4x09: The Factory - Let's Not Meet

[00:00:03] My name is Andrew Tate and this is Season 4, Episode 9 of Lets Not Meet, A True Horror Podcast. Let's call her Sam. All throughout high school, and even a bit afterwards, we were best friends.

[00:00:28] Even though we were best friends, I felt like I didn't know her, if that makes any sense. We were pretty wild teenagers, drinking, smoking, hanging out with older guys. I know, it's gross. Sam dated super sketchy guys.

[00:00:44] When we were 16, Sam started dating a 27 year old named John. I know, this is disgusting as well. I had my fair share of dating guys way too old for me as well though. So, I didn't see anything wrong with it.

[00:01:01] Also, predators have a special way of making you feel like there's nothing wrong with what they're doing. I have my fair share of trauma due to older men that I've been with during my life. But, that's a story for another time.

[00:01:16] She didn't have a car at the time, so she would regularly ask me to drop her off at his place to hang out and cover for her if her mom contacted me. Because this quote on quote relationship was obviously hidden from her mom.

[00:01:30] Being an idiot teenager, I said sure, whatever. She's my homegirl and I know she'd do the same for me. Plus, I had met John several times before and he seemed decent enough at the time.

[00:01:43] Please keep in mind, I was also a teenager and obviously I realize that he's a predator now. He would give us alcohol and he would invite us over to party with his equally disgusting friends. Their relationship seemed fine at first, but it turned toxic within a few months.

[00:02:03] I mean yeah, he's a full grown man manipulating a little girl. He would constantly demand to track her phone location and control what she wore. He also cheated on her multiple times, but she always stayed. During the time that this happened, I stopped driving her to see him.

[00:02:23] One time she called me begging to drive her to go see him. I said no. She went on to explain that he was drunk and if I wouldn't then he would pick her up

[00:02:34] and if they got into a car crash due to drunk driving it would be my fault. So I drove her to his house. I was furious with John at this point for hurting my best friend and I had a rebellious teenage give no fucks attitude.

[00:02:50] So as soon as I walked into his house to drop Sam off, I started screaming at him for being a manipulative piece of shit. His response and the dark twisted yet emotionless look in his eyes still gives me chills to this day.

[00:03:06] I could break your neck so easily, he said. Thankfully, I was standing right next to the front door. So I ran out to my car and immediately sped off. I asked Sam to stop talking to me about John because I was sick of hearing about him.

[00:03:25] Well, the next couple of years are kind of fuzzy, but basically they were constantly breaking up and getting back together. Sam dated a string of other guys but would always cheat on them with John. When we were 18, this is when things started to get progressively weirder

[00:03:44] and I started to distance myself from Sam because of it. Long story short, Sam had a new boyfriend who she seemed crazy about and was so relieved because she finally seemed to be over John. Then she heard through the grapevine that John got engaged and became irate.

[00:04:05] We were hanging out when she heard the news and she was like, I just have to go home and process all of this. So she immediately left and I just thought whatever, I'll give her space.

[00:04:18] She calls me after a few hours and she's talking very fast, laughing a lot. I said, are you good? She said, yeah, I broke into John's apartment and I smashed all of his shit.

[00:04:33] I know that I have this new guy that I'm dating but I've been hooking up with John still. Don't hate me and I'm sorry I didn't tell you. But anyway, I feel so great. I broke his TV, I cut up all of his sheets.

[00:04:49] Too bad John and his fiance weren't home. Now I've never seen her act like this before. I was alarmed. What would she have done if they were home? The break-in was never reported to the police because she told John it was her.

[00:05:04] And if he went to the police, John's fiance likely would have found out that he was cheating on her with Sam. Now at this point, a smart person would completely cut her off but I didn't. I stopped hanging out with her as much as we did

[00:05:19] And we naturally grew a bit distant because I had moved across the country for college but we would text and FaceTime every couple of weeks. In 2018, John's fiance was found dead.

[00:05:33] The police immediately ruled it as a suicide because there was a note and a gun found in her hand. But all of her friends and family insisted that she would never do that. I know this because I had a few mutual friends with his fiance

[00:05:49] and it was understandably all that anyone could talk about. She was known to everyone for being extremely positive and cheerful. They pressured the cops to investigate more and lo and behold, one year later, John was found guilty of murdering her. He's currently in prison

[00:06:10] and it chills me to the bone knowing that I was in his house on multiple occasions and used to frequently hang out with him. Well, I think my friend may have had something to do with it.

[00:06:22] Last year she was visiting my city and asked to meet up for dinner. I said, yeah sure, why not? We're going to be in public and I do miss her. It'd be nice to catch up. While we were at dinner, she had her phone on the table

[00:06:36] and I saw a call from the name Jail ringing into her phone. She quickly excused herself to take the call and was gone for a couple of minutes. When she got back, I asked what was going on. She explained that she visits John in prison regularly

[00:06:54] and they talk on the phone every day. I asked why? He was found guilty of murder. Why would you want anything to do with him? She looked me dead in the eyes with a look of pure evil and malice and said,

[00:07:09] I'm the only one who knows the truth about what actually happened. Nobody else knows the truth. I quickly changed the subject and finished my dinner as fast as I could then made an excuse to leave.

[00:07:24] I was terrified at this point and had no idea what she was capable of. I hightailed it back to my apartment and blocked her on everything. I haven't spoken to her since. I know this isn't solid proof that she was involved,

[00:07:38] but her past behavior, the break-in, coupled with that chilling comment and the fact that she regularly visited a convicted murderer in prison leads me to believe that she had something to do with it. At the very least, she knows much more than she's admitting.

[00:07:56] Sam, let's never fucking meet again. This goes back to the mid-90s. I would say 95. My grandma, already a widow, lived alone in her house in a small village surrounded by hills and small mountains. As it happens, my grandma's house was in the slope of a mountain

[00:08:30] beside a small partially paved road hardly wide enough for one car. This road was used by my parents and uncles to drive their cars up to the house when visiting and they would park on the road itself as there was no traffic whatsoever.

[00:08:45] So me, my sister, and our three cousins, all of us in the age range of 8 to 13, took advantage of the paved road to play soccer. We would spend almost two months every summer at my grandma's. Those vacations were the highlight of the year.

[00:09:01] Well, across the road from my grandma's, there was another house whose occupant, an elderly man who lived alone, was a bit eccentric. His name was Pepe. Pepe would only leave the house to go shopping and take care of his garden.

[00:09:18] He was a bit of a loner, as was my grandma, who among us was the only one who ever had a conversation with him. They had a polite but distant approach towards each other. You know, neighbor basics, good morning, good morning,

[00:09:34] talking about the weather, small talk like that. All this after 30 years of living in front of each other separated by no more than 10 meters. Hey, privacy is always to be respected. Pepe led a quiet monk life that was threatened only by soccer and naughty kids.

[00:09:57] In the beginning, he just stared at us from one of his windows as we would play. As the kids we were, this was actually quite comical, and we'd look at each other and roll our eyes up as if, oh, the weirdo's stalking us again from the window.

[00:10:15] He would stay there for as long as we played ball, more than hours sometimes, with his poker face on. He never said a word to us. I recall sometimes we waved at him so he would feel uncomfortable for displaying such weird behavior,

[00:10:33] but he never waved back and never left until we stopped playing ball. He was clearly pissed off, and our assumption, of course, was that the ball was the problem. This situation repeated itself every day for around 2-3 weeks, and my grandma grew uncomfortable with us playing ball,

[00:10:53] so she repeatedly told us not to, but kids will be kids, and any time my grandma was in the garden or in the back collecting apples from a nearby field, we wanted to play soccer. Big mistake. One evening, we were doing our thing

[00:11:08] and Pepe had been staring at us for about 20 minutes or so from his window when suddenly he disappeared. Now that was new. Not a minute passes and Pepe shows up on his big-ass porch oriented towards my grandma's, where he had some firewood and a bunch of long sticks.

[00:11:29] He had a small knife in his hand, but we didn't notice it at first. The situation is still funny for us because he's looking super upset, just dressed in his usual apron and wooden shoes. So we once more just look at each other, roll our eyes up,

[00:11:47] and contained our laughs. Soccer carries on. Pepe grabs one of the long sticks and starts to sharpen it, as if it were a spear. By this point, I remember our faces started to change, but I guess our feeling was that he was just trying to intimidate us.

[00:12:06] Bottom line, we were not doing anything illegal by playing ball on public property. As we kids had discussed among ourselves several times, he had been weird on purpose to scare us, but it didn't stop us from playing. But then it happened.

[00:12:24] He left the porch and with his wooden shoes started to chase us with the spear pointing out front, as if he were some fucking medieval knight in a tournament without a horse. The crew and I ran for our lives to our grandmas

[00:12:39] and locked the door, completely in shock as my grandma came inside from the backyard after hearing our screams. As we told her what happened, Pepe was just outside the house, screaming that he was going to set it on fire with all of us inside.

[00:12:53] My grandma calls 112, and in the meantime, my father, who had gone for a jog, arrives to the house to find the neighbor screaming like a possessed man with a spear in his hand, and engages him. Now, we're on the top floor of my grandma's,

[00:13:10] watching my father and Pepe scream at each other. Eventually, Pepe drops a spear. Police arrive and there's a report filed. The police talk to Pepe for a while. As one of the policemen told us later,

[00:13:23] Pepe wanted to sue us for playing ball in the street by his house and thus threatening his property with damage. It seems that police warned Pepe he wouldn't sleep at his place if they ever had to come back. But after he threatened to burn my grandma's house

[00:13:40] with all of us inside, no one slept that night. We never again played ball around there, and a couple of years later, Pepe left the house to live with a relative across the country, as my grandma would later find out. Well, you know the drill.

[00:13:56] Beware your odd neighbors and Pepe, let's not meet. First, I want to apologize. English isn't my native language, so the writing may seem a bit odd. When I was in high school, I wasn't a very hard-working student. I wasn't a troublemaker, but I was an incredibly lazy girl,

[00:14:26] working just the minimum so that my parents wouldn't get angry. I never really knew what it truly meant to make any effort. So I spent all my classes drawing on my copybooks without any consequences. My junior year's math teacher, who was seen by everyone as uptight but caring,

[00:14:45] was pretty upset about this, as were many of my previous teachers. He wanted me to work harder. I wasn't bad at math. I usually got a B or a B-, but sometimes my grades would be pretty low.

[00:14:59] During a teacher-parent meeting, he told my mom that I was wasting my capacities, that it was infuriating how lazy I was. My mom then replied that she agreed with him, and that she wouldn't blame him for pushing me harder or punishing me

[00:15:15] if it was making me work harder. And from that day on, he did exactly what she told. In every math class, he would always question me first before anyone else. He was always sitting next to me when we were doing our exercises.

[00:15:30] During a test, he would be telling me, You can do it, Elisa. It made me feel incredibly uncomfortable because at that age, no one wants to be the center of attention. My classmates started to realize that my math teacher was a little obsessed with me,

[00:15:45] and they were teasing me about this. The last class before Christmas break, the math teacher threw a little surprise Christmas party. It was really nice. He gave us chocolates and mock champagne. We had a lot of fun.

[00:15:59] During the party, he poured me another glass of this mock champagne, telling me that I deserved it because I was doing so much better. It was true. Because of all that attention, I was forced to get my grades up to an A or an A-.

[00:16:15] I accepted it, but I didn't drink it entirely. I have diabetes, and I already had a lot of chocolate. But during the next class, I felt very odd. I almost fainted and finished my last day of school before Christmas in the nurse's office.

[00:16:33] At that time, I wouldn't even think it was because of the alcohol-free champagne. I thought maybe it was due to my diabetes, that I indeed did have too much chocolate, even if it didn't look like my usual crisis.

[00:16:47] A few weeks later, my class threw some kind of charity event, and it was a class project. We were very proud of it. In my country, we don't have proms, so it was our occasion to wear formal clothes and dance together. The math teacher was invited,

[00:17:03] and he was helping out some of the boys tend to the bar. He served me an alcohol-free cocktail, but before I could drink it, a classmate of mine, Flora, poured some vodka into it, even though it was forbidden to bring alcohol to the event.

[00:17:20] I was mad because of my diabetes. I couldn't drink alcohol, so I told her that she could just throw the cocktail away. At the time, I thought that she did, but now when I think about it, I wonder if she didn't just choose to drink it instead.

[00:17:35] The event ended pretty badly because of the alcohol that Flora bought. Some of the guys were drunk. They even started breaking things, and Flora passed out because of the alcohol that she had. This ended the event.

[00:17:48] Flora had been admitted to the hospital because she was in a coma. It was pretty severe. We spent the next day being lectured by our teacher at school. Flora got expelled from school and never went back again. I was very upset with her

[00:18:04] because every event would now be forbidden, and our project was a failure. It gave us a very bad image to the association that we were raising funds for. So I kind of ghosted her and never asked if she was doing any better.

[00:18:17] Now I feel bad about this, but at the time, I was just immature. But because of that, I'll never know if she was ill because of the alcohol or because of my cocktail. A few weeks later, I failed a math test.

[00:18:33] It had been a long time since I failed a test, and my math teacher was very angry with me. He yelled at me in front of everyone, saying how much of a disappointment I was, that I was hopeless,

[00:18:46] that I would just end up living in a cardboard box under a bridge. Something was off, though. I was feeling it. He had a very weird look in his eyes. It chilled me, and I couldn't help but start crying. He calmed me down a bit

[00:19:02] and said that he would just give me an hour of detention, during which I would copy my lesson. I was a bit surprised because normally detention was for bad behavior, not for bad grades. But I was a little relieved because it was a small punishment.

[00:19:18] My parents would never know. I actually lived far away from my high school, and there was only one bus every night between my high school and home at 5 p.m. Because of that, even when I finished at 4 p.m., I wouldn't even go home before 5,

[00:19:34] and my detention was supposed to be between 4 and 5. My parents would never know. But then, when he officially gave me the detention hour, he said that he wanted to be personally present, and that the only possible way was for me to serve detention between 5 and 6.

[00:19:51] I was really nervous because I would have to tell my parents to come get me at 6, and then they would know everything. As I said earlier, I wasn't a troublemaker, so at first I planned to go to the detention hour,

[00:20:04] but during the day, my friend and I talked about it, and I was feeling a bit more rebellious because of the sensation of being supported by my friends. So I decided not to tell my parents that I was in detention

[00:20:15] and that one of my friends would pick me up at 6 and drive me home. At 5, when heading towards the detention room, I was angry, mumbling that it wasn't fair to be in detention because of one bad grade. When I arrived in front of the detention room,

[00:20:32] I realized I was the only one waiting. I then also realized that I would be the only student in detention, alone with that math teacher who was obsessive. It was getting dark outside. It was during late winter, early spring, so the night came early.

[00:20:49] This was a big no from me, and when I saw him coming, I panicked. I said something along the lines of, Sorry, I have an emergency. I have to go. I'll email the school for a rescheduling of my detention hour. Then I ran off.

[00:21:07] He started to yell at me that I had to obey him and go to detention, that he would call my parents. But at that moment, I didn't care. I sprinted towards the bus stop and caught my bus and went home.

[00:21:21] I was afraid that he would have called my parents, so when I arrived, I was shaking. But my parents greeted me normally, so I assumed that eventually he just didn't call them. He didn't come back the next day, nor the next week.

[00:21:36] Eventually, I learned that he quit his position. A shrink came to the school one day and asked us if we wanted to talk about this math teacher, but nobody knew what was going on with him, and we didn't have much to say.

[00:21:52] The shrink left, and we never heard from him again until a few months ago. I became a teacher, which is ironic given my laziness from when I was a teen. Well, one day I was chatting with a co-worker. I mentioned his name,

[00:22:07] talking about how weird and bizarre this math teacher was and how I skipped the detention hour. And one of my oldest co-workers went very pale when they heard his name. In fact, a few days after the detention hour incident, the math teacher was arrested

[00:22:25] for having downloaded a few child pornography videos from the dark web as well as some kind of snuff movies starring children and young teens. Maybe this detention hour was just a detention hour, and I would have gotten out of it with any problem, but now I'll never know,

[00:22:45] and I'll always wonder what would have happened if I would have stayed there and didn't catch my bus. Sorry, Flora. Maybe you were expelled because of me. This took place in San Francisco in the early 90s. I was 33, living alone in San Francisco. I'm a female.

[00:23:16] I had a good job and I was very interested in real estate. I decided to walk to a neighborhood grocery store to pick up a real estate magazine. That's what you did back then. We didn't really have the Internet just yet.

[00:23:31] It was a rare warm evening in San Francisco, and there were quite a few people walking around outside. I was walking behind a group of maybe 5 or 6 apparently unrelated people. At least they weren't talking to each other, so that's what I assumed.

[00:23:45] I'm rather short, so all I could really see was their backs. Suddenly, without a single word from any of them, they all turned around and started walking back in the direction that we had just come from. I was a bit amazed by this.

[00:24:04] I didn't really look at them. I just sort of shrugged it off and kept going in my original direction. As I turned my head, I was stunned to see a man just in front of me, pointing a gun at me and grinning like a madman.

[00:24:23] He was about my height, wearing those green mechanics overalls covered head to toe in grease and dirt. I was about 2 feet from him, and my gut reaction was to continue going forward. So I passed him, every muscle in my body tense, my heart racing. I kept walking.

[00:24:46] To my dismay, I heard his footsteps following me. Then he started whispering, Oh, you're a bad bitch, huh? At that moment, my mind seized on the belief that he was waiting for me to run before he was going to shoot me in the back.

[00:25:05] He seemed to want it badly. So I was determined to do the opposite. I just kept walking, expecting to feel a bullet slam into my spine at any moment. That shot did not come, and I believed then and now

[00:25:24] that if I had run, that would have given him the piece of fantasy that he needed, if that makes any sense. I headed up the hill and around the corner to a gas station where there were plenty of people.

[00:25:40] It was dark already, but when I turned around, he was gone. It all happened back in the 1990s, I would say maybe 96 or 97. I was around 14 years old. I had this close friend, Carl. Carl was a big brother to me, sometimes playful, sometimes a bully.

[00:26:13] As most of the boys who grew up in the 90s, we spent all of our free time playing video games, watching cheesy horror flicks, and roaming the neighborhood on our bikes, all stickered up like motorcycles. They lived in the countryside just outside of our town.

[00:26:32] After having a meal, we'd usually gear up, grab some snacks and juices, then jump on our bikes to go to the lake. To do so, we had to ride till the end of a bumpy road, then go through a sunflower field. The lake was downhill from there.

[00:26:52] Now every time we'd cross that field, a building in the distance would intrigue us. It was a typical factory building from the 80s. We could see a lot of windows were jammed, some parts of the roof had holes, and the sun was beaming from it.

[00:27:07] I swear we came across this place 30 times at least. Sometimes we'd come closer and play dare. I always ended up being chicken as Carl was willing to check in there. One day though, I dared. We climbed a wooden fence and then we started trespassing.

[00:27:26] Outside of the building were dozens of rusty cars, engines out, some seats put on the floor, some others burned and mauled. The entrance was poorly barricaded, but enough for us to climb up a pipe to the first window that we saw.

[00:27:42] The inside was shocking. It looked like people just stopped what they were doing and rushed out. Tools were disposed on workshops. The pipe was hanging by a huge chain and it was still slightly moving. The only thing that yelled abandoned was the tremendous amount of dirt and dust.

[00:27:57] I remember Carl found an iron pole and started swinging it like he was a video game character or whatever. I knew him, even if he played it cool, he felt just as scared as I was. He tried to act tough though.

[00:28:09] We headed to what seemed an abandoned factory. We were told to go to the other side of the building. We headed to what seemed to be an administrative aisle. It was upstairs. We had to take some thin iron stairs threatening to detach from the staircase every breath.

[00:28:28] The gloominess intensified. The place was basically a long hallway with offices all along. Again, it could have been functional the week before because except the dust and the stuffy smell, everything was left untouched. In one room, I found a newspaper from 1984 or 85.

[00:28:47] It made us compute that they bailed out this year. What impressed me the most were the family pictures and the frames that we found in some of the offices. That was creepy. Who would leave their work forever without taking back pictures of your kids?

[00:29:03] At this time, a picture meant something. Smartphones didn't exist. So if you lost it, it was done. When we took the stairs back, Carl saw a small wooden door under the staircase. It led to a basement. The place looked inhabited.

[00:29:26] The floor was covered with trash, feces, and it smelled like urine. In a corner, we found the actively decaying corpse of a cat. A green curtain was hanging and masked by a black, white, and yellow frame.

[00:29:37] Behind the curtains, we stared in awe in front of a man laying on the floor. He was gibbering words we didn't understand, and he didn't look directly at us. There was another man facing the wall. Although it was clear that we were there,

[00:29:53] I even stumbled on an empty can. I thought, I'm going to die. He still faced the wall. To this day, I don't know what he was doing. But now it was clear that the guy laying on the ground was drooling, and his eyes were red.

[00:30:20] We ran out of there. I recall jumping on my bike and seeing a silhouette behind a window on the first floor. We never told this story to our parents. We were too afraid of being grounded. Last year, I chatted with Carl on social media.

[00:30:39] We hadn't seen each other in 15 years. I asked him if he remembered that day, and he told me, Of course I remember. I was shitting my pants, dude. I didn't want to go there at all, and I never thought you would say dare.

[00:31:13] Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Let's Not Meet, a true horror podcast. This week you have heard, I think my high school best friend was involved in a murder by Reddit user SadRadDad69.

[00:31:24] Odd neighbor didn't like us playing ball nearby and does something about it by Reddit user MKUltra198623. I skipped detention hour, and it may have saved my life by Reddit user BabBetterAv. Pay attention to the crowd by Reddit user Trayland62. And finally,

[00:31:40] The people dreaming of a new life by Reddit user BabBetterAv. All of the stories you've heard this week were narrated and produced with the permission of their respective authors. If you'd like to hear your story on the show, email me at letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com.

[00:31:51] I'd like to give a shout out to the Patreon superstar of the week, Jessica Camaro. You've been supporting me for so long, and I really appreciate you. If you'd like to gain access to all the bonus content, head over to patreon.com for one day free,

[00:32:07] and if you want to support me on Patreon, head over to patreon.com forward slash letsnotmeetpodcast to support the show. Let's Not Meet, a true horror podcast, is not affiliated with Reddit or any other message boards or entities online.

[00:32:18] If you have any questions, email me at letsnotmeetpodcast at gmail.com. I'll see you guys next week for a brand new episode of Let's Not Meet.