“He Wasn’t Just Creepy, He Was Sinister
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“I was 11-12-ish and the oldest kid living on a block in military housing. A new family moved in, with a girl a year or so younger than I was, and a younger brother about a year younger than my own younger brother. The boy didn’t come outside much or play with other kids and the girl was overly eager to be friends with me.
After a month or so, her parents trusted me enough that I was allowed in their house and the boy, I’ll call him Red, was really creepy and uncomfortable to be around. He was a troublemaker and had this wide, toothy grin on his face when he was doing something he knew he wasn’t supposed to be.
He abused animals. He mated the hamsters to watch the mother eat the babies and cut the dog to collect its blood in a test tube in a chemistry kit. My dad had a professional style slingshot, and I was kind of a tomboy/marksman, but I was behind this girl’s house, skipping rocks on a little pond, and I accidentally killed a duck. I was so distraught. When Red got wind that I had killed something with it, he became a pest for days trying to get me to let him use that slingshot. Even though I was bigger than him and I knew the rules when it came to the weapons I shot, my dad took it away from me for fear that Red would get it somehow.
Eventually, I was so weirded out by Red that I couldn’t be friends with his sister. He wasn’t just creepy, he was almost sinister. Their mother had a baby about a year after they moved in. I drifted off and went to high school, and lost touch with the kids, but our moms were friends. The baby died before it was a year old, and while people said it was due to SIDS, they looked uncomfortable as they said so.
A few weeks to a couple of months later, it came out that Red had killed the baby and he was ‘taken away’ to be hospitalized or something. Once he was gone, people said out loud that they always knew there was something wrong with that kid, they just couldn’t put a finger on it.
I will always use this story as a cautionary tale: if someone makes you uncomfortable, makes everyone uncomfortable, say something. Tell someone. If everybody felt their skin crawl when this kid was around, perhaps speaking up would have saved that baby’s life. I certainly told my parents he did stuff to their animals. They didn’t believe me. But Red was so off-putting, my dad felt the need to take his slingshot from me. Big red flag, dad. Big red flag.”
He Didn’t Seem To Be Hurting Anyone…Or So They Thought
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“A buddy of mine ended up working for a couple years on a ranch out in the middle of nowhere. It was an absolutely beautiful country and when I could get the chance, I would drive out to partake in some premium backpacking.
My buddy was the sort who saw the good in everyone and perhaps also due to the limited social opportunities, befriended an eccentric local old-timer.
When I would visit, it was not uncommon that we would end up having a drink and conversation with the old guy. He was a bit strange, to be honest, into crystals and paranormal theories, claiming he could communicate with spirits and stuff, but didn’t seem to be hurting anyone, so I would usually laugh along and chalk it up to experiencing local flavor.
After some years, I moved away and lost touch, but at some point, the old guy apparently had let a woman stay with him in exchange for cleaning and cooking. One day he snapped, knocked her out, chained her up, and proceeded to torture her for several months.
He was only discovered because he also had taken in a teenage girl who had a warrant and one day the girl wandered into town begging to be arrested because she couldn’t take being a part of it anymore.”
She Was A Little TOO Friendly With Her Students
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“When high school began, I really liked one teacher of mine. She was friendly and kind of goofy. The class was always fun. But I started to notice that she got along with her students too well. Like, it was as if we were her best friends. She started asking our class if anyone could help her around her house. She wanted us to mow her lawn, shovel snow, clean her windows, babysit her daughter, etc. On bring your child to work day, she brought her five-year-old daughter in and she sat in the empty seat next to me. She kept joking that her daughter really liked me and I should babysit her so she could be around me more.
Anyways, I graduated and a few years later I heard, she had a breakdown in class one day. She was on her computer and started screaming and crying. She ran out of the room and never came back to school. It was then revealed that she was having an inappropriate relationship with an underage female student. Some of their conversations were leaked and it was really twisted stuff. She was gonna leave her husband and daughter to be with her student. The student used to babysit her daughter and when she would come home, they would hook up in the room next to her sleeping kid.
I remember thinking, ‘I knew she was too friendly with students. I bet this isn’t the first one either.'”
“I Was Always Kinda Worried He’d Snap”
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“In my high school Calculus class, I sat next to the weird, skittish kid. He was really quiet. I was previously homeschooled so, of course, the outcasts sat together. I taught him to use a graphing calculator and he did his part of the group projects. What we had worked, but I was always kinda worried he’d snap. He always made me uneasy, but we had a good thing so I let it slide. There were little things, like the look in his eye, a flash of irritation, a strange out of place comment, etc. I worried worst case scenario I’d catch a beating one day for being in his circle, but hey, good project partners who do their half are worth a beating, no matter how strange or skittish.
Three years later, I randomly ran into him. We were in college together and he had dark, dark, dark, circles under his eyes. ‘Must be tests,’ I thought. We talked a little and he was clearly not ok. I asked him what was up. I hadn’t seen him in years but I heard he was working at a local bar. I figured he’d just be kind of noncommittal like, ‘Oh you know tests and Adderall, too much drinking,’ but instead he asked me a strange question.
‘If you did something and no one knew,’ he asked, ‘would you turn yourself in?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I guess I probably would.’
Turned out he was walking home from work, got heckled and threw a burning broom into a frat house, which ended up killing a guy.
He got a life sentence, suspended down to 37 years.”
Always Trust Your Animal Instincts
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“I’m a house-call veterinarian who also does after-hours call-outs in the middle of the night as well. There have been a couple of times now where a call has come in for an ’emergency’ and the information given over the phone by the owner seems legitimate, but upon arriving at the property the feeling of, ‘wrong, stop, leave now,’ kicks in before I even get out of the car. I don’t question it. However, because animals are involved and I don’t want to neglect them, I maintain a good relationship with the local police as I also take care of their dogs on occasion. In those instances, I will drive a short way away from the property, call the police, wait for them to turn up, and only then would I enter the property.
The first time resulted in me dragging a sick cat from under a bed that had a comatose teenager lying on it, off their face on whatever substance they had ODed on while a mother chain-smoked in the living room while abusing me and the police. The place was filthy with rubbish and moldy food was strewn all over the floor. The entire place was a biohazard.
The second place I drove away the moment I saw it from the car. It didn’t look any worse or better than the neighboring houses, but once again the gut instinct of ‘NO’ was immediately present. When I relayed the address to the police, they immediately alerted me that the place was ‘of interest’ to them already. I gave them the information that was fed to me, they alone went in and found there was no sick animal that needed to be treated. I likely would have been jumped for whatever medications I was carrying in the car. The people who made the call had practiced their story for the call to me to make it sound legitimate because they sounded genuinely distressed.
All I can say is, trust your instincts.”
His Mom Never Wanted To Admit There Was A Problem
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“I had a 16-year-old that came into my work a lot and there was clearly something wrong with him. We called his mom whenever he had outburst or issue, but she just told us that he was just autistic and had several nervous tics, one of which gave us (and several customers) the impression that he was jerking off. She assured us this wasn’t the case and punished him by telling him he couldn’t visit us for like two weeks. When she lead him out of the building, he was cursing and grunting and acting crazy. He came back in a few weeks later and was fine, no more issues with him other than having to tell him to be quieter and to watch his language.
The mother was a widow with two boys and two girls, one of whom was my daughter’s friend. I was on friendly terms with the mother. She always seemed exhausted, but happy and was very involved with her church and stuff. I didn’t know how to approach the subject that her son seemed pretty far beyond autistic and she should be worried about being around him as he got older (dude was 6 feet tall and built like a linebacker).
A year or so after the incident at my work, he murdered his mother while his brother and sisters weren’t home (they were at my place of business). When he went to court, they determined him to be mentally unstable to stand trial and he’s been in the state’s mental asylum since then.”
You Wouldn’t Want To Be One Of His ‘Special Friends’
“When I was young, there was a VERY popular cheerleading/gymnastics place where I live. It was run by a man. He was always nice and we never had a problem with him. He and his wife were weird, but that’s not my place to judge. Eventually, they got into a domestic abuse case and he closed his place and reopened it a few years later. When I was getting ready to try out for cheerleading in high school, we realized he had reopened his gym, just at a much smaller location and changed his name. I started going back to him for private lessons at 5:30 every Tuesday morning. My mom came with me and everything was fine, until about five lessons in when we realized he was living there. No big deal, we were just kind of creeped out and we tried not to judge once again.
Fast forward to the next Tuesday, I was there stretching when I heard footsteps coming down the stairs. I looked and saw one of his daughters walk into the gym area. She was like 5 or 6 at the time and she looked at me and back to her dad and said, ‘Daddy, I thought we weren’t allowed to teach girls gymnastics anymore?’
To which he replied, ‘No baby, I only teach my special friends, remember?’
My mom yanked me out of there so fast and we never went back, and the gym closed almost a month later. We then found out that he had been arrested for touching young girls and his wife had beaten the crap out of him when she found out. I’ve never gotten over it. Thank God my mom didn’t just drop me off for practices like some parents did.
A couple of years later, he messaged me on Facebook the day I turned 18 to ask me if I wanted to be a playmate for him and his girlfriend. I posted a screenshot of the message and blocked him on everything I could find him on.”
“I Looked At Him And Immediately Got An Eerie Feeling”
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“Back in August 2006, I was 20 years old and working in a deli near my house while I attended a community college nearby. One summer night, I was working until close, which was 7 pm. Around 6:30, the only two people left in the deli was me and my boss. I was stocking drinks in the cooler towards the back of the store when I heard the front door open, so naturally, I looked and it was a guy I had never seen before. When you’ve been working at the same deli for 8+ years, you tend to remember people and so I figured he might have been from out of town. He had red hair and it almost looked like an Afro, which I thought was strange. He walked back towards me, went into the cooler, and grabbed a peach Snapple.
As soon as he walked passed me, the smell hit me. I motioned to my boss and pinched my nose. He and I had a brief chuckle before I started walking to the front to ring the guy up. I got to the counter and soon as I looked up at this guy, I got an eerie feeling. His eyes were black and he had pale skin and this blank stare. It’s hard to explain, but I felt as if he was looking through me and not at me. I asked him if he needed a bag and I got no response. He paid for the Snapple and walked outside of the deli and then stood at the front of the store.
We closed up the store at 7 and started cleaning up. 7:30 came around and I looked outside and this guy was still standing at the front of the store, leaning up against the glass. He was so strange that my boss thought he was staking out the place waiting for us to leave, but technically he was a paying customer so we couldn’t tell him to leave just for being weird.
We shut the lights off and as we walked out, my boss turned to the guy and said, ‘Hey, I don’t mind you hanging out here, but please don’t lean on the glass.’ The guy turned to him and didn’t say a word. He just smashed the Snapple bottle on the ground at my boss’s feet. My boss at the time was a BIG guy. I’m talking 6 feet tall, 380 pounds, and covered in tattoos. My boss got in his face and said, ‘What is wrong with you dude? Now you’re going to clean that up.’
The guy just stared back at him again and didn’t say a word. The whole time I was thinking to myself, ‘This guy is either insane or has the largest balls on earth.’ After a few seconds, he turned away and got in his car and drove off. I went back inside, got a broom, swept up the mess, and then we called it a night. It wasn’t the first time we had someone high come into the store.
The next morning I woke up and put the news on. The first thing I saw was that guy’s face. It turns out, the same night he stopped by our deli, he murdered and dismembered his neighbor right down the street from the deli. The cops caught him pulling up into his parents’ driveway the next morning with the woman’s severed head in his trunk. To this day, I wonder whether or not he committed the murder before or after he came to the deli. I don’t remember seeing any blood on him, but then again I wasn’t really looking for any.”
Their Denial Cost Someone Their Life
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“When I was 14, my mom and her boyfriend at the time invited their friend to stay with us. He was homeless at the time and getting off some really hard stuff. They wanted to help him get back on his feet, mostly because he had four children that needed him to stop messing around and come home.
A couple of weeks went by and I started noticing he left the house every time my mom’s boyfriend went to bed. Now, typically this wouldn’t be a huge sign that something is off, but my mom’s boyfriend was a recovered addict so he would’ve known something was up if he saw the way this guy acted when he left. I told my mom, but she told me he had found a job working security. Still suspicious, I let it go.
A few weeks later, I start noticing behaviors that were out of the ordinary for him. He was erratic, his speech was faster than usual, and he became very generous with his money. I also started noticing he’d been coughing a lot and staying up all night and all day. My mom dismissed it again and her boyfriend didn’t take anything I said seriously since he didn’t see any of this. Honestly, he thought I just wanted him out of the house. Then someone witnessed him cough up blood. Lots of blood. I thought they would finally agree that this guy was using again, but they said he was sick and my theories were still dismissed.
On 4/20 (of all days), I woke up to police and medics at my house at 4 in the morning. My mom and her boyfriend witnessed their friend die in our bathroom. All the crap he was taking messed up his body so bad, it caused him to start internally bleeding. He basically drowned in his own blood. Police found opiates on him and had to start an investigation because of my mom’s boyfriend’s past.
Neither of them got in trouble during the investigation, they were just idiots who wanted to believe their friend was getting better. They were in complete denial and it cost their friend his life.”
An Innocent Crush Turned Into Something Much Creepier
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“After my divorce in 2005, a female coworker started making less-than-subtle advances towards me. She was a pretty cool girl, but I kind of viewed her as just ‘one of the guys.’ She’d hang out with everyone after work and goof off and drink and stuff. I didn’t have any kind of attraction to her other than as a friend.
One Friday at work, she casually asked what I was doing when we got off. My response was probably something standard like, ‘Eat a pizza and play Wii,’ or something like that. To which she responded, ‘What are you going to do if I show up, knocking at your door?’
I told her I’d be surprised, seeing as she doesn’t have any idea where I lived. Most people didn’t. Following my divorce, I had moved into a smaller apartment and hadn’t really divulged my new address to anyone.
‘Oh I don’t, huh?’ was her response.
Friday evening and Saturday passed with no issue. I came and went and no one showed up. Sunday evening, however, as I was lying in bed watching television, I started to see a bunch of flashing lights outside the window of my second story apartment. I looked out and noticed paramedics on the yard bow my window. I ran outside, as all of us would, to see what was going on.
Turns out my coworker had climbed the tree outside my apartment and had been watching me through my windows. At some point she fell asleep and fell from the tree, breaking her leg in two places. A neighbor walking his dog heard her screaming for help and called 911. As if this weren’t enough, I realized mid-week that her car was parked a few spots down from mine at the apartment complex, and had been there since late Friday the night before.
She never came back to work and her car was picked up at some time when I wasn’t home.”
The Real Reason They Could Afford That Fancy Lifestyle
“When I was a kid, we lived in this nice neighborhood. It was a typical 1990’s neighborhood. It consisted of mostly management level GM or Ford employees. My parents did well, but we weren’t rich. The family across the street was rather large, maybe 7 or 8 people. The mom was a stay-at-home mom and the dad painted houses. They had a pool, multiple TVs, every video game system, a car for each kid, etc. It didn’t seem right. Both of my parents worked full-time and made decent money, but even they couldn’t afford the lifestyle the people across the street were living. I just couldn’t figure out how someone painting houses could make enough to have all that. Something felt off about him.
Turns out he was a bank robber. He would take painting jobs in locations to survey either the bank or the area. Then he would rob the place. He robbed over ten banks over the years. He did so well that they had no leads on who was doing it. It seemed he was running low on money or just enjoyed it and overextended on his last heist and they tracked him down.
I still remember the day the showed up at his place. My bedroom overlooked their house and I saw 9 or 10 cop cars all over their yard. My dad told me to stay inside. It’s weird thinking back on moments where I remember him and then seeing him taken away. I am not sure whatever happened to him or the family.”