1x15: Roommates (Ft. True Crime Fan Club)

[00:00:00] This podcast contains adult language and content. If you have a story to share, send it to letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com. Enjoy the show.

[00:00:25] So this happened over the span of around a year when I was 15 to 16 years old. I'm 20 years old now and it only recently has been revealed to me how fucked up this situation really was. I was still living at home at the time, but my sister, who was 7 years older than me, had moved out and was living with her now husband, their high school best friend, and some other dude that they met via one of those find a roommate websites.

[00:00:53] He was kind of the reclusive nerdy type, much preferring to hide in his room watching Star Trek and playing computer games than to actually hang out with the other roommates. And the only person he ever really seemed to want around was his similarly shy and nerdy girlfriend. For a little context to the story, at the time that this happened, he was 28 and she was 24. They were both a little weird, but initially seemed entirely harmless.

[00:01:21] Now, for ease of telling the story and saving on characters, I'll refer to them as the friendly roommate, the weird roommate, and the weird roommate's girlfriend. Now, my sister and I have never really had the best relationship with our parents, and at this point, things were especially rocky. Our mother was dating a guy who, to put it kindly, was an abusive sack of shit who seemingly loathed me and would find any excuse to go off at me.

[00:01:51] As a result, I spent a lot of time staying over at my sister's place. It was around the time that I was there that the weird roommate and the weird roommate's girlfriend started to get really strange. As I said earlier, the pair of them were always kind of odd. They only ever seemed to want to speak to each other and would even go so far as to ignore anyone else who spoke to them. The weird girlfriend was worse than the weird roommate.

[00:02:15] For this, by a mile, she had a kind of creepy habit of just blankly staring at you for a couple of seconds, then walking away if you asked her a question or tried to engage her in any conversation at all. That isn't the really weird behavior, though. When I would stay over, I'd sleep on a futon in the friendly roommate's office, which was on the ground floor. It happened to be next to the downstairs bathroom, which for some reason the weird girlfriend vastly preferred to the upstairs one.

[00:02:44] She would take long showers in the middle of the night, which is whatever. I'm a pretty heavy sleeper and she wasn't a shower singer or anything like that, so I generally slept right through them. One night, however, I stayed up super late doing revision and homework and happened to be awake after she finished her shower.

[00:03:05] I was too absorbed in my task to really pay attention to anything else, but I definitely noted hearing the shower shut off because that was my indicator to how goddamn late it really was. Approximately ten minutes later, I look up from my laptop and there she is. I always kept the door open just a crack because that room tended to get unbearably hot if I didn't.

[00:03:30] And she was just standing there, right outside of my room, butt-ass naked, watching me through the open crack of the door. I said her name and asked if she was okay, which seemingly startled her because she walked away pretty fast. I convinced myself that my over-caffeinated, sleep-deprived state had imagined the whole thing and didn't mention it to anyone.

[00:04:00] Fast forward around a month, and I head over to my sister's one night to find the friendly roommate kind of agitated about what he perceives to being a peeping Tom problem. He found fingerprints on the outside of his office window in such a way that would imply someone had been pressing up against the glass and looking in.

[00:04:21] The blind in his room was slightly too small for the window, so you could see in from the outside if you looked through at the sides. And the room was on the front of the house, and the window was easily accessible from the street. He had become concerned that some random passing pervert had been spying on him while he was having a private moment, so to speak, in his office. Or some potential burglar had been sizing up the joint.

[00:04:50] The police were called, but as they didn't have any external CCTV at this point, no evidence could be proved. Ultimately, not a lot could be done. To combat this escalating further, the friendly roommate installed both internal and external CCTV on the house. It was installed whilst the weird roommate and the weird girlfriend were away on a holiday, and I guess everyone just forgot to tell them about it.

[00:05:17] Another couple of months later, I go to my sister's to find weird roommate's room empty, and informed that he has moved out. Of course, I asked why, and I was informed simply that he and his weird girlfriend were a pair of fucking creeps, and that the others had collectively decided to kick them out. Apparently, her watching me through the office door was not a one-time incident.

[00:05:45] The CCTV footage showed that she regularly made a habit of standing and watching me through the cracked door, sometimes for as long as 20 to 30 minutes. I was usually asleep when she did it. Not only that, but the fingerprints on the window had quite apparently been from the weird roommate standing outside and watching me after I'd showered,

[00:06:10] and was hanging out in just a towel, which was a less regular occurrence, but apparently was caught on camera enough times for it to be concerning. Now, as if that wasn't weird enough in and of itself, I was recently hanging out with my sister and her husband, and he made a comment about how he wishes they had told me about the full story at the time so I could have chosen to press charges. I asked what he meant by that.

[00:06:36] He revealed that not only had they both been secretly watching me, the CCTV also showed that they'd mess with food and stuff that I bought, including clips of them licking all of my apples, her spitting in my orange juice, even dumping regular cow's milk into my lactose-free drinks, which explained why I had a period of feeling very sick out of nowhere.

[00:07:02] To top it all off, apparently the friendly roommate barged into their room to confront them about it. He not only found that several shirts I thought I had misplaced elsewhere had been stolen by the two of them, and literally hung up on the wall, but she had also done several drawings of me sleeping, and had written a poem called Ode to Me, whose contents I don't know and don't really want to know.

[00:07:29] Apparently the friendly roommate gave them an ultimatum of, you have two hours to get the fuck out of this house, and never contact me or any of us again, or I'm going to call the police. And they took the former option. They've never tried to contact me subsequent to this, but I feel sick thinking of what they were potentially planning. To my sister's 20-something roommates who watched my teenage self sleep, let's not meet again.

[00:08:18] Long time lurker. Had an experience this past weekend. I'm posting to just get it off my chest. It's been weighing on me. Last Friday, after a particularly difficult week at work, I wanted to meet up with some friends at a local wine bar or art house that we're regulars at. My poetry was actually debuted there. I am good friends with the owner. I texted my friends during the day. Great, we are on.

[00:08:45] I work close to the wine bar, so I head there straight after work, arriving before my friends. I order a glass of wine. I greet the owner who is behind the bar, and there is an older man there who seemed excited to have a conversation. But I cut it short. He seemed intoxicated already, and I take my drink out onto the patio to relax. It's quiet at the bar, but by the time my friends arrive 45 minutes to an hour later, it's getting very busy. They order their drinks,

[00:09:15] and I get a second one. We find a spot outside of the patio to catch up on. A few of our friends join us, and while we're all chatting, a group of guys who we've never seen before try to come up and hit on us. They are saying things about how they like the way we look. Definitely not our thing. We shake them off politely and keep chatting. My boyfriend texts and says he would be by in a few minutes to drop something off. He knows the owner,

[00:09:43] and it was a piece of art for the bar. My boyfriend pulls up, drops the item off. I walk him to his car and give him a kiss goodbye. Back to my friends, they are chatting and having a good time. The group of guys comes up to us again, and we shake them off. Again. I finish my second drink, and my friend asks if we want to go to the side of the building to smoke a bit. I was down, so we went to the side. Continuing our chatting, my friend was rolling her joint,

[00:10:13] and this is when I start to feel strange, like lightheaded and hot flashes, like when you're about to pass out. I remember turning my head to look out towards the road, and everything seemed very far away, and then everything went black. I remember bits and pieces of trying to get to the car, and my legs not working, my friends trying to hold me up.

[00:10:39] The next thing I remember is sitting on my couch crying with my friend. She tells me that she called my boyfriend to come stay with me, and that they think someone put something in my drink. I notice my legs are scraped and bleeding. I don't remember falling. My boyfriend stayed with me all night. I remember bits and pieces of it more, crying and confusion and being extremely uncomfortable. Yes,

[00:11:08] I am happy and grateful that my friends were there to notice and to get me to safety, but it has greatly affected the way I feel. I don't feel safe anywhere. I feel uneasy. This may be because I have prided myself on being able to take care of myself, and in my ability to protect myself. This is a place I felt safe. I have had sleep issues and anxiety since this has happened.

[00:11:36] My boyfriend wants to bring me back when I'm ready, so I can have good memories there, and experience it in a good way again. I don't know why I'm really writing this, other than to attempt to get a sense of relief. I apologize if the writing is disjointed or unclear. I am just writing what comes to my mind to get it out. I'm not sure if this even fits here, but to whoever puts something in my drink, let's not meet.

[00:12:25] First, for some background, I'm a 22-year-old college senior about to graduate and start medical school This happened to me when I was in elementary school, so over a decade ago. Over the summer, way back then, my mom sent me to YMCA summer camp. I enjoyed going in every day and hanging out with all of my friends from school who also went to the camp. But I especially loved one of the counselors, Mike. Mike was always sitting in the same spot

[00:12:54] when I got dropped off in the morning, and he would see me walk in and put a huge smile on his face. We would always sit there and play cards or some other board game in the morning while all of the kids were arriving. Once the day's scheduled activities started, Mike would always be the counselor in charge of my group. He would always be just close to me. As a kid, I didn't know that that was weird. I really liked him.

[00:13:24] As I said, I thought he was a really cool guy as an 8-year-old. Fast forward a couple of years. I don't remember the exact time frame or timeline, I'm sorry. My mom, my younger sister, and I were out at the state park in the area about half an hour from where we lived. We had just gone down there to hang out for the day. We have a great time on the playground, walking around the trails, etc. And then we head back to the car. When we arrived back to the car,

[00:13:54] my mom was getting my sister all strapped in and ready to go for the ride home. And I was getting situated in the backseat as well. Now our car was in the parking lot, obviously, and there really weren't tons of people at the park that day. The lot was pretty much empty. So when I noticed that there was a car parked right next to our car, I said, that's weird. But again, I was a kid and I didn't really think anything of it.

[00:14:21] Why would this car park literally right next to us when I can see 50 empty spots from right there? Anyways, my mom is getting my sister and I all ready for the trip back home. Suddenly, the driver door of the other car opens and out pops Mike. My mom recognized him, so she just said hi and continued back to what she was doing. Mike says, do you mind if I take a couple of pictures of your son?

[00:14:51] He's gotten so grown and I want to remember this. My mom obviously says, no, you're not going to do that and shuts the driver's door, locks the car, and we leave. As we're leaving, I see Mike trying to take a photo through the car window. A couple of years later, when I was a bit older, my mom told me a little more of the details about Mike. At the time, my mom was pretty high up

[00:15:19] in a company that pairs kids with adult mentors. Adults would apply to be paired with a kid. So my mom starts telling me about how one day they were going through the applications to be a mentor and Mike's name popped up. Apparently, someone else had interviewed Mike and recommended him for approval into the system. My mom, on the other hand, essentially vetoed it because she obviously had known Mike from these other experiences and she got a weird vibe from him

[00:15:47] that something was off about him. So finally, we're watching the news at dinner one day, a bit later. They start sharing a story about a man who was arrested and they show the mugshot of this man, Mike. The charge? Thousands of images and videos of child porn that he both made and was in possession of. He actually was caught by Border Patrol

[00:16:16] as he was acting weird when trying to cross into Canada and they decided to search his car and they found a bunch of it on his computer. They alerted the U.S. authorities who then searched his house and they found a ton more. I'm 100% confident that he wanted to add me to the collection. If not for my mom having a great mother's instinct and the Canada-U.S. border, it might have happened.

[00:16:45] Summer Camp Counselor Mike, let's not cross paths again. In 2003,

[00:17:16] I was working as a stripper in the Phoenix area. I had been dancing for almost a year and was still getting the hang of how to get the most money from a regular with the least amount of clinginess reciprocated. I was also working off and on at four different clubs. I'll be calling them club one, two, three, and four for reference. Alternating day shifts and night shifts depending on money. One night shift, this skinny, scraggly looking guy comes into club one

[00:17:45] and hones in on me right away. From the way he's bouncing and twitching in his seat, it's clear even in strip club lighting that he's a meth addict and higher than my heels. No biggie. I was raised by meth addicts. As long as he is happy, this should be easy money. We go to VIP, chat, I relieve him of his paycheck, and he goes on his way. The next night, he's back again and is looking for me. I get his name.

[00:18:15] Steve. Name has been changed to protect the insane. Obviously. I tell him my name is Tori, my fake backstory, and head back to VIP again. He tells me he's a truck driver and is only in town a few days a month. We have a perfectly nice, if not jittery time, so no red flags. Everyone goes home happy, or in this case, sexually frustrated. Repeat the next night, then I don't see him for a month.

[00:18:45] This continues for about four months. He starts bringing in the finest gas station meth addict approved gifts when he comes to see me. By this point, he is also serenading me half the time I'm dancing for him. His favorite was Picture by Kid Rock and Sheryl Crow. He sang it despite whatever song was playing. Thankfully, I spent a lot of my time with my back to him and my ass doesn't have ears so I could only hear snippets

[00:19:15] of his impassioned baritone. The singing was creepy, not just because it's on repeat. He's now gesturing specific lyrics at me. The longer he sings, the more grabby he's getting. Not anywhere illegal, but grabbing my face to force me to stare back at him, intertwining our fingers to hold hands, pressing my hand to his heart, trying to press his hand to mine. By the end of this month's visit,

[00:19:44] he asks me to move in with him. He tells me he just wants to know I'm at his house all the time. Of course, he also envisions himself as the typical customer in shining armor. He's telling me he wants to save me, take me away from all of this. I decide to be a little more honest with him and explain I have a girlfriend and I'm not interested in men, not interested in him, and that I am happy living where I am.

[00:20:14] He tells me he will let me keep my girlfriend. All he needs is to go down on me the three days a month he's in town. I shut him down again. He starts begging me to think about it and he will come help me move in with him when he gets back next month. After this visit, I ask the manager to ban him. Unfortunately, without a pick of him on hand at all times, it's pretty much impossible. I settled for alerting the security, bartender, and manager

[00:20:43] to give me a warning if he comes in asking for me again. When his time of the month comes around, I switch to a different shift at clubs 2, 3, and 4 to avoid him. When I go back to club 1 the next week, he has left a couple of plastic-filled grocery bags for me. They're full of notes scrawled on crumpled, dirty scraps of paper, silk roses, stuffed animals, panty roses, mismatched, taped-together greeting cards, and other things.

[00:21:13] There's a barely legible letter professing his love, insistence again that I move into his place, and some poorly written graphic details of what he wanted to do to my body. I was sufficiently grossed out and creeped out and happy I dodged this monthly visit. The following month rolls around and I ditch what had become my regular club to avoid him again. I'm working the day shift at club 2, good money

[00:21:43] from lots of bored dudes on their lunch breaks. It's getting to the last couple hours of my shift and starting to get slow. I was on stage not really paying attention as I finished up my routine. I didn't see him until I was heading down the stairs to get off stage. He was a few feet in front of me, waving, and he starts yelling Tori over and over. There was no way to get around him. As soon as I got to the bottom of the stairs, he grabbed me in a big hug.

[00:22:12] I was still topless from being on stage and did not want him touching me. He wouldn't let go and kept grabbing handfuls of my hair and smelling it. I pushed away from him and I start to tell him that my shift is over. That was my last stage and I'm headed home. He looks super upset and frustrated and says he just wants to hang out with me before he has to leave town tonight. I tell him he will have to pay for me to sit with him whether I'm dancing or not

[00:22:41] and he agrees. I go and give the bartender insecurity a heads up that he's my creepy stalker guy then go back to taking his money and attempting to placate him. Instead of having me actually dance for him, he has me just straddle him topless while we talk. It's not as unusual as it sounds plus it's a nice break for me. He was unusually shaky and jumpy this time so I resorted to making him

[00:23:11] sit on his hands. He proceeds to tell me how he went to multiple clubs looking for me this month, how he had asked various clubs if his girlfriend Tori was there. He tells me he has his house all cleaned up and ready for me to move into. I remind him again that I am not moving in with him. He excitedly replies, well, you never know. I again remind him of my girlfriend who I was making plans to move to Canada with. He says he's in love with me

[00:23:40] and that our whole lives are about to change now that we found each other. Between all this jilted conversation, he's singing lines from picture again and prodding me to sing along with him like some fucked up romantic duet. Finally, despite the money, I decide he's just being way too crazy this time and really starting to creep me out. I tell him I'm done with my shift and I really need to get home. Before I can get off him,

[00:24:10] he suddenly wraps his arms around my waist, picks me up and starts running towards the hallway that leads to the exit. I'm still fucking topless, wrapped around this cracked out skinny scraggly dirty trucker while trying to flag down the bartender, DJ, anyone because security wasn't there all of a sudden. He made it to the hallway and about 10 feet from the door when the absolutely massive security guard stepped back inside from walking a girl out to her car.

[00:24:41] Steve tries to dart around him and I'm reaching for security, while Steve tries to pull me away from security and get to the door. The brick wall of a security guard manages to plant himself in front of us and pulls me off of him before Steve can try anything else. He insists he was just joking and that he was just trying to tell me goodbye. I bolted out of there and into the dressing room while he was still yelling for me to come say goodbye to him as security practically carried

[00:25:10] his bony ass outside. Thankfully, he was banned this time. I decided to take a vacation with my girlfriend for a couple months after that just in case he tried to show up in the parking lot of the club to stuff me in his trunk. He continued to call the club looking for me while I was gone. They lied and said I quit working there. So, crazy meth addict trucker, let's never meet again unless it's your few remaining teeth and my

[00:25:40] baseball bat. I live in Florida and this incident happened to me about three weeks after Hurricane

[00:26:09] Irma, so not that long ago. Back in July, the ex and I had finalized the divorce and I moved into a gated neighborhood where every house was rented out by the same rental company slash landlords. It was a very small neighborhood with about 15 houses tops. All 15 houses are bordered around the man-made lake with the backyards facing the lake. No one really has a fenced backyard.

[00:26:39] When you walk out your back door, you can see the lake right in front of you in your neighbor's backyard on each side of you. Everyone in the neighborhood seemed very close. Someone was always hosting a family-friendly party or barbecue or having people am still depressed about my divorce. So, I never partook in any of these social gatherings. The only person I ever got to know was my next-door neighbor, Steve, an active Navy soldier with

[00:27:09] a huge love for firearms. Steve is the true hero in this nightmare. My daughter Alice is four years old and I get her every weekend. Alice's bedroom window faces the backyard towards the lake. I spoil that girl to death. She truly is my everything and I count down the days to every weekend that we can just be together. That's why I was so upset when Irma came and I had to go almost three weekends without seeing her.

[00:27:38] The weekend before the storm, she was with her mom. Then obviously the weekend of the storm, she was with her mom. And then on top of that, the weekend after, she had to be with her mom because my power was still out and no AC in Florida is miserable. the humidity was so bad that week that I slept in my daughter's room the whole week because she has the only room with a window that faced the lake. I opened the window exposing

[00:28:08] just the window screen so the wind from the lake could cool the room as much as possible while I slept. Eventually the power comes back and Alice starts visiting me again like normal. That was when the nightmares started. My daughter would complain about the singing lady and how she doesn't like her anymore. I thought maybe she was referring to one of my ex's friends or one of the teachers at her school. Maybe there was a teacher at her school that sang to the kids that she didn't like.

[00:28:39] That Saturday night, Alice woke up in the middle of the night screaming bloody murder. I ran into her room and turned on the window. I found her hiding under her covers. I asked her what was wrong and all she could do was point to an empty corner of her room and say, look, look. There was nothing there. She was acting as if she saw a ghost. After I calmed her down, she started to talk again about the singing lady.

[00:29:09] Please tell the singing lady not to come back. Please, daddy. Make her go away. Obviously she's having the nightmares, right? I showed her there was nothing in the closet, nothing under the bed, and that there was nothing to be afraid of. She calmed down and went to sleep. I went back to my room and quickly fell back to sleep myself. It couldn't have been more than 20 minutes before Alice comes running into my room screaming, she's back, she's back.

[00:29:38] Alice absolutely refused to go back to her room, so I let her sleep with me. The next morning, Sunday morning, I took Alice out to breakfast and we stopped by Target to pick up a baby monitor. I haven't used one of these since her mom and I were still married, but I wanted to easily be able to hear if and when she started having these nightmares again, so I could respond quicker. After I set them up, I showed Alice how they worked, to give her assurance that I could hear

[00:30:08] her and she was safe. That night, she slept soundly and didn't make a peep all night. The following weekend, Alice had to stay with her mother again because she caught a stomach virus from one of her little friends at school. It was Saturday night, and I was sound asleep in my bed. Around 2 a.m. is when I heard it, a woman's voice humming a soft nursery rhyme through the baby monitor. The humming, the soft singing, got

[00:30:38] louder and clearer as the voice got closer to the monitor. I wasn't dreaming. I could hear a woman's voice softly singing lullabies in my daughter's bedroom. I had never been so scared and dumbfounded in my life. I was feeling a mixture of pure terror and disbelief. Then the voice spoke out. Alice, sweetie, are you awake? Adrenaline shot through my veins.

[00:31:08] I jumped up out of bed and locked my bedroom door. I picked up my cell and called Steve from next door. He didn't waste a second. As soon as I got off the phone with him, I heard him storm out his back door screaming, don't you fucking move. I ran outside and found him aiming his shotgun at a woman crouched outside my daughter's window. The one I had left open after Irma and never closed. Steve quickly dropped his guard when he recognized the

[00:31:40] woman. Steve's wife came running out after him and confirmed that it was her. Jean played dumb. She said she was not singing and didn't even know my daughter's name. She said she was near my daughter's window because she was doing her weekly patrol for gators and thought that she saw one approach our house from the lake. Bull fucking shit. She was singing and she called out my daughter's

[00:32:10] gator spottings around the neighborhood and yes part of Jean's job was to patrol the lake at night every now and then but at 2am I obviously knew it was bullshit and even though neither Steve or his wife called her out on it I could tell from the look on their faces that they didn't believe her either. The next morning I went over to Steve's house to thank him and tell him exactly what had happened. He told me Jean and her husband have been known to be a little cuckoo but this was by far the craziest

[00:32:39] thing that has happened. Steve helped me install metal bars on Alice's window that afternoon. Thank you for

[00:33:09] listening to this week's episode of Let's Not Meet, a true horror podcast. If you'd like to get access to ad-free versions of all of our episodes and over 100 bonus episodes with stories you won't hear anywhere else, updated weekly, sign up and support the show at patreon.com forward slash let's not meet podcast. All of the stories you've 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, send it to

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