4x16: Noah - Let's Not Meet

[00:00:02] My name is Andrew Tate and this is season 4 episode 16 of Let's Not Meet, A True Horror Podcast. Bear with me. I'm typing on mobile. Hello Reddit. I'm a longtime lurker and a first-time poster.

[00:00:32] Quarantine has me so bored, so I figured I'd share one of the creepier moments that has happened in my life. 2012 was not a kind year to me.

[00:00:42] I lost my grandfather and then my boyfriend of three years decided to break up with me just ten days later in my grandpa's house. Late April, I decided to do what most mid-twenty somethings do. I set up a dating profile. I talked to a few people,

[00:01:01] one of whom was a creepy EMT, who for the rest of the story I'll refer to as Noah. It's not his real name. Noah was, if you haven't figured it out, an EMT. He lived about 15 to 20 minutes away from me.

[00:01:19] Initially things were great. We had great conversation and we had a lot in common. We texted all the time. He seemed like a genuinely kind, caring, and wonderful person. So after about two to three weeks of calling and texting, we decided to finally meet.

[00:01:37] The actual date itself wasn't bad. We went to the movies and then went for coffee. It was after the date that things started spiraling. Suddenly Noah is in love with me. Suddenly Noah wants to marry me.

[00:01:55] Suddenly he can't wait to tell our kids our love story, like on How I Met Your Mother. He told me that we were like Romeo and Juliet, that he was destined to be with me.

[00:02:08] Every single conversation that we had for seven days after that one date was just like that. It creeped me out. He went from this sweet guy to being overbearing, forcing marriage and kids down my throat. We barely knew each other. But it gets worse.

[00:02:26] So I decided that I'm going to let him down easy. I try to treat people the same way that I'd like to be treated, but in hindsight, I realized that this was not the way to do it. I invited him out to the subway by my apartment.

[00:02:42] I was trying to tell him how I wasn't over my breakup, how I wasn't ready to move on to a serious relationship and definitely wasn't ready for marriage. He took this as I just wanted to casually date him. And he took the position of, he'll wait for me.

[00:03:02] It gets worse. Somehow we wound up at my apartment. It was so awkward and uncomfortable. He kept trying to make out with me despite me telling him no. So he would stop, mess with one of my cats and then try again.

[00:03:21] At one point, I moved to my recliner thinking that this would stop. Nope. Noah took that as an invitation to sit on my lap and try to kiss me. Yes, that's right Reddit. You read that correctly.

[00:03:35] Thankfully my sister who was also my roommate called needing to be picked up from work. But the story isn't over. That night or maybe the next, I decided to send him a message on Facebook and tell him what a wonderful guy he was.

[00:03:50] Now any woman would be lucky to have him, but I wasn't ready to be in a relationship with him. I wasn't going to be seeing him anymore. This led to a barrage of messages from him about how he loved me. How could I do this to him?

[00:04:06] We have something special. Then when he realized that I wasn't budging, it turned to how he knew that I was just like all the other women. I'm a bitch. I'm a whore. Then when that didn't work, he talked about suicide. But it wasn't any run-of-the-mill threat.

[00:04:25] Noah told me that he was going to get drunk on margaritas and try to drown himself in his bathtub. Not knowing if the guy was legit or not, I called a welfare check on him. You might be thinking that this was the end, but it's not.

[00:04:40] About a month later, he saw me at the local community college. He followed me all over campus. A mutual friend sent me screenshots of his Facebook where he talked about how he saw me and he should have raped me when he had the chance.

[00:04:59] His friends were agreeing with him. It was chilling. And somehow, that's still not the end. In the fall of 2012, I took a job at a local outpatient mental health clinic as a receptionist. A few months later, a girl named Rose started at a different office.

[00:05:22] Next thing I know, there are these rumors about me and how I broke Noah's heart. How I cheated on him. And how I can't be trusted. People I never met were talking about me and my dating life. Eventually, Rose came to work in our office.

[00:05:41] And Noah was there all the time. He was always staring. Always following. It was very creepy. I dealt with him until December of 2014 when I left the clinic. Thankfully, I haven't seen him since and Rose, if you're still with him, I hope you're safe.

[00:06:04] As for you, creepy EMT, let's not meet ever again. When I was around 6, my parents divorced and my dad was soon given full custody as my mom is an alcoholic and racked up a few DUIs and such.

[00:06:33] Anyway, me, my younger sister, and my dad moved into a new neighborhood and transferred to a nearby elementary school. The school was pretty close to my new house. Maybe 5 or 7 blocks away. Close enough to walk. But my sister and I were too young to walk alone.

[00:06:55] Sometimes our dad would walk us to school in the morning and then walk back. And less commonly, he'd walk to pick us up. Most of the time, he picked us up in his black Mazda. The way pickups worked at my school was pretty common.

[00:07:11] We went out with our class, stood by our teacher and classmates, and when a car pulled up, designated staff members would ask who the student was that they were picking up and go find them with their class and escort them to their car.

[00:07:27] Seeing as my mom was in jail at the time, the only person who ever picked us up was my dad. One day, when I was in 3rd grade and my sister was in 1st, we were waiting outside to be picked up.

[00:07:41] After being outside for only a few minutes, my sister came over to me and said that someone who wasn't dad was in a car to pick us up. He had said both of our names and they'd found her first.

[00:07:58] She said that he smiled at her and told her that our dad told him to pick us up that afternoon. But she said that she wanted to find me first before she got into the car since she didn't recognize him. Thank God she did that.

[00:08:15] Our dad had always told us not to talk to strangers. So I grabbed my teacher and told her what happened. She got this very alarmed look on her face and told us to stay where we were while she told another teacher.

[00:08:31] Our dad arrived to pick us up just a few minutes later and we got home safely. We told him about it and we all had a long talk about safety protocol. He asked my sister to describe the man in the car.

[00:08:46] And he called the police and gave them the best description that he could, although my sister was very young and wasn't very focused on important details like that. A few weeks later, it happened again. But this time, he said my name.

[00:09:04] My dad had given the school the same info that he gave to the police, but presumably he had multiple vehicles because my sister said that he had been in a red car and this one was black, similar to my dad's.

[00:09:21] I saw the black car and ran up to it, but luckily I caught a glimpse of the face before I opened the door and hopped in. He was middle-aged, very pale with a very angular face.

[00:09:36] We made eye contact and his mouth was smiling, but his eyes looked wrong to me. Squinty, almost angry. I turned back towards the carpool assistant who delivered me to the car to alert her. But by the time I did, that car was gone.

[00:09:58] I couldn't give too many details. My dad contacted the police again, but without a license plate they weren't able to do much. The last time I saw him wasn't until months later, near the end of the school year.

[00:10:15] I was walking home with a big group of kids that lived in my neighborhood as he drove by us and slowed the car down to try and talk to us. I recognized his face immediately and alerted all the other kids to run.

[00:10:32] Luckily, we were only about three houses down from where my friends lived and we all piled into her house, which concerned her parents significantly as we explained the situation. I never saw him again after that.

[00:10:48] My dad started dating my new stepmom and we moved to her neighborhood and switched schools shortly after. I still think about him occasionally though. His face was actually in my dream just a few nights ago. Which reminded me to write out my experience.

[00:11:06] To this day, and I'm now in my 20s, I don't know how he knew our names. How he knew anything about us really. Very fucking scary to think about what would have happened to my tiny little sister if

[00:11:19] she had gotten into the car with that man and what might have happened to me if I had. To my child predator, please, please let's not meet. So let me get a couple of things straight.

[00:11:42] Our little village was the kind of place where everyone knows everyone and I could count the amount of houses on two hands. We were a very quiet and close-knit community and nothing ever happened here. Proper out in the sticks stuff.

[00:12:00] One night a few years ago, my mom and stepdad had gone out to this concert and left me in charge of my little brother and the dog. I wasn't very old, about 14. And I felt very proud that my parents trusted me enough to do that.

[00:12:16] I thought I was a pretty cool big brother and I thought that we'd be doing cool babysitter stuff like staying up late, eating pizza, etc. I'm kind of glad we did because I don't know what would have happened if we hadn't. At about 1030, the power cut out.

[00:12:35] I didn't think anything of it though because the weather hadn't been great lately and I figured that it had something to do with that. I got some candles out of the cupboard and lit them and put on some of our favorite songs.

[00:12:49] As soon as I sat down, Sunny, my little brother, turned to me and being the weird little kid he was, told me very calmly that someone was outside. I was a little perturbed by him, but the dog hadn't done anything so I presumed it was

[00:13:07] just the neighbors or something. He just shrugged and went back to his drawings. There's a running joke in this house that you don't need a clock with a dog around because he's such a creature of habit that he'll consistently get up at exactly the

[00:13:24] same time every single night to tell you that it's time to initiate his nightly go-to-bed protocol. It was about three quarters of an hour after the power went out when my dog decided that now was the time.

[00:13:37] I told Sunny to go get the dog his biscuits while I let him go out for a piss. Now our kitchen is an extension to the original house and so as such has a flat roof that's completely low to the ground compared to the rest of the house.

[00:13:53] It offers easy access to the bathroom window. As I opened the door so the dog could do his thing, Sunny pushes past me in the doorway and whispers, I know you're out there. I'm calling the police.

[00:14:09] As he turned around with his biggest proudest smile you've ever seen on his face, there was a very distinct rustling coming from just above the doorway. I don't think I'll ever forget the way Sunny's face dropped when he looked just above my head.

[00:14:29] I looked up and I saw a man sitting on the roof above me panicked trying to kick me and then they ran off to the next door's garden and presumably into the cornfield surrounding the village. I was scared shitless and Sunny was bawling his eyes out.

[00:14:51] I ushered him inside as quickly as I could and got a knife from the kitchen. We both went to his room and I told him to try and get some sleep while I waited for our parents to come back.

[00:15:04] It was an astonishingly long four hours before they did. My stepdad immediately went outside to check to see if everything was alright. I heard him talking about how something had smashed the fuse box. Obviously we called the police but they didn't come until later that day.

[00:15:25] They did a search of the immediate premises and found a makeshift bed in a nearby disused barn along with pictures of silhouettes of us in the shower through frosted glass. I think it's pretty safe to say the whole experience shook us up.

[00:15:46] We moved out as soon as we could but I still shut curtains whenever I can and I see shadows underneath every single door. Sunny keeps quiet about it but I'm not sure if that's just because his brain has cut it out or what.

[00:16:04] So weird kitchen roof stalker, let's not meet. This is the scariest thing that's ever happened to me and what makes it worse is that had things gone down differently I might not be here to tell the story. Okay, first thing is first.

[00:16:35] I'm a girl about 5'7 and around 130 pounds. This happened to me around 3 years ago when I was in my early 20s and still a student living in a very safe area and growing up in a small rural town I took what I could get. Karate? Fine. Judo? Sure.

[00:16:55] Kung Fu? Why not. Taekwondo signed me up. I loved martial arts and I still do because they really helped me discipline my body and mind and I grew confidence. It had been just a few years since I moved out of my country's capital to study and

[00:17:13] I had fallen off the martial arts wagon at that point with college taking up most of my time. I should also mention that at the time I lived with my younger brother and our cat.

[00:17:25] We lived on the first floor, the second floor for many American people right next to a military camp and a patch of forest that leads to a creek. On our back balcony there was a circular metal ladder that would lead up to the balcony

[00:17:44] and to the kitchen door which of course we always kept under lock and key. Except for when the cat would want to go out when we'd unlock the door and he would go outside down the metal stairs and find his cat friends to play.

[00:18:01] I commuted to my college every day walking 30 minutes to a bus stop then riding the bus for an hour and then walking another 10 minutes until I made it to the campus.

[00:18:11] When it was time to go home I'd have to do the same thing all over again so as you can imagine it was very tiring. I would be out of the house every single day from 10 in the morning until almost 10 at

[00:18:25] night so when I'd come home I'd be knackered. I don't believe in premonitions much but I do believe in instinct and for quite a while I felt like something was up with that patch of forest behind our apartment. I felt watched.

[00:18:45] Maybe it was the blackness of that patch of forest that made me feel uneasy because there wasn't a single light there and the outdoor ladder looked like it descended into an abyss. You could take three steps into that patch of forest and you'd be under the cover of

[00:19:05] darkness completely. It made me feel weird because even though I couldn't see anything I knew that something was up. I had no proof but I knew it. I was in class one Wednesday afternoon with my best friend at the time and a professor

[00:19:21] came in to pitch an internship to us. Internships aren't very well known in my country so professors actually have to argue their case about why, as students, we could benefit from this. My best friend, I'll call her K, was very interested but when the professor listed off

[00:19:41] the requirements she realized she couldn't apply as her GPA was not high enough. This led to K having a crying fit after the class was over which led to a panic attack

[00:19:55] and it got so bad that she had to call her boyfriend to come pick her up from campus and since I didn't want to leave her alone I stayed with her until her boyfriend showed up and got in his car with her.

[00:20:06] The conversation in the car was basically her boyfriend and I trying to console her. I asked her if she'd like me to go over to her place so that we could hang out but

[00:20:16] she said that she was okay and she didn't want to put me through the hassle of commuting home the next day. She lives a full hour away by car so it was decided that they would drop me off at my house and they'd go off to theirs.

[00:20:29] We get to my house in the evening, a full three hours before I normally come home. I hug her, tell her to text me if she needs anything and I thank her boyfriend and get out of the car. Glad that I'll be home early for a change.

[00:20:46] I went in through the main entrance, climbed up the stairs to the first floor and put my key into the lock. I opened the door and called out my brother's name like I always did. No response.

[00:20:59] The house was dark except for one light in the room but where the front door opened into it was eerily quiet. But I felt my stomach tie into a knot because even if I couldn't hear anything, I could feel that someone was there.

[00:21:17] And when my instincts talk, I listen. I turned right into the hallway that leads into our rooms and I saw my brother's door slam shut hard as soon as I got into the hallway.

[00:21:32] My brother's room is on the end of the hallway, on the left facing my own room, which is on the right. My first thought was that my brother had taken a shower and forgotten to get a towel so he

[00:21:44] made a run from the bathroom, which is next to my room. An embarrassment. But then I heard muffled whispers coming from his room. It sounded hushed and pressing. I still had no reason to be afraid but I was on high alert because I thought my brother

[00:22:03] and his friends were planning on jumping out of his room and scaring me and I wasn't about to let them get the satisfaction. So I inch down the short hallway through the darkness and before I knock on my brother's door, I take a look into my room.

[00:22:20] It was a fucking mess. The mattress was off the bed, my clothes and my books, they were all over the floor. My jewelry box was empty and thrown on my bed. All in all it looked like a tornado had gone through there.

[00:22:35] The hushed whispers in the next room sounded extremely pressing and anxious now that I was so close because though I had tried to tiptoe as silently as possible, my steps had to have been audible. Had to have been audible. I realized what was happening and I went ballistic.

[00:22:55] In that moment I fucking lost it. My fight or flight instinct kicked in and it kicked my fight into maximum overdrive. The words danger, thieves, fight hit me like a truck and I threw my whole body's weight

[00:23:11] against my brother's door, busting the door down so furiously you'd think it owed me money. I saw no one in the room. But it was also a mess and I knew what I had heard.

[00:23:26] I ripped the curtain out of my way and went through the open balcony door just in time to catch one of the thieves right after he jumped off the balcony's ledge. Looking back on it, he looked like a normal guy.

[00:23:37] Black hair, normal height, athletic build, a big earring in his left ear. But at the time he looked like a fucking monster to me. A vile, putrid, home invading piece of shit thief monster. I started screaming unintelligible things until I saw him stumble around, obviously

[00:23:56] having hurt his legs, before he got back onto his feet and ran away. They were gone. I was safe. But then it hit me. Where the fuck was my laptop? I ran into my room and tore the place apart looking for my laptop. It was gone.

[00:24:15] I started screaming and crying. The unfairness, the audacity, and the cowardice hit me like a steel toe to the stomach. I screamed and cried like I was in a Grecian tragedy. I'm not rich by any means and neither is my family.

[00:24:32] I had an old laptop which was probably worth pennies secondhand. But I needed that laptop for my schoolwork and without it I couldn't finish my semester. Not to mention that I don't have any real life friends.

[00:24:47] And the majority of my friends at the time were online so if I lost that laptop, I lost them too. My laptop was lost and so was I. I felt violated, dirty, and less than. I was afraid I was going to throw up or pass out or both.

[00:25:06] I was taking such rapid and deep panicked breaths that my vision began to blur. In the most panicked and grief-ridden state I've ever been in, tears started to stream down my face.

[00:25:18] I called my mother to tell her what had happened and she told me to call the police. It took almost a full minute on the phone with the operator telling her again and again where I lived,

[00:25:28] who I was, and what had happened before she understood me and said that she would send somebody over. A few days later I was talking with my mother about the incident and she told me something that hit me hard.

[00:25:40] I come from a trilingual family and she told me that when I called her that night, she couldn't make out what language I was speaking because I had been so panicked. It makes sense why I had to repeat myself over and over to the operator.

[00:25:54] I started running around the house like a lunatic checking every door and every lock in a frenzy until I got to the kitchen and saw that the window had been broken. Without thinking, I slammed it shut. Stupid, I know, but I was beside myself.

[00:26:12] I wasn't thinking straight. My brother came home a few minutes later and when he came in, he saw me panicked, crying my eyes out and speaking almost unintelligibly.

[00:26:22] He came to the bedrooms and saw the damage then told me to go sit in the living room and calm down. I did as he said and tried to calm down, but I jumped at every sound and started crying even

[00:26:32] worse telling him I was sorry that I got home too late and that our laptops were gone. The house seemed so big to me in those moments, so dark and hostile. I felt small and helpless.

[00:26:48] My brother called me over to the room and showed me a pillowcase full of something and when I looked inside, I found both of our laptops, all my jewelry, fake all of it,

[00:27:00] my old phone, and some other stuff. They had been right in front of me the whole time, but I was so messed up that they didn't even register. The police eventually came about an hour later and did fuck all,

[00:27:15] so my brother and I took it to the police station and filed a report of the incident. And since I had seen half of one of the culprit's faces, they asked me to come in for identification.

[00:27:26] They even sent over someone to dust for prints, but nothing ever came of it. The police said that since they didn't even have a backpack to put the loot in and resorted to using one of our pillowcases, they were almost 100% junkies. We had the outdoor metallic ladder ripped

[00:27:45] off of our kitchen balcony, much to my cat's displeasure since that's the way they got in, but also installed several motion-detecting lights. For the next few months, I was constantly on edge

[00:27:57] and every time I passed near someone suspicious who hung around the bus stop, I felt a violent rage boil inside of me. I caught myself looking for the man that I had seen ready to beat him

[00:28:10] within an inch of his life, but I never saw him or heard his creepy whisper again. And my brother and I moved away from that apartment a few months later because I never felt comfortable in that

[00:28:22] apartment again. I picked up kickboxing, and because it had made me stronger, it helped me feel safer. And I also carry a knife with me now. I still think back on that encounter and realize

[00:28:35] how fucking stupid I was. What creeps me out the most though is knowing that, that night, there had been nothing but a thin plywood door separating me from two potentially dangerous men. Even if I know that me bursting into my brother's room like a lunatic was what scared

[00:28:55] them off because of how stupidly fearless I was, I also realized how bad that could have gone. They could have had guns, they could have had knives, they could have had pepper spray or a

[00:29:06] chain or whatever. And there were two of them and only one of me. And if they ganged up on me, even with the adrenaline having turned me into Doomguy, I don't know how much of a chance I

[00:29:19] realistically stood against two men, high on whatever they were on and desperate enough to break into my apartment and loot in a pillowcase. Had they been willing to put up a fight, this would have ended very, very badly for me. What I know is that I probably still

[00:29:38] would have bust in there like Doomguy. So to the creepy cowardly bastards who dared break into my apartment and try to rob me and my brother and ended up traumatizing me so bad

[00:29:49] that I had to move, fuck you both. I hope for your sake we never meet again because I've been kicking that sandbag for two years now and picturing your face every single time.

[00:30:34] I can't read your episode on the story unless I hear back from you. So it's very important that as soon as you submit your story, check your email for that reply and get back to me

[00:30:43] as quickly as you can. I have a lot of stories that I can't get to because I'm still waiting on that reply. Also, you can put your story in the body of email, you can attach a word document,

[00:30:54] and you can even just send me a link to your Reddit post like most listeners do. Either way, I read everything that I get. I just can't necessarily read it on the show until I hear

[00:31:03] back from you. That being said, thank you for listening to this week's episode of Let's Not Meet. This week you have heard the creepy EMT by a cat named Mr. Weasel. A man tried to pick me up

[00:31:17] from school saying that he was my dad's friend by Reddit user Spicy Fried Mushrooms. Why I always look up when letting the dog out by Frodo Frog. And finally, the home invasion that could have

[00:31:30] gone way, way worse by Reddit user Chocolate Vinois. All the stories you've heard this week were narrated and produced with the permission of their respective authors. And again, if you want to hear your story on the show, email me at letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com. Let's Not Meet

[00:31:46] is not associated with Reddit or any other message boards online. If you want to get access to all the bonus episodes, head over to patreon.com forward slash Let's Not Meet podcast. Thanks so much for

[00:31:57] all of your support. I'll see you all next week for a very scary episode of Let's Not Meet.