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Oh, such a clutch off season pickup Dave. I was worried we'd bring back the same team. I meant Those blackout motorized shades. Lines.com made it crazy affordable to replace our old blinds. Hard to install? No, it's easy. I installed these and then got some from my mom. She talked to a design consultant for free and scheduled a professional measure and install hall of fame son. They're the number one online retailer of custom window coverings in the world. Blinds.com is the goat shop up to 40% off site wide plus an extra 10% off every order and a free professional measure happening right now@blinds.com hi everyone, welcome back. Some of the stories covered in these episodes are dark and disturbing. I advise you to check the pinned comment down below. If any of the stories are too dark, they will be labeled in the timestamps so you can skip the ones you do not want to listen to if you aren't ready. Let's get into the stories. I'm in the Netherlands on a work trip and in the evening I find myself alone in a hotel with nothing to do. Like any self respecting gay man. Reading or watching TV seems like pretty unedifying pastimes when you've got free time, so why not compulsively throw myself on the grinder for hours and maybe risk my life meeting some weirdo? I started chatting with this cute, nice young guy. He lives fairly far from my hotel so we decided to meet halfway to get to know each other. Five kilometers on foot, which I happily do because I like walking around new cities not knowing the local geography. I imagine pubs and bars and instead I find myself in a rather lonely, gloomy part of town. We meet and he's actually much better looking than in the photos, but if on chat he was friendly and nice, in person he seems pretty reserved and unsociable, which I chalk up to Dutch stiffness. I talk to him and he replies on monosyllables with no engagement whatsoever. The emotional and physical affective deprivation my parents raised me with has produced me an insecure egocentric who has to be liked by the other person at any cost. If he likes me, my unconscious suggests I'll heal my narcissistic wound and finally be worthy of my mom's love. I perform my personal mating dance. He's sufficiently smitten. Out of nowhere he invites me to his place and I accept. We get to his place, another 5km away, right in the countryside, and my phone stops getting a signal. I don't know if it's a lack of coverage or if I just ran out of credit. The house is nothing like I imagined. It looks like the house of an old lady who collects doilies. He tells me the villa we're in was actually inherited from his grandmother, and he's been living there alone for several years. He shows me what he's cooking in the kitchen, a nauseating watery stew that I hope he won't offer me. He takes me into the living room. We sit on the couch and he loosens up a bit between one Chad and another. He tells me he's a fashion designer and that he produces the fabrics he uses himself with the help of a 3D printer, a super innovative technique. I tell him I know a Dutch designer who uses the same technique. Her name is Iris Van Herpen. Pause. He starts foaming at the mouth. He begins telling me that this very Van Herpen stole his ideas and he wants to sue her. He pulls out DVDs of his fashion shows and comments on every single piece, meanwhile showing me YouTube videos of the established designer shows with the supposed copies of his work. If Van Herpen's models look like ethereal, graceful works of art walking down the Runway, his models wearing his creations look like runaway girls on the third walk of shame of the week. I don't tell him this, and on the contrary, I nod along sympathetically to his megalomaniac statements as I resign myself to the idea that nothing's going to happen. He kisses me, one of the worst kisses of my life, surely a harbinger of far worse performances. I try to guide him and improve things, but nothing. He just can't do it. Like your grandpa when you try to teach him how to use email. He stops and he tells me he'll be right back. He goes upstairs to the second floor. Ten minutes go by and he's still nowhere to be seen. I approach and shout, hey, everything okay? Yes, of course, he says. Could it be that he wants me to go upstairs and I'll find him naked, bent over? I ask him so should I come up, to which he just says, no, no, wait. I Wait. Another 20 minutes pass. Is he taking a shower yet? I don't hear any water running. After a while, much darker possible scenarios start to crowd in, ones anyone with a bit of common sense would think of if they found themselves in an isolated stranger's house? Is he putting on a raincoat to protect himself from the blood once he chops me up? Is he sharpening an awl with which to carve red rum into my belly after chanting me to the fireplace. I decided to make a run for it if the idea of being murdered by a stranger has just barely surfaced. The doubt turns into certainty when I realize that the door we came in through is locked. Oh my God, I'm going to die. I go to the kitchen, where there's another door and that one's locked too. Oh crap. I go back to the living room and meanwhile scan the place for possible escape routes. In a dramatic flash forward, I picture myself throwing an armchair through a window and then jumping out and running away, or finding a flashlight in the bookcase to send Morse code distress signals. After about 50 minutes, he comes back downstairs, impassive. I want to have sex with you, he adds, without any emotion. I've completely lost the desire. I'm genuinely convinced he's going to kill me. I tell him that I have to go home and that it's late. He replies that I can't go home now. He wants to fuck. I tell him he took too long and that I have to go back to my hotel, which is 10km away and it's pitch dark by now. He sighs. I ask him to let me connect to his WI fi since my phone has no signal so I can follow the route on Google Maps. He points to a modem blinking under a chair. The password is underneath. I crouch down to look for the password on the sticker on the back of the modem. After a few seconds, I realize I'm bent over with him behind me while trying to type the password. I keep glancing at him as he watches me slyly from the couch. My hands are shaking. At a certain point I see him lean forward from the couch to grab something behind a piece of furniture, an object I can't see and that I decide it must be a weapon to knock me out. I jump up, grab a lamp, brandishing it, then telling him, let me out of here. He looks at me, surprised. If you want to go, go. I tell him that the door is locked. He looks astonished at this statement. Follow me, he says. I'm now certain I'm going to die. I keep the lamp with me. He looks at me impassively, as if this were practically Norma. I follow him and we go into the kitchen where the nauseating stew reigns supreme, and he tells me the keys are there. The light in the room is off. He walks in without turning it on and opens a drawer and I clearly hear the clinking of cutlery. Oh my God. He wants to attack me with a kitchen knife. I suddenly turn on the light and keep brandishing the lamp. He looks at me coldly and takes the keys from the cutlery drawer. We head toward the door and as soon as I'm outside, I run like hell. All while the lamp is still in my hand. It takes me two hours to get back to the hotel. As soon as I enter my room, I open my laptop and since his first and last name were visible in the fashion show he tortured me with, I block him on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Years later, this encounter unsettles me so much that every now and then I google the city name, fashion designer and killer, sure that sooner or later he'll kill someone. I'm left with two questions. What did he do alone on the second floor for 50 minutes? Was he actually preparing the post coital crime scene? Did he take Viagra and wait for it to kick in? What was he trying to grab from behind the piece of furniture? A weapon? A portable WI fi hotspot for my dead phone? A dildo? Unfortunately, I don't think I'll ever know. Don't chew on that Max Cooper loves that chew too. Oh, now he's into Cooper's food. Wow, he is loving it. What do you feed Cooper? Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula. He never leaves a crumb. I love it because it's made with high quality protein, nutrient rich fruits and veggies, and wholesome whole grains. Looks like we're switching to Blue Blue Buffalo foods are made with the superior ingredients your dog needs to thrive. Can your dog food say that? Visit feedbluefood.com to learn more. My mom basically got kind of forced into a friendship with this woman. She has an adult son who I've also become friends with. The very first day this woman met my mom, she immediately opened up and told her that her granddaughter passed away nine months ago and that her son found her lying dead in her bed. She said that the cause of death was sids. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which honestly should have been the first red flag because the granddaughter was around 4 years old I think. And well, SIDS only happens to infants. If anything it would be sudc. Sudden Unexplained Death in children, which is extremely rare. Anyway, this woman is very clingy and she constantly inserts herself into my mom's plans. She talks about how she envies my mom and she compliments my 4 year old sister a lot. She compares her to her dead granddaughter non stop and she even sniffed her hair once. Obviously this all weirded my mom out so she told me my intuition is telling me to keep my family away from her. I try to be understanding because I know that grief can do strange things to people and she's also neurodivergent, so maybe she struggles with social cues and boundaries. A couple hours ago I was sitting with her son and he was showing me pictures of his family back in Utah. He comes across a photo of his niece and at this point he doesn't know that I already know she died. My mom told me beforehand because the woman said her son has PTSD and he struggles with the death. So my mom warned me to not say anything triggering, which is wild because the mom constantly talks about the granddaughter and shows pictures of her and it clearly ruins his mood every time. Anyway, he sees the picture and says yeah, this is my niece. She died. Everything went downhill when she died. I comfort him, acting surprised since he doesn't know I already knew. Then he adds that he found her dead, but then he says I found her dead in the bathtub. The the mom originally told my mom that her son found the child dead in bed lying upside down, so now the stories don't match at all. More context. The woman grew up in a Mormon cult and she said that she was running from someone when she moved to Utah to Oregon, but wouldn't say who. She also told us that she watched her daughter's kids a lot, but after the granddaughter died, CPS got involved and they took away the grandson, the other child. My question is why would CPS remove the other child if the death was truly Sid's, which is out of anyone's control? It doesn't really make sense to me. If the child actually died in the bathtub due to lack of supervision, wouldn't that be considered neglect? And wouldn't that explain why CPS removed the other kid? Between the conflicting stories, the CPS involvement, and the way that she's acting toward my little sister, my mom and I both feel really uncomfortable. I guess I just want to know are we overthinking this or does this situation seem genuinely concerning? Hello, this is quite a long one, so apologies that it may take a while to tell. I do have to give a little bit of context. Also. I'm a 22 year old female, but the story took place when I was 21. I live in a small town and I work in a pub in the town center. Two pubs, two small shops and a bank. On my walk home, I walk past one of the shops which also has a small bus shelter next to it. Buses run every hour ish, but none run after 8pm after that it's just residential housing and then my house near the end of the road. All in all from my job and house, it's about an 8 minute walk. My town is usually dead after 10pm as everything is closed and I would genuinely say it was relatively safe. I never had a problem with walking home alone. This incident happened on New Year's Eve going into New Year's Day, so the pubs were open later. I finished my shift at about 1:30am and me, my boss, boyfriend and two other coworkers went to the pub next door for a drink before we went home. It was about 2:30am When I realized what time it was and that I needed to get home. My boyfriend lives on the other side of town and I wasn't staying with him that night. My boss insisted on driving me home and I kept insisting that he stay as everyone else was enjoying themselves and talking about the Christmas period we had at work. Same with my boyfriend. He insisted on walking me home but I was adamant that I was fine and it's literally less than 10 minutes. Anyway, after a lot of pushback I told them I was walking home. I really enjoy walking without headphones, having a cigarette, especially after a shift because it genuinely is so silent and peaceful. I didn't pass or see anybody until I got to walking past the shop. Like I mentioned previously, there's a small bus shelter next to it and as I got closer I realized there was a man sitting on the bench in the bus stop. Bear in mind, it is nearly 3am and even the pub we were at wasn't actually open anymore. They just let us in because we worked at the other pub. I didn't really think much of the man, but as I got closer I realized I had served him at my shift earlier on in the night. He looked up as I was walking and I realized he was sniffing some sort of drug from his keys, most likely cocaine. I didn't actually know who he was and still don't, but he didn't seem threatening, he just looked like he was kind of chilling. I guess probably not the best choice of words. He did meet my eyes though and I was actually walking past the bus shelter. He said something along the lines of Sorry darling, do you have a lighter I can borrow? I was smoking as I was walking so he knew I would have one. I stopped and he was already walking towards me as I had, so I started digging one of the many lighters that I had out of my bag. I was fully intent on just letting him keep it. I'm not the type to stand with a 30 something year old man while he's lighting a cigarette. Then he had asked me for a cigarette, but I had just lit my last one, which I said during this whole conversation he was very close to me, but I was kind of frozen in place. I'd realized that I'd stopped and was standing with a man in a dead street where nobody was around. I was still in the part of town where there isn't housing for another couple of minutes and if anyone had come out of the pub, I was too far away where they wouldn't have seen me. I just started mumbling something like, hey, just keep the lighter, I've gotta go. But this man who I had only spoken to for about 20 seconds told me, wait, just stop a second. And when my feet had started to turn to walk away, I stopped again. Side note, I know I should have just walked away, but I thought maybe it was innocent enough and I didn't want to give a reason to provoke him if I had just walked away from him. This time his demeanor switched and he wasn't very polite to start with. But it's like him telling me to stop made him realize that I was a young woman walking alone at this time of night. I genuinely still get chills thinking about what he said. He looked me up and down. Then he said, you know, I've been real angry and I've been waiting for someone to hurt all night. You shouldn't be walking around here alone. My legs literally turned to jelly at that moment. I didn't even know if my phone was in my pocket or in my bag. I looked around and then said, I'm not alone, my boyfriend is waiting for me around the corner. I will be with him in a minute. Then smiled. Just a bare faced lie. My boyfriend was still in the pub and had no clue that this interaction was going on. I thought maybe I should walk back and go back to the pub, but I just decided not to. My my house is closer. The man smirked as if he knew I was chatting absolute bullshit. And he would walk with me to meet my boyfriend. There was no boyfriend waiting for me around the corner. I kept saying there was no need, but he was literally on my tail rambling about how I don't understand him, I don't get it, I need to walk with him, that he wasn't going to hurt me. And this whole time I kept thinking he was going to grab my hair or pull me to the ground and and that any minute he was going to realize There was no boyfriend waiting for me. I ended up pulling my phone out of my pocket and it opened to our work group chat and I just typed a message about a man walking with me. Realizing my phone was on 2%, thinking that I just wanted someone to know what was happening, I didn't dare go to call my boyfriend. This guy had started mumbling about how I wasn't listening to him. By some miracle, when we turned around the corner onto my street, the guy didn't realize my boyfriend wasn't there. Or maybe he did, but didn't say anything. He did up his behavior though, and he started spewing the most perverted stuff to me, saying, you're such a pretty young girl, I bet your boyfriend doesn't know how to handle you. The whole time I wasn't speaking, just speeding up and checking my phone discreetly. I realized that he was going to know where my house was. So I just thought, I'm going to have to pretend one of these houses are mine, otherwise I'll be leading him right to my house, where my dad would be asleep at the back of the house, none the wiser. All of the houses on the street had a small gate and footpath leading to the door. So I chose a house with the light on and opened their gate. I turned to the guy and then said, uh, this is my place. See you later and thanks for walking me. Then close the gate behind me. I ran up to their door and shoved my key into the door that wasn't mine and prayed that this guy would leave and wouldn't wait for me to go inside the house. Thankfully, he didn't and he started stumbling in the opposite direction, back down the street, away from where my actual house was. In what I thought was my only chance, I opened this gate and sprinted home. This guy clocked what I was doing instantly and started walking in my direction. By the time I got to my house, he had either not caught up quick enough or had given up. When I put my key into the door, I realized my dad had left his in the door internally, meaning I was locked out. I got my phone out and realized it had died by the time we were walking. So I just started banging on the door and luckily my dad let me in after a couple of minutes and that was it. But it was absolutely terrifying. I haven't walked home alone since, and my boyfriend was so upset that he didn't push more and let him walk me home. Thankfully, I'm okay and nothing physical happened to me. Back in late 2023 I began seeing a man in my neighborhood walking his dog. I would see him in the morning when I went to work, maybe two, three times a week. He's an average looking guy, maybe in his 60s. I would see him again regularly when I came home. Since I worked an 8 5. I didn't think much of it, just assumed we had similar schedules. He always wore the same blue jacket. I didn't think much of it because it looked like a rain or wind jacket. So I thought it was just what he threw on to walk the dog. He would stare a lot when he walked by, but again assumed maybe he was just a lonely guy and didn't think too much of it. One day I asked him if he had got the end of the year letter from the HOA and he seemed confused. I repeated myself and he said that he hadn't received anything yet. Wrote this off as well because I assumed that he was just caught off guard. I had been seeing him daily for months, but we never spoke. He genuinely seemed shocked by me speaking to him. I told him to keep a lookout for it and he just stared and went back to walking his golden retriever. I began seeing him even more after this. By Christmas, I was seeing him at least once a day, if not twice. I treated him like every other neighbor and did a quick neighbor wave whenever I saw him walking his dog. In March, I had separated from my husband. He moved out and took the dog. He owned him before I came along, so I understood this since I was now alone and sad. My mom stayed with me for a while. She doesn't work, so she would be at my house during the day while I was gone. She noted the same guy always walking by. She noticed that he always stared too, and it was kind of odd. She waved hello to him a few times, but he never did anything but just stare and walk his dog. She said since he walked the dog often but also seemingly on a schedule, he could have early onset dementia or maybe he was sick somehow and using the dog walks as a way to get exercise. We both agreed he was very odd but harmless. After a month or so, my mom went back to her house and I was living alone. One thing I loved about that house was the fact that the backyard butted up to a national park. Beyond my fence was trees and forest. After my husband and dog left, I would be sitting in the backyard and hear what sounded like footsteps. It was almost always late at night when I'd be sneaking out for a late night cigarette before bed. I was drinking a good amount at the time. So I figured one, I was paranoid, and two, I was probably hearing raccoons or opossums in the woods, and three, having the dog before would have scared off any critters. It didn't happen every night, far enough apart that I was able to ride it off, but I couldn't shake the feeling of being watched. My fence had horizontal planks rather than your more standard vertical style. There were gaps you could see through if you were right on it. I looked over the fence in the daylight for a sign of anyone back there. The national forest kept the firebreak cleared between the edge of the park and the back of the homeowner's property, so it was difficult to tell if anyone had been there or not. I had started noticing lighters and cigarettes missing from the backyard. I would swear I had an almost full pack going to bed, but when I checked the next day, it would be half empty. I wrote this all off due to my heavy drinking. My cousin started coming over and helping me do some handiwork around the house on the weekends. The neighbor, guy in the blue coat, would walk his dog every day. Still, he would now stop and watch my cousins from the sidewalk as they did work at the house. He would let the leash out for the dog to come up to them, but they didn't pet it because it smelled awful. I told them the theory. My mom said that he was sick and weird but harmless. They didn't agree, and the next time he let the dog into the driveway, my cousins had told him to screw off. From what they told me, he just stared at them for a while, then walked off. From then, the man would still stare, but it was even creepier now. When I would drive by, he would stop and watch me, as in physically turning his body to follow my car as I went by. I would always wave as if it were any other neighbor, as I always did, and he didn't flinch. Around June, a friend of mine moved in. She was going through a divorce as well, and I was happy to have someone to hang out with after work. We had a lot of fun, drinking and burning fires in the fire pit. And it began again. The sound of footsteps in the woods. We were both drunk, so we ran inside and just laughed it off. This happened a handful of times over the next few months. I would hear things more often when I was alone. My roommate split her time, so she was never with me on the weekend. She had noted the creepy guy with his dog. He seemed to be walking his dog. When I left for work around 7:30 and again when she was leaving for work around 8:30. He would let his dog out to her daily and she would pet the dog. At first she stopped because the dog smelled so bad and the man never spoke. He just stared. She started being creeped out too. She said he seemed friendly enough until she stopped petting his dog and his stare shifted to being mean too. He began stopping to watch her drive by as well. Then one day I saw it. I saw him down out past the entrance of the neighborhood and at the treeline to the forest. He was clearly walking into the woods. That's when it clicked. Why did he wear the same clothes every day? Why? He seemed to be there with his dog every day. We left the house. Why did they smell so bad? Why? I was hearing things in the woods. I almost began to panic. Surely a man isn't living in the woods watching me, right? Surely this man hasn't been watching me through my fence for almost a year. At this point, the whole time this was happening, the house next door was empty. It was a rental, and the previous tenants left and it sat. I started thinking back and I began seeing the man sometime after the previous tenants moved out. I tried my best not to panic and started looking into trail cameras to film behind my fence. I told my roommate about my theory and she said I sounded crazy at first. She jokingly started yelling out for him to go away and leave us alone. Then we finally started hearing footsteps in the woods at that moment and then ran inside. Before I could even order a camera, they had rented the house next door. It was just days after I told my roommate what was going on. A family with a dog and two kids had moved in. The last time I saw the man walking his dog was the morning the family moved in because I came home from work to see the moving truck. When I introduced myself to the neighbors, I had asked about the woods behind the house. They didn't have a fence. I asked if they found anything back there and they said they did, but it was just random junk they threw out. I didn't say anything more. I really contemplated telling them, but I figured I would sound insane. I believe this man was living behind their house and watching me through my fence. I never had cameras in the backyard, so I can't say for certain if he ever crossed the fence. Since I never saw him again, I decided that his cover was blown and he had moved on to watch other people. I stayed in that home until October 2025. Literally never saw that guy ever again. After that day. When I was 10, my parents and I went to visit my grandmother for spring break. My cousin also came to visit and we decided we wanted to go to the YMCA for the day. My grandmother dropped us off and said she would come and pick us up in four hours. On that day, the YMCA was empty. There were a couple of adults in the exercise room, but that's it. We went to the basketball court and after two hours of playing tag and shooting baskets, we were bored. I've never been the biggest fan of swimming. I've never been the biggest fan of swimming, but this YMCA had a pretty cool pool. So we changed into our bathing suits and headed in there. The pool was empty except for the lifeguard. We played a bunch of games and swam laps. But after about an hour there wasn't much left to do and there was no one except us to hang out with to keep things interesting. So we decided to play a game of seeing how long we could hold our breath underwater. We stood in the shallow end near the clock on the wall so we could time ourselves. Instead of fully submerging, we just stuck our heads face down in the water. We did this a couple of times and I was winning. On our last round, I felt a tap on my shoulder. I figured it was my cousin giving up and just telling me that I won. But instead it was the lifeguard who told me to knock it off or she was going to have to ask us to leave the pool. Since we were tired of being in the pool anyway, we figured we would get out, get dressed, and go back to the basketball court until my grandmother picked us up. We only had an hour left anyways, and the water was freezing. As we got out, the lifeguard stopped us and asked us if we wanted to go into the sauna to warm up and dry off. The sign said 18 years or older, so of course we were super excited that she had allowed us to do that. She walked us to the sauna and unlocked the door. The door was glass and the interior was made entirely out of wood. Inside, above the door, there was a clock, probably to help make sure you were not in there for an unsafe amount of time. The lifeguard stand was adjacent to the sauna, but if you looked out the door, you could clearly see it. She followed us in and went over to the thermometer encased in plastic and unlocked it so she could crank up the heat. I figured that she must have to turn it on each time, so I didn't think anything of it. Both my cousin and I were very short girls and so we couldn't see the temperature that was printed on the thermometer knob. But I knew that she was turning up the heat. Then she left and shut the door behind her. I thought that I saw her lock the door too, but I thought to myself, why would she lock the door when we might want to get out? I checked the clock and decided we should get out in 10 or 15 minutes. It was already plenty warm in the sauna, but now the room was blazing. It felt nice because I was so cold from the pool. After about 15 minutes, it was starting to get a little bit too hot and my cousin agreed that we should leave so we could get dressed. I went to turn the knob on the door, but it wasn't budging. I thought maybe it was jammed, so I shook it, but it still wasn't opening. Then I let my cousin try. She couldn't get it open either. We figured the lifeguard would be back in a couple of minutes, so we sat back down and waited. The room was getting hotter now and I really wanted to leave. I got up and started banging on the door and shaking and twisting the knob trying to get the lifeguard's attention. My cousin got up and joined me. We started screaming at the top of our lungs for her to let us out, but she just stared straight ahead. I don't think there's any way that she couldn't have noticed or heard two little girls banging and kicking the door and screaming. Now. We had been in there for about 25 minutes. It was so hot in the sauna that it hurt to breathe. It felt like my lungs were on fire, my eyes and skin were burning. We sat back down and put our towels over our heads because they were still a little damp and it made it easier to breathe. I was so worried about my cousin as she's a couple of years younger than me. I looked at the clock and I saw that we had been in there for 35 minutes. I got up and walked to the door again and I saw the lifeguard still just staring straight ahead again. I tried to get her attention by screaming that we needed out and banging on the door as hard as I could, but still nothing. I was starting to get pretty dizzy, so I went to sit back down, but the wooden seats of the sauna burned my skin. My towel was completely dry, so I put it underneath me to sit on. My hair was also dry, but I wrapped it across my face to cover my nose and I squinted my eyes so that they didn't burn as badly. But I could still watch if anyone passed the door. It helped a little bit. My cousin was laying face down with a towel over her head, not moving or saying anything. So I nudged her to make sure she was still okay. She was, but I could tell that we really needed to get out of there soon because she seemed a bit disoriented. It had been 45 minutes now, and I was extremely nauseous. There was no way that the lifeguard would forget that we were in there, and I thought that she would have to come back soon. But there was this little voice in my head telling me that maybe she had purposely locked us in there. Finally, a man walked past the door towards the pool, but for some reason, I just couldn't get up. My whole body was on fire and I felt so dizzy. Luckily, the man wasn't going to the pool. He wanted to be led into the sauna, and he came back with a lifeguard. I saw them walking this way and immediately jumped up to grab my cousin. I knew now that for sure she had locked us in there because she pulled her keys to unlock the door and let the man in. I didn't want to take any chances of us being trapped in there any longer. So as the man was trying to walk in, I was trying to shove our way out. As we were going out, the lifeguard started trying to shut the door and push us back with it. The man was clearly confused about what was going on and then said, um, I think they want out. The lifeguard let out a sigh and opened the door fully, and we ran away as fast as we could into the changing room. We only had about 10 minutes before our grandmother was supposed to pick us up. We were both so shaken by what had happened that we didn't say anything to each other as we got dressed or on the car ride home. When we got back to the house, my parents were making us dinner, and I told them the story of what had just happened. They thought that I must have been exaggerating, and they didn't believe me. I truly think that woman was going to let us cook alive in there. The only bit of doubt that I have is what would have happened if we actually died. She obviously would have gotten the blame. What was her endgame? I'm 21 now, but I still think about this interaction all the time. And when I'm in small spaces or I get too warm, I still have panic attacks. No one believes the story, and I get it. It's pretty absurd. I'm not sure if I should ask for opinions or what? But do you think this could have been some crazy misunderstanding? Or do you think that she really just left us there to die? And why? So this incident happened to me a couple of months back. I was returning from work rather early, around 1:40pm or somewhere near that time frame, to the apartment complex I lived in. It's not the best area in the city. Even though the police station is just up the street, it doesn't really stop all the sketchy activity that goes on. As I unlocked the front door to the complex so I could make my way in, I headed over to the elevator and pushed the button. And then I waited until it arrived. As it arrived, I pushed the button for the fourth floor reach into my pocket, I pulled out my cell phone to check some text messages I had not looked at earlier. As the elevator climbed up to its destination, I could start to hear a lot of screaming and thrashing. I pretty much thought it was a bunch of kids just screwing around in the damn complex. As I pushed open the elevator door, I looked down the hall towards where my apartment was located and my eyes locked into some madman who was banging on my neighbor's door. He was wielding a knife with blood running down his hands and smashed glass from one of the hall windows scattered everywhere. He was yelling aloud about how he wanted his money and it looked like he was trying his hardest to break down the damn door. My first thought was, this guy is clearly on something and wants his damn money. Now I can't get to my apartment for two reasons. One, he was in the way and I had no way of sneaking past. And two, the apartment complex was set up awkwardly so the staircase was on the other side. Just then, out of all my luck, my damn phone began to ring. And that's when he turned his head towards my direction and began to yell even louder, using every damn swear word I've ever heard of. Before I could even mutter a word, he began to walk towards me, hitting the knife against the wall, letting his blood smear all across it. I figured I was pretty much screwed at this point. Opening the elevator door, I frantically pushed the first floor button and was watching with anticipation as the elevator doors slowly began to close. I could now hear him running towards me, yelling louder about how he was going to freaking kill me. Just as the doors closed, I could hear him banging on the outer door and just screaming as if he was being murdered or something. A scream I'll never forget. As the elevator began to descend down, it clicked in my head. What if this psycho is waiting for me downstairs. All I could do out of instinct was hit the emergency stop button on the elevator and call the cops. From what the operator had told me is cops were already called and were standing outside. That's all I pretty much got out of the call I made. As I sat in the elevator for what seemed like an eternity, I could finally hear a bunch of noise below me. I guess I was at the halfway point of the second and first floor. It was the cops detaining the guy. As I worked it up, I finally clicked off the switch to let the elevator resume its descent to its destination. Looking out the glass doors, I could see the police walking off with the man in cuffs. One of the officers walked up to me and asked me if I saw anything. I told him that I got off the same floor as the psycho before he started to make his way to me. Apparently, I got off lucky as they had also retrieved a gun from the man. I was told. Shortly after that incident, I moved out of the complex to a better part of town. But I'll never forget that psycho and all the blood smeared on the walls and the way that he was wielding that. Knock it, Sam.