15x15: Night Shift Nightmare

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CBS Thursdays.

Don't miss the new season of the CBS original, Matlock, with Kathy Bates starring in her Emmy-nominated role.

I lost a daughter, and someone at this law firm covered up the truth, so I'm going to get justice.

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CBS Thursdays at 9-8 Central and streaming on Paramount Plus.

We're taking Let's Not Meet on the Road again this year.

Phoenix, Arizona, I'll be at Rebel Lounge on November 17th.

St.

Paul, Minnesota at Turf Club on November 19th, and Chicago, Illinois at Beat Kitchen on November 20th.

Get your tickets at let's meetpodcast.com/slash tour or follow the link in the show notes.

I'll see you there.

This podcast contains adult language and content.

Listener discretion is advised.

If you have a story to share, send it to let's not meetstories at gmail.com.

Enjoy the show.

I found out about this around eight months ago, and it has been on my mind ever since.

For context, as a child, I had severe speech delay.

I was completely mute until a few weeks before kindergarten.

This caused me to have a speech impediment, which I technically still have to this day, but it's now to a lesser extent.

I'm lucky enough that the letters I have trouble with match up with the letters often dropped in certain accents.

So, to an untrained ear, I sound British or Australian, depending on who you ask.

When this happens, I often confirm where people assume my accent is from, because honestly, it's easier just to go along with the bit and pretend that I'm from elsewhere rather than explain the speech impediment thing and face any stigma that goes along with it.

The only people who know the truth are my very close friends and family.

Now on to the story.

I am an 18 year old female, and I was dating a female who was 18 as well.

We're no longer seeing each other for reasons unrelated to the story.

We were at a social event when we met up with one of her friends who was a 19-year-old female.

I technically knew this girl beforehand since around ninth grade, but I didn't know her too well.

As a group we got to talking, and then my girlfriend's friend randomly changed the subject and asked me how my mom was doing.

I was caught off guard because that's not something someone would ordinarily ask without knowing said mom.

I asked her, why?

Do you know her?

She then explained that my mom was her EA and had helped her work out her behavioral issues throughout elementary and middle school.

This struck me as odd because although my mom did work in a school for a brief time, She was a lunchtime supervisor and only ever worked in one elementary school and it was a school that I knew this girl did not go to.

I asked her if she was sure it was my mom and clarified that my mom wasn't an EA.

She then confirmed that it had to be my mom since she said my mom used to talk about me all the time.

When this girl was talking to quote-unquote my mom about needing to decide which high school to go to, this person who she said was my mom recommended my high school and she said that her daughter went there.

Now, I went to high school with a few people who had the same name as me, since my name is about as basic of a name as you could get.

So I asked this girl if she was sure that she was talking about my mom, since there were more people with the same name in my school.

She once again confirmed she was definitely talking with my mom, since my mom would tell her all about the details of my life.

And she told her about my time going to speech therapy.

As I said earlier, I'm very secretive about the fact that I have a speech impediment.

This girl was clearly someone I had never told, although I will admit my girlfriend at the time may have told her about it, but I have never, and I mean never, told anyone about going to speech therapy.

That's just never a detail I'm comfortable sharing when telling my life story.

Anyway, just to confirm that that my mother didn't have a secret double life somehow, I asked the girlfriend's friend what my mother looked like.

She said that she was somewhat short with curly brown hair.

This confirmed what I already knew.

This wasn't my mother.

My mother is tall and blonde.

But the description she gave me was exactly what my first speech therapist looked like.

She was hired through the school district, and I saw her for about two years years before she switched to another school.

She also works with a variety of special needs, meaning it's highly likely that she went on to become my girlfriend's friend's EA.

So, somewhere out there, there was a speech therapist who for some reason was pretending to be my mother, and in order to keep this up, she had to do some stalking to some extent, as she would have had to do research on how to find out which school I went to.

I also remembered a side story while I wrote this out.

When I was a child after I had switched speech therapists, I was in a store with my mother where there was a shiny blue guitar.

Being a child and liking shiny blue things, I was really insistent on wanting this guitar.

My mom said no, as it was expensive, and I had shown little interest in playing guitar besides watching my dad play his bass.

I was disappointed, but I understood.

Well, out of the blue, blue, my first speech therapist showed up and bought the guitar for me.

My mom told her she didn't have to, but she insisted.

At the time, this seemed like a nice thing to do, albeit overly generous, but after finding out that she was parading around pretending to be my mom, it definitely paints this gesture in a different light.

And I don't know how I feel about it.

There isn't much that I can do about the situation, as I don't even remember remember what the speech therapist's name was.

So, let's just hope we don't meet again.

This story took place in December 2005 when I was working the night shift at a hotel in Myrtle Beach.

The summers there weren't so bad since we mainly dealt with families and golfers.

However, wintertime was another story entirely.

Wintertime meant fewer people were out and about, so times were hard for a motel to make money.

To combat this, the motels in the area would have very low weekly and monthly rates.

The idea was to attract snowbirds, which was the term that we would call older people from up north.

They liked to come down and enjoy the quiet of the slow off season.

The downside of this was that it attracted undesirable local guests as well.

These locals were often addicts and criminals.

Due to the low rates, they would somewhat set up shop in our rooms.

As such, we had to deal with methlabs, domestic violence, and all kinds of other things.

Dealing with one of these locals who was taking advantage of the low rates wound up being the root of one of the scariest experiences of my life.

The night shift started as usual.

I came in and counted the cash as the person who was working the second shift left.

About ten minutes later, my good friend and fellow motel employee Andrew stopped by.

Andrew was a maintenance man who worked second shift at all three of the hotels owned by the company we worked for.

Even though I worked third shift, it was typical for me to see Andrew, and he often went and grabbed food for both of us.

He would hang hang out with me for a bit and keep me company because third shift was never really busy during this time of year.

Anyway, I went back to the office to grab money out of my wallet to give Andrew, since he was going to get some food.

While I was back there, I heard the door chime go off, indicating someone had entered the lobby.

As I walked back into the front office, I saw Andrew fall down to the ground right in front of me.

I then looked up just in time to see a fist clutching a steel pipe coming towards my face.

It made contact with my jaw and I fell to one knee as blood instantly filled my mouth.

I thought I had heard the attacker say something about Andrew getting away, and then the same pipe that hit my jaw hit me once more on the head.

The next thing I knew, the guy who hit me with the pipe turned and ran out the door.

He was followed by his friend, whom I had not noticed before.

As they dashed out the door, I staggered to my feet and went to grab the office phone to call 911.

As I was using the phone, blood started running down my head and into my face.

I talked to the dispatcher and requested the police and an ambulance.

Right as I hung up, Andrew returned, and I saw him walking in with a police officer.

It seemed that the friend of the man who hit me was supposed to get Andrew while his friend pummeled me, but he froze up.

Since he hesitated, Andrew was able to scramble back up to his feet and run out the door, flagging down a police officer that was passing by.

Andrew then came back with help.

And it's a lucky thing for me that he did because if not, I may have been killed.

I ended up being rushed to the ER, where I had to get 13 staples in my head, and was diagnosed with a severe concussion.

I didn't even realize how brutal the attack had been.

When I got out of of the hospital, I was shown a video of the attack.

I thought that the guy punched me and then hit me once with the pipe, but I was wrong.

I must have been out because in the video I kept trying to stand up and grab the pipe.

I don't remember this at all.

Meanwhile, the guy attacking me was alternating between punching me in the head and hitting me with the pipe, trying to get me back down to the ground.

He had to have hit me ten times.

I have gained terrible PTSD because of this, but I still went right back to work after it happened.

I was always nervous after that, but was relieved when I got a safer job with a daytime shift.

The guys who attacked me and Andrew were never found.

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I'm 18 years old now.

And when I was a little girl, I had a friend named Harry.

We met through school, but our dads worked together.

My dad got his apprenticeship through his dad, and through working together, our families became close friends.

Harry occasionally had days where he would be completely different from the kid that I knew.

Sometimes, he seemed like he couldn't stop himself from screaming or flipping tables in school, which was later found out to be a mix of autism and ADHD.

Unluckily for everyone else, he was also pretty creepy and aggressive if he didn't get what he wanted.

I only found out about his official diagnosis during my tenth year of school.

But when we were pretty young, I think around year four,

I was told by my parents never to go near him.

Their instruction didn't have anything to do with Harry, though.

I later found out it was because his mother had become overly obsessive and began stalking my dad.

She managed to get her husband, Harry's dad, to get my dad fired since she somehow had gone through my dad's personal messages and direct messages on his laptop and found a bunch of them between my dad and his mom.

I have no idea what she saw in there, but I know she found a message my dad had sent where he said he didn't enjoy working with Harry's dad.

Unbeknownst to her, it was because of the lack of clients that my dad had.

He didn't say this because of Harry's family or anything, but seeing that was enough for her to scream at her husband about it.

This resulted in my dad losing his job and moving his work to Eastley.

I didn't talk to Harry for about a year after that, which is why I think it was year four when that went down.

But then in year six, when I was around eleven, I found myself in a very close friend group trio with Harry and his best friend Isaac.

I developed a crush on Isaac, and this crush eventually became a relationship.

Isaac confessed his feelings for me while Harry was right next to us as we walked what seemed like a marathon across our school's field.

Once Isaac was officially my boyfriend, we spent every day at the park, nearby, with Harry, playing manhunt.

Everything was great, but in year seven, as we were heading into our teenage years, we completely grew apart.

Then Harry moved to a different school for a couple of years.

He came back in year nine, but I never really saw him around school at all, and I never talked to him.

Isaac and I eventually broke up in year seven, and when we did we fully lost contact with each other.

The next time I talked to Harry, that I remember, was during my year ten work experience.

I was a teacher's assistant to a group of kids, and he was helping with fitness, so we came across each other during kids' PE.

We caught up when I was, unfortunately, in an I Have a Crush on Anyone Who Shows Me Special Attention phase, so for a brief moment I thought I liked Harry, so the feelings quickly dissipated when I found out that he was with one of my friends at the time.

We didn't speak again for a long time after that.

I honestly didn't hear much from him about him until he and my friend ended up breaking up.

Once they split, she warned me about him.

She told me that he had a bunch of my profile pictures saved on WhatsApp, and he had several screenshots of me from Instagram.

When she confronted him about the pictures of me, he dismissed her and told her that his screenshot buttons were easy to press, so he often took accidental screenshots.

At first she thought that he was cheating on her with me, which explained why she had previously completely distanced herself from me.

But I showed her the messages between me and Harry.

I showed her that our last conversation was during the summer holiday before year seven, and she believed me.

She then told me that he likely had a thing for me, but she warned me and said that if he asked me out, I should immediately say no.

Additionally, she told me that I should tell him that I declined since he was being pushy and pushed for every little thing.

She was urging me to do this since, at the time, there were many rumors about him crossing the line and doing some pretty unbelievable things to people.

I won't go into it now, but he had an issue with understanding consent, and she was telling me to give him some pushback if he tried to ask me out.

At the time, I listened to my friend and helped her through her breakup with Harry, but our conversation became a distant memory in my mind as time passed.

We eventually finished school and got our general certificates for secondary education, which is comparable to what those in the US call a diploma.

We then started college, and that was the next time that I heard from Harry.

He tried to reach out to me through Instagram since our numbers had changed.

He started the conversation by telling me that he had a massive crush on me when I was in year year eight.

It was making me uncomfortable, but we kept talking and moved the conversation to Snapchat since we were both on there.

As we continued talking, he said some very creepy things about how I looked.

He tried to cool off and generalize a bit by saying things like you're so pretty, but I just wanted to leave the conversation.

Then he went into more detail and said that he had a massive crush on me in years 10 and 11 when he was with my friend.

He eventually asked me out in the middle of another wave of compliments, but before I could reply, he messaged me again to confirm the number bus that I got onto to go to college at the time.

I thought it was really weird that he knew which bus I got on, but he explained that he lived near that bus line.

I figured he must have seen me on the bus, but then he clarified and said that he always saw me sitting in one of the back seats to the right, but he was too shy to say hi.

This was also very creepy, since I had never even seen him on the bus.

Not once.

And you could recognize this guy easily.

He was the type of guy that you'd see at every anime convention wielding a fake katana.

My seat always allowed me to see everyone who got on the bus, and I never saw him.

I always sat in the second to last row of the bus, so I spent the rest of my college years feeling like he was right behind me whenever I couldn't see him.

Every time I boarded the bus, I would actively look out for him, but I never saw him.

Sometimes I'd see him start to message me over Snapchat, but whenever I'd look around, he'd stop typing.

There were even a few times where he would say, You're on your way to college, or Saw you on the bus.

You look good today.

But when I would look around, he was nowhere to be seen.

I was even looking for him outside of the bus, but he was never anywhere.

Harry eventually confessed the love that he had for me again, and I rejected him, telling him that I was only interested in women.

At the time, this was an excuse, because I wasn't aware that I was a lesbian then.

Months later, he tried again.

He was sending me the same creepy messages, but he was getting bolder and more intense with every attempt.

This time, I was direct and straight up told him that I was not into him.

He briefly accepted that, but then he tried again a month later, and at that point I told him I was gay.

I did this to see if maybe that would stop him permanently.

It didn't.

And he ended up trying again a few weeks later.

I told him I liked someone, and he even tried more after that, and I told him I was in a relationship.

Well, his responses to my declining got more and more aggressive, but after I rejected him for the fourth time, he hastily said, for fuck's sake, in all caps.

He didn't message me a while after that.

Time went by, and I didn't hear from him again, so I finished college and I started working full-time with my brother, who's now my manager.

While I was working, Harry walked in one late evening and got an energy drink with some crisps.

Instead of using one of our four self-serve stations, he came up to me at the till.

When I made eye contact with him, he was suddenly the Harry that I once knew.

Again, he wasn't aggressive, he wasn't creepy.

He just seemed genuine.

A casual guy.

I introduced him to my brother, since he had known Harry's family, but he hadn't known Harry specifically.

Later, during my break, Harry messaged me on Instagram again.

He said, it was nice to see you again.

And then he said that we should catch up, which I wasn't entirely happy about.

The last situation I'd want to be in is where I'm alone with him, especially since I knew that he couldn't control himself after he drank.

So I just acknowledged what he said without specifying any kind of plan to actually meet up.

We spoke again the next day and I mentioned I had work.

I also said I was thinking about buying myself a little something, just making casual talk.

But in the middle of this, Harry interrupted me and said, I really liked you when you were going out with Isaac.

I was shocked, and then he continued, Yeah, it was a massive crush.

I didn't know what to say, so I left him on red, and I haven't heard from him since.

Unfortunately, he's only blocked by his socials and number,

but he knows where I work and where I live.

We also live pretty close to one another, which means he's probably just going to try to see me in person anywhere that he can.

This is his usual move when he's blocked.

I'm certain he'll try to get back in contact with me again.

I'm thankful that I have my older brother to keep me safe at work just in case.

So, to my very creepy childhood friend, for the love of God, let's not ever meet again.

I'm a 32-year-old female.

I don't fully remember this story as it happened when I was two,

but I'll share all of the details that I have been told, some of which I do actually remember.

Every summer there's this big street fair on grandmother's street.

My grandmother lives on a corner directly across the street from an elementary school.

Next door to her house is the police station, then the town library, a Chinese restaurant, and a gas station on the next corner, which connects to Main Street.

The street fair always starts at my grandmother's corner and then continues to Main Street, and then it goes up Main Street in both directions for about a block or so.

The route was like a T.

My grandmother's house had been in the family for 80 years, so the street fair was a natural part of my childhood.

When I was two, I was at the street fair with my mother, who was pregnant with my younger sister.

I was also with my father, my grandmother, and my older sister who was three.

We wound up splitting up.

My dad took me with him while he shopped at one of the stands that was selling watches, while my mom, grandma, and sister stayed back at my grandma's house.

I'm not sure why exactly.

I think my sister may have needed to use the bathroom, so my dad and I went ahead without the rest of the group.

When my mom returned a few minutes later, she asked my dad where I was.

He pointed towards the ground and said, she's right here.

But I wasn't.

He was paying for the watch and let go of my hand for just four seconds.

My mom became frantic, looking through the crowds.

She started screaming, Help me find my baby.

A bunch of people started looking.

My mom then noticed one woman with a long blonde ponytail walking the other way.

She turned the corner onto Main Street, and my mom saw me in her arms.

I was looking over her shoulder, reaching with my hands, doing this silent cry that I used to do as a baby.

My mom then screamed, That woman has my baby, while running after her.

This didn't even deter the woman.

She just picked up her pace and continued walking without looking back.

The crowds were splitting up for my mom, who was running after her and screaming, and she saw the woman put me in her car at the end of the street.

My mom caught up with her, then literally shoved the woman aside, reached into the car, and grabbed me.

She was screaming, that's my baby.

What are you doing with my baby?

The woman said that I looked lost and alone.

She was taking me to the police station.

My mom said, The police station is right there.

It was literally right next door to my grandma's house.

She had to walk past it to get to her car.

The woman had a few creepy looking men with her, and my mom said that they reeked of booze and drugs.

My mom also said that the woman seemed high and nervous and wasn't making any sense.

Without saying another word, the woman and the men that she was with jumped into the car and sped off, never to be seen again.

There is a rough city about two towns over with some pretty high crime rates, although the town we live in is pretty safe.

My mom believes that's where they came from and she thinks that they planned to sell me into trafficking or something like that, but we'll never know for sure.

Fast forward a few years, and I kept having a reoccurring nightmare of being carried by a strange-smelling woman, and my head looking over her shoulder, her long blonde ponytail swinging and swishing in front of my face.

With every swish of the ponytail, I could see my family getting further and further away.

In this recurring nightmare, I tried to cry and scream, but nothing would ever come out.

I eventually told my mom about the dream, so my family told me this story.

It was so creepy to hear, hear, and I genuinely think that my life could have turned out very differently if my mom hadn't joined my dad at the watch booth right at that moment.

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This happened when I was in fifth grade.

I live in Kyrgyzstan, and the school system here is not the same as it is in America.

I had first shift, which means I had school from 8 a.m.

to 1 p.m.

I headed back to my house on my own after school, but I was always walking with my two best friends.

We all lived near each other.

When we got to the point where we were heading in different directions, we said goodbye to each other and went our own way.

It was fall, so I was dressed in my school uniform with a jacket and hat.

It was quite chilly.

There were seven entrances into the building that I was living in, and the specific entrance I would use was the seventh one.

I was living in a good neighborhood, in the town center, so it was always bustling, and there were always people around.

When I started approaching the door to the seventh entrance, I noticed a man that was standing near the entrance.

He was right on the porch.

I had a strange feeling when I saw him.

It was telling me not to enter the building with him.

He then turned his head in my direction and looked at me.

His eyes felt empty.

That scared me a bit.

He looked right at me and then turned to enter the building.

My mom always told me not to enter the building with other people, so I stayed on the porch and tried to listen to him getting on the elevator, so that I could enter the building.

Once I I heard the elevator going up, I went inside, and I was relieved to see that nobody was there.

So I pressed the elevator button, waited for the elevator, got in, and pressed the button to go to the eighth floor.

As the elevator went up, I heard rapid footsteps going up the staircase and the stairwell.

The stairs were right next to the elevator, so it was easy to hear what was going on in the stairwell.

It sounded like someone was running, and I instantly thought about the man with the empty eyes that I saw outside.

I began to panic.

I didn't know what to do.

I knew if it was the man that I saw outside, he was going to approach me.

When the elevator doors opened, I ran straight to my front door and started banging on it.

I was also incessantly pressing the doorbell, trying to convey the urgency that I was feeling, but unfortunately my older brother was always so slow with getting to the door.

As I was waiting, I kept looking over at the doorway leading to the stairwell, and then, just as I feared, I saw the man from outside.

He was running at full speed, looking right at me.

He was so tall that he was skipping at least two to three stairs.

It was like he was effortlessly gliding up the stairs.

I was terrified, so I banged on the door even more while this man zeroed in on me and was running.

Just then, my brother finally opened the door.

But the story doesn't end there.

I flew inside, locked the door, and told my brother what was going on.

My brother, who was 16 at the time, also nearly six feet and a wrestler, opened the door, approached the man, and then asked him who he was.

The man started to get aggressive, but he also grabbed his phone and started acting like he was talking with someone.

My brother was calm in his approach, but the man was rude and aggressive during their interaction.

My brother told the man that he was scaring some of the residents in the building, but the man just started to curse at him.

My brother just walked away from him, came back inside, quickly closed the door, and told me to be careful.

To this day, I'm still scared of entering the building with any unknown people.

This happened almost twenty years ago, when I was fifteen.

I had an older neighbor who taught drums.

He was a friend of my family's, and I would take drum lessons from him once a week.

He only lived about two and a half blocks from me, so I would always walk to where he lived with his family at the end of a cul-de-sac.

One summer day, when I was walking home, at around 4 p.m.

in broad daylight in a quiet neighborhood, I noticed a strange man.

He was standing across from the end of the cul-de-sac.

He was wearing a big cowboy hat.

This was odd to see in my area.

He appeared to be possibly in his thirties, and I could see that he had some facial hair.

He was just standing there at the end of the cul-de-sac staring at me.

He was fixated on me as I walked out from the cul-de-sac and crossed the street.

I honestly didn't think too much about him, but once my back was to him, I could hear that he was following me.

My heart sped up at the sound of this.

I was still clutching my drumsticks and they seemed like weak protection.

Plus, I was wearing these thin little flip-flops, and I still remember thinking that if I had to kick him, they weren't going to help at all.

Less than half a block away was a busier street, and I decided I just needed to get to that more populated street now.

I figured if we were somewhere where people would see us, he'd have no choice but to just back off.

But as I was mulling over this, his steps sounded closer, and I began to panic.

I felt like I really wasn't going to make it.

I ended up running up to a house that belonged to a family whom I somewhat knew.

Well, I knew a mom with some young kids that lived there, so I pounded on her door and even tried to open it myself in a panic.

When she opened the door, I essentially spilled into her house.

Once I was inside, she locked the door and I told her what was going on while trying to calm down.

After being in their house for about 15 minutes, I asked if I could just hop her back fence to go home, since it would cut out a block of my travel.

But when we slid the drapes from her back door open, the man was there.

He was leaning against the fence right outside her house.

He positioned himself so that he could see both the front and back doors.

She ended up loading her kids in the car and driving me home, and later had her husband ask around about the guy.

It turns out this guy was living with his mother and had just gotten out of jail.

I don't know what the charges were, but all I know is that hearing this made my stomach twist into knots.

It was the first time I'd ever experienced a fear like that.

I don't know what would have happened if he had caught up to me that day.

Even though this was almost ten years ago, I have never been able to get it out of my head, so I thought I would share.

Back then, I was about 11 or 12 years old, living in an apartment with my mom.

Right across from our apartment was a creepy neighbor.

I could write a whole book about all of the creepy, wild, and downright insane things that said and did throughout the two years that he was our neighbor.

But this is something that really stuck with me more than anything else.

My mom and this neighbor were having a casual conversation with each other, and my mom's goal was to try and find some common ground with him and clear up any misunderstandings or miscommunications that may have led him to dislike us as much as he did.

He had a pretty blatant feeling of disdain towards us.

But evidently something went wrong during this conversation, as my mom suddenly came stomping into our apartment, loudly shutting and locking the doors.

She was visibly upset and shaken, so I asked what was wrong.

As her voice trembled, she said that our neighbor said,

You know, if I were you, I'd keep your daughter away from guys like me.

She said this statement was completely unprompted.

Now, while I'll never know exactly what he meant by this, my mind definitely had plenty of ideas what it was.

In any case, at the very least, it felt like a thinly veiled threat.

And the worst part was that I was often home alone, as I did online school while my mom went to work.

So, from then on, I never felt safe when I was home, as my imagination ran wild on what he might end up doing to me if he had the opportunity.

I never thought I would say this kind of thing, and I feel a bit guilty about it, but thankfully, he ended up dying before he ever even demonstrated any kind of follow-through on his creepy comment.

My mom only told me about this because she wanted to warn me to stay away from him, and she never wanted me to keep the door unlocked.

She didn't have to tell me twice.

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When I was seven years old, my mom and father got divorced.

This event prompted my mom to move and transfer her career to a small town where she would receive better pay, which was important to her as she would be moving forward in life as a single parent.

During our long 12-hour drive to the new location, we stopped in this little town along the way.

It was very bohemian with lots of art, independent businesses, and little specialty shops.

My mom said that we were there to meet up with her friend Paulette.

Now, I had never heard of Paulette previously, but they were friends from way back in her college days, and they recently reconnected with each other after a decade.

We ended up going to this East Indian restaurant, where we met for dinner.

When we were there, this slender, somewhat fragile woman walked in.

She was very tall, well over six feet.

She had frizzy, curly brown hair, with blonde streaks in it.

She was wearing a colorful shawl and feather earrings, and she had a fair complexion and very pale blue eyes.

She looked like a mosaic tapestry or something.

Well, she walked over to the table and gave my mom a big hug before making her way over to my older brother to shake his hand.

After that, she came around to my side of the table.

I extended extended my hand out to her to shake her hand as well, but she initially just stood there expressionless.

Her mouth was partially open, and a blank gaze was staring at me.

It made me uncomfortable, but then, as if someone had flicked on a switch, this spark ignited, and her face was suddenly animated with this huge Cheshire cat-like smile.

Then she bent over and hugged me tightly.

Paulette then sat down, and she and my mom caught up about what they had been up to over the years while we ate dinner.

After we were done eating, my mom got the bill, and then she told Paulette, You can just follow us.

My brother and I didn't know what my mom meant by this, but when we got into the car, my mom explained that Paulette was actually coming to live with us for a while.

So she followed us for the next several hours until we got to the new place.

It was fairly late when we got there.

It was around eleven.

We then unpacked our necessities, as the moving truck that we had hired wasn't going to arrive with the rest of our stuff until the morning.

There was a bunk bed already set up at this place for my brother and me.

I took the top bunk, and then my brother and I set up our sleeping bags.

My mom said goodnight to us soon after that, and I fell asleep pretty quickly.

I ended up being woken up at at around 1.30 a.m., since I guess the patio deck light had been turned on somehow, and it was right beside our bedroom.

I peered outside through the blinds, and I saw the back of Paulette's mop of curly hair.

She was sitting on the deck, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette.

I didn't think anything about this, and laid back down, but then I noticed the light from the window was partially blocked out.

With my head on the pillow, I slowly shifted my gaze back to the window behind me, and I saw the unmistakable outline of Paulette's silhouette facing the window.

She just stood there for a few minutes, but I didn't want to sit up again, so I pretended to be asleep.

After a while, her silhouette disappeared from the window.

and moments after that I heard the front door open and close, and the patio light turned back off off after a few minutes.

I then repositioned myself facing the wall and went back to sleep.

As I began to drift off, I heard the door to our bedroom slowly open.

I quickly turned my head around, and I saw that it was Paulette.

She was quietly walking into our room, wearing a nightgown.

I turned back to face the wall and closed my eyes.

She quietly made her way up to my bunk.

I then felt her fingers in a claw formation combing the back of my hair.

She was running her nails on the back of my scalp.

I kept my eyes closed tightly.

I was holding my breath, trying not to give away the fact that I was awake.

Then I smelled lavender essential oil as she began rubbing it into the back of my neck.

She was also pinching the back of my neck muscle, sometimes holding it, and then releasing it.

I was confused, but it didn't feel bad, so I just ended up falling asleep eventually.

I woke up in the morning, and my mom was at work, so Paulette was waiting for me and my brother at the kitchen table with cereal.

She put chocolate chips in with my cereal, but she didn't do the same for my brother.

My brother and I made some small talk with her, and she was very giggly and seemed to be trying to make us comfortable with our new living situation.

After my brother was done with his cereal, he headed back to his room to set up his game cube.

I ate slower than my brother, so I was always the last at the table.

As I slowly continued eating my cereal, Paulette just sat there, watching every move.

Once I finished I told her thank you.

Then I grabbed my bowl and I brought it to the sink.

She placed her hand on mine and said, I gave you a neck massage last night so that you wouldn't pee your bed.

I know lots of young ones pee their bed when they sleep in unfamiliar surroundings.

I looked up at her and replied, I've never peed my bed before, but thank you.

She proceeded to massage the back of my neck for the next few nights.

I ended up telling her I was comfortable in the new home and said that she didn't need to do it anymore.

She reacted with a sigh, but acknowledged it.

I started elementary school the following week, which meant bedtime was earlier for me, and I usually went to sleep at around eight.

My brother went to bed earlier as well, so Paulette and my mom stayed up later than us to chat and drink wine.

I always waited for them to go to bed before I used the washroom if I had to go to the bathroom at night, since my mom would lightly scold me for being up late on weeknights.

So once things got quiet, usually around eleven, I'd sneak out and tiptoe very quietly to the washroom.

This was my routine for the next few weeks, until Paulette started doing the exact same thing at the exact same time.

Every night when I needed the washroom, it just so happened that Paulette needed to use it too.

She would blaze down the hallway across from my room whenever I'd opened the door.

I always went back to my room and waited for her to be done.

This happened so frequently that I started going out the back mudroom door to pee outside.

This started to really upset me, so I tried to open my door as quietly as I could and then sprint to the washroom.

This new tactic seemed effective for a while, but then one night I got up slightly later than usual.

It was around midnight, and I was a little more careless about the noise that I was making since I was pretty groggy, still half asleep.

I opened my door, and Paulette's door just whipped open instantly.

She burst out from her bedroom into the moonlit hallway, completely naked.

She started quickly walking down the hallway after me.

I was already way down the hall, so I couldn't turn back to run to my room.

I jumped behind my mom's jade plant and squished my knees to my chest and tucked my head down.

She whizzed straight past me so fast that I felt a gust of wind in my hair.

Then she stayed in the washroom for almost an hour with the door cracked open.

The lights were off.

She was just lurking in there, in the silence.

I stayed there beside the washroom, tucked in the corner behind the plant pot, not making a sound.

Eventually I heard the washroom door open, and she walked back out and started pacing up and down the hallway.

I stayed small and insignificant behind the plant until she went back into her room.

I brushed this entire thing off as a complete accident and chalked it up to being unfortunate timing.

But it wasn't just an untimely coincidence.

No,

every night going forward, she literally whipped her door open and sprinted down the hallway naked.

If I made a single noise, she would tear down the hallway at every creak of the floorboard or any time I opened my door.

About two months after all of this happened, my brother and I were sword fighting with tree branches outside.

He ended up clipping my forehead, causing it to bleed pretty badly.

Paulette saw this happen, and she walked right up to my brother.

I thought she was going to scold him, but she kicked him in his head with her boot.

He fell onto his back.

He then got up off the ground, crying, and ran into the house.

She then grabbed me and started cradling me, rocking me back and forth.

She was shaking me so much that she was vibrating as she repeatedly asked, Are you hurt?

My mom found out what happened through my brother, and she decided that Paulette had to leave.

On the day that Paulette was moving out, she made a point to catch me one-on-one in the driveway before entering her car.

She met me at eye level and said,

I hope I can see you in a different life.

You remind me so much of my husband.

Goodbye for now.

Then she started bawling her eyes out as she hugged me.

I asked my mom who her husband was, and I guess she was a Marine who died in Afghanistan a few months before she moved in with us.

My mom told me that she would say how much I reminded her of him daily.

My mom hasn't spoken to her since.

I've never told my mom about the massages or anything like that to this day, as Paulette was quickly exiled after kicking my brother, and I didn't want to cause any more drama.

Thanks for listening and send your stories in to letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com if you'd like to hear them on the show.

And stick around after the music if you're a patron for your extended version of this week's episode.

If you want to get access, go to patreon.com forward slash let's not meet podcast to sign up and support the show today.

You'll get access to ad-free versions of all of our episodes at a higher bit rate and bonus content in those extensions every single week with stories you won't hear anywhere else.

Don't forget to get your tickets for the live shows in Phoenix, Arizona, St.

Paul, Minnesota, and Chicago, Illinois for next month.

You can get those tickets at let's not meetpodcast.com slash tour or follow the links in the show notes.

And be sure to check out the new episodes of my other podcasts like Odd Trails and the Old Time Radio Cast at crypticcountypodcasts.com.

You can also follow me on Twitch at twitch.tv slash crypticcounty if you'd like to to watch my live streams.

We've been hanging out and doing a lot of movie night streams with the listeners.

It's been a lot of fun.

I'd love to see you all there.

On this week's episode, you have heard Mother by Copper.

Night Shift Nightmare by GeekDad NSC.

Creepy childhood friend keeps messaging me by cold warning 6519.

I was the victim of an attempted kidnapping by I'm Teddy.

A man chased me in my apartment complex by GR4PIS.

chased by an ex-convict in broad daylight by Grapefruit Parking 848,

something my neighbor said still haunts me by awkward dorky nerd, and finally, my mom's friend by severe purchase 6949.

All of the stories you've heard this week were narrated and produced with the permission of their respective authors.

Let's Not Meet a True Horror podcast is not associated with Reddit or any other message boards online.

If you have a story to share, remember, send it to Let'sNotMeetStories NominateStories at gmail.com.

We'll see you all next week.

Everybody, stay safe.

I'm from New Zealand.

I currently live in a rural area on a dairy.

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