3x06: Country Roads

[00:00:00] This episode of Let's Not Meet is sponsored by the brand new podcast from Wondery and the Los Angeles Times titled Detective Trap. Listen to Detective Trap on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you're listening to this podcast, or simply click the link in the show notes.

[00:00:19] My name is Andrew Tate and this is Season 3, Episode 6 of Let's Not Meet, A True Horror Podcast. Let's Not Meet This was a strange encounter and it was very scary at the time,

[00:00:40] but when I tell people this story they usually don't think it was something to freak out about. Last Thanksgiving, I was driving home from college with my friend. We were both 21 at the time. I

[00:00:54] live in a very isolated part of Arkansas that requires driving through an hour of hairpin turns in the mountains. There are a lot of blind turns, and the whole time that you're driving, you're on the edge of these huge drop-offs with no barriers. I'm usually pretty confident driving

[00:01:13] through the mountains, but we were in my friend's car so I was going slower than usual, driving about 5 over the speed limit. Almost as soon as we started through the roughest part of the drive,

[00:01:26] another car was tailgating us pretty close. This was stressing me out, and as soon as I saw somewhere that I could pull over, I did. I pulled into a church parking lot, and my friend offered

[00:01:38] to drive the rest of the way, but I declined as it was completely dark and she had never driven this route before. We get back on our way, and a few minutes later I have to come to a screeching

[00:01:51] halt as there's a car stopped in the middle of the road. It wasn't on the shoulder at all, it was just stopped dead in the middle of the road. My friend is saying that they must have

[00:02:02] broken down but can't call a tow because there's no service in this area. I immediately have a bad feeling and lock the doors. I tell my friend to stay in the car no matter what. She's starting

[00:02:14] to get scared at this point. It's parked right before a hairpin turn so I can't pass. My friend starts frantically telling me to go ahead and pass it but I don't want to get hit by a Mack truck or

[00:02:26] fall off the mountain. I honk the horn. Nothing happens. No chance of calling for help as there was no cell service. We wait for a while doing nothing. My friend is crying and freaking out,

[00:02:41] but I'm too scared to try and pass them. I honk a couple of times and eventually a guy gets out of the car and comes around the back and leans against his car just staring at us. My friend is

[00:02:55] freaking out even more and I'm frozen. I tell her not to make eye contact. I'm ready to floor it if he does something but he just stands there. He's not checking his car or anything. I try to stay

[00:03:09] calm and pray that another car will come along soon. This goes on for what seems like forever but it was probably just 15 minutes or so. He's just casually leaning against his car looking at

[00:03:22] us. Eventually we see car lights in our rear view and then the guy jogs to his door and gets back in his car. He speeds off dangerously fast so there was nothing wrong with his car. I start driving

[00:03:38] not wanting to cause a wreck. We don't see anything else for a while but we pass the same car parked along the highway and a while later it pulls back on and starts tailing us again.

[00:03:52] I try to speed up and get rid of him but he keeps following. We have cell service at this point but I don't know if we should call the cops because nothing technically has happened yet. I call home

[00:04:04] and tell my brothers what was going on and tell them to wait on the front porch for us. The car follows me all the way home down this very long drive. I get to my house and my two brothers are

[00:04:19] waiting on the porch holding their deer rifles. I pull in and the car just goes to the end of the drive loops around and speeds off back the way it came. We tried to see its plates but we

[00:04:32] couldn't make them out. Me and my friend were very freaked out when I told my friends about what happened. They didn't think it was a very big deal. I'm a big lurker on this subreddit at least

[00:04:57] for two years now but only recently made an account to share this story. I hope you enjoy. So this is pretty anticlimactic but it still just gives me the creeps. At the time of writing this

[00:05:10] I'm 16, female and this happened from the time I was 9 till about 14. When I was in primary school 4 years old till 11 years old I had a best friend named Marie. Marie's parents were split up and her

[00:05:26] father lives on the same street as I do whilst her mother lived in a town over. She spent the rest of her week with her mom and the weekends with her father. I would often go to his house

[00:05:38] and play with Marie. We played hide and seek and pretend and other games like that. Marie wasn't exactly the best child and her play fights left me with scratches and bruises. Her father spoiled

[00:05:51] her and always had sweets and money in the house. He was always on dating sites or Facebook and was an avid Arsenal fan watching every single game. In the summer if I was playing in my garden

[00:06:04] I could hear him shouting at the TV because of a match outcome or a goal. He would take me and Marie out and would buy us McDonald's and once a pillow pet because I wanted one so badly. I

[00:06:16] remember my mom being kind of weirded out when I said that Marie's dad bought it for me. He would take us swimming too but I don't remember much of those trips. Marie's father was around 5'11

[00:06:31] stocky with a bald head and ears that stuck out. He had a very kind smile and was very soft-spoken with a deep voice. I used to walk home from school and he would often wave out of an

[00:06:45] upstairs bedroom window down at me. I would wave back and smile and say hi and he'd return it. The summer that I was 10 years old I was over at their house almost every weekend. When I was 11

[00:06:59] Marie moved with her mother to a seaside town and we went to different secondary schools. I lost touch with Marie and we never really hung out again. I need to lay out how my route home is for the next bit to make sense and I'm really sorry if

[00:07:15] this is confusing. My road is like an L and the longer part being a shitty tarmac road while the shorter part is uphill. I could walk up this road to my house that was at the top of the hill. The

[00:07:29] houses are like a T with a row of terraced houses along the top of the hill and another row going down the hill along the road. The backs of the houses face a road and an alleyway leads around

[00:07:41] to the front of the houses and I could also go walking along this alley to get to my house. Whichever way I took to my house Marie's father would see me as he lived halfway up the hill in

[00:07:53] a row of terraced houses that went down the hill next to the road. When I'm in my room at home with the blinds up I can see Marie's father's house. Let's call Marie's father Ken. Ken would

[00:08:08] open his window, lean out and watch me from his window. It would take me a few minutes to notice him watching me and as my bed was right next to the window I would often be in pajamas or

[00:08:21] minimal clothing. I would wave or smile and he would cheerily wave back. I would close my blinds and wait a couple of minutes before opening it and he would be gone. This happened a couple of

[00:08:33] times. My mother put in a net curtain for me so that nobody could see into my window. I changed my sheets at night and do it often in my underwear as my bed is in a weird position

[00:08:48] and changing sheets required a lot of effort. Now I would have to sit on my windowsill so I would often have to remove the net curtain. I have no idea how many times he had watched me

[00:09:01] contort and struggle to change my sheets bearing in mind that I was around 13 or 14 when I began noticing these things. I walk home from my bus stop the same way I'd walk home from primary school

[00:09:15] and every single way I would take to walk home Ken would always see me. He would always wave hello and smile like he was expecting me or something. It really creeped me out. I began

[00:09:30] to get scared to see him. My heart would race and I began to completely ignore him as I sped walked home. Earphones in my ears blasting music. I thought he was watching me waiting for me every

[00:09:44] day. One day when I was 14 I tested my theory. There were two ways that I could walk past Ken's house. Both would leave me home. The first way was the way that I usually walked along that tarmac

[00:09:58] road and up to my back garden. It passed the back of his house however from the bottom of the hill I would be able to see his window and see if he was there waiting for me and I could divert my

[00:10:10] route and go around the front of the house along the alley up the hill and to my front door instead of the back. One day I saw him in the window at the back of his house and I tried not to give off

[00:10:23] that I knew that he was watching me. Without stopping on my route I diverted to walk up the alley in front of his house. He had crossed along the top floor of his house and when I reached his

[00:10:35] house some way up the hill he was looking down at me from the window at the front of the house. He was definitely watching me. I power walked home and immediately dug up Marie's contact info. I told

[00:10:49] her to tell Ken to stop watching me walk home and that I thought it was creepy. She did so and told me that Ken was only waiting for his girlfriend to get home and that he always watched for her.

[00:11:03] I can hear her car on my street pull up from my house and I never heard any the hour after I got home. I know Ken's girlfriend drives a BMW and I know what it sounds like. Luckily he stopped

[00:11:18] watching me after that and I've never really seen him again so Ken let's not meet. This is not my story but instead my sister's who will be using my account to share it with all of

[00:11:41] you. When I was in high school I was good friends with a girl named Emma. Emma was kind of quiet and shy but was always there if you needed her. When I finished high school I lost touch with Emma

[00:11:54] and this happens to a lot of friendships after school. Two years later in college I started dating a guy named Ben and Ben's best friend Gary was Emma's boyfriend. After discovering that we

[00:12:07] all knew each other we started to hang out again. One of the nights we planned to hang out in Gary's house. We wanted to have a few drinks and play a few games. Myself and Ben showed up about 8pm

[00:12:21] to Gary's house and Gary said that Emma would be over soon. That was fine. We opened our beers and started drinking. It was nearly 9pm and Emma still wasn't here so we decided to ring her.

[00:12:36] Emma answered and apologized for being late. She said she was just finishing getting ready and should be here soon. At 9 30 pm there was still no sign of Emma so we called again. This time her younger brother picked up the phone. Her brother was 15 years old at the time.

[00:12:56] He told us that Emma was not feeling that well and she was in the bathroom. Gary was worried and asked if he could head over and check on her but her brother was adamant that he was looking

[00:13:07] after Emma and she was alright and just to enjoy our night. We didn't go home instead we kept drinking and hanging out because we all thought that Emma just had a simple flu. Well just after

[00:13:20] 10pm we decided to call one last time to check on Emma. Her brother answered and calmly told us that Emma had gone to bed and she'll call us in the morning. We left it at that believing that

[00:13:35] she was safe at home in bed and didn't want to annoy her brother by calling non-stop. That night Emma's mom returned home at 12am to find Emma dead on the kitchen floor. Emma had been bludgeoned to death by her younger brother a couple of hours earlier.

[00:13:57] We later found out that when Emma was leaving to come to us she and her brother got into a fight about something ridiculous and he beat her with a baseball bat and then stabbed her

[00:14:08] over 51 times. Since her brother was a minor he was not going to be sent to prison instead her brother pleaded insanity and was sent to an institution. A lot of this information

[00:14:22] was not leaked as the accused was a minor. I do not know if his parents stuck by him but he was released after 4 years. This happened when I was 19 or 20. I'm 31 now. I rarely drink

[00:14:54] or go out anymore but last weekend a friend of mine who I hadn't seen in a couple of years asked me out and we ended up going to a club on the same street where this story takes place

[00:15:05] and it reminded me of it. The legal drinking age in Brazil is 18 so people here start partying early and let's face it no one really knows their limits when they start drinking. My friends and I

[00:15:20] had gone to this club, I honestly can't remember the name right now but I know it closed down a couple of years back. We had a great time, the sun was coming up as we were leaving. Most clubs here

[00:15:31] give you a credit card when you walk in where you either put in money that you planned on spending or they work as a personal digital tab where the bartender adds up what you've been drinking

[00:15:43] and then you pay for it on the way out. I pay for my stuff and sit outside to wait for my friends who were taking a long time to get out, probably due to being drunk. As I'm there I notice a car

[00:15:56] across the street. There's two men in the front seat and one out of the car trying to make this clearly drunk out of her mind girl get inside. She's mumbling, stumbling and struggling to

[00:16:08] keep her eyes open. She's saying no I don't want to go over and over shaking her head clinging onto the car door as the guy keeps telling her to let go and get inside. He said they're just going to a

[00:16:23] friend's apartment to drink some more it'll be fun come on. I watched wondering if I should do something if no one else is seeing this happen. I look at the club security guard and he looks at

[00:16:35] me and shrugs like it's not his responsibility. I look back at the girl and I'm really uncomfortable but also scared. My friends are still nowhere to be seen. I'm alone. The security guard is clearly not

[00:16:49] doing anything and there's three of the guys. What if they decide to try and get me too? The girl says one more time that she doesn't want to go with them and before I realize what I'm doing I'm getting

[00:17:02] to my feet and shouting hey. The guy stops trying to push the girl into the car for a moment and looks at me. She said she doesn't want to go dude I said starting to make my way across the street

[00:17:18] even though my hands are shaking and my voice is probably not the most convincing. She's our friend she's just drunk and being cranky it's all good we're just gonna take her home he says. He seems

[00:17:32] a bit nervous and not exactly angry which makes me feel a bit better or at least less scared. Do you know them? I ask her and she just shakes her head no using the door as support to keep herself

[00:17:47] on her feet. Creep number one, the one who is trying to push her into the car, looks at me then looks at his friends who seem to be frustrated but start saying come on man let's go just leave it.

[00:18:01] Creep number one now looking a bit pissed grabs the girl and pushes her towards me before getting into the car and they all leave. The girl nearly falls on her face but I grab her and we walk back

[00:18:14] to the front of the club. My heart slowly goes back to its normal rate. Only then I realized my friends had come out and were watching everything from across the street with confused faces.

[00:18:28] We all meet random people at clubs, at the door, walking down the street so they probably thought I had met someone. I start asking her what happened if she's alone where all her stuff is and

[00:18:42] she's an incoherent mess mumbling about losing track of her friends her purse and she doesn't even know how that she paid her tab to leave. I ask for some help from the security

[00:18:52] guard but he says that he can't leave his spot he can't do anything. I explain what's going on I explain what happened to my friends and they talk to the hostess about it who begrudgingly

[00:19:01] goes and checks the lost and found. Her purse is thankfully there minus money that she had in her wallet and we manage to call her parents. I talk to her mom because the girl can't explain anything

[00:19:13] and promise to stay there until the mom comes to get her. 30 minutes later mom arrives and I've never seen someone look so relieved and terrified at the same time. She thanks me and my friends

[00:19:26] profusely and offers us a ride home but as we live in a town over she just drives us to the subway station. In the middle of all the craziness I forgot to exchange numbers with any of them so

[00:19:39] I've never heard of that girl or her mom again but I hope she's learned to be more careful with how much she drinks and who she talks to in the clubs. Also shame on her friends for not

[00:19:52] looking out for her or trying to find her when they realized that she was missing. Though they were probably all drunk as she was who knows. I know that what I did was a bit reckless but

[00:20:04] I wouldn't be able to watch that car drive away and live with myself. Please be safe when going out people and creeps at nightclubs who try to take advantage of intoxicated people let's never meet again. I was 18 and living in Colorado at the base of the foothills.

[00:20:30] I had recently graduated from high school and was out on my own going to college full time during the day working nights at a waffle house and generally doing whatever 18 year olds do in small

[00:20:42] towns. I was always a bit of an impulsive person so when the perfect guy walked into the waffle house one night and asked me out I agreed. What can I say I'm a sucker for patch covered leather

[00:20:57] jackets and blinding blonde fashionably messy hair. I always had a nagging intuition that I often ignored as a teen though it was usually accurate. This guy was soft spoken sweet and very much a

[00:21:12] gentleman but before our date something told me to call my best friend and let her know where I was going and who I was going to be with. I had no discernible reason for this but I'm glad I did.

[00:21:26] This guy we'll call him Jay was a night trucker and wanted to take me to his favorite trucker spot for pancakes. I love pancakes so I met him there we had a decent conversation over food and black

[00:21:40] coffee. At some point I mentioned that I told my friend about our date after dinner Jay asked me if I wanted to take a drive and there it was that nagging again. You barely know this guy are you

[00:21:54] really going to hop into his car? Of course I am I answered myself. This guy is so nice you're being dumb and there's nothing to worry about. We paid for our pancakes and drove off towards the foothills.

[00:22:08] Jay was driving north out of town and into a desolate hilly darkness. There was no moon that night and I remember the sky turning from a deep blue in the evening to a foreboding black. I saw

[00:22:22] no other cars the entire trip we started holding hands and playing with each other's fingers. Jay started talking in sort of a far away dead tone about how fascinating it was to touch another

[00:22:36] human being. I don't remember how he led into this but a few minutes later he said something about how fun it was to tie people up with duct tape. Before I could catch myself I whipped my head

[00:22:50] towards him with wide eyes. I'm just kidding he said. We drove for a while in tense silence before he said I gotta pee and pulled off into a sandy spot with scraggly bushes and hopped out of the

[00:23:06] car. He said he was kidding but something felt very wrong. It was slowly dawning on me that I was in the middle of nowhere in a place with someone I didn't know and that there was nowhere

[00:23:21] to run even if I tried. Frantically I started scanning for something that could function as a weapon finding nothing but my eyes landed on a large roll of you guessed it black duct tape

[00:23:36] and it wasn't even in the back seat or anything like that it had been under our hands the entire time. I froze and my anxiety mounted. Jay got back into the car seeming a little more relaxed and

[00:23:51] said let's get out of here. I felt a little better not much but at least we were heading back to town then things got weird. Jay leaned his head forward put his hand over his eyes and started

[00:24:07] massaging his head and face slowly as if he were dealing with something highly distressing. He started pulling me to the side and this is hard to explain but the atmosphere in the car changed

[00:24:23] as if something heavy had come down over us. It was like that feeling you get you know when someone's behind you but amplified thousands of times or like the temperature had simply and inexplicably

[00:24:38] plummeted. I wish I could better describe it but I've never had the same experience since and I'm at a loss. As it changed I became absolutely terrified. He turned off the car. I thought about

[00:24:54] running but there really was nowhere to run. This is it I thought. I'm stuck with a maniac and I'm gonna die out here. Out of ideas I said with a shaky voice are you okay? For a moment

[00:25:09] he just kept massaging in silence. My level of terror in those seconds was indescribable then just as suddenly as it had come that heaviness that cold it lifted. He sat up dropped his hand and said yeah just a little bit of a headache. Sorry about that. Relief

[00:25:33] washed over me as he turned the car back on and we drove off. As he was pulling out I remember that I had given my friend his name and wondered if he had remembered that. Very long story short

[00:25:48] he dropped me off at my car and I got home in one piece. Years later I was reading a book on early circumstances that most serial killers have in common. There was one story about a guy in

[00:26:01] Australia that killed hitchhikers and was actually caught when two hitchhikers escaped from his car and reported him. The hiker said that he was very friendly but right before he tried to attack them the atmosphere in the car changed suddenly as if a cloud had dropped on them.

[00:26:18] They said that all of the warm feelings during the encounter just dropped. I remembered sitting straight up in bed horrified that for the first time I was hearing someone describe exactly how it felt that night with Jay. There were other weird things about Jay including a creepy list

[00:26:37] of girls that he kept under his bed but I think I have said enough for now. He's still around. I checked about a year ago to see if he had killed anyone or was in jail but not yet.

[00:26:49] But creepy cute trucker guy with a roll of duct tape. Let's never meet again. My best friend and I decided to take a trip to my hometown in Alabama. I've since moved and

[00:27:13] we both work endless hours and decided to finally take a break and visit where I grew up. The eight hour road trip was nothing compared to the amount of trauma that we would endure.

[00:27:26] We arrived at about 3am to a crummy hotel in a neighboring city to my town. We planned on sleeping in, waking up and visiting some of my old friends as well as driving around that day

[00:27:40] and I would show her all of the milestones. I've got a past there that she hadn't really known about until this trip. I dated a guy for a few months that I had rodeoed with. He was a bull

[00:27:54] rider. I was a barrel racer. Classic love story. I know. He and I split up a year before I moved and I learned from recent Facebook stalking that he was newly engaged. He also lived in a town about

[00:28:08] 45 minutes away from the hotel that we were in and that'll be important in a moment. The hotel was worn down and gross but we were two broke teens that could only afford a place like this.

[00:28:22] As we walked in, I noticed a guy sitting in the lobby with a cowboy hat down, legs crossed on his phone. I was so tired I didn't give it another thought and stumbled

[00:28:34] to the front counter. The grouchy older woman sat there peering at us as if we had stolen her children. I gave her my information, we received our key card and we went to our room. The next

[00:28:45] morning, there was a knock at our door. I had the no service needed sign on the handle from the night before so we wouldn't be woken by the maids. I grumbled as my friend stood up and opened the door.

[00:28:59] It was a man in a cowboy hat with a scraggly beard and worn out clothes. Yes, my friend replied to the man's gaze. Is she here? He replied. I jumped up and ran to the door

[00:29:15] hoping it wouldn't be who I thought it was. It was, although he was much more worn down than I remembered. It was my ex. After a few moments of catching up, he asked us to dinner that night. We replied yes and closed the door. Then I realized something.

[00:29:36] I hadn't spoken to this guy since I was 15. I'm now 18. How did he know we were here? I shook it off assuming some people that I had contacted about the trip to hang out with had let him know about our trip and where we were staying

[00:29:51] and just left it at that. Later that night, we arrived to the barbecue place that he requested and met him at the exact table he set. He sat looking at us with the most aggressive

[00:30:04] eyes I'd ever seen. My friend got up to go to the bathroom and he peered at me. This is when I mentioned his fiancé. Yes, I realized that by saying that I'd have to mention

[00:30:18] the fact that I had stalked him, but I didn't care. He looks at me harshly and replies, she's still around. How about you? You and your boyfriend still a thing?

[00:30:29] Part of me freaked out that he had stalked me, but I was also a little satisfied at how better looking I had gotten through the years. Yeah, still a thing, I replied shortly. His gaze made me more and more uncomfortable as we sat there.

[00:30:45] Following my friend's return, I requested to leave. I told him we had another meetup to get to and that we'd speak to him later. We left and as soon as we reached the car, he walked out of the

[00:30:56] door of the restaurant. He stared at the car before hopping into his truck and sitting there. I backed away, freaking out. And that's when I told my friend our history. See, this guy and I

[00:31:10] had not only dated, but he was abusive. I know you're thinking, then why the hell did you have dinner with him? And the answer to that is simply, I don't know. This guy had done endless harmful

[00:31:23] things to me as well as stalked me for my final year of living there. I told her everything and she agreed to never want to see him again. Two more nights went on with fun meetups

[00:31:33] with old friends and everything seemed fine. Although mentally, I was back into that horrible fear of seeing him again. On our last night, we arrived back at the hotel really late after

[00:31:45] driving back roads with some friends and we entered the lobby. It was dark, no one at the counter, almost as if it had been randomly shut down. I ignored it as I was tired and I knew that we

[00:31:59] had to be up early. My friend grabbed my arm, being the paranoid girl that she is, and we walked to the hallway and into our room, only to find that all of my stuff had been

[00:32:11] scattered. Her bed was exactly how she left it. It was as if whoever had done this was simply after me. Among the scattered clothes and torn up room was a note. A note that read,

[00:32:26] you got away once. I moved on, but I'll be damned if you get away again. Then it came to me. He hadn't done some normal Facebook stalking on an ex like I had. He had

[00:32:40] creeped on me, to all my friends and my family within the state so he knew everything, even the hotel that we would be in. He was in the lobby the night we arrived and heard our room number.

[00:32:56] We packed our bags and left that night without a goodbye to anyone. I later found out that he had come in there during a mental breakdown and scared the receptionist so bad that she ran out,

[00:33:07] allowing him to run freely throughout the hotel before the cops arrived. The most terrifying part is that he was still there when we left. The cops didn't arrive until another 20 minutes after we

[00:33:18] had left. God only knows what he could have done to us. The 8 hour trip was silent, as my fear that he would find me again suffocated my mind. I guess time doesn't really heal old wounds and he

[00:33:33] wanted me to know that. So to my ex that beat me and stalked me for 3 years, let's not meet again. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Let's Not Meet, a true horror podcast. This

[00:33:44] week you have heard Country Roads by Reddit user LucientValkyrie42. I should have realized something was off by PrimroseM. Ex-bestfriend's dad, a peeping tom on preteen me by Reddit user tylaloved. The one time I saved a girl from being taken by Reddit user ohnocami. I couldn't make

[00:34:22] this shit up if I tried by listener foxmolder. And finally, visiting home by listener wit. Special thanks to all of my Patreon subscribers over at patreon.com forward slash let's not meet podcast for supporting the show. And to Wondery's brand new podcast, Detective Trap. Don't

[00:34:40] forget to check out the link in the show notes to listen and subscribe. And don't forget to send your stories into letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com. I'll see you guys next week for a brand new episode of Let's Not Meet.