B (22:49)
windows and the outside of it was worn down like someone had been chipping away at it for a while while with a chisel I brushed it off like it was nothing and continued on walking. However, during the time that it took for the song I was currently listening to to swap to the next, I heard an extremely loud scream. I took my headphones off and let them rest around my neck. I stood confused for a few seconds, wondering if I was imagining things or if it was part of the song. After those few seconds, another scream filled my ears, only much louder than the one before. Now, if you ever hear something like this when you're walking somewhere, I advise you to stop what you're doing, find out where you're at, and call 911 to report it. Being the curious person I was, and given I didn't have much to do that day, I decided to check it out and see if everything was okay. The screams sounded almost staged, but I couldn't be sure without checking it out for myself. I walked up to the building so I could look through the holes in the door. It looked old and had a fair bit of rust around it, so it was an average peephole, but more of a rusted away. You need to replace this door Kind of hole. I looked inside and what I saw made my stomach turn faster than I ever thought it could. Inside was a man. He was wearing all black and a mask that you probably could buy at a party store if I had to guess. There was also a woman who was on the floor. She had bruises and blood stains on her shirt. The man was holding a hammer that had blood covering the tip of it. I cannot go into detail of what I saw next, but it was the most disturbing thing I have ever seen. I had the sudden urge to throw up. I backed away from the door and threw up. Only nothing came came out because I hadn't eaten much that day. A few seconds after that, I heard the sound of the man's shoes practically stomping on the floor inside the building and they were getting closer. I gathered my composure quickly and started to pull out my phone when the door swung open and the man stepped out. I pretended that I had been recording the entire thing to hopefully scare the guy into letting me live. If I told him, I wouldn't tell anyone if he would let me go. He proceeded to slam the door shut. After a few minutes of us standing there staring at each other without muttering a single word, my heart was beating so fast that I was beginning to be distracted by it as well as the fear that this could be my last moment. After he slammed the door and went back inside, I took off running and immediately called 911. They stayed on the line with me until I got far enough away to feel safe telling them my location. A couple cop cars showed up roughly six to seven minutes later and I pointed them to the building. There were four of them. When they came back, nobody else was with them. The man had taken off during the short amount of time he had and must have taken the woman with him. They found some hair and blood on the floor, but other than that, it was as if the two were never there to begin with. The police never found the A guy and I never saw any reports or articles about a missing woman or a woman that was killed. After that day, I never walked home again. I always either rode the bus or had one of my parents pick me up about half a year after that. I eventually transferred to an alternative high school that was much farther away from those buildings than my old school. I was 16 at the time and I am currently 20 going on 21 in August. And this incident has been with me ever since. I have always been skeptical about situations around me, but after that, I was never even close to the same again. To start this story I should mention my occupation. I am a 30 year old female journeyman electrician. I often work alone and in people's homes. So needless to say I often find myself in rather interesting situations. I am 5 2£125. I am very aware of my limitations when it comes to physically dangerous situations. I served in the military so I have a rudimentary knowledge of hand hand to hand combat and am adept, trained and licensed to carry certain tools of self defense. I also have experience as a paramedic in a major city. Needless to say, I feel as prepared as someone my size and gender could possibly be for most situations. However, this situation triggered a visceral response so I thought I would share my experience with who I refer to as the man with the mannequin legs. In the interest of privacy and simplicity, I will refer to him simply as John Doe. It's a Friday, approximately a year ago. The time was 19:30 or 7:30pm for you not using a 24 time clock, I received a dispatch to an apartment complex several towns over. The dispatch was for a loss of power to a condo unit in one of the older lower areas income buildings. There are certain homes and buildings I go into which automatically trigger a certain amount of caution. Upon seeing the building I had a gut feeling already that I would proceed with an air of caution. I immediately texted both my office manager, my boyfriend and my mother my GPS location with a message saying this is where I am. His name is John Doe. This is his address and you unit number. If you don't hear from me every 20 minutes until I tell you I have left, please call me first. If I don't answer, please call the police. When I rang the bell, a gruff voice of a man who smokes far too many cigarettes forcefully inquires as to who is there. I answer, stating that I'm the electrician that was dispatched. He hits the buzzer and lets me in. I walk up the stairs and the first thing to hit hit me is the smell of the building. A building full of unwashed bodies, unemptied wet ashtrays and stale alcohol. He opened his door and the smell intensified. He wore grubby, unkempt, ill fitting clothing stained with fluids bodily or food in origin. His face thin and gaunt, unshaven with dark heavy bags under his eyes. Entering the door I notice a small table that was stacked with empty beer cans toting the king of Beers. A plastic whiskey bottle went thunk off the toe of my steel toe boots and skidded across the floor I look up at him, though on the skinny side, he was tall. I ask him for details regarding the loss of power and he explains that some things work while others don't. I won't bore you with the details, but in the end I had to see the panel. He leads me to his bedroom as I pick my way across a sea of discarded items. We pass the kitchen, the sink stacked high with plates, unwashed with rotting food precariously balanced atop one another like a perverse game of Jenga. Stepping over clothing, garbage and discarded alcohol containers, burn marks in the carpet from someone nodding off and dropping in a lit cigarette, I enter his bedroom. A mattress with a tattered blanket and no sheets or pillows sits in the center. The furniture is all secondhand and distressed, broken in places, water stained as if it was saved from some unknown curb which was not sold during the estate sale. The top half of a naked, dirty mannequin, appearing as if it were stolen from a abandoned storefront of a long dead store, lays in the bed. I trip over something as I'm making my way around the bed. Looking down, I see two things that make me take pause. The more alarming of the two happened to be a set of legs from the mannequin carelessly hacked from the top half with what looks to be a very dull hacksaw, lines drawn at the natural human joints, though it was a hard molded plastic. I also see a dimly flashing red light coming from the ankle of my creepy host. It's a Department of Corrections GPS ankle monitor. I have to turn my back on him to make the repairs, which makes my hair stand on end. He watches me smoking a cigarette and sneaking to the living room often to take a swig from a brown paper bag. I make a few temporary repairs and tell him I'll have to to come back to finish the rest of it. I take payment and leave. He watches me walk to my truck, following me to the apartment, landing into the main front door. I am almost running now and I jump into my work truck and lock the doors. I finally breathe. I finally feel safe until I see him in my mirror, staring back at me from the rear section of my truck. Not threatening, just staring. I leave without finishing my paperwork and go a few blocks down. I stop and start shaking as the adrenaline slowly leaves my system. I reassure my family that I am safe and tell my boss that I cannot go back to that address. He offers to send me back with another person and my heart drops. I look for a reason not to. I quickly google John Doe and find out exactly why he was wearing an ankle monitor. He had just got out of prison. John Doe served two years in state prison after stalking a woman. When she threatened to report him, he broke into her home, demanded her to disrobe. When she refused, he told her he would kill her and threaten to dismember her. My heart leapt into my chest as I realized what this man may have truly been capable of. With the evidence of the mannequin staring me in the face, it appears his fantasy is alive and well. Needless to say, my company never sent any technician back to the man with the mannequin legs and I ended up with nothing more than a story. A story that shows no matter how prepared you may be for a situation, you never know exactly who you are dealing with. It was 2011 and I was fresh out of the Navy. I had decided to move back home to the family farm with my folks in Michigan until I could get established on my own. However, this was right after the market crash of 2008 and it took longer than anticipated to get back on my farm feet. So I ended up living with them for a while, longer than originally planned and my mother had grown accustomed to having me around to help with mowing the lawn, raking the leaves and shoveling snow. So she specifically asked me to stay and help and so I agreed. Unfortunately, the farmhouse my parents owned and had been in the family for generations burned down and so they moved into town and were renting. They found a nice house for for a reasonable amount and signed a lease. I initially moved with them but now there was no more farm to take care of so I started looking for a new place to live. My mother again insisted on me staying with them and after discussing it with my significant other it was decided that I would stay with the folks in order to save up money for the future. After living in the same house for a few years we found out that the owner had mortgaged the house to heaven and back and it was being foreclosed on. Me and the folks found yet another house and lived there until the owner decided he wanted to retire from being a landlord and so sold it off meaning no renewed lease and therefore they had to find a new place to live again. We ended up stuck in a little house in a bad neighborhood which had no front porch light. I was again considering leaving for a more stable living condition but at this point my long term girlfriend had become my fiance and I really needed to save up money for our future wedding and so I stayed. Several things happened around that little house on the bad street that eventually scared my parents to buying a new house. Some of these events were just the result of living in a bad neighborhood. For example, there was a house down the street that the cops raided a few times in the year that we lived on that street because they were running a brothel. A church on the street got broken into and robbed more than once. A house burned down by an arsonist. A woman was dragged out of her home by the sheriff after the homeowner reported her for lack of rental payments. A guy across the street was being arrested almost weekly for domestic violence. Another up the street got raided a couple times for selling drugs. Also sorts of other crazy and drama on that street. But none of those things are really what convinced my parents to buy a new place and move. The following are those events Shortly after moving into the new place, my parents went out to spend some time with friends one night and I was at home talking with my fiance over Skype as she was in Ireland at the time. It was a warm summer's evening in early September and the little house had no air air conditioning so I had the front door open to let air in through the screen door and my bedroom door open so I wasn't roasting alive. From where I was sitting at my PC in my bedroom, I had a straight shot view out of my bedroom door to the front door. As my fiance and I talked, I heard what sounded like the latch to the front screen door. I looked toward the door but saw nothing. Assuming it was the wind rattling the screen door door, I continued my conversation. Then I heard it again and I watched the door for a moment to see if I could see the branches of the trees or the leaves blowing and swaying in the wind. There was no wind so when I heard the latch jiggling a third time, I got up and went to investigate. And as I walked outside there was a man walking off the side of the porch and away from the house. I called after him asking if there was something he needed, but he ignored me completely. As this was happening, my parents were arriving home and saw the man crossing our driveway at an angle that made it obvious he had been on our porch with me standing on the porch calling after him. He walked into the neighbor's house and disappeared from sight. My dad turned to me and asked what's happening? What did the guy want? I proceeded proceeded to tell him about how I kept hearing the latch on the screen door and when I attempted to investigate I found this guy on our porch and bailing as quickly as Possible, and when I asked what he needed, he ignored me and ran off. My dad then walked over to the neighbors to ask about the odd behavior. He wouldn't come to the door at first, but when he finally did, he claimed he was just looking to bum some cigarettes. My dad handed him a few, then asked why he hadn't just knocked and if he needed cigarettes, why did he run when asked what he wanted? I should note here that my dad had accidentally left an almost full pack on his porch chair and it hadn't been bothered. So naturally we didn't believe him and instead of answering my dad's questions, he just ran off into the house somewhere. My dad then found himself talking to an older couple and found out through the old, old couple that they owned the house next door and that the weird guy was their son who had just gotten out of prison for theft related crimes. He got caught about six weeks later breaking into another neighbor's house. The homeowner called the cops and he was found to have violated his parole and was sent back to jail. But that's not the end of the story. Shortly after the man next door tried to sneak into the house while I was still, still there, we started having an issue where someone had tried to get into the back door. We would come home from grocery shopping or something and the back gate would be open and the screen door on the back door would be swinging in the breeze. This went on for a while until one day we came home, found the back gate open again, and when we went to close the back screen door, there were tool marks on the door jamb like someone had been trying to jimmy the door open. We found a small pry bar in the tall grass next to the back porch, and we realized that the only reason to leave it there was if the culprit had dropped it while running away as quickly as possible, say, for example, if he needed to beat a hasty retreat over the back fence as the residents pulled up. At this point, my dad had had enough of the guy who had been next door, whoever was trying to get in through the back door, and so he decided some cameras would be useful and started to price things. He ended up getting some trail cams that could be plugged in to recharge, were motion activated as trail cams usually are, and could be easily mounted. He put one up facing towards the back door where the camera could see through the window in the back door, and he mounted the other where it could see out the front door. These cameras were about to prove they were worth it. We had been in the place a few months now and it was early March and we had had snow overnight. I awoke to find 4 inches in the driveway, so I shoveled the snow out of the driveway real quick before heading off to work. My dad woke up about an hour later and also left for work, leaving my mother home alone. According to her, sometime during mid morning she was surprised by a knock at the door and when she answered there was a man there, stocky, around 57 with a goatee, offering snow removal services. My mother looked at the driveway and found it devoid of snow. When she looked back at the guy he looked like he was trying to peer around her into the house. She shut him down, telling him that she clearly didn't need snow removal and closed the door in his face. As she did, she heard him kick the screen door as if he was attempting to put his foot in the door as he insisted that he could do snow removal for just a nominal fee. She ignored him and he eventually wandered off. She told me and my dad about it later, but there just wasn't much to the story. Some idiot offered snow removal to people who didn't need it. Not exactly the Amityville horror. So we kind of just brushed it off. A few weeks later, in early April, my parents went on a cruise for my mother's birthday, leaving me alone in the house. I had been in the house alone for a few days when some guy showed up at around 8.30pm, Pitch Black Night outside, saying that he was from the gas company that provided our gas company with natural gas and he needed to come in and see our gas bills to make sure we were not being overcharged. I was immediately wary of the man as he matched the description my mother had given me about the snow removal guy a month earlier and it was 8:30pm the gas company closed at 5. It was possible people would be doing overtime, but for three and a half hours after closing, going door to door in the cold Michigan spring, it seemed unlikely. He was wearing an ID on a lanyard around his neck, but he kept his hand over the actual ID and he flashed it at me so fast that I couldn't really see it. To be honest, what I did see looked like that back of a Topps baseball card with the player's stats. Then he actually tried to push past me into the house, but I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him back while telling him no. At the same time he insisted that he was just making sure that we weren't being cheated and then pointed to the only other house on the street street with no front porch light and said he had just come from over there and that he had managed to cut over 10% of their gas bills. I cut him off and told him that not only was it late, but it did not go over my head. That his best and only example of his work was the only other poorly lit house with no front porch light. That I found it very suspicious that he actually expected me to show him private financial information on the gas bill, nor did I believe the gas company would have people out so late. I told him he needed to leave and he responded by trying to push past me again, again telling me it was fine and he was just there to help. I pushed him back again, more aggressively this time and almost push him backward off the porch, firmly telling him no, I wasn't going to show him anything and that he needed to leave now. I told him that it was not okay that he repeatedly tried to enter the home without permission, nor was it fine that he repeatedly demanded to see private financial information. Then I looked him in the eyes and as confidently as possible told him that this intrusion felt more to me like he was casing the house for a burglary and I would be calling the cops immediately after closing the door. And then I warned him that I was former military and that I was armed and that if I saw him around my house again that I would act accordingly. Now, I am not a psycho. I had no real want to hurt anybody, but I needed him to know that I had the means, capability and willingness to defend myself and the home if necessary. He slowly walked off the porch as I closed the door and he started down the street. I watched him through the windows walk right past all the well lit houses of my neighbors. As he walked away, it occurred to me that he should have some sort of company vehicle. If he really was from the gas company as he claimed, there should be some sort of service truck or company car with a logo or rental tags. So I went out onto the front porch and looked up and down the street to find one. There was nothing. However, as I looked back toward him, he was signaling at someone who came from behind some bushes on a side street street near the house, literally less than 10 yards away. The guy was taller and skinnier than his friend, like sickly and frail, skinny, but somehow he still had an aura of danger about him. The first guy made me feel slightly uneasy, but this guy made me feel chilled to the core. And he wore an oversized hooded sweater that in the darkness completely Hid his facial features, giving him a look like the grim Reaper. He kept pointing at the house and his body language kept getting more and more forceful. I could tell he wanted to come back to the house for whatever reason, but the first guy didn't and I couldn't help but wonder what their plan was that the accomplice wanted so much to complete. What would have happened if I had actually let this guy into the house? At this point, I followed through with my promise and pulled out my phone and called the police non emergency line and reported him. I was on the phone with the officer taking my statement when the fake gas guy and his friend turned and started pointing at the house. That's when they realized I was still watching them from the porch and the first guy began to run down the street. However, his accomplice just stood and looked in my direction as I spoke to the officer. I don't know how I know this as I couldn't see his face with that giant hood up in the dark of the night, but I could tell he was staring at me. And as I watched him I realized I couldn't look away from him. I felt like I had just entered a battle of wills and if I looked away it would end badly for me. So I just stood there and watched him with chills dancing up and down my spine. After what felt like a small eternity, but what had to have been only several seconds of this staring contest, he looked away slowly and nonchalantly made his way back down the street to catch up with the fake gas guy. I realized I had been holding my breath and let out a long sigh. The officer was asking me if I was still on the line and it occurred to me that I had just dropped off mid conversation with the person on the other end. My knees felt weak and I needed to sit down, so I went inside and locked the door. The police promised promised to send a patrolman around and take a look for anything suspicious and told me to call back if they came back. I hung up the phone. I was alone in a bad neighborhood with a couple of random guys casing the house, one of which was clearly not right in the head. I went to bed with my weapon on my desk ready to go, just in case I was woken up from a fitful sleep by my phone. A couple hours hours later, the patrolman had caught the guys pulling the same shtick at another house with no porch light down the street. The creepy one was hiding around the corner of the house. When the patrol car pulled up. I had to go in the next day to confirm they were the same people. While I never got a clear look at the accomplice's face, I was able to identify the person who knocked on my door. I read up on them in the paper a little while later. Apparently, apparently they were looking for victims to rob, or so they claimed. The accomplice apparently had several large knives on him when he was arrested, hidden underneath his giant hoodie, leading police to believe he at least had other plans than just burglary. When confronted with these questions, they took plea deals in exchange for confessions. The one with the knives got his parole revoked and found himself himself back in jail with an extra couple years tacked onto his original sentence. The door knocker got 30 days in the county jail, 100 days community service, $1,000 fine, and one year probation. When my parents got back from their cruise, I told them what happened and my mother rushed over to the trail cams she found early March and the pictures of the snow removal guy, and then went to the next day and question and found pictures of the gas company guy. They were the same guy, near as we can figure, because my dad and I worked long hours and were typically gone most of the day. The only person they had ever seen leaving and entering the house was my mother, who was a tiny old lady, so they assumed she lived alone. Then when he showed up late at night a couple weeks later, and instead of a lonely old lady, there was a 6.3mil military vet telling him, no, you're not coming in. And it bungled up whatever they were planning. I'll tell you what, though, There was something about the accomplice that scared me. Maybe it was because he was hiding in the bushes the whole time me and his friend were having our exchange. Or the fact that he kept his face hidden by an oversized hood. But before he ever even noticed me standing there, I could feel the danger emanating off him like warning bells going off in my head. And it felt like he just loathed my entire being and wanted me to suffer for simply existing. The way he stared at me from under the dark shadows of his hood was almost inhuman. I took some time off work, used up some of my savings, and went to Europe to see my fiance. I just needed to get away from that house for a while. While I was in Europe, my parents quickly bought up a house on the very edge of town, away from bad neighborhoods and moved into it. When I got back from vacation, I asked them why they decided to buy all of a sudden, and they just told me that they never wanted to rent again after that.
