2x07: Lucy

[00:00:00] My name is Andrew Tate and this is Season 2, Episode 7 of Lets Not Meet, A True Horror Podcast. So me, my boyfriend, his best friend, and his girlfriend drove up to Big Bear on June 26th. Then a day later, another friend of ours drove up on June 27th.

[00:00:45] He was supposed to sleep downstairs, and the couple slept upstairs since there are only two bedrooms. The first night that we stayed there, it was a little creepy because the cabin was pretty remote, and of course, there are absolutely no lights outside.

[00:01:02] It is in the woods with coyotes howling and bears, but nonetheless completely normal activity. On the 27th, around 12am, my boyfriend and I are laying in bed when suddenly our friend sleeping downstairs comes banging on the door, freaking out saying that he saw shadows in

[00:01:22] the woods and that the motion light came on and there was thumping outside. We got a little freaked out, but my boyfriend gets out of bed to check the entire cabin and even goes outside. Nothing.

[00:01:38] We go up to the other couple's room where there is a porch with a sliding glass door that looks out onto the woods. It's important to note that I am a naturally very anxious and scared person while my boyfriend is a rock.

[00:01:54] He's calm and logical while I tend to jump to the worst scenario. My boyfriend goes over to check the last place in the cabin, so he pulls the curtain and jumps and yells, Oh my god! At this point, I'm terrified.

[00:02:13] My boyfriend is 180 pounds, he's a CrossFit coach, and to see a big guy like that, scared, is nauseating. He locked the door and backed away slowly. He quietly says, There's a large man standing outside, staring at us. He's just standing in the woods looking at us.

[00:02:36] He looks at me and says, Go lock the door. That's when I knew that he was serious. Everyone is freaking out. I run and lock the door behind us, and we all decide to stay in the room to keep an eye out.

[00:02:51] It's the middle of the summer, and it's really hot but we refuse to open a window. I'm so scared but trying not to show it as everyone else seems to have calmed down. About 30 minutes go by and nothing happens.

[00:03:05] I get annoyed with the heat and the fact that there are 5 people in a tiny room and 3 of them are men, so my boyfriend and I go back to our room. I'm still pretty freaked out, so my boyfriend tries to cheer me up.

[00:03:19] At this point it's about 1.30am and I told him I was too scared to sleep with the lights off. He tells me that's totally fine and he understands so we just lay with the lights completely on. Finally, I start drifting to sleep when I hear a thud.

[00:03:36] I sit up and look at my boyfriend. He looks at me. Then the power cuts. I immediately start sobbing. I'm trembling and I can't see anything because it's pitch black.

[00:03:48] I try to get out of bed and run but my legs are tangled in the sheets and I fall. My boyfriend picks me up and we grab our phones and run to the other room where everyone else is staying. We're hysterical at this point.

[00:04:01] I try to contact our host but nothing will go through. I try to call my dad but all of our phones say no service. We're all alone out there. Thank God the friend who drove up after us had a different carrier because his phone had one bar.

[00:04:19] So he calls the local sheriff. I realize now it's a bit of an overreaction but at the time we thought we were going to die. He's on the phone with the sheriff and they transfer us to the utilities company.

[00:04:31] We give the address and they tell us that we're too far into the woods and that they don't cover that area. At this point we're wondering if the entire area has no power or if the man outside has just cut our power.

[00:04:46] We call 911 and report the suspicious activity and the power outage. They send the fire department. A few hours go by and it's 3am and suddenly the power comes back on. We fall asleep and the next day we talk to some locals of the area.

[00:05:03] We told them that the power went out and he said that was strange and that should not have happened. He told us the only reason that happens out here is because of snow, if there's a snowstorm. He said that he couldn't explain it.

[00:05:19] So to the man in the woods who probably cut our power, let's not meet. I met Lucy for the first time when she fell asleep on my arm on the bus. When she woke up, she gave me a really weird look before shambling off of the bus.

[00:05:46] I figured she was weirded out that I didn't wake her up sooner so I kicked myself for being a creep and went on with my day. Can't win them all. I was thrown for a hell of a loop when her whole friend group was sitting by my usual

[00:06:01] spot on the bus that next day. Being an awkward teen, I wasn't about to turn down any kind of positive attention. So I got to know her friends and ended up being on good terms with her before I realized I hadn't even asked her name.

[00:06:17] I'm hard of hearing so I didn't hear her when she first said her name. Lucy right? Yeah. Lucy and I had your typical high school courting process. That is to say she was overwhelmingly forward and after a few weeks, I got the hint.

[00:06:37] As we were getting close, Lucy would fixate on learning about past heartbreaks and finding out about my personal life. I'm a serial over-sharer so I didn't really mind talking about myself but she would constantly

[00:06:51] butt in by saying how fucked up things were and that she'd kick my friend's ass for hurting me. I was weirded out. Even at 16, I knew that was cringy and I was going through an emo phase.

[00:07:06] The thing that really bugged me at the time was that she'd asked so much about me but she would never really say anything about herself. During this time, she missed a few days and I let another girl sit by me since I was in

[00:07:19] an overcrowded bus and I didn't think it mattered. When Lucy came back and saw me with another girl, you'd think she was shot. She just about ran to the seat behind us and started going off.

[00:07:34] I can't remember exactly what Lucy said but the other girl never talked to me again after that. Once her rival was gone, Lucy reclaimed her spot next to me and it was all sunshine and rainbows. Nobody ever asked to sit in Lucy's spot after that.

[00:07:54] Lucy always had a crude sense of humor but after a while, things started getting hurtful. She would take jabs at my insecurities and anytime I got upset about it, she would give me shit for not being able to take a joke.

[00:08:08] These jokes usually stopped just shy of outright insulting me. When Lucy wasn't breaking me down, she was super affectionate. She would sleep on my chest while we rode home on the bus and she'd even talk about herself from time to time.

[00:08:26] I don't remember the first time she hit me. It seems like something that would be burned into my memory. Some kind of cinematic moment in my life. Honestly, it all just blended together after a while. I know it started off small though, flicking me and playfully slapping.

[00:08:45] By the end of it, she would elbow me in the ribs for telling a bad joke. It didn't register as anything abusive until she slammed me into a wall while we were walking through the hallway after class.

[00:09:01] I told a shitty joke and she shoved me hard into that wall. She laughed because of the sound I made after shoving me again. People were going through the halls with us, but they didn't do anything. Sometimes I wonder what they thought of me.

[00:09:17] I didn't dump her after the hallway incident, but I did start standing up for myself. We started getting into a lot of fights after that. Of course, they only ever ended in one of two ways. She was right or it was an honest mistake.

[00:09:34] I tried to break things off a few times around that time, but every time I did, she had a new sob story I hadn't heard before that made her actions totally understandable. I let it get into my head that she was some kind of tragic soul.

[00:09:51] I convinced myself there was something noble about taking the abuse, and nobody I knew tried to step in and stop me. I finally got the nerve to dump her after three major things happened within a three week span.

[00:10:04] First, I found out she was taking pictures of me while I wasn't looking and posting them online. The weird thing about that was that I only found out because she showed me. It felt gross seeing a bunch of nearly identical pictures of me not facing the camera.

[00:10:22] The way she showed me was worse. She seemed excited like I'd be happy that she invaded my privacy. The second weird thing happened when I tried to wake her on the bus. After about half an hour on my chest, not saying anything, I nudged her on the shoulder

[00:10:37] since we were at our stop and she just got up, looked me in the eye, and told me that she wasn't asleep. Combined with the pictures, this seemed really weird to me.

[00:10:49] She didn't try to be cute or romantic about it or anything, just that I pretended to sleep on you sometimes. What the hell is that even about? The breaking point came when she was showing off some award she had got from school.

[00:11:07] There was something off about the award. It didn't have her name on it. No, it had a name on it. It even had a picture of her smiling on it. The problem is, it wasn't addressed to Lucy.

[00:11:21] You can't imagine how I felt when I found out I didn't know my girlfriend's name. A few days later, we got into one of our usual fights and I broke things off. Lucy always was the persistent type.

[00:11:35] She would sit a few rows behind me on the bus and stare at me while I went to get my car after getting off the bus. Looking at her wouldn't make her stop. It felt like she wanted me to know she was watching me.

[00:11:51] One day, she got on the bus and looked right at me in the eye for a solid 20 seconds while she walked past me to her new seat. I'm pretty sure she was expecting me to say something to her. The next year, I graduated and got a retail job.

[00:12:08] End of story, right? I thought so too. It was the start of Christmas season and I was working as a cashier that night. Lucy came into the store that I was working at, random chance.

[00:12:24] It had been a year and a half since we broke up at this point so I wasn't happy to see her but surely we could pretend it wasn't weird. She gave me that look the squirrel in Ice Age gives his nut.

[00:12:37] She grabbed something from the front of the store and went into my line. She didn't say a word to me but she wouldn't break eye contact with me and she was swaying like an excited toddler. It hurt to look at her.

[00:12:51] I rang her up silently and waited for her to leave. Then I looked over at the other cashier for support and she told me that she was giving her weird vibes. I got this really bad gut feeling after she left. Lucy became a regular at our little shop.

[00:13:08] She would come in and creep out my co-workers. Lucy never really tried to hide what she was doing. One of the cashiers mentioned how often she came in while ringing her up and she said that she was visiting me. She didn't say my name but she described me.

[00:13:26] After that, whenever she showed up, someone would make a note of it on the radio. She was usually in one of the areas bordering my workspace. I heard about her a lot more than I saw her so I think she was hiding from me.

[00:13:40] She never got banned from the store despite complaints because the managers were penny pinching assholes who would sell anything to anyone to get the sales up. I know Lucy was responsible for at least one resignation from my workplace.

[00:13:55] Someone who looked like me caught her staring a few times and heard how often she came in. After a while, the stress wasn't worth the minimum wage. The last time I saw Lucy was at the store a little over a year ago now.

[00:14:09] I was hanging out with one of the girls in the back while we were loading up our carts with stuff that we had to stock. We were right by the back entrance so you could see right in front of the store proper.

[00:14:24] I left to put some stuff in my cart and when I came back I saw her. She was standing about 40 feet from the back entrance still as a statue. I froze when I saw her.

[00:14:36] I watched her stare into the back for what felt like hours before she suddenly turned and walked briskly away. The girl I was talking to was still in the back when I got back. She was a lot more awkward after that.

[00:14:52] That girl quit after three days and just about crushed my ribs when she hugged me goodbye. She hated her job so I'd like to think it didn't have anything to do with Lucy. I don't know.

[00:15:06] I left the store not too long after that and got a job that didn't involve customer service. That wasn't the last time I saw her though. Over the summer after taking my new job, I had a mental breakdown.

[00:15:18] I convinced myself that I was unlovable and that Lucy was the only person I could be with. I left the house without any conceivable plan to find her. With the stars in the sky lit by the street lamps, I saw her. She was with another girl.

[00:15:36] I got so close I could almost touch her before I snapped my senses. I thought about her stalking me at the store and realized I was becoming her. I ran home, but I cried that night. The last time I saw Lucy was last week.

[00:15:54] I was walking home from work and decided to stop for dinner. I thought I saw her in line, but I convinced myself it was someone else. I ordered and sat down to eat.

[00:16:05] I was looking out the window while I ate and she took the table between me and the window that I was looking out. She was with some guy that looked vaguely familiar, maybe a school friend.

[00:16:18] She sat at an angle so that she was half looking at him and every few seconds she would look right at me. I know it was her. She changed her hair. It looks an awful lot like mine now.

[00:16:32] After I finished, I went to the bathroom because I felt sick. After washing my hands, I looked into the mirror and felt like I could die. It hadn't occurred to me before, but I was wearing my work uniform, complete with company name on my hat in big letters.

[00:16:54] She was reading my hat. Lucy hadn't been to my current job yet, but I'm sure she's going to show up eventually. I'm moving soon, so I'm just hoping that I'm not there anymore when Lucy turns up.

[00:17:12] See, Lucy has been a part of my life for the last four years. We dated four months in high school and she keeps turning up. I wasn't a paragon of mental health before I met her, but I feel like she broke me as

[00:17:28] a person and I'll never forgive her for what she did to me. Since her abuse and her stalking, I've developed serious trust issues. I get painfully nervous leaving my house, and people who show interest in me immediately put me on edge. I'm tired.

[00:17:50] I have tried to date since everything happened, but I just can't. I'm too much work at this point, so I've just decided to stay single until I can work through my issues, but I'm begging you, Lucy, please let's never meet again.

[00:18:13] This is a story from my childhood, one of the ones that haunt me to this day. Have you ever seen those memes where it says people react like a criminal when an unexpected visitor arrives at their doorstep?

[00:18:28] They freeze and drop everything they're doing and throw themselves onto the floor to avoid being seen in a window. This is my story of how I became one of those people. At the time, I must have been around maybe 7 and a half.

[00:18:44] I was visiting the Midwest, Kansas to be exact, from South Korea, where I was born and raised, just visiting family, nothing major. On that particular night, the adults, our aunt and uncle, and our parents, were going

[00:19:00] to have a date night, so our parents had ordered a pizza for us before they left and waited for it to arrive, so that we wouldn't have to open the door for anyone.

[00:19:11] My aunt and uncle had two kids, two boys to be exact, and they were ages 15 and 8. Like I said before, I was maybe 7 and a half at the time. My older sister was 11 and our baby brother was the young tender age of 3.

[00:19:27] So all in all, we're ready to have a fun night of games. After all, it wasn't that often that the cousins got to get together like this. They lived in the States and we lived in Korea, but we loved each other dearly.

[00:19:42] We saw our parents move out of the garage entryway. They made sure that we knew the rules and we would recite them back to them. They also would make sure that we knew where the telephones were and had the emergency numbers to accompany them.

[00:19:59] It was just going to be the typical night with no parents, or so we thought. It had been maybe an hour, maybe two after our parents had left. We were downstairs in the basement, in the playroom or the game room, whatever people like to call it these days.

[00:20:16] We were down there just watching movies, playing air hockey, things of that nature, just being kids. We weren't being loud or anything like that. And even if we were, it wouldn't be that big of a deal because the way that the houses

[00:20:29] were in Kansas, the basements were built into the ground in case of a tornado. I had gone upstairs with my oldest cousin because I wanted to drink some chocolate milk. I couldn't reach the cups alone, so we wandered upstairs into the kitchen, which was on the

[00:20:45] far end of the house. The others stayed downstairs continuing their games. We had been upstairs for maybe 15-20 minutes because while I was drinking milk, my older cousin was making snacks since we were planning to watch a movie. Then all of a sudden, we hear the doorbell ring.

[00:21:03] I remember my cousin looked at me and told me to stay there. My cousin started to creep towards the door quietly. It was unnerving for someone to be ringing the doorbell. We weren't expecting any guests, and the pizza had already been delivered before our

[00:21:16] parents had left for the evening. And before he's even halfway to the door, whoever is on the other side starts rapidly ringing the doorbell over and over, the constant ringing echoing throughout the house.

[00:21:30] By this point, I had looked over towards a staircase, and I saw our other siblings starting to creep up the stairs with the exclusion of the baby who was still asleep in the crib down in the guest room.

[00:21:43] The oldest of the kids, James, put his finger to his lips and told us to be quiet and to make it seem like no one was home, despite there being lights on. He crept closer to the door as the banging and ringing on the doorbell continues, and

[00:21:58] he peeked through the peephole. I had never seen my cousin look so freaked out. His face drained in color, and he backed away from the door rapidly. He told us all to go downstairs, but of course, we didn't listen. Honestly, we thought he was playing a joke.

[00:22:17] Maybe it was some of his friends wanting to scare us, since he did cancel his plans that night to stay home and watch all of us. My older sister shoved past him and looked through the peephole herself, and for whatever

[00:22:31] reason, whatever was on the other side of that door made her have the same exact reaction, and she stumbled back from the door, just as pale. At the time, I didn't understand what was going on.

[00:22:45] I didn't think any of us younger kids really did, but something wasn't right. After a while, maybe 20 minutes, whoever was at the door stopped ringing the doorbell and was completely quiet again. It seemed like they gave up. Maybe they thought no one was home.

[00:23:03] If only we knew how wrong we really were. We all sat in silence for a while after this initially occurred. My other cousin, Kyle, mustered up the courage to ask his brother James who was at the door, and why James and my sister were acting so skittish.

[00:23:23] James told us that there was a man wearing dark clothes and seemed to be carrying some type of package or large box, but they couldn't see his face. Of course, Kyle, being the little smarty pants that he was at the time, started to mock James

[00:23:39] saying that he was just being a scaredy cat and didn't recognize their neighbors. Kyle was convinced it was just a neighbor trying to drop off a package that might have gotten mixed up in the mail, seeing that it happened all the time.

[00:23:54] So we all agree that was probably the cause, until we realized whoever was ringing the doorbell didn't leave the package at the porch. And isn't that what most neighbors do? In the case that no one answers, they'll just leave it?

[00:24:10] And why would they try to bring it over to the house at night instead of just waiting until the next day? We went back to the kitchen, grabbed the snacks, and started to head back downstairs until we heard the banging again.

[00:24:23] But it wasn't from the front porch this time. We were in shock. We were frozen in fear. I mean, it was coming from right behind us. We turned slowly and looked back into the direction from which the sound came from. We were currently standing in the dining room.

[00:24:40] We had already passed through the kitchen. It was like someone was banging on the kitchen window. You know, the one that's typically above your sink? So your mother and father can watch the kids while they play in the backyard, while they wash the dishes?

[00:24:56] So James and my older sister, who I'm just going to call Nicole for this story, got down on their hands and knees and crawled back into the kitchen, much against our charging.

[00:25:08] Just as they crawl into the kitchen to take a peek, they crawled back to us almost in hyper speed and told us to get low and stay low as we crawled into the den further down the hallway.

[00:25:20] James had us all huddle close to the fireplace, out of sight from the windows, and he told us to stay there. And he was going to be protecting his home and his family the best he knew how. James quickly crawled away.

[00:25:33] I didn't know where he was going, but I was scared. The banging was getting louder and was getting closer and closer. At some point I started to cry and I remember Kyle putting his hand over my mouth and my sister hugging us tight.

[00:25:48] Around that time we saw James starting to appear back around the corner and he had a baseball bat. He had crawled up another staircase to get to his room. He crawled past us and put a finger to his lips again and that's when we realized he

[00:26:01] was crawling towards a doggy door. He was attempting to close off the one entrance to the house that wasn't locked. Thankfully he managed to get it latched in time because I don't think the man outside realized that the house had a doggy door.

[00:26:14] But when he heard the lock click into place, the banging became more erratic and more violent. Then all of a sudden, much like before, the banging stopped but we heard pacing. The man was walking back and forth across the porch slowly and deliberately, thumping.

[00:26:32] His heavy boots thundered across the red oak porch. And then without warning, the pacing stopped. And it became quiet. Eerily quiet. Then the man called out, why won't you open the door? I have a package for you! We didn't respond.

[00:26:48] We stayed quiet, or as quiet as we could be with the way that our hearts were pounding and how ragged our breath was. The stranger called out again, open the door! And again, we didn't answer. The man called out angrily, I said open the door!

[00:27:07] I have a package! Like before, we didn't answer, nor did we make any sudden movements. The man started banging again, this time directly on the panel window of the room that we were sitting in, yelling. I know you're in there!

[00:27:24] I know you can hear me, open the door or I'll open it for you! The banging continued. The window rattled and shook violently with each impact from the strange man. Thankfully, our cousin's house had reinforced windows so they weren't easy to break into.

[00:27:42] But unluckily, we didn't have any neighbors close by, so we didn't think anyone could hear the commotion. But while he was making all of this noise, we took this opportunity to book it into another room and get to a phone.

[00:27:55] At one point, while we were on the phone with the police officers, they asked us if we could describe the man, and all we knew was that he was tall and wearing black. So Kyle and I decided to be brave.

[00:28:09] So if something did happen to us that night, they would at least have a better description of who did it. We crawled back into the den and we dared to look out of the small corner of the window. We gently moved the curtains out of the way, and...

[00:28:26] The man was still banging. He had moved the shutters off the side of the window. They're basically hanging off the hinges at this point, rattling with the wind. We made eye contact with the deranged man. Direct soul-searching eye contact.

[00:28:44] I don't think before this night that I had ever believed that there was pure evil in the world, but when I looked into this man's eyes, I didn't see a soul. I know it sounds crazy, but those were not the eyes of a human.

[00:28:59] It was something unlike I had ever seen before. Animalistic maybe. The only word I could use to describe it besides demonic was evil. Unnatural. It was something I would never want to see again.

[00:29:15] When he saw us, he smiled a twisted grin that I'm sure he thought was reassuring, and he crouched down so he could get a better look at us. And then he said, Do you want your mail?

[00:29:29] You have mail, and I can give it to you, but only if you open the door. I remember just grabbing onto Kyle's hand for dear life, and Kyle shook his head no,

[00:29:40] and he threw the curtain back over the window, and before we even had a chance to move any further the man started violently banging on the window again. At this point, James had had enough. He passed the phone to my sister and he yelled, Leave us alone!

[00:29:54] The police are on the way! You're not getting in here! After that, it seemed like the man panicked, and the banging abruptly stopped, and then we heard rapid footsteps on the porch. Kyle and I peeked out the window again, and the man was running through the yard, past

[00:30:12] all the trees. He jumped the fence, the wooden 22 foot fence at the end of the yard, and then into the alley that separated the neighborhood from the old cemetery. We stayed on the phone with the police until they arrived, and our parents arrived not

[00:30:28] long after, but the man was never caught, and we don't know what happened after that night. He just disappeared into thin air. To this day, I'm 21 now, whenever I hear doorbells ringing, when I'm not expecting a visitor my heart drops and I break into a cold sweat.

[00:30:48] Mystery package man, let's not meet again. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Let's Not Meet, a true horror podcast. This week you have heard, Guy in the Woods behind my Airbnb by Pending Disasters. I could write a book about this maniac by Complete Jinx.

[00:31:15] And finally, Man from Hell by Tizen Motelte. If you'd like to hear more of Let's Not Meet, visit patreon.com forward slash let's not meet podcast to become a patron and get access to bonus episodes every other week and bonus single story episodes every other week in between.

[00:31:33] Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to submit your story, email letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com and for general inquiries, email letsnotmeetpodcast at gmail.com. I'll see you next week for a brand new episode of Let's Not Meet.