4x02: Unknown Caller - Let's Not Meet

[00:00:03] My name is Andrew Tate and this is season 4 episode 2 of Let's Not Meet, A True Horror Podcast. This happened to me about two years ago in my second year at university. I was 20. For context,

[00:00:32] I'm French, so if anything's weird about how I describe my university experience, that's why. At the time, I lived in a government-owned apartment building on the third floor. My direct neighbor was my younger sister, who was studying in the same university as I was.

[00:00:49] One other thing that's important to the story is that I'm disabled. My right leg is useless after an accident when I was 13 and I suffer from debilitating chronic pain to the degree that it keeps me bedridden and nonverbal unless I take a twice-a-day dosage of my prescribed morphine.

[00:01:09] All of that is important. Bear with me. When I take my medication, I'm able to leave my bed. On the worst days, I have to use either a wheelchair or a cane to get around. Isn't it great that we

[00:01:26] live on the third floor of a building with no elevator? On top of that, as you might have guessed, morphine is a very strong pain medication. It screws with your visual and hearing perception. It makes you sleepy and dizzy. It lessens your reflexes, numbs your nervous system,

[00:01:42] and makes you paranoid. You get the idea. At the time, I had only been taking morphine for less than six months after ten years of various other pain medications, and I was dealing with the side

[00:01:55] effects in full force. Most of them are now gone though. So for me, that meant mainly auditory hallucinations, sleepiness, dizziness, and bad reflexes. At that point, I had gotten used to hearing stuff that wasn't there, mostly clapping noises, clicking noises, small things ultimately.

[00:02:17] I never hallucinated human voices though. That night, I had gone out to the center of the city to meet with my friends. This was a rare occasion for me, and I do mean rare. I didn't go out more

[00:02:29] than once every two months or so, and my friends understood. Bless them. They understood perfectly. Morphine means no drinking so that half of the fun of going out to the bar is removed from the start.

[00:02:44] Despite the very useful nature of the meds, I was still and still am in a tremendous amount of pain if I stand for more than a couple of minutes, and I was sure to do a lot of that at the bar.

[00:02:56] Plus, walking back from the bus stop to my building was about a five-minute walk, but I went anyway. For a few days, there had been rumors going around about a group that was going around kidnapping people from a university. From memory, two girls had disappeared already,

[00:03:14] and it was suspected that a blue van was the vehicle being used. Those reports were circulating on our majors group and the universities group as well, about the same details each time.

[00:03:27] But my friends and I were skeptical mostly about the blue van because we didn't believe the van would still be running around if the information had spread enough that we were hearing about it

[00:03:37] on Facebook. Not that I was thinking about any of that as I came back from the bar around midnight. Early, I know, but I was in a lot of pain, and the bus stops at half past midnight,

[00:03:51] and missing it would mean waking up my sister so that she could come pick me up at the tram station since I was physically unable to walk the 20 minutes required. So I got into the bus.

[00:04:02] Only three people there, and none of them got out at my bus stop. Now bear in mind that I was in an extreme amount of pain, so much of my vision was blurring out at the edges, and I was swaying a bit

[00:04:16] from side to side, trying to minimize the weight being put on my leg. On top of that, I had just taken a fast-working morphine dose to help me get through the five minute walk back to my building,

[00:04:29] and unlike my twice a day high dose, those pills I could take to my discretion whenever I needed a quick relief. The downside of that very practical pill is that it basically knocks you out

[00:04:42] in about 30 minutes. You get so sleepy you can barely keep your eyes open, and basically you're high for about 20 minutes before either passing out or getting through it, and it gets better after

[00:04:54] a while. I get on the bus. On my right is a parking lot in front of a bakery with a lot of cars. It's normal because there are a lot of government-owned student flats around that block, and that's where

[00:05:07] most of them park, so I'm not concerned. The road I take is straight from the bus that dropped me off. For the whole walk before my building is to the right, there are a couple of parking spots in

[00:05:20] front of it and a wheelchair slope going to a magnetic door. You need your magnetic student ID to open the door, then a key to the specific door of your building. As I walk by the parking lot,

[00:05:33] I see movement in the corner of my eye, but since I'm half out of it from pain and meds, I don't turn to look at it. I hear some noise and just assume that I'm hallucinating it,

[00:05:44] so I keep on walking. But then the streetlights reflect on a car window, and I don't know why that made me turn around, but my brain was catching on to some weird stuff.

[00:05:58] So I briefly look to the side and I see an old, beat-up, white car, pretty long and low to the ground. On the driver's seat is an Algerian man in his mid-50s. The neighborhood is half students,

[00:06:15] half France-born Algerian, but the thing that gives me pause is more the fact that there's someone awake in the front seat of a car at one in the morning. But again, I'm out of it,

[00:06:26] so I don't question it. I don't even stop walking because at this point my only thought is put one foot in front of the other. There you go. You're almost there. You're almost done with the pain.

[00:06:38] Literally all my attention, my focus was on putting one foot after the other because of the debilitating pain. I walk past a small roundabout on my left, still going straight

[00:06:51] when I hear a car starting. I don't know why that was the thing that slapped me in the face, but suddenly I was worried. My heart was beating fast, probably half the meds and half fear,

[00:07:03] but also I was well aware that morphine tends to make me paranoid, so I tried to calm down. I see the headlights coming from behind me, drawing a long shadow in front of me. In a second, I run through the calculations. I'm still about 30 meters from my building,

[00:07:23] so I get my ID out and open the door. A slow, automatic, magnetic door. I can't run. I can barely walk. I'm up to my head in morphine. It's the middle of the night. I'm alone with no

[00:07:36] residual building close enough to hear a scream. That's when I start to panic. I'm right to do so, because the car catches up to me and slows down to my walking speed. I notice that the man

[00:07:51] isn't alone in the car anymore. Someone is in the passenger seat, and there's movement in the back, but I don't turn my head because I try to pretend that I didn't notice them slowing down.

[00:08:02] I had my earphones in with no music, as I didn't turn it back on after the bus ride. I just keep walking, hoping with everything that I have that they'll leave me alone.

[00:08:16] I try to walk faster, but I'm in so much pain now a few tears fall down my face. I can hear that they're calling for my attention, but not what they're saying. Finally,

[00:08:28] I see the lane that goes up to my building. I take my backpack off and shove my hand down the front pocket, fumbling because I'm so nervous. Thanks meds. I can't feel my fingers,

[00:08:40] and I'm shaking like crazy. I can't find my ID. At that point, I'm close to a panic attack. My heart is beating so fast, and I'm feeling close to fainting from the combined pain and terror.

[00:08:54] I turn to face the wheelchair slope when I see from the corner of my eye the car stopping abruptly right next to the slope and the car door slamming open. I don't know how I did it,

[00:09:05] because I was so close to fainting that I managed to run the last 10 feet to the door and slap my ID on the card reader, yelling at the door to open faster. I could hear people running behind me.

[00:09:17] The door finally opened enough for me to slip in, and I slammed it shut behind me. I hear the men run into the door with a loud noise and them cursing and yelling things at me. I

[00:09:28] didn't stick around to hear what they had to say. I fumbled with my keys to the point of almost dropping them before opening the door to my flat complex. I got inside on shaky legs, and as soon

[00:09:42] as I closed the door behind me, I dropped to the floor and had the worst panic attack of my life. When I managed to put myself back together and painstakingly climb the three flights of stairs,

[00:09:53] I crawled into my sister's flat. We left our doors open for each other for precisely these circumstances, and I woke her up, telling her the whole story. She told me later I was

[00:10:05] deathly pale, so much so that I scared her enough that she offered for me to share her single bed that night. That was too fucked up to refuse. The worst part is, this isn't the end of the story.

[00:10:21] My sister went out to the bars a lot more than I did, and she's able-bodied and drop-dead gorgeous. About three weeks later, she called me in the middle of the night,

[00:10:32] as she was coming back from the bar. She had seen the exact car I described in the parking lot at the bus stop. She didn't stop to see if there was anyone inside. She reacted and sprinted to our

[00:10:46] building. Of course, she was a lot faster than my drugged, disabled ass, so she made it to the door where I was waiting for her, having it open from the inside just as the car stopped in the lane.

[00:11:02] After that, we left a note on our flat, complex door to explain everything to other people, posted about it on every university group we knew of, and contacted the police who, helpfully, told us they couldn't do anything without catching them in the act,

[00:11:21] but that they'd probably send someone to patrol, as it matched the reports they had gotten that sparked the whole blue van rumors in the first place. In the following year, it took me to

[00:11:33] finish my degree, neither me nor my sister saw those men or their car again, but we still hear from people the same story being shared from their parts of the city. As far as we can tell,

[00:11:48] they're still active, and two years later, I'm still fucked up about it. So this happened to me almost 7 years ago now. I should give some background info before getting into things. At the time that this all happened, I was around 16 years old.

[00:12:20] I had a friend that I'll call Karen, who was dating a boy named John. At this point in time, Karen and John had been dating for maybe 6 months, and after going out with Karen and John on many

[00:12:31] occasions, they decided that they wanted to hook me up with John's friend. We'll call him Cameron. At this point in time, I had met Cameron in person only once. He was nice, so I gave him

[00:12:45] my social media, and we had chatted a couple of times. It's important to note, he didn't have my number, and he didn't know where I lived. Now it's time for the story. Fast forward to

[00:12:58] one night, maybe a week or two after I met Cameron. I'm laying in bed. It's about 2 or 3 in the morning, and I get a call from an unknown number. Thinking why the hell is an unknown number

[00:13:11] calling me at this time of night? I decide to answer it and see who it is. So I answer the phone and say hi. A man responds, saying hi back. Since I didn't recognize the voice on the other

[00:13:24] end, I ask the person who they were. Instead of giving me an answer, the man on the line tells me to look outside my window. Thinking this is probably a prank call, I tell the man to leave

[00:13:39] me alone, and I hang up the phone. Once I did this, the number calls back again. I don't answer. The person then proceeds to call me another 4 times until I finally answer the phone,

[00:13:53] which again I ask who is calling me. This time the person responds and tells me that one of my friends gave him my number, and that I'm the guy he's been talking to.

[00:14:07] At this point, my stupid 16 year old mind is trying to rationalize this, and the only person that I can think of is Cameron. Before I can say anything to this person, he again tells me to look

[00:14:19] out my window, and that he's outside. I begin hearing noises outside my window. Now I should mention that my room is right beside my parents' room. And being stupid, my first thought was that

[00:14:33] this fool is going to wake them up, and I'd never hear the end of it. Let me tell you, that thought soon turned into the last thing I would worry about that night. At this point, I'm also starting to get creeped out. I'm thinking to myself,

[00:14:50] okay if this is Cameron, and Karen did give him my number, how the hell would he know where I live? So I reply to the man, and say, Cameron? The man says yes, and tells me to look out my window.

[00:15:06] I reply telling him to go home and hang up the phone again. Weirded out, I decide that I'm going to get up, and go into my basement and call Karen, so that hopefully my parents

[00:15:20] don't hear me talking from my room. This is really important because to get into my basement, I have to pass a door that is partially made of glass. So I get downstairs and call Karen,

[00:15:33] and she answers clearly half asleep. I tell Cameron about the unknown call, which I'm assuming is from Cameron, and how he's telling me to look out my window because he's outside, and on top of all

[00:15:46] of this, I can hear someone out there. Karen, now clearly awake, tells me she's never given Cameron my number or my address, and calls John quickly from her home phone to see if maybe he did.

[00:16:02] At this point, John answers and tells Karen that not only had he never given my information out, he's with Cameron. They tell me if someone is outside, I need to hang up and call the police

[00:16:14] immediately. So I hang up the phone, and before I can even go to dial for anyone, I get another call. Guess who? Unknown number. So I stupidly answer again, and before I get a

[00:16:30] word in, the man tells me he knows I'm in my basement. He saw me walking by my back door. Now I'm clearly disturbed, as I did just walk by my back door to get downstairs so I know

[00:16:45] someone is outside. Again, before I could even say anything, the man tells me to come outside. So I stupidly tell this person I'm calling the police and hang up the phone. Why didn't I call the police at this point? I don't really know. Probably because I was 16,

[00:17:05] stupid and literally in panic mode. Not more than a minute later, I get another call. Unknown number. I answer again. The man tells me to come outside, or he's coming inside to get me.

[00:17:21] Clearly panicking at this point, I have this deep gut feeling that if I go outside, I'm never coming back. However, I do have to go by the door again to get back upstairs, and that was equally

[00:17:33] terrifying to me. So I hang up the phone again and muster up the courage to run upstairs because the last place I want to be was in the part of my house no one else was in. I get more calls. Unknown number. Unknown number. And again, unknown number.

[00:17:56] Again, my 16 year old stupidity answers. This time the voice on the phone sounds shook and says to me that police stopped him outside my house and want to speak with me to make sure

[00:18:10] that I know him. The phone then gets passed to someone who identifies themself by name with some title I no longer remember and asks if I know the man outside my address. He says my house number

[00:18:25] and street. I quickly tell the voice on the phone that I have no idea who the person is that's calling me, and I hang up the phone. Never got another call again. However, I did sit there all

[00:18:39] night holding a bat, and I had problems sleeping for months. I should also mention I didn't have very many friends at this point in my life, and looking back on this night, I thought maybe this

[00:18:53] was a prank taken too far. However, I begged the few friends that I did have for months to admit that one of them was the person who pulled this off, and to this day they all insist that none of

[00:19:06] them did this. So whatever got this person to stop calling me, thank God, and to the unknown caller, let's not meet. When I was 18, I was living in a small town. I was friends with the ratty skaters

[00:19:32] around, and they helped me connect with this dude who sold weed. He was 29 at the time and gave me pretty good deals and lived nearby. I wasn't driving at the time, so this was convenient for me.

[00:19:46] His name was Max. Max has always struck me as a weird guy, but I honestly quite liked his weirdness. Not in a romantic way or anything, but I just like weird people. We had normal

[00:20:01] weed-buying interactions that never lasted more than 10 minutes. Buy some weed, maybe smoke a bowl, and that's it. He'd often tell me that he could drop me off at my house, but I never let him because

[00:20:14] as I said before, he was weird. I wasn't afraid of him, but was definitely aware that he and his offers to deliver were weird. One day in May 2018, I was invited to a bonfire by the same ratty

[00:20:31] skaters that introduced me to Max. I had no idea that he would be there, nor was it important to me at all. I brought the guy that I was dating at the time. I said hey to everyone, including Max.

[00:20:47] We stayed for a couple of hours and some of them played some music on their guitars. Nearing the time that I was leaving the bonfire around 11pm, Max was getting upset about something

[00:21:00] and threw his guitar into the bonfire. I don't know what he was angry or upset about and paid no mind to it. This happened as I was leaving with the guy that I was dating. I went to bed

[00:21:12] and woke up to paragraphs upon paragraphs of crazy texts from Max ranging from 1am to 5am. It's a constant stream of texts stating things such as, you know how much I loved you,

[00:21:29] you're a cruel cunt. He would go back and forth between saying I would give you the world if you'd let me and you really do deserve him though. He said really scary things like, you're a predator

[00:21:44] and you should be snubbed out. Just wait. He would send a winking face with this. He also said, you are stuck. I will either love you or hate you to the fullest extent of my powers.

[00:21:59] Behold, right now I pay the worst death on you and to that fuckboy bitch. To top it all off, he said losing you is like losing a mother to me and told me to tell him

[00:22:15] I never loved him and that I wouldn't hear from him again if I did. So that's what I did. I said, I never loved you, don't message me again and I left it at that.

[00:22:29] I didn't get a respond nor did I care to get one. Max had never expressed any romantic interest or asked me out or anything. This was all out of nowhere and he was 11 years older than me,

[00:22:44] I was barely 18. That night, he cut his long hair off and posted photos naked on Facebook, curled up in a fetal position talking about being a statue of shame. It's as if he had some

[00:22:59] breakdown but I had no intention of causing that and didn't think I would even offend anyone by bringing the guy that I was seeing. Everyone else seemed to like the guy that I brought.

[00:23:15] About a week later, Max texted me pretty late at night and asked if I had seen the flowers that he spread along my sidewalk saying that he stole every flower in the vicinity of my neighborhood

[00:23:27] that night. I asked how he knew where I lived and said that I hadn't seen the flowers so he must have had the wrong house. I told him that he shouldn't do that as I never felt anything for

[00:23:40] him and so on. He told me that he heard that I had lived on the same block as another one of the skater guys that we both were friends with but he was wrong. The skater guy I lived by was on

[00:23:54] the other side of the block and I never walked that way so I never saw the flowers. I blocked his number and I didn't hear from him again for weeks. Well, a few weeks later, I woke up after

[00:24:08] a rough night and there were loads of flowers on my sidewalk right up to my house along with a little bouquet at the top of my walkway. I was pissed. I wasn't scared yet and stupidly, I unblocked

[00:24:25] his number and texted him asking why the fuck these flowers were outside my house. This confirmed that this was indeed where I lived. I still to this day feel so stupid for texting him and making it known

[00:24:39] that weeks later he had found my house. He responded saying, hmm sounds nice, twas me. I bitched him out basically and blocked his number again. About a week later, I was out of town and

[00:24:55] my roommate texted me a photo of a heart with the peace sign inside of it and my name written under it drawn in chalk outside my house. When I got back into town, I went to the courthouse and began

[00:25:07] the process of getting a stalking order against him. When I left the courthouse, I went to Max's work and told him that he needed to stop this behavior and that he was stalking me. He looked

[00:25:18] me in the eyes with no facial expression and said, if you don't leave, I'm calling the cops. I got angry and said loudly, call the cops, I was just talking to them about you.

[00:25:31] And I left his work in a rage. Soon after this, I began driving. I once drove by him and he noticed it was me. The next day I woke up with my car covered in flowers. I presented my case to

[00:25:46] the judge and she put a stalking order in place. He was served with it by police officers and I thought that this would be the end of it. He wouldn't be bothering me again. I was wrong.

[00:25:59] After the stalking order was served, he made several other chalk messages outside on my sidewalk then left random gifts for me like chalk and beheaded my little pony heads on top of beer

[00:26:13] bottles. I brought these things to the police station, but they said they needed to catch him doing it and that I should take a photo or get a security camera. So I got a security camera and I

[00:26:25] really hoped that I would catch him. It turned out my security camera was stupid and I couldn't just watch the videos that it took, but I had to skip through them second by second by hand.

[00:26:40] It was an impossible task. I was terrified of leaving my house at night at this point. I never had the curtains open anymore and I was frustrated that my livelihood was being taken away from me.

[00:26:52] Ultimately, I unblocked his number in hopes that he would text me directly, violating the stalking order. And after a few days, it worked. He sent me a weird text saying something like, forgive me. We are charming. This is harming. Let us try again. By now it's September 2018

[00:27:14] and he finally goes to jail. He's facing up to a year in jail and has to stay there until our court date. I finally start calming down. I'm able to go outside at night, even if it's just to get

[00:27:26] to my car. I let myself have my curtains open sometimes. I'm starting to feel alive again. Right when I start feeling secure in my small town life again, someone posted bail and he was

[00:27:42] released after only three months in jail. And I went back to living in fear. We still had court dates coming up and I was optimistic that he would serve more time for ruining my life for so long.

[00:27:57] His lawyer kept pushing the court date back to gather evidence. And after about six months of pushing it back, the state decided he wouldn't do anything more and just closed his case.

[00:28:10] I had moved out of town three hours away at this point, so he didn't actually have an option to continue his behavior. Living in this new place, I feel safe. I can walk at night and don't have

[00:28:22] to close my curtains all the time. It's been over a year since they decided to close the case. About a month ago, he began responding to my friends' Instagram stories,

[00:28:33] friends that live in this new town, telling them how fond he is of me. I have always had him blocked, but my Instagram isn't private so he must have found them that way. I have since changed my

[00:28:47] account to private and he hasn't messaged any of my friends. I refuse to be fearful now, the way that I was then. He will never find me where I live or where I work now. However, my life has

[00:29:01] forever changed after this experience. I will always be more aware of people and their weird energy. I will always close my curtains early in the evening and make sure that all my windows and

[00:29:13] doors are locked. I will always live a little bit in fear, maybe not of him, but of this happening again. He ruined my life for a year and I truly wish that he had gotten that time in jail. He deserves it. So Max, let's never meet again.

[00:29:44] Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Let's Not Meet, a true horror podcast. This week you have heard a group kidnapping college students tried to grab me by Reddit user laughing stars, the unknown caller who was watching me from outside by Reddit user bubblyemily1,

[00:30:01] and finally my weed dealer turned creepy, very creepy by Reddit user motherofhendricks. All of the stories you heard in this week's episode of Let's Not Meet were narrated and produced with the permission of their respected authors. If you'd like to hear your story on the

[00:30:18] show, email me at letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com. If you'd like to gain access to bonus content, head over to patreon.com forward slash let's not meet podcast. I'll see you guys next week for a brand new episode of Let's Not Meet.