2x15: Rock Salt

[00:00:00] My name is Andrew Tate and this is Season 2, Episode 15 of Lets Not Meet, A True Horror Podcast. This happened yesterday while both of my parents were at work. For context, my dad's a mailman and my mom is an RV saleswoman that is always on her

[00:00:42] feet so neither can pick up their phone very quickly. I do have an older brother but he's in college two hours away so that doesn't really matter in this story. I was sitting in my living room with my dog, a fairly big German Shepherd but he can't

[00:00:59] do much harm. That's when I heard people talking in the hallway. This is unusual because I live on a third floor apartment and there's a noisy family next door that brings over a lot of friends. This was also a Saturday so I wasn't expecting pure quiet.

[00:01:18] I obviously just ignored the talking since it's not that loud and I had headphones on but my dog perks up and walks towards the door with an alert posture. The hair on his back was sticking up which he usually never does so I got concerned and

[00:01:36] took my headphones out. This is when I heard the voices from before which were two adult men yelling very loudly in the apartment hallway. I got a bit freaked out so I pushed my dog away from the door, made sure that it was

[00:01:51] locked and crept towards it to make sure that they weren't near my place. When I looked out of the peephole I couldn't see either of them and because the only blind spot in my peephole is directly to the right, I knew that they were at my neighbors.

[00:02:08] As I'm leaning against it my whole front door starts shaking because the men are banging on the neighbors door and still yelling things like, SHIT TALKING MOTHERFUCKER COME OUT AND TALK PUSSY.

[00:02:19] It's at this point that I grab my dog and pull him into my room while I try to call my dad who luckily picks up in a few rings. He told me that I should just stay in my room and be quiet and that they would go away.

[00:02:32] It'll become very obvious that my dad has very bad advice. I did stay in my room for the most part but I called my best friend just to have someone on the phone because my dad couldn't stay on.

[00:02:45] My room is the furthest from the door so they definitely wouldn't have heard me whispering to my friend about the situation. After about 5 minutes I didn't hear the banging and I told my friend that I was going to check if I could hear anything.

[00:02:59] When I got out there I didn't hear the banging anymore so I got closer to the door. I looked out of the peephole and when I could see one of them pacing I freaked out again. All I can remember is that they were bald, tall and white.

[00:03:12] I started creeping back to my room when I heard one of them say, maybe we have the wrong house. If they didn't even know the exact number and they obviously weren't scared to bang down an apartment door midday they would probably come to my door.

[00:03:28] So again I pulled my dog into my brother's room since it had a lock and camped out there. I waited about 10 minutes before I heard the banging calm down again and I couldn't hear any talking from my position.

[00:03:42] I was texting my friend who lives in the complex what was happening and that it was stopping but the banging started again, this time on my door. They went through the same routine but this time they were much more aggressive.

[00:03:57] I could hear them slamming, kicking and hitting my door all while yelling for some guy to come out. I called my brother later and he told me there is no way he could have been involved in

[00:04:10] this, especially because he's 19 and those men had to have been at least 25. I called my dad again and in his panic he told me to go out of the room and tell them

[00:04:22] that there's no guys in my apartment through the door and that I'm just a girl but I told him I'm just going to call 911. I know they weren't just looking to break down a door and that they were targeting this

[00:04:35] at some guy who did them dirty but I still didn't want to go out there because 1. Even if they are looking for some guy, I don't know if they have weapons and in their enraged

[00:04:47] state they might just call bullshit but they still have info on me which leads me to 2. I'm a high school freshman girl, I'm 5'4", 116 pounds and quite frankly I have no fight in me.

[00:05:01] For example, I'm terrified of knives and guns so I brought a bowling pin to my room for protection instead. I know, I'm stupid. Plus I was mid panic attack. I would stand no chance against two adult men at my door so letting them know that I'm

[00:05:20] a teenage girl home alone isn't the best idea. I sat next to my locked bedroom door as I called 911 with my dog who I tried to keep quiet the whole time but I didn't want to be suspicious.

[00:05:34] During this time, I made sure not to talk to my friend when I was out of the room to keep doors quiet and to tiptoe everywhere so that they didn't know that I was home besides my dog obviously.

[00:05:46] I'm pretty sure that they didn't know anyone was home even though they said, we know you're in there during the yells because earlier they were unsure if they were even at the right place.

[00:05:57] I was on my phone with 911 for a few minutes before I heard a light knocking at my door making me realize I was in so much shock that I didn't even know the banging had stopped.

[00:06:09] The operator said that it was the cops so I ended the call and answered the door. The officers told me that the guys took off right before they got there. But anyway, the two men trying to break down my door to find their enemy, let's not meet.

[00:07:01] It was 2002 and I was 14 years old starting freshman year. I was an awkward nerdy girl and I didn't know how to handle attention from boys so you could say that I made things worse for my situation.

[00:07:16] I had a knack for making friends with weird people that no one liked, but I tried to be friendly with everyone that I met so it wasn't a big deal to me. Unfortunately, this was my downfall.

[00:07:30] Clubs were a big deal and they actually had an anime club so of course I was all about that. So at my first club meeting, I sat next to a couple of friends and soaked it all up.

[00:07:43] I thought that it was finally a chance for me to be with my people. Then here comes Stalker Kid. I'd use his real name but to this day I have no clue what it actually is.

[00:07:58] He sat in front of me and being the person that I was, I said hi. I could tell that he was uncomfortable and didn't know anyone so I was just trying to be nice. And boy did this guy cling to me.

[00:08:11] At first, he would just find me during lunch and stand there mumbling things to me. He had such a soft voice, it was high pitched. He was a mousy little guy and you just felt unnerved when you spoke to him.

[00:08:27] The way he would look at you as he spoke, I could never look him in the eyes. After a while, it became more about asking about my personal life and what I was into.

[00:08:40] Me being dumb and naive, I tried to be friendly and chat while being incredibly uncomfortable. After a while, my friends and I would move to different tables, benches, and even hallways to avoid him. But he always found me.

[00:08:54] After about a year of this, my best friend told me that if I didn't tell him to fuck off, he would. I really didn't want him around anymore so sure, go ahead. So one day during lunch, here comes my stalker kid and his signature greeting, barely above

[00:09:14] a whisper, hey. My buddy goes, dude she's not interested, fuck off. Looking hurt, he shovels away. I was like, man you didn't have to be so hard on him. But thanks, I guess. I didn't see him much around school after that except for club days where he would

[00:09:36] just sit across the room and stare at me while my best friend glared at him. Cut to me being 16 and driving now, minus the awkward club days, I didn't really notice anything from him.

[00:09:49] That is until an old grey beat up car started parking next to me, extremely close. One day after school, he was waiting for me in that car. He started asking me how I've been. What about prom and all that kind of stuff?

[00:10:07] I was still trying to rack my brain on how he knew that was my car unless he'd been watching me before and after school. I started getting there later and leaving later to avoid him because he was like clockwork.

[00:10:21] Finally, a boy I used to be friends with in elementary school was walking out with me and made a comment about how that guy is always next to my car and asked if he was my boyfriend. I immediately said no.

[00:10:35] He's always following me around and that I hated it. It was really starting to freak me out. Bless this guy because he walked right up to him and scared him off, threatening that if he ever parked near me again, he would kick his ass.

[00:10:47] I figured maybe that was enough to keep him away, so again there was a small space where I could hear nothing from him except for my friends who had classes with him telling me about how creepy he was.

[00:11:00] One friend had an art class with him and said that he would draw naked women constantly in his books. All big busty sexy poses of women. Classy guy. Junior year is wrapping up and I started taking my best friend, Phil, to and from school.

[00:11:18] He was on my way so I figured why not. At some point, Phil started noticing that little gray car was always heading the same way after school and making a joke thinking what if the stalker kid lived next to him. Small world right?

[00:11:35] I could only be so lucky. One day, as per usual, the little gray car was following us so we took a detour. Sure enough, he was with us every step of the way and it was no longer a joke. We both started freaking out.

[00:11:53] I pushed the gas pedal as hard as I could with my foot and we got out of sight. I went home and told my mom everything because at this point I knew this wasn't normal. She shoved it aside saying that I was probably seeing things blah blah blah.

[00:12:09] Well it came time for the end of the year club party. For whatever stupid reason I decided to host the party thinking he hasn't gone to one yet, let's celebrate this moment. I was terrified when my dad let him in the door.

[00:12:23] I don't remember giving him an invitation to the party so someone must have given it to him. He spent the whole party talking to me, my dad and being all buddy buddy with him, asking him where my room was. I wanted to cry and hide.

[00:12:41] It was all downhill after that. I remember there were days where I could hear a car pull up outside my front door and my room having a window that saw the front.

[00:12:50] I would call my buddy Phil and peek out to see if it was him, three times in one month. I just hid under my desk and cried on the phone with Phil. Other events from school would be him asking a girl I played softball with to prom only

[00:13:06] to dump her and follow me all night. Our high school had a radio slash TV channel for kids to run and during prom they would record us going up the stairs and playing around in the gym after the prom for the parents to see their kids having fun.

[00:13:23] It took one of my friends to point it out but it showed me playing DDR for a while against my friend Phil and the stalker was standing right behind me watching for a good five minutes. I didn't know and that one still creeps me out to this day.

[00:13:38] It was graduation for his class. Our classes were so big that they did a day and night ceremony where all our students had to attend. I was scanning the crowd to see my friends who were graduating when I saw a hand wave as I passed by.

[00:13:55] I looked back and of course it was my stalker waving at me. How he picked me out of the crowd of thousands, I'll never know. Well, 2006, my senior year was great. No signs of my creepy stalker to the point where I was kind of starting to forget about

[00:14:12] him. I graduate. I choose a college in town, get a job at a local retail store and move on. My life was beginning to be normal. I work in the gaming department so you get weird randos once in a while.

[00:14:26] One that I saw a lot was this little Mexican guy with glasses. This is important, I swear. He never purchased anything but would just walk around from time to time. Then my stalker comes strolling in the doors and walks into the gaming department and just talks.

[00:14:47] I ask how he knew where I worked. He says his friends saw me and knew we were friends. I tried to radio for help over and over to someone to come and get him out.

[00:15:00] Suddenly a big guy from computers walks by and asks for my help in the back. Once he pulls me to safety, I tell him everything. From that point, security is aware and is told to watch for this guy.

[00:15:12] Of course, he wasn't doing anything physical so all they could do was watch out for him. So every time he came in, they would walkie me and I would dip back to the warehouse. I started seeing his friend, who we'll call his ninja friend, constantly.

[00:15:30] And all he ever did was walk around on his phone. I began to suspect that he was texting my stalker to tell him that I was at work because sure enough, 10 minutes later, he would come in too.

[00:15:42] So I tested this theory and started randomly walking around the store. At one point, a friend who worked register asked why I would do this. So I had her take a walk with me on her break.

[00:15:56] I told her that this ninja friend would follow me around everywhere, even just going down a random aisle. Sure enough, he did and she began freaking out. A few minutes later, I told her my stalker would walk through those doors. Again, sure enough.

[00:16:16] So I'm making my way to the warehouse and out steps the ninja friend from an aisle and he says, she's right here. I just stared at him like, who the hell do you think you are?

[00:16:30] Well my stalker walks right up behind me and asks why I'm always running away from him. And oh, he lost my number and asks if I could give it to him. I say, knowing damn good and well that I never gave it to him, sure.

[00:16:45] I go to the warehouse and write, this is where I work, don't ever come here again and hand it to him and glare at his friend, walkie security about him and sit in the warehouse and break down.

[00:16:57] Security tells me later that he also cried while they took him out. Later that day, as I'm leaving work, security officers walk me to my car. This of course isn't the rules but friends caring about friends so I say sure.

[00:17:12] Well my stalker is out by my car waiting for me. So this is where security says fuck it and calls the police which we are conveniently next door to their headquarters. He books it when he sees the car. A few years go by, nothing comes up.

[00:17:27] I buy a fancy new car, I don't see him much. I'm thinking, that did the trick and I'm finally free. Well my buddies and I are leaving work ready to hit the night at a bar per usual on Thursday.

[00:17:43] We're all walking out the door where we all have to stand to wait to hear the alarm sound verify that it's armed. As we're walking out, I hear it, that awful sound. Hey, he says. I cringe, grab my friend's arm and turn.

[00:18:03] There he is leaning on his car waiting. My friend recognizes him and asks what he wants. The guy says he just wants to talk to me. He didn't ever see my car so he didn't think I worked here anymore.

[00:18:19] His other friend is sitting in the back seat of the car just staring at me blankly. I start to think the worst. If my friends leave me here, my gut tells me I'm not coming into work the next day or ever. I'm terrified.

[00:18:37] I'm terrified that he's had years of time to think about our last encounter where I wrote my quote unquote number down and made him cry. I grabbed my friend's arm tighter. My friend goes off, pretends to be my boyfriend and rips into him.

[00:18:53] My friend is about two feet taller and much, much bigger. They get into it and I'm standing in the parking lot. He spooks my stalker so bad that I'm pretty sure he pissed himself before getting into his car and booking it.

[00:19:08] Ever since, if he comes into my store, my friend stares him down from his office and he leaves. Never has he bought anything in all these years. Years later, I moved on. I've gotten married and moved out of town.

[00:19:25] Recently we moved back to start a business and to this day I still feel myself looking behind me at stores just in case I randomly bump into him. He's caused me so much anxiety, mental and emotional pain, and fear. I also have trust issues. It's been a decade.

[00:19:42] Even after moving on, I still feel the effects today. I never even knew his name. I live in a middle-sized Indiana factory town. Though the auto industry puts most of the food on the residents' tables, the rural areas surrounding the city are mostly commercial farmland.

[00:20:19] In the house that I was raised on, beyond a line of railroad tracks were acres of farmland that were mostly used for corn or soybeans. When I was young, my friend and I always looked forward to the late summer and early fall

[00:20:34] when the corn was taller than we were, so that we could make our own corn mazes, peg each other with corn cobs like they were grenades, and use the corn stalks for building materials

[00:20:46] and the many forts that we built in the fields and along the sides of the weeds, and brush that bordered the farmland and railroad tracks. In this general area where we lived, there were four large fields that were all separated

[00:21:00] by fences and or lines of brush and weeds. My friends and I had walked to the other fields before, but we pretty much stayed in the nearest field to our house, and our mazes were small and easily navigated. We never got lost.

[00:21:17] One summer in particular, the whole neighborhood of kids our age kind of organically came together to build a much more elaborate maze than any of us ever tried before. One of the older teenagers had ridden his four-wheeler through the corn which carved

[00:21:32] a big path through the middle of the field that ran its entire length. This was going to be our main corridor, and all the paths were going to branch off from it. Similar branches even crossed into one of the other fields.

[00:21:47] As a kid, you always hear of the local scary stories, you know, of crazy people doing crazy things. I had witnessed some of these crazy things myself. In a house across the street, a neighbor held his family hostage at gunpoint two different times a couple of years apart.

[00:22:05] One of the local stories my friend and I had heard from the older kids was about this guy in one of the cornfields that would shoot rock-salted kids with his shotgun if they got too close to his property.

[00:22:16] It was always a story that you heard from a friend about another friend's cousin who'd been chased off by the gun booming in the distance. I don't think any of us ever took it seriously, though.

[00:22:30] One afternoon after the maze was finished, me and several neighborhood kids went exploring. The maze was so big that no one person had ever seen all of it. So we got together, maybe seven kids, and decided to try and walk the whole maze.

[00:22:43] At some point, we split up. I was walking with a few of my friends, maybe seven or eight minutes before a kid I knew named Andy came running full speed out of one of the maze's branches. His face was red and he was scared shitless.

[00:22:58] He stopped long enough to tell us that the old guy with his gun was coming. He took off and we followed. I never heard a shotgun blast as we ran, but I did hear a dog barking. It was close. It had to be in the field. Hearts pounding.

[00:23:15] We got the fuck out of there. It didn't take long before we were lost, but we were so panicked we quit trying to follow the trails and just bolted through the corn until we saw rooftops.

[00:23:30] The next day came, and for whatever reason I stayed in and didn't roam the fields with my friends as I normally did. I wasn't worried about the old man, if anything the adrenaline dump from the previous day was an incredible rush.

[00:23:42] I probably just wanted to play video games or wasn't feeling good, or something mundane. I heard from friends though that they went back into the old guy's field and got chased again and this time he was actually shooting.

[00:23:55] After that we all stayed away from that section of the field. There were plenty of adventures to be had where old men and guns were not a factor. That old man always stuck with me though, and what stuck with me more was where he lived.

[00:24:10] The old man's house was just off a county road that my parents would occasionally drive when I was with them because it was close to the state road. The house didn't really catch my attention as much as the large shed on the back of the property.

[00:24:26] It was metal and completely rusted, so it was colored that grimy industrial red that sent my young imagination into dark places. Summer gave way to fall, which melted into winter. Me and a couple of friends found ourselves trying to scare each other with creepy stories,

[00:24:45] and this was right before the internet was widely available in the early 90s so we couldn't rattle off random creepy pastas that everyone had heard a million times. It was all bloody merry and something someone saw through a window that might have been a ghost.

[00:25:01] The old man from the field and his weird shed came up. We started daring each other to go out to his property and look in it, and eventually we all agreed that we would make an adventure of it and go together.

[00:25:14] We walked down the railroad tracks until we came to the trail that crossed the brush into his field. Looking back now, it wasn't really his field as he had no farm equipment or grain silos. His property just happened to be surrounded by this farmland.

[00:25:31] As we walked towards his property in this open field in the mid-afternoon winter, we kept a large shed between us and his house so he wouldn't likely notice our approach. We got to the metal shed first.

[00:25:43] In my memory, it was probably smaller than what my 12-year-old mind perceived, but I remember it being bigger than what I expected. Maybe the size of a full-size barn. At this point though, my sense of mischievous adventure turned into nagging anxiety.

[00:25:59] None of us wanted to look into the shed right away. Luckily for us, his yard was not boring. The yard was overgrown. Even in the pre-snow winter, it was littered with skeletons of cars. It was like a mini junkyard.

[00:26:16] There were at least a dozen old vehicles in different stages of metal decay. One car was as rusted out as the shed with nothing but a metal frame left behind. Another was covered in black soot like it had been burned.

[00:26:29] Not a single window in any of the junkers had escaped damage, and none of them looked remotely drivable. If this weren't creepy enough, we walked by what we thought was a pond. It was probably a deep indentation in the ground that had been filled with rainwater

[00:26:47] rather than an intentional landscaping, but to us this felt like a pond. There was a thin layer of ice covering it, and just beneath the ice, it looked like a raincoat and pair of gloves floating beneath the thin surface.

[00:27:02] Creepiness was starting to morph into fear, and we decided that we had been here long enough. But as we were passing the shed to leave, my friend insisted it would be a waste if we didn't peek into the rusted building that inspired our trip.

[00:27:17] So reluctantly, we did that. I would have been perfectly happy to leave right then and there and let the shed be a mystery, but peer pressure is a bitch when you're twelve. My silent prayer was that the door was locked in some way that wasn't obvious.

[00:27:36] Nope, that door swung out pretty easy without much creaking. We all slipped inside, since it was daylight outside and there was no light source inside except for cracks that let light in. It took ten seconds or so before our eyes adjusted.

[00:27:53] We just stood there like idiots, each of us too freaked out to say anything. Inside was a large open space and metal beams crisscrossed above our heads, hanging vertical from several beams were big chains that hung down and stopped just before they touched the dirt floor.

[00:28:13] I know you might think that because of all the cars in the yard that maybe they were used for moving heavy car parts like a transmission or an engine block, but there were way too many for that.

[00:28:24] There had to be twenty or more hanging everywhere from the ceiling. There was a workbench with a bunch of rusted stuff on it, probably car parts, but to us they might as well have been instruments of torture. But that's not the weird part though.

[00:28:41] There were at least six different wheelchairs and one of them had a full body cast in a sitting position still propped in it. At this point someone said let's get the fuck out of here, and we did.

[00:28:54] As we loudly shut the shed door and were almost off his property, we heard the screen door snap shut. The old man caught us. I turned around just in time to see him as he yelled something at us that I couldn't understand.

[00:29:09] That's when his Rottweiler shot out of the house and into the yard. I didn't bother warning my friends, seeing me run full out and hearing the old man was enough to turn us all into track stars.

[00:29:20] I didn't hear gunshots but the dog, probably on a leash or a run, didn't catch up with us. But my friends and I never dared to go near his property again. Several years later, when I was in my early 20s, that man took his wife and daughter hostage

[00:29:36] at gunpoint after raping and beating both of them. During a police standoff, the two women managed to escape. The old man put his shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. That time, I'm willing to bet rock salt, was not what was in his gun.

[00:29:54] Who knows what he would have done to me and my friends if he caught us that day. We might have ended up in that shed. Rock Salt Man with the Horror Movie Shed, you won't be meeting me or anyone else again. This happened over a year ago.

[00:30:25] Our oldest son, Caden, was 3 at the time and our youngest son, Connor, was around 5 months old. It still gives me chills and still makes me uncomfortable even walking by it. It was January in the evening in Pennsylvania.

[00:30:44] It was dark outside with a couple inches of snow on the ground and we had just finished eating dinner and I planned on giving our little one a bath. My husband drives truck for work so he isn't home very often. It's me and the boys during the week.

[00:31:00] Caden was playing with his toys in the room that has a door leading to the side deck. For a little detail, we have no sensor light or even a porch light on that whole side of the house.

[00:31:13] It's not close to the sidewalk or even the next street over. Basically an open space of yard is off of that deck. Anyway, Caden was playing in his toy room waiting for his turn to take a bath while I brought Connor into the bathroom.

[00:31:30] We were just about done with bath time when I heard Caden's little feet running towards the bathroom. He stands in the doorway and says, Mommy, there's a man looking in the side door. I think it's the mailman. My heart skipped a beat because 1.

[00:31:52] No mailman is coming at 7pm and 2. The side door, as he called it, was never used, especially during the winter. I didn't hear anyone knock. I began to sketch myself out more by thinking about how there was no light on the deck and

[00:32:11] this person would have to walk through the yard in the snow and walk up the back stairs of the deck and go to that door where the front porch light was on and attached to a shoveled sidewalk.

[00:32:26] I took Connor out of the bath, put him in a towel in his little chair and told Caden to sit with his brother and not to come out until I said it was okay. He was confused, but listened. He just kept asking what was wrong.

[00:32:42] I grabbed the biggest kitchen knife that I could find, had 911 ready to call and my mom a bare face on. When I walked up to the side door, I shined my flashlight on my phone through the window

[00:32:53] of the door at a distance, walking up to it to hopefully scare someone away. It's mostly made of glass. The worst thought with this as a mother is that as I reached for the handle, I realized it was unlocked. Someone could have walked right in.

[00:33:14] I flung the door open and shined my light, held up my knife and yelled, Hey! In the most threatening voice a 5'4", 120 pound woman could make. There were footprints in the snow leading up to the deck stairs and back down going into

[00:33:31] the field of woods behind our house. I slammed the door, thoroughly freaked out and locked it. I called the police and waited in the bathroom with the boys. While I was in there, I asked Caden, Do we know who the man was?

[00:33:47] He said, No, but he smiled and waved at me for a really long time. I asked him what he was wearing. He told me a hat that looked like a mailman's hat. And he wasn't wearing a coat. That's all I got out of him.

[00:34:09] The police officers came and searched the property with flashlights before coming inside. He asked me and Caden questions and then informed me that he not only saw footprints leading up to the side deck, but to the outside door to our basement and kitchen window on the

[00:34:27] other side of the house as well. He suggested I have someone come and stay with us for the night and that they will continue to follow the footprints that were left in the snow back to the field in the wood line.

[00:34:42] My father-in-law slept on the couch that night with his gun being the closest relative to our house. My mother was a nervous wreck and I got very little sleep. I never heard back from the police. I'm guessing the tracks were probably lost through the woods.

[00:35:01] Caden still mentions it from time to time randomly and we got a blackout curtain for that door. I'd still very much like to get better locks to be safe. My husband and my father think it might have been a man who saw me home alone while passing

[00:35:17] and wanted to hopefully sneak a peek. But why just stand and watch my child and go around the whole back of the house and not by the front door or straight?

[00:35:32] I hope to never see the creep's face and I hope he never smiles or waves at my child again. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Let's Not Meet, a true horror podcast.

[00:35:53] This week you have heard, the two men trying to break down my door by Reddit user don't get on Reddit. Stalked for 10 Years by Reddit user gamerchickx3. Rock Salt Man by listener nicks. And finally, Man Looking in Our Son's Window by Reddit user britneyballistic.

[00:36:13] Don't forget to send your stories in to letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com if you'd like to hear them on the show and email me at letsnotmeetpodcast at gmail.com if you have any questions. I'll see you guys next week for a brand new episode of Let's Not Meet. Bye!