a lot of things in common.

[00:02:00] We played some of the same games, liked some of the same cartoons, etc. He seemed really, really nice. I think it was maybe a week or two in that the first uncomfortable thing happened, even if I didn't exactly think much of it at the time.

[00:02:18] The two of us shared a somewhat misanthropic view of the world. So there were a lot of dark jokes passed back and forth between us. Sometime about a week after we first started messaging, he casually mentions that he thinks the world would be better off without him.

[00:02:36] I sent him a sad face and assured him that that was not the case as I quite liked talking to him. He didn't say anything more about it then so I assumed that that was it. It wasn't. Joker talked about suicide a lot.

[00:02:52] His talking about it quickly morphed from passing commentary to long, graphic rants about how much he hated himself and how he wanted to die and what method would be the best for him to do. I spent hours talking him down over chat,

[00:03:08] terrified that one day I wouldn't be able to do enough and he'd actually do it. His messages started to get creepy in a different way though. He started telling me how grateful he was to have me

[00:03:22] and how no one ever cared about him as much as I did, how important I was to him, how he couldn't live without me, how he'd just die if he were to ever lose me. He was obsessed. Well one day, a couple of months in, my laptop breaks.

[00:03:41] It wasn't too bad but it still took a couple of days before everything was back in working order. I logged back into DeviantArt to find dozens of messages, all from Joker. They started out normal enough but quickly became frantic after I didn't respond.

[00:04:00] The last message he sent was along the lines of, I can't take this anymore, followed by a link to a picture. The image was of a pair of slit wrists. The cuts were deep and fairly fresh looking,

[00:04:16] with red inflamed edges and the beginnings of an ugly scabbing just beginning to settle over the top. I was horrified. I quickly messaged him back, terrified that I had just lost a friend. And he responded, I thought I lost you, he said. I thought you'd left me.

[00:04:37] I couldn't handle the pain. I thought you'd left me. I couldn't handle the pain without you. Don't ever do that to me again. I said I wouldn't and he seemed relieved. He only got worse from then on.

[00:04:53] It reached a point where practically all of our conversations consisted of him either professing his obsession with me, threatening suicide or both. The stress was keeping me up at night. I was terrified that one day, soon, I'd open up the chat and see nothing.

[00:05:12] I was utterly convinced it was my job to keep this guy alive and that was failing miserably. Joker kept escalating until one day, nearly a year in, he finally said something that frightened me so badly, I had to leave.

[00:05:28] Joker started talking about how I was the last good person left on this miserable planet. He waxed poetic about how much he wanted to kill himself and said that he'd finally found a way to truly be happy.

[00:05:45] He said the only way he'd ever be able to find happiness was in killing himself and taking me with him. That way we would always be together, free from the cruel weight of the world. He started going into very detailed, very graphic descriptions of how he'd kill me.

[00:06:06] A lot of them involved carving out my heart then clutching it to his chest and laying beside me as he took his own life as well. I was terrified, enough so that I did what I should have done a long time ago and deleted that account.

[00:06:23] For years following that incident, I never spoke to anyone online. Even to this day actually, there's still a lingering sense of dread when it comes to an online interaction. So to the boy who I thought was my first internet friend, I don't know what your deal was.

[00:06:39] Whether you were mentally ill or purposefully malicious or some combination of the two, but whatever the case may have been, let's not meet. The story I'm going to share with you took place in North Pole, Alaska in May.

[00:07:08] The incident I'm going to describe was a wrong place, wrong time and completely unprovoked situation, which no one believes. Another note, I was still only 20 when this incident occurred and could not legally own a pistol yet.

[00:07:23] Also, I was in the army and if you live in the barracks, you have to keep your weapons in the arms room.

[00:07:27] So it's not like it's convenient to get that out and carry as compared to a guy living off post who can keep his gun in a safe closet. I know people will wonder why I wasn't carrying and those are the reasons, but anyways, here's my story.

[00:07:43] On the night of Cinco de Mayo, I attended a party at a friend's house in North Pole, Alaska. North Pole is about 20 to 30 minutes outside of Fairbanks.

[00:07:52] It's a somewhat rural community, lots of houses that are on 1 to 2 acre lots and mostly all dirt roads off of the main road.

[00:08:01] I was the designated driver that night and drove four of my friends, but three of the friends that I brought decided that they were going to spend the night at that person's house instead of going back to the barracks.

[00:08:12] Only one of the friends that wasn't drinking a lot decided that he wanted to go back to the barracks when I was ready to go. We ended up leaving about 1.30 a.m.

[00:08:23] As we were pulling into the front gate, we got a call that there had been a fight at the party. They said that after the fight everyone was going to go home instead of staying the night and continuing drinking.

[00:08:36] They asked us all to come back and pick them up, but said that they had went to a different friend's house that lived in the same area because everyone had to leave after the fight. Well, the GPS signal doesn't work that well once you get outside of Fairbanks.

[00:08:51] When we went to the address that was given, it came up as being in the middle of the road.

[00:08:57] So we took a turn down a side road to turn around and try to get service so that we could make a call to figure out what house it was. By this time it was around 2.30 a.m.

[00:09:08] As we turned down the road there was an old red minivan with fog lights mounted on top just idling there with two guys that looked to be in their late 20s inside.

[00:09:19] I remember thinking that it looked like something you'd see in a TV show or a horror movie, just a really creepy van, especially at almost 3 in the morning.

[00:09:29] We had to pass them to turn around and they looked at us in a way that gave us all a very bad feeling. So we turned around and then we had to pass them again to pull out onto the main road.

[00:09:43] As we passed, the driver was leaning his head out of the window like he wanted us to stop so that they could ask for something. Being that it was almost 3 a.m., we knew it was probably best to keep driving.

[00:09:57] My friend wasn't able to get a hold of anyone so he tried mapping it out again. The GPS was delayed due to the poor service though and we missed the turn again.

[00:10:08] We saw a small clearing to pull over so we pulled over to the side of the road to verify where we were compared to the street that we missed.

[00:10:18] About 10 seconds later, the red minivan with fog lights pulled up next to us on my driver's side and rolled down the window. I rolled down my window and they initiated conversation by asking if we had seen a white Dodge pickup.

[00:10:33] We said that we hadn't and they said, okay, thanks. We then asked if they knew where Meadow Rue, the street that we were looking for, was. They said it was the first street on the left if we headed back the way we just came.

[00:10:49] We were suspicious but when we looked at the GPS, it looked like that was the road. We found out later that the road was on both sides of the main road. Note, locals outside of Fairbanks tend to not like the active duty military guys.

[00:11:07] The military guys stick out a lot due to the lack of beard and long hair and having the military haircut. We started heading toward the Meadow Rue, which was about half a mile away, and saw them pull out and start heading that way behind us.

[00:11:25] We made the turn into what we thought was Meadow Rue and this road was a little bumpy dirt road and immediately forks off into two directions.

[00:11:35] One side goes straight and up a slight hill, the other side is off to the left and drops down about two feet then flattens out. We turned left and dropped down the small incline.

[00:11:46] The road was narrow, only big enough for one car and lined with trees on both sides for a good distance. The first thing we noticed was a dead end sign and that's when we started to get worried.

[00:12:01] We drove about 20 feet and then we see the minivan with the fog lights turn in and drop down behind us. At this point my blood turned cold and I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. I knew at this point that they were following us.

[00:12:20] I tried to be positive and hoped for a split second that they'd hang back and turn off at the first driveway, but we hadn't seen a driveway yet.

[00:12:28] But then we saw them speeding up. Again, this is a bumpy dirt side street and there's no reason to be going fast. I started speeding up and they slammed into the back of my car, backed off, then rammed me again.

[00:12:43] A few seconds later we made it to a small clearing like a cul-de-sac that was in the dirt. I had enough room to pull forward and then reverse myself back so that I was facing the direction I had just came.

[00:12:57] While I was doing this, they stopped and blocked the one lane dirt road. They hopped out of the car and one of them shouted, This ain't Meadow Rue, motherfucker. Get the fuck out of the car.

[00:13:12] The one guy had positioned himself directly in front of my car about 10 to 15 feet away between the trees and the van. The other guy started walking up to my passenger side where my friend was.

[00:13:26] They kept shouting at us to get out, but I gunned it right at the guy in front of me trying to run him over. He managed to jump out of the way.

[00:13:35] I thought for sure there wouldn't be enough room between his minivan and the trees and figured we'd get stuck, but we had no guns so there wasn't a better choice.

[00:13:47] I thought we'd have to bell out and run into the woods and hide, but to my surprise we squeezed through. It was such a tight fit that both of my mirrors collapsed in. I then sped out of there, got onto the main road and headed for home.

[00:14:02] I had seen a state trooper not long before all of this, not too far down the road. I was scared to death of being chased again and then run off the road at higher speeds.

[00:14:13] So instead of slowing down, I blew past the state trooper while doing 90 in a 45, not exaggerating. Since that is extreme speeding, I thought I'd get the troopers attention, but for whatever reason, it didn't.

[00:14:27] There was only one turn on the whole way back and when I slowed down to make it, the van was nowhere in sight. I flew back at 90 miles per hour all the way just to be safe. The next day we had to tell our friends what happened.

[00:14:46] Nobody believed us, not one person. They thought we didn't feel like driving all the way back to pick them up. So we made up a story to get out of it.

[00:14:54] The guy who had invited us all over originally said if we were serious that we needed to go file a police report with the Alaska state troopers. So I went to file a police report at the state trooper's office in town.

[00:15:07] We filed the report and after giving our story to the trooper, he told us to wait and he left us in the room. About 15 minutes later, he came back in and told us to go back to the state troopers.

[00:15:19] He came back in and told us to tell the truth. Confused, we asked him what he meant. He said his theory was that we were drunk driving around late at night after Cinco de Mayo and we had plowed into the van that we described.

[00:15:36] He said he thought the owner heard what had happened then came out and confronted us so we took off.

[00:15:41] He said that to get ahead of the story, we made up the whole thing so that we wouldn't get into trouble for wrecking into a car while drunk and leaving the scene.

[00:15:50] We repeatedly told him that was not the case and said that everything we told him was true. Without evidence to prove his theory, he did let us go. The next day, he went and checked the area that we showed him on the map.

[00:16:03] I guess he didn't find a wrecked car and he knew that we were most likely telling him the truth.

[00:16:08] He called and asked us to come to meet him out there to verify that was the area but we told him we did not want to go anywhere near there again. About two weeks after that, he called and asked us to come in and possibly ID the vehicle.

[00:16:23] He showed us a picture of a red minivan with fog lights and we said that looked like the vehicle from the incident. He then told us that the vehicle was stolen from another town sometime before that and it was stolen from an old woman.

[00:16:38] These guys may or may not have been related to her. The trooper said if any arrests were made that he would call us back. We never heard any follow up after that. To this day, no one really believes my story.

[00:16:52] They think we did something to provoke the incident or just think that we made it all up to sound cool or something. But it was just a case of wrong place, wrong time. This happened in the summer of 2010 when I was entering my teenage years.

[00:17:21] My family took a trip to a really nice hotel in the city. I can't remember why we decided to take this trip but I remember a lot of family friends coming with and staying in adjacent rooms.

[00:17:34] I never asked my parents and it's not really important to the story. To preface, I am a bit of a scaredy cat and always have been. I'm pretty skinny and a fragile kid so I get spooked pretty easily even now.

[00:17:48] This however was almost definitely not me freaking out like I normally did. Looking back, I'm incredibly lucky I trusted my instincts. This hotel had a strange design. The lobby was actually on the fourth floor, not the bottom floor which I found strange.

[00:18:07] To access the lobby you had to use the elevator. There was no way for you to get to it from the stairs. The information would have been nice before everything happened as you'll soon find out. The hotel was organized in a square shape.

[00:18:23] Every floor was lined with the balcony so that you could look down into the lobby and the cafe area from your floor. Essentially if you were walking to your room, you could be seen from anyone that was on your floor if they just stood there.

[00:18:40] I just stepped out of their room and looked around. The first day or two were nice. My friends and I hung out and played cards all day or we watched whatever was on TV. At night, we'd explore the halls of the hotel and tell each other ghost stories.

[00:18:56] It was a really fun time even though I didn't fully understand why we were there. On the third day though, things got strange fast. I woke up to the sound of screaming coming from outside my door.

[00:19:08] Now because of the hotel's design I mentioned, sounds from the lobby would echo all the way up to the top of the building. So when I walked outside to investigate, I immediately looked over the balcony to see what the commotion was about.

[00:19:24] I saw a young girl laying on the ground. Eggs and milk splattered all around her. People were rushing to help her and I heard a couple of people telling each other to call 911. It seemed like the girl was unconscious. Maybe she had passed out or something.

[00:19:42] I scanned the lobby and saw that my family and a couple of friends were in the lobby getting breakfast, all staring at the event in front of them. I decided to rush down to meet them and find out what happened.

[00:19:54] The elevator was on the opposite side of my floor so I took the stairwell located right next to my room. We were on the 7th or 8th floor so I knew that I had to take about 4 flights down. Not a big deal.

[00:20:08] I descended for a little while, looking for number 4 on the wall or the letter L. I passed floor 5, ready to find a door to the lobby.

[00:20:18] It took about 2 more flights of steps before realizing that there hadn't been a door on the 4th floor nor had there been a door on the 3rd or 2nd.

[00:20:28] Now at this point I probably should have turned back, but I continued down because I was tired and didn't want to climb back up.

[00:20:35] There were some weird side hallways that went into pitch black areas with a bunch of piping and wiring and though I was curious to explore I passed them by. I quickly hit the bottom floor, a dimly lit and cold room with cinder block walls and concrete floors.

[00:20:52] In front of me was a set of double doors. I hesitated at first but I assumed that this was just another way back to the lobby so I opened and entered. Behind the doors was a massive warehouse type room, probably the size of a smaller basketball stadium.

[00:21:13] The only light coming in was from the stairwell behind me so I really wasn't able to see much. Stairs were stacked and covered in plastic wraps. Tables lined the walls and in the distance I thought I could see boxes stacked and lined against the wall as well.

[00:21:33] I was probably in the storage room for the hotel. I looked around and saw an elevator in the back of the room so I made my way towards it.

[00:21:43] I closed the door to the stairwell and began to walk in the dim light. The room was super muggy and dusty and it seemed like nobody had been down there in a long time.

[00:21:56] As I got closer to the elevator I noticed it was a little bigger than the elevators in the lobby and the other floors.

[00:22:03] I pressed the up button and got no response. There was a card swiper next to the button. It must have been for employees only, I thought. I turned back towards the stairwell doors making my way past the chairs and tables along the wall.

[00:22:21] When I got to the door I gave it a tug. Locked. Of course. This is where things started to hit me and I realized that I was stuck in the dark in the dusty basement of a hotel.

[00:22:37] I didn't have a phone because my parents wouldn't let me get one until I graduated middle school so I couldn't call anyone. Everyone likely assumed I was still asleep in the room so I began to freak out believing that nobody was going to be looking for me.

[00:22:53] I searched around the warehouse looking for other ways out. Some areas of the place were better lit than others so I looked around in areas that I could see first before starting on the darker side of the room.

[00:23:06] There was one other set of doors that I found but they happened to be locked as well. I began to cry, scared that nobody was ever going to find me in this basement.

[00:23:17] I swear it felt like hours but I think only a handful of minutes passed before I heard the door creak open. It wasn't the door from the stairwell, rather the second door that I had found. A slim, middle-aged man in a lab coat came out of the doors.

[00:23:35] Now if this were 21 year old me seeing this man I would be very confused as to why this guy was wearing a lab coat in a hotel. I was only 12 or 13 at the time so I immediately felt relieved at the sight of an adult who looked smart.

[00:23:52] I approached him, tears in my eyes and he immediately looked surprised to see me as you'd expect. What are you doing down here? He yelled. I got lost on my way to the lobby. I've been locked in here. Do you have a key?

[00:24:09] I was shaking, eager to get out of there. He didn't answer my question though. Instead he said, I know a way out of here, follow me. He began to walk towards the door with the stairwell and I followed, relieved that someone had finally come to save me.

[00:24:28] We approached the doors and I began to reach for the handle but he continued walking. Isn't it right here? I asked him. I'll never forget the look on his face when I said that.

[00:24:40] He looked nervous and though it was dim I could see sweat glistening from his forehead behind his glasses. No, this way, he said sternly. I continued to follow him but I was now nervous myself.

[00:24:59] We had passed the door to the stairs and were now headed toward a darker side of the basement, away from the elevators. He looked like he had no clue where he was leading me as he kept checking around him,

[00:25:15] almost as if he were taking in his surroundings for the first time. We turned a corner and began walking towards the boxes. A dead end. I immediately froze, realizing that something was very, very wrong.

[00:25:31] This guy had no idea where he was going, nor did he appear to work at the hotel. I said, with my voice shaking, Okay, where are we going? He turned and said, This way, just follow me. I knew that there were no doors by those boxes.

[00:25:53] I had checked there first after I found out that the stairwell door was locked. I want to thank whatever God is up there for gifting me with the idea that I had next.

[00:26:04] I started yelling, as loud as I could. I yelled so loud that I gave myself a headache. The man, irritated and plugging his ears, began yelling back at me, What are you doing? Be quiet! I continued to yell. I don't even remember how long I was yelling.

[00:26:22] Finally, the man snapped and began quickly walking towards me. I went in a full sprint towards the stairwell doors, hoping to God they'd somehow be magically open. He didn't run after me. He walked sternly behind me, muttering things like, Stupid fucker! And other kinds of compliments.

[00:26:46] I was about five feet from the door when somebody burst through, my savior, a hotel janitor who had heard the screaming from the stairwell. He saw the situation, me and some random guy in a lab coat in a locked basement, and immediately told me to get behind him.

[00:27:06] The janitor asked me who the man was, and I said I had no idea, and that he had come through the door on the other side of the room, and I pointed to the door.

[00:27:14] The janitor quickly radioed to the desk that he had found a child in the basement, and quietly, so that I wouldn't hear, he said, This man came from outside. Get security. The man in the lab coat started trying to argue with the janitor,

[00:27:33] claiming that he simply was looking for the bathroom. The janitor clearly wasn't buying it, The janitor clearly wasn't buying it, and kept saying things like, Wait until security gets here and talk to them about it. I was standing beside him the whole time,

[00:27:50] trying to take in whatever was happening, confused, out of my mind. Eventually an employee from the front desk arrived and took me back up the steps to the lobby, where I met my family, who surprisingly had no idea I was missing.

[00:28:05] I told them the story, crying and shaking, and they hugged me tightly, thanking the employee over and over again for their help. I never got to thank that janitor though. Looking back now, I have absolutely no clue what that man was doing in the basement.

[00:28:20] I don't have any information as to what happened afterwards or who he was. I know for a fact that the incident with the girl in the lobby was unrelated, something about low blood sugar. Not sure.

[00:28:34] I thought about that day a lot, and the only explanation I can put together is that the door that I had found in the basement led to the streets of the city, where he must have wandered in from. I have no clue what his intentions were,

[00:28:49] why he was wearing a lab coat or why he chose to pretend to know a way out. To be frank, this could have been a huge misunderstanding of some sort, and I just chose a really bad time to get lost.

[00:29:01] But all I know for sure is if I hadn't screamed my lungs out, I might not have been telling this story the same way. Or at all. So strange man in the lab coat wandering around a dark, dusty hotel basement? Let's not meet. Let's not meet.

[00:29:57] If you'd like to send in your story, email letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com and for any questions about the show, email me at letsnotmeetpodcast at gmail.com Special thanks to Pat Hills from Earth Tone Studios in Sacramento, California

[00:30:12] for having me in the studio so that I could record my episodes in peace and quiet. And it's thanks to my Patreon subscribers that I'm able to do this. So if you'd like to sign up, go over to patreon.com forward slash

[00:30:24] letsnotmeetpodcast to get access to bonus episodes and support the show. I gotta say though, it's a bit creepy at night. It's about 11 o'clock here. It's dark, it's quiet, it's cold, and this vocal booth is surrounded by red curtains.

[00:30:42] I feel like I'm in an episode of Twin Peaks with the lighting and these curtains. It's pretty creepy. I want to get out of here as quickly as possible, so I'm going to go! I'll see you guys next week for a brand new episode of Let's Not Meet.