Kinda sorta copy/pasted question from Reddit. But wanted to see what your answers are like on here!
20 yrs ago…
Driving through upstate new york with my family. Passed through a small town looking for some food and/or gas.
One house had nazi banners hanging openly on the front of the house. Not flags, they were like those big vertical banners behind hitler during speeches.
Nope. We can hold our pee and get gas later… drive a little faster and get out.
As a canadian, i was shocked… i thought stuff like that only existed in the deep south… we were 3hrs from the canadian border or something.
In hindsight, it explains a lot about the current state of affairs in the US
In upstate New York one of my college friends borrowed my car and was driving around with it. My car had a Norwegian flag decoration on it and some guy pumping gas at a gas station mistook it for the Confederate flag, pointed at it and said, “yeah the South will rise again!!!” while my (Asian…) friend was also filling up. When she got back she had a lot of questions for me about what kind of flag it was since she wasn’t familiar with the Norwegian one.
Never ever seen a Nazi flag in person and I’ve lived in the Deep South for about a decade. Confederate ones are super common though, albeit less so than just a few years back.
A New Yorker so dumb he doesn’t even know NY wasn’t part of the confederacy.
And remember, those are just the dumbest handful of them.
1 downvote is the house owner
Well I’m not entirely surprised. Rural areas just tend to lean right. Even in a wider region that is more liberal like California and New York, their rural parts are more right leaning.
I live in Albany, NY. It’s a city of about 100K people, and it’s pretty diverse. I’ve found lots of pro nazi shit on peoples houses within 10 miles of the city limit.
I sort of think, people were always Nazi douche nozzles, but trump made them brave about being open and upfront with their hate.
I kinda had the opposite happen.
I was working for a charity doing some reconstruction in an ex war zone. That weekend was a major festival. I’m not of the area nor the religion so I volunteered to keep an eye on our camp instead that weekend.
I finished my breakfast in the canteen and was about to walk the perimeter and do my checks when, inexplicably, I decided to stall and have a second coffee. Something I never did.
As I went to sit down a massive explosion happened outside, shattering the entire area me and my clipboard should have been in. I wouldn’t have stood a chance. The canteen we were in was made out of shipping containers and probably saved our lives.
Driving out west in Canada from the prairies to see the ocean years ago. Went through Golden, BC and decided to go into the town proper for a dinner, rather than the roadside chains. It was about 6:10 PM. When we walked in there were about twenty locals who immediately all went quiet when we walked in. We grabbed a table and proceeded to get stared at by the whole room. I nodded at a few with no response. My wife looked terribly uncomfortable. We got up, apologized to the waitress and got the hell out of dodge. Even looking back years later I am still weirded out by that scene. I’m sure that, if we stayed, we would’ve wound up in some sort of Stephen King short story.
I’ve had something similar happen. Old school mom n pop diner type of restaurant in a “big suburb” level city, sorta “local famous” kind of place, had seen cars with their bumper stickers around town for years, figured we’d try it one day just for shits and grins. The feeling was not bad enough to leave, we went ahead and ate and paid and left. But definitely had the feeling that we were being, not necessarily watched overtly, but they were keeping an eye on us. Everyone. Wait staff, other customers. No idea why. The whole time just vaguely uncomfortable feeling that you can’t really put your finger on. After we left, my wife and I both at pretty much the same time were like “ok that was creepy right?”
Stephen King was what I thought of too. Specifically the scene in (I think) one of the Dark Tower books where they go into the restaurant that is owned by vampires or whatever they were.
Is that like the Canadian version of a Sundown town?
any idea what the cause was?
Could be something as simple as discomfort due to road strangers coming in or, we may have interrupted the start of some sort of ritual sacrifice. 😁
Oh my god. My friends and I were doing a road trip around the US when we got lost somewhere crossing the border into southern California. We took some weird back road into the woods looking for a campsite that was on Google (we were roughing it as much as possible to be cheap), but it became super apparent that we took the wrong turn somewhere and we went deeper and deeper into the woods. It started to get dark and at this point my ex and I were like, “Let’s just go to a hotel, it’s already too dark to camp.” My friend, the driver, was convinced we were almost there and the campsites were just around the next corner and wanted to save the money.
At some point, we saw this tree across the road and the only way to keep going forward was into what looked like just a clearing where some rusted out cars were. Immediately my ex and I felt this overwhelming, hair-raising “it’s time to go” vibe and we started telling him to turn around. My friend pulled into the clearing saying something like, “No, this might be it, there’s cars parked here”. We pull into the lot and kinda do a loop, just to put the headlights on the surroundings and see what’s all there. Like I said, it’s an island of gravel, short, dry grass, and some rusted out cars in the middle of dense, mountainous forest.
My friend is juuuuuuust about to park and gloat about ‘finding the campsite’ when some feral looking dude comes barreling out of the woods like a cryptid, sprinting at the back of the car. My ex and I start screaming like loons as this dude closes the gap and my friend punches it and starts driving back down the road we came in on. The dude just stood in the road behind us with something metal (I think a pipe) and watched us go in a cloud of dust and taillights.
Absolutely HORRIFYING experience and we still have no idea what the fuck the situation was there.
I ended up in a similar situation, except I was hiking the Appalachian trail alone. I decided to stop at a creek and get some crawfish for my dinner and to boil water. While I was turning over rocks I heard some distant rustling and got this feeling I was being watched. I unclipped the button on my knife holster because that made me a little more comfortable. I heard from another hiker that this area wasn’t safe and that I should pass through and go past the shelter a few miles. He looked very tired and sounded nervous under his breath and didn’t take time to explain and he speed walked on.
Back to me catching crawfish, I ended up eating like 5 or 6 of them and ate the rest of the wild berries and mushrooms I collected from the morning. I heard the rustling but it sounded much closer. Close enough that I could tell it was something that weighed a good bit. I took that as my warning and got out of there.
I was a good two or three miles from the creek when I remembered what the guy said and how nervous he was. That feeling I was being watched never went away. I decided to dart into the woods and form a fishhook maneuver to see if I was being followed. It was something my friends native American grandfather said to do when hunting in a area with lots of bears or mountain lions to avoid leading them back to your camp. And sure enough it worked because their wasn’t an animal following me but a person was following me.
I slowly moved back to the trail and walked about 100 ft on the hard packed soil to not leave a footprint trail then I darted in the woods and ran for a good 20 or 30 minutes before hitting a road. At this point I decided to hike 5 miles to a motel and just sleep. No way I was sleeping in the woods with a maniac on the loose.
This is a rough photo of where this happened, and what the fishhook maneuver looked like.Man, your story gave me goosebumps.
everytime I tell people my experience I get that feeling of being watched again. It’s scary thinking that could have ended very bad for me if I didn’t get that warning from the distressed hiker. I have heard stories about there being being creeps on the trail, but never encountered one before my experience.
what the fuck the situation was there
opioids and/or amphetamines, at a first guess
Nah, he just thought OP had a real pretty mouth
Most likely scenario was a homeless person, scared out of their mind that someone was robbing what little they had found and making their one safe place unsafe.
Smart move getting out quick, but probably a sad story behind the fear.
That was just Jesse. You probably didn’t notice the Winnebago.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuurwerkramp_in_Enschede
I live in this city. We were watching the fireworks depot burning from what we thougt was a safe distance…After the first explosion we knew we were waayyyy to close and left right away. Just minutes later the whole neighbourhood was gone.
There are vídeos on YouTube showing the disaster, it’s scary to watch really
I was just moved to Italy. I knew no one and I had to do some history assignment for Uni. I went to the city archive looking for some documentation and I was incredibly lost.
Some middle age man approached me and starting helping me around. He talked with everybody there and they all respected them. He was really nice to me all the time. I got into the archive and got everything I wanted. But I was more creepied out each minute. The guy had starting talking about how spaniards(me) and italians needs to be friends because our shared history of friendship with Franco and Mussolini. At the end he asked for my number, he really looked like he was trying to recruit me. I gave him a fake one and moved away. Never got near that location again in all the the time I spent in the city.
Three hours down a very remote hike with no phone service, a schizophrenic guy asks what we’d do if someone tried to kill us right now
I’d laugh maniacally and kill them with my man eating machete.
And then?!
Wished him good luck on his journey, hauled ass out of there and picked up a really nice pointy skull crushing rock for companionship. The hike back was a lot less scenic and we nailed it in half the advised time. Made a police report when back in phone reception.
We later worked out he just wanted advice because he thought HE was being chased
We later worked out he just wanted advice because he thought HE was being chased
I feel bad for laughing at this. I can just imagine the guy being scared out of his wits and then the guy he asked for advice running away.
Like two sides of the story both going home to post it on LetsNotMeet 😂
I require context.
Yelling Bird is a staple of filler comics for Questionable Content. It’s generally ornery. This was a guest comic about two single characters being playful together, the depicted panel was the punchline.
Only correct answer: “What are the chances that there’s two people here with that intention”
In the early 2000s, I had just joined the US military right out of high school and found myself stationed in Japan for my first assignment.
I loved Japanese culture and had started a college course on basic Japanese language so I could communicate with the locals and find my way around without getting lost in a foreign country.
One day, one of the civilians in my office was retiring and he chose a fancy hotel in the next city over to host his retirement ceremony. They had a bunch of meeting/party rooms we could host our ceremony in. It was fun, but I’m a bit introverted, so at some point, I stepped out into the grand lobby of the hotel to recover some energy by myself. There was a grand piano in one corner with some petite Japanese lady playing soft music on it. I learned against a large pillar and quietly listened for a bit.
All of a sudden, a meeting room door nearby banged open and some Japanese businessman stormed out on his phone. He was agitated and speaking angrily into his flip phone (smartphones didn’t exist yet). He stopped on the other side of the pillar from me and continued his loud discussion.
I had gotten absorbed into some Japanese drama TV shows and had learned to identify the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) slang. This guy was using the same dialect. I got a chill down my spine; it was my first time running into a Yakuza member in real life.
The guy finished his call and turned to leave… and stopped when he saw me standing practically next to him. His anger flared up and he started speaking aggressively at me in Japanese. Probably pissed that I was listening in on his call.
I caught a few words here and there, but my Japanese wasn’t good enough for full sentences yet, especially spoken rapidly at me in an angry tone.
When he paused, I said in English, “Um… I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” I knew how to say it in Japanese, but I didn’t want to give him any inkling that I knew Japanese.
His entire demeanor changed. He grinned from ear to ear and said, “Ah! America-jin, ne? Good! Good guy!” He gave me a rough pat on the shoulder and then turned and went back to his meeting room.
I thought he was gonna drag me into the meeting room with his buddies and I’d never be found again, so I was relieved when he smiled and left me be. I went right back to my party and made sure not to go anywhere by myself for the rest of the evening.
“Don’t shoot! I’m American! I’m stupid and didn’t understand a word of what was said!”
Haha! Yup, basically.
Fortunately, a lot of Japanese folks were obsessed with Americans and American culture when I was living over there, so if you could convince them you were American, they would bend over backwards to help you with anything.
I flew back into Japan after a vacation and I had a 25-hr layover in Tokyo before flying back to my military base. I slept in a hotel that night, then went to the airport the next morning and asked if they could bump me to an earlier flight so I wouldn’t be stuck in the airport all day.
The lady at the counter said they had a flight leaving in 15 minutes and she would ensure I got on it.
Then she took off her heels, grabbed me by the hand, and literally ran me through the airport! She pushed me to the front of the security line, then we sprinted all the way to the terminal. They even held the plane an extra 10 minutes to ensure I got on it. I felt bad for holding up a plane, but damn! What service!
Wow. What a legend that lady was.
So uh are you Japanese by heritage?
No, but I have dark hair and have been described as having a Mediterranean look, so a lot of people around the world assumed I was from Europe at first glance. The Yakuza guy didn’t immediately pin me for an American until I spoke English.
This was also way up in northern Japan, where very few foreigners can be found, so their exposure to us is limited. Lots of Japanese people stared at us in public if we went anywhere except the town our base was in.
Not OP but I take it that you’re asking because you’re trying to figure out why they weren’t visually assumed to be a foreigner and why they were assumed to be able to speak Japanese?
Yes.
When I was around 11 I was at the McDonald’s down the street from my house with a couple of friends. It was just three 11/12 year old girls chilling eating in the back of the restaurant. It was dark out but not late, probably 7 or 8 at night. After a bit my friend leaned over to me and said the guy at the table next to us “looks like (her abusive stepfather)”. Realistically it could not have been her abusive stepfather and she was across the other side of the country.
However, he was creepy and sitting alone and watching us VERY closely. We started getting nervous and at some point I said loudly enough for him to hear “okay, my dad is coming to get us”. He wasn’t, but I was hoping that would make the man leave us alone. He immediately got up and went to go stand just outside of the back door into the parking lot.
We panicked even more and walked to the front entrance of the McDonald’s, called my dad from a payphone. I remember how panicked we must have looked because a random person who was in line came over and asked if we were okay. Thankfully my dad was home and came to get us from the front entrance and we left together.
Another time I was on the last train home from work, I was around 18. A man had gotten on the train near my stop, first sat on a further seat and then moved closer as the trip went on. From my stop, I had to walk about 50 meters to a not-very-well lit taxi pickup area. This man got off at my stop, and as I approached the well-lit exit of the train station I could feel him following me. I almost went outside and then thought better of it. Turned back and thankfully found a transit worker on the platform. I asked him if he could walk me to the taxis and he did. As my taxi was driving away I saw the man who had been following me walk back further into the train station. As I mentioned, it was the last train of the night so he had no reason to have gotten off at the stop if it wasn’t his stop. There were no businesses or anything else around. Anyway my favourite part of this story (not favourite) is that when the transit worker was walking me over to the taxis he said something along the lines of “oh you’re just too cute thats why that man is following you”. No thank you.
Always trust your gut, kids.
I absolutely agree. Better safe than sorry.
Nevertheless, I want to tell a quick story of where someones gut feeling was wrong.
More than 20 years so I used to go to an evening school (don’t know the English name for, maybe college or something like that). One day I was done, it was very late and dark outside (around 10 in the evening) and I was tried and not in the best mood and I just wanted home. To get there, I had to catch the last train of the evening and the train station was a few minutes walking away.
Since I’m a pretty tall guy with long legs, I can walk pretty fast. I was walking down the narrow sidewalk towards the train station when another pedestrian appeared on front of me. This pedestrian, a young lady, was slower than me and since I was in a hurry I tried to overtake her (get in front in of her so she wouldn’t slow me down and could walk at her own pace). However, when I started my maneuver she got a little faster, but I still wanted to finish my maneuver and walked a little faster myself and she got a bit faster again… after a short while of this, it ended with her running away to a street on the other side of the road while screaming in fear.
This way quite confusing for me since I had no bad intentions at all. However, from her perspective it was probably super scary with a tall grumpy looking guy “following” her and then getting into snatching range. So I think she did the right thing and from that point I tried to avoid accidentally scaring other people.
Yeah I’ve had a similar experience, when I was in my early 20s, and have since chosen to accept missing the train or whatever is the reason I’d need to hurry, so as not to scare someone that bad. Jesus it’s awkward and it’s entirely understandable, but man does it get me questioning whether I look scary or weird or do I seem suspicious and has been a constant source of anxiety ever since. But I’ve realized it’s my job in that situation to clearly signal I’m not a threat, and I’ve chosen to do it just by slowing down myself so the distance grows and I become no threat to them (feels so bad to think of one’s self this way by the way, fuck me, but what can you do?) or alternatively if there’s a detour I could take to still catch the train as in your example, I’d rather go to another block and jog if nobody’s there and not miss the train. Either way, if I’m perceived a threat, there’s nothing in the moment that can be done about that other than no longer be perceived one, i.e stall or reroute away.
This only ever happens in dark, at night, and them likely drunk or tired, so it’s entirely understandable. I’d be fucking anxious too if someone bigger than me started speeding up on me. I have the privilege not to be scared this way due to my physique, so I also have to respect it the other way around too.
It’s so easy to go with the gut reaction of “this is disrespectful” without considering the scenario from a third person you know? I think this is where most end up in and start thinking “you can’t do or say anything anymore” and become either incels or too fucking loud magas or equivalents, because it is kind of hard on self confidence to be in that situation. But it’s always going to be worse for the other, they might fear for their life, and rightly so, so there’s no comparison there once you actually start thinking and exercising your empathy. So if you manage to get past the initial feeling of disrespect, frustration and self-doubt, then this is a real non-issue. And something very small to avoid and handle properly in the moment.
But if you don’t get past it, or lack the empathy to see it from others’ pov, well, you end up a shithead basically, coping unhealthily with that and it might even grow as large to be the whole identity ultimately.
Just rambling here I suppose, sorry to hog all the space, felt like I needed to let that out. I’ve had some friends go with the disrespect and self image and confidence shattering effect that I’ve helped get past it and see it objectively, and I just can’t help but think of everyone who doesnt have the help nor the inner capability, and stray from the sensible and humane path due to something so small as this.
I feel like if I were ever in that situation I’d just straight-up yell something to the effect of “hey lady, I’m not trying to chase you; I’m just in a hurry” and try to get her to cross the street or something so I could get by. I have no idea if it would actually help or not, but if it’s awkward anyway I’m the kind of jerk to be willing to make it more so.
“On your left (right if you’re in a right hand pass country)” is something that would personally make me feel safer as a woman. It’s a clear, “hey I’m passing you not chasing you”
I use that as a cyclist, but it only feels appropriate when the closing speed is high and/or the person in front is unaware and there’s a risk of a collision. If the situation is more like a semi-truck trying to pass another uphill, I think a little more verbosity is warranted.
Yeah I picked it up from cycling, but my standard advice as to how a man can come off non-threatening is for him to signal his presence (so it’s clear he doesn’t think he’s hiding) and to signal some form of lack of threat. Expressing intent to pass is a lack of threat, especially combined with giving a wide berth
I usually do my best to just take an extra wide berth to get by. It’s usually only going to happen late at night or so when it’s super quiet, so in that case I will just cross the street myself.
Kinda just signalling, don’t worry I want nothing to do with you. It helps lull them into a sense of security.
The doom of all ADHD blokes who can’t stand being behind people walking slower than him.
‘I’m not following you, I just have places to be faster than your leisurely dawdle down the pavement will allow’ is a phrase I wish we had a polite word for.
Ludacris has a song about this topic. At least in my interpretation of the song.
What on earth would possess a transit worker to say such a thing‽
In none of your stories anything really happened, though. Of course, it might have, but it might also just been coincidence or whatever.
The people to whom something did happen aren’t here to tell their stories.
When we’re talking personal safety, you want to play it safe, surprisingly. I mean, maybe you’d rather be the one who says to themselves “ah, it’s probably nothing” and then gets murderaped, but most of us wouldn’t.
Yeah no I believe women even they say they’re being followed. They aren’t crazy and it’s very common.
2010 Loveparade. First we got told that there would be a different entry, which there wasn’t, which meant we needed to walk quite a while. On the way we had a few situations, where people pushed a lot and it’s not a nice feeling, when you have a considerable mass and you get pushed easily. We made it to the last big check and we where greeted with a clear view to the tunnel. At this point there weren’t big queues visible and it was just a short walk. I said to the 2 friends I was with, that NOW I want to go home. It was not a gut feeling or something, I just knew I don’t want to continue and I want to go home. One friend decided to stay, as we where this close and another agreed with me and left with me.
The friend who stayed, did cut his visit shorter, lucky for him. For people who don’t know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Parade_disaster It was one of the biggest crowd crushes disasters. 21 dead, 652 injured. It happend in that tunnel, which I looked into and decided to go home. That criminal trial is considered one of the most complex ones of the post war period. In 2020 they dropped the trial. The issue was for these crimes, they only had 10 years and they said due to the limitations of covid, they said they will run out of time.
Okay, now I’ve read about crowd crushes and am living in fear of groups of 3 or more people
The fascinating part for me is that sufficiently dense crowds of people (> ~5/m^2) exhibit behaviors similar to fluids
Does anyone else find it odd that a lot of day old accounts make their first post here specifically, or is that just a coincidence?
We need to leave … now.
Could be a lot of lurkers finally found something worth posting too.
…or as history has taught me, BOTS
Well just about every askreddit post I’ve made was removed and then reposted by a mod. I can see why people would want to try here.
askreddit so overmoderated by the sub filters and reddit AI.
that’s not a bad idea, though
There was a pretty noticeable moment a few years ago when lemmy seemed to spring to life with activity. Mainly those screenshot posts from other social media or those newer image macro things. I’m 99% sure that’s when somebody turned on bots to make lemmy look more lively.
If they post interesting stuff, who cares?
Reddit is very interesting, yeah.
Is it?
I trust my spidey sense. When the hairs on the back of my neck go up and i get that feeling in my chest, i listen to it.
Its gotten me out of an armed store robbery, 2 ither street level robberies, 2 houses that just didnt feel right, multiple encounters with dangerous animals ( gators and 1 panther).
My wife just thinks im paranoid.
We get that feeling for a very good reason. It’s our intuition telling us something our instincts already know. Many people don’t get it and are conditioned into telling themselves “it’s probably nothing” because they don’t want to look silly in public. It can lead to paranoia, if you’ve been in enough hairy situations, but most of the time you’ll want to listen to that intuition and do something about it as soon as you get that feeling.
How many false positives for your spidey sense?
Dont know… i dont hang around long enough to find out.
was doing a building search of a flooding (from water leak) multi story building and as i was looking around the living room, i felt “time to move to next room” and yeah glad i did. ceiling fell in the living room as i rounded the corner.
these kinds of incidents are always so fascinating.
studies were done on people who had their brain hemispheres separated and it was found that the brains continued to communicate through alternative methods, often providing context to one half of the brain that was unaware of context the other was aware of.
it only proved that our brains are complex machines that are constantly working to ensure our survival. so when you get the nagging feeling you’re in danger, take it seriously because your subconscious has noticed something your consciousness has not.
I was like 12 and I was baby sitting two ~eight year olds. Went to the local elementary with them to use the big toy. There was a group of three boys there and one had what looked like a real gun, yes this was in America. I said NOPE! and immediately turned my kids and myself around and got out of there as fast as possible
The other one was when I was about the same age and my best friend and I were walking around in the neighborhood by her house. It wasn’t a nice area but it’s not like anywhere I spent time was. Some man in his like 40s probably rolled up to us in his big yellow car and started talking to us to get in his car and go to his house, he was drunk, we told him if he told us where he lived we would walk there if he would go buy us beer. He kept hitting his chest like in the wolf of Wall Street and talking nonsense, I tried to scoot away to look at his license plate but he snapped at me to come back. Eventually we got him to agree to go buy us beer in exchange for us walking to his house. As soon as he started driving away we ran as fast as we could back to her house and called the cops and told them everything, including where the guy lived since he told us
I was young and had just moved to a decent sized midwest city by myself. I didn’t know anyone so spent a lot of my time exploring by myself. There was a large park in a quiet area of town where it wasn’t unusual to be the only person around. I was sitting at the end of a very large rose garden when I noticed a tall skinny guy in a dirty wife beater and jeans standing on the outside of the garden with his dog. Something big like a Rottweiler or pitbull I don’t remember exactly. I just remember being super freaked out because he was just standing there looking directly at me.
I got up and started walking back to my car but he started walking parallel to me matching my pace. When I walked faster he did too. I got my phone and keys out and just kept walking as confidently as I could. I was parked a couple minutes away and over time his pace did slow slightly as mine got faster but I knew he was still behind me. I had a habit of unlocking my car several times with the keyfob because the car beep was satisfying. After I did so the white cargo type van parked next to me unlocked and beeped the exact same amount of times mine did.
At this point I as terrified. I backed out and raced out of the park without even looking behind me. I needed to pick up something from one of the neighborhood Walmarts on the way home so I stopped there and headed inside to calm down. The sun was still out and I’m a guy. I was young, short and slender but I still felt like that somehow protected me. I convinced myself I was being crazy and that guy just happened to be leaving the park when I did. I left the store and started walking to my car when I saw him. The white van was parked directly next to my car and he stood there at the back watching me. No dog this time. All I remember thinking is I had to get into my car because it was the only place I had any leverage. I slow motion got in, backed out, and headed back into a neighborhood where I knew I could zig zag my way around different blocks to try to lose him. I spent 10 minutes looking over my shoulder making random turns before I headed back to my apartment.
Never saw him again and to this day I still feel like I’m in a bit of denial about the whole thing. There were plenty of other cars in the parking lot. It was early evening. If he was trying to kidnap me it was a stupid place to do so. Perhaps he saw how scared I was at the park and just wanted to mess with me. Whatever the case I’ve never been so scared for my own life.
I’m surprised you actually got in your care at Walmart with the van right next to it. I probably would have gone back inside and asked a security guard to come out with me.
I was young and dumb and had just finished gaslighting myself into thinking that I was being dramatic. It never crossed my mind.
If this ever happens again, or for anyone reading this, the best thing to do if you’re being trailed in a car is to drive to a police station. (Despite the other dangers that can also cause unfortunately)
Your story reminded me of an incident I experienced a few years ago. I did grubhub in the evenings and would often hit a 7/11 on my way home for smokes. For context, this place was constantly busy with homeless people and bar-hoppers milling about outside, but they had never bothered me.
One night, a young man in mechanics coveralls approached as I was leaving and bummed a cigarette. As he was lighting it, he asked if I could give him a ride to the Walmart about a mile up the road because he was worn out from his long day. I declined, but he kept pushing. I finally told him I wouldn’t give rides to strangers without my husband along, and he backed off.
As I got into my car to leave, I noticed that this dude walked over to a car parked at the next business over, immediately hopped into the passenger seat and turned to talk to someone in the back. I couldn’t clearly see through their tinted windows to count heads, but I think there were at least 2 other people in the car. I high-tailed it out of there and took the long way home. I suspect it was a setup for a carjacking at best.
Always listen to your gut instincts. If something doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t.
Edit: redundancy
