Let's Not Meet: A True Horror Podcast - 13x01: Don't Park on the Side of the Road

Episode Date: July 1, 2024

Upcoming LNM Live Tour Dates: 8/10/24 : San Diego, CA @ House of Blues: GET YOUR TICKETS 8/11/24 : Los Angeles, CA @ The Moroccan Lounge: GET YOUR TICKETS 8/18/24: Sacramento, CA @ Harlow’s: GET YOUR TICKETS 9/19/24: Salt Lake City, UT @ Metro Music Hall: GET YOUR TICKETS More Dates to be announced soon! Stories in this episode:  I was Kidnapped at 7 Years Old | 2000sgirl (0:40) Utah is a Strange Place | Egodram (5:40)  Two Guys Tried to Lure Me Into a Dark Alley | Sabbydab (14:54)  Trespassing | grumpyclifbar (18:17)  My Boyfriends Almost Became an Unsolved Mystery | Lailamamii (22:24)  I Was Almost Nabbed | AWholeBeer (26:05)  Don't Park on the Side of the Road | plutoniumhorse (45:43)  Extended Patreon Content:  Mystery 3 am Knocker | Liv  I Know Someone's There | P. Jones  Two Stories | Daniel  Due to periodic changes in ad placement, time stamps are estimates and are not always accurate. Follow: - Twitch - https://twitch.tv/crypticcounty - Website - https://letsnotmeetpodcast.com/ - Patreon - https://patreon.com/letsnotmeetpodcast - Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsnotmeetcast/ Check out the other Cryptic County podcasts like Odd Trails and the Old Time Radiocast at CrypticCountyPodcasts.com or wherever you get your podcasts!    Get access to extended, ad-free episodes of Let's Not Meet: A True Horror Podcast with bonus stories every week at a higher bitrate along with a bunch of other great exclusive material and merch at patreon.com/letsnotmeetpodcast. This podcast would not be possible to continue at this rate without the help of the support of the legendary LNM Patrons. Come join the family! All of the stories you've heard this week were narrated and produced with the permission of their respective authors. Let's Not Meet: A True Horror Podcast is not associated with Reddit or any other message boards online. To submit your story to the show, send it to [e-mail].      

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If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. This podcast contains adult language and content. Listener discretion is advised. If you have a story to share, send it to letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com. Enjoy the show. I'll start by saying I have a terrible biological father. He has been a shady person all of my life and constantly caused me a lot of grief. This story is a shining example of that. When I was four years old, my parents split up.

My mother and I moved out of our home state and they agreed that I would visit my dad during school holidays for a week. One particular time, I had been with him for a few days when I was playing with my cousin at a nearby park. A car pulled up and I recognized the man who was driving as one of my dad's friends. Now I say friends in quotations. He called me over to his car and without thinking, I ran over to him and left my cousin at the park.

He asked me if I could show him where my dad lived and I agreed and got into his car. I gave the man directions and didn't notice at all that he wasn't following them correctly. Looking back, I don't think I really knew the way myself anyhow. Well, after a while, I finally realized that we were getting closer to the city which was far from my dad's house. We pulled up to a house and I didn't recognize it. The man then told me to wait in the car. I did and, as fishy as this was, I didn't feel at all scared for some reason.

He eventually came back out to the car to get me and took me inside. That's when I started to feel unsafe. I remember seeing two topless girls passed out and a much older man who was lingering around them. I made eye contact with this man and he made me sick to my stomach. At this point I had figured out that this was a bad situation for me to be in. Then, a lady took me into a bedroom and brought me a sandwich. The bread was stale, and I wasn't hungry, but

I ate all of it because I felt bad for her. I think I assumed that she got there the same way that I did, unknowingly. She sat in the bedroom with me for a while and told me a lot of things that I didn't understand. When she left, I remember thinking that my dad would be arriving to pick me up soon. I fell asleep waiting for him. I wet the bed that night, and no one came to see me the next day until I cried very loudly and banged on the door. The lady came back and yelled at me for stinking up her bedroom, and I asked about my dad. She said that he was coming that night after he finished work.

She didn't offer me a shower or a bath, so I sat in my soiled clothes all day. After that, everything was a blur. My dad didn't come that night, and I was very terrified. He also didn't come the next night or the night after that. As the days and nights kept rolling by in my head, I felt like I was there for months. I thought that I was missing school and everyone had forgotten about me. In reality, I was there for five days. They let me take one shower.

I don't remember eating much except for these boring sandwiches. And I was given chips and gravy once. Finally, my mom drove across the country to come and get me after not being able to get a hold of me or my dad for so long, and after I missed my flight home, she panicked and came looking for me. And thank God that she did. She found my dad at his girlfriend's house, where he was hiding, and completely methed

out. It turns out he owed a lot of drug money to the people who had taken me. They told him they had me, but he couldn't afford to get me back or maybe didn't want to get me back. Whichever it was, he didn't even bother to try and get me back. My amazing mom paid off his debt for him after borrowing from a lot of people, and she came to get me. I remember when someone came into that room and told me that my mom was there.

I walked out and I could immediately smell her. Seeing her made me feel safe again, and it was the best feeling. She took me home, and I didn't see my dad again for a long time. I'm okay now. I've spoken about this thoroughly in therapy, and I've come to terms with most of the things that I went through as a child. But that doesn't change the fact that this was a very messed up situation for a four-year-old little girl. To my dad's friend, the Sandwich Lady, and even my dad himself, let's not meet.

This is something that happened to my family when I was a little girl back in the mid to late 80s. Our family consists of me, my dad, my mom, and my older sister. My sister and I were formally raised as Catholics from a very early age. I remember going to mass as soon as I could read and write. When my dad retired from the Marine Corps in the late 70s, he took an engineering consulting job with a major defense contracting corporation based out of Salt Lake City. Utah, as it is known in the United States, is basically the central headquarters of the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka Mormons. I apologize in advance to any Mormon listeners if I get terminology wrong or anything like that. I've read some church publications for curiosity sake, but that was a long time ago. My sister and I both went to the same elementary school while both of my parents worked during the day. I was a bit of a shy kid, so I kept to myself,

but I always loved and still love going outside for long periods of time. There was a family living next door to us who had a lot of children, though none of them went to our school. It's my understanding that large families are common among mainstream Mormons, especially in Utah. Our houses were divided by wooden plank fences that had a few gaps here and there. I remember that if I wasn't careful, I'd get some pretty nasty splinters from it.

Sometimes as kids, two boys and a girl my age would climb over our fence to play in our yard with me and my older sister. They never stuck around terribly long despite having a blast with us. A lot of the time, I could hear their mother yell something at them when they came over, which essentially meant that they'd have to go home. I didn't think anything of it at the time, as my mom would often yell for me to come inside as well. So it seemed normal. Every single time they would hop the fence to come over and play, in about an hour, sometimes less,

I would hear a woman shouting for them to come back home immediately. One day, while they were over, my mom brought out a plate of apple slices and cheese as a snack. Sure enough, after we ate, the woman yelled loudly and the kids had to go back home right away. I went back inside not too long afterward and eventually ate dinner with my family later that evening. As we were eating, there was an emphatic banging at the door.

My father got up to see who it was and what was happening. In doing so, he told my mother to keep me and my sister in our seats at the dinner table. It turns out there was a man banging on our door. He was the father of the family next door. The kids were on some kind of restricted diet that we had no idea of knowing about and he was very angry when he learned that we had fed them snacks without consulting him first. I don't remember how the whole conversation went exactly, but I remember hearing my dad, a 6'7 ex-Marine, originally from Brooklyn, saying, fuck, a whole awful lot, followed

by the door being slammed shut. The dude huffed off, and that was the only time I ever actually saw this man. After that night, the kids weren't allowed to come over and play anymore. We would say hi to each other through the gaps in the wooden fence, though. We would talk to each other for as long as we could since they were too afraid of coming into our backyard again. I remember thinking that it was silly since all of this was over apples and cheese. This was especially tough for me to process. At Sunday school, we were taught about Jesus and how he wanted people to share with one

another. We thought that we were just being nice. Even though we couldn't play together, we liked talking with each other through the fence. But same as always, a saggy looking middle aged woman would yell at them to get inside the house if she saw them talking to my sister or me. Sometimes they didn't even say goodbye, they just ran. The fact that they needed to break away from us so quickly was peculiar, but I was too young to understand that something might be up.

When I told my parents about our little fence meetings and how the kids had to run away from us, I think they got worried. Over time, there were more young children among them. I remember seeing them playing outside with a couple of toddlers later on. Eventually, the style of their clothing would change from what you'd expect a young child of the neon decade to be wearing. The boys started wearing button-down shirts and blue jeans

while the girls only wear dresses. I had schoolmates with strict parents, sure, but not that strict. At the time, I thought they must have been super duper grounded for doing something bad, and that's why they couldn't come over anymore. But they continued hanging out at the fence and sure enough, every time it happened, a woman would start yelling at them and they'd have to bolt. I swear it would be a different middle-aged woman yelling at them to come inside every

so often. As this kept happening, it kept upsetting me more and more, so I told my mom how sad I was for these kids. The last time I saw any of those kids next door, it was the girl who was my age. She was waving at me through the gap in the fence, beckoning me to come over to her. She said that her family had moved since they needed more space, and she said that they were all going to a ranch in Arizona and that they probably wouldn't be back. Of course this made me sad, like the whole situation wasn't sad enough already, but being

the good Girl Scout I was, I offered to give her a friendship bracelet that I had made. But she wouldn't take it. She refused to even say why. But as soon as I tried to get her to specify, a look of dread washed over her face. Just then, two older women, one almost gorilla-like in stature, and a thin woman with blonde hair, both wearing pale, quilted-looking house dresses, shouted at her to get inside, right this instant. After that, none of us ever saw who lived in that home next door again.

My parents seemed strangely relieved. About a year later, one day, my mom suddenly took to asking us weird questions about them. She asked if we had ever been over to their house or if they had ever offered to take us to their church services. I was eight or nine by then and I hated going to our own church, so I remember thinking, why would I want to go to another one? My mom's persistence in her questioning was worrying my dad.

And one night, when the questions got particularly annoying, my dad took her aside and said, if they knew anything, don't you think they would have told someone or us by now? They're just little girls, they didn't know. After the last batch of stock market tumbles in 1989, we left Utah for good. It wasn't until the YFZ Ranch raid of 2008 that I remembered this happening. After news articles broke, I called my parents after a few days of reflection. Since they were quite a bit older, they didn't remember everything as clearly as they once

did, so I didn't get much information for them. After I connected the dots, it seemed that our neighbors were very likely members of a fundamentalist sect of Mormon ideology. Yes, I know full well that the mainstream Latter-day Saints Church no longer officially practice polygamy. But after thinking about the situation some more and doing some research on the origins that the mainstream Latter-day Saints Church no longer officially practice polygamy. But after thinking about the situation some more and doing some research on the origins and beliefs,

the odds are very high that their parents were followers of Warren Jeffs. Those poor kids didn't stand a chance in an environment like that. But at that age, they had no way of knowing, neither did we. In 2011, I got an email from my mother who had been casually chatting with some of our old Utah friends, the few relatively sane ones that we had anyway.

She told me that a girl who used to come over and play with us fairly regularly as a child had passed away after she had been running away from her husband for some time. I pressed her for details, but my mom outright refused to tell me, and she won't tell me anything else to this day. So to our neighbors from Salt Lake City, let's never meet again. The fear. Calculating every detail. Heart racing as you move to the front of the line and tap to pay. We understand. When you're in debt, everything looks different. Like the fear of the cost of buying anything.

At Farber Debt Solutions, we can help you see things the way you did before you were in debt. Farber Debt Solutions. Licensed insolvency trustees. Get the truth about debt. This happened when I was a 20-year-old college student. My friend and I were living and working near her college for the summer. A guy that she worked with invited us to a party at his place. The two of us went, along with three other friends. We turned out to be the only females at the party. There were at least twice as many guys there. After drinking and playing a few drinking games, people started to leave.

A large group of guys were invited to another party so they left to go there. Then our three other friends decided to go as well. It was down to the host, my roommate, and two other guys. Instead of sticking around for some reason, possibly because we ran out of alcohol, my roommate and I decided to go to this other party. The host and the other two guys decided to leave with us as well. I had a few drinks, but not enough to seriously impair me yet. My roommate, though, was pretty tipsy. She was walking with her friend from work who hosted the party that fizzled out, to purposely impair me yet. My roommate, though, was pretty tipsy.

She was walking with her friend from work who hosted the party that fizzled out, and the other two guys, who had been talking to me at the party, were walking close to me while talking to me. At one point, my friend and her co-worker were walking far enough from us to be out of earshot. The two guys told me that they knew of a shortcut and tried to get me to follow them down this dark alley. I told them I wasn't interested in the shortcut and I wanted to stick with the group.

They tried to persist for a few minutes, but I was adamant that I not be separated from my roommate. Somehow, we never found the party. The details to get there were a bit fuzzy, so I think they just couldn't find the exact location. It was the mid-90s. Nobody had cell phones to call or text to confirm a location. My roommate told her co-worker that she wanted to walk around and find another party because she wasn't ready to go home yet.

There were always a lot of people out and it wasn't uncommon to run into somebody who would invite you somewhere. I told her I just wanted to go home since I was desperate to get away from those two guys who were urging me to go down an alley with them. My roommate was feeling good, so she wasn't having it. Then the two guys started to whisper to one another. I was able to hear some of what they were saying. One of them said, no, didn't you hear what she said?

They live with four guys. This was true. She and I had four male roommates, which at some point had come up in the conversation earlier. This immediately set off more alarm bells. I continued to argue with my friend, who finally caved when she realized that we weren't going to find another party. So, then the two creepy guys left, and her coworker walked us home.

On the way home, I told them that I wanted to leave because those guys were scaring me, and I told them why. If something like this were to happen now, I wouldn them that I wanted to leave because those guys were scaring me and I told them why. If something like this were to happen now, I wouldn't spare those guys' feelings. I would call them out for being so sketchy in front of everyone and make a scene. ["Skyfall"] Back in 2016, I went on a road trip from Phoenix, Arizona to Estes Park, Colorado to camp with some friends.

I was driving solo and saw pictures of a place called Coal Mine Canyon that was on the Navajo reservation. It looked really neat and secluded, so I penned the location in Apple Maps and headed that way. I exited the highway around Tuba City and I drove about 15 miles to where I had to turn off for the canyon. As I was driving, I thought that it was strange that there weren't any signs but Apple Maps was directing me and it had me turn off the road and onto a one lane dirt road. A mile or so into the road it got to a point where the road descended at about a 10 to

15 percent grade, maybe 150 feet down into a canyon. It wasn't until I got to the bottom that I realized how steep it was. It was very muddy at the bottom, but I continued. Every minute that I drove, I started to realize that I was in the wrong place. I knew that I needed to turn around, but the road was so narrow and had thick desert bushes on either side so it wasn't possible to flip back around. To make matters worse, I didn't have any service, and nobody even knew where I was.

I finally got to the end of the road, which was a point that stood another 200 feet above the valley. This was where I saw this very creepy shack that somebody had built there. There was something about the shack that didn't sit right with me. While it was a nice spot, it was very dilapidated, which gave me a very bad feeling. The scenery was pretty though, so I got out to take some pictures. On my way back to the car I noticed that a person was looking at me through the window slash opening of the shack. The shack was just far enough away that I couldn't see the facial features or expressions,

but I could tell that they were looking at me. So I booked it back to my car, turned around, and headed back. As I was approaching that 10-15% grade, I noticed a big truck at the top just sitting there which made my heart stop. It wasn't there before, when I was on my way down the dirt road. When I got close to the hill, the truck started to drive down towards me, so I knew that that meant I had no way out, as I didn't have enough room to get around the truck, and I couldn't drive into the bushes on the side of the road.

This truck and I slowly made our way closer to each other, as I scanned for places to get off of the road or get out of the way. But there was no such luck. We both stopped when we were about 30 feet away from each other. I noticed that there were three men sitting in the front seat staring at me. I gave them a little wave, but they didn't wave back. At this point, I had no idea what to do. I thought I was about to die.

I assumed I had accidentally driven down their dirt road and was trespassing on their property. I was certain that this person in the shack must have notified them and they were coming to get me. I didn't know if it was 30 seconds or 30 minutes later, but to my surprise, the truck pulled off of the road and into the bushes to let me go around them. I slowly moved past them, and while doing so, I looked at them on my left, and I saw three sets of expressionless eyes looking back at me.

I got to the muddy area at the base of the hill and wasn't sure I'd be able to get enough speed or traction to get through the mud to make it back up the hill and wasn't sure I'd be able to get enough speed or traction to get through the mud to make it back up the hill. So I straightened my tires, slammed down on the gas pedal as hard as I could, and shot up the hill. When I got off of the dirt road, I gunned it into Tuba City and I got out of there as fast as I could. Sometimes I think back on that situation and I get a knot in my stomach. I can't help but wonder what would have happened if they didn't get out of my way.

I'm a 21 year old female. This happened a few months ago when my boyfriend, a 22 year old male, went on a short trip with his friends. The original plan was for them to go to this poker cruise. It was canceled, though. There wasn't a port available for the boat to harbor or something like that. The boat would have gone to Norway,

which wasn't where they were planning on going. So instead, my boyfriend and his four friends decided to drive to the Czech Republic. God knows why. I only found out about this change in plans when they were already on their way. All they did was play poker in different places, one of them being King's Casino. My boyfriend loved that place and it looked beautiful in the photos. When they were on their way back, something terrifying happened.

They were driving back home on the highway in Germany. My boyfriend and two of his friends were in the car. His other two friends were in a different car, and they left to go back home earlier. After quite the drive, they needed to stop and use the bathroom. They waited too long to stop and they were desperate and decided to stop at this abandoned looking place where a lot of truck drivers were stopped. This place immediately gave them the creeps,

but they needed to go so they decided to stop there, which was something they regretted very much. I mean, just picture an abandoned looking place with a bunch of trucks, presumably, with the truck drivers inside sleeping or resting. It was in the middle of the night, and the rest area was surrounded by a dark forest stretching beyond view. It was quite creepy.

So, my boyfriend and his friends arrived there and got out of the car. While walking, one of his friends made the joke about how it was such a quintessential place for a murder to take place. They were still feeling a bit uneasy, but they laughed in an effort to comfort themselves. They quickly found somewhere to go to the bathroom and it wasn't far from their car. But after a minute or so, one of them suddenly said, Someone's coming. My boyfriend and the other friend were obviously freaked out,

but they thought that it was a joke. That is, until they heard footsteps running towards them. The footsteps were approaching fast. Someone was full on sprinting at them. Once they heard that, they all started running for their lives back to the car. They frantically got in and sped out of there as fast as possible. My boyfriend and the friend who wasn't driving were trying to look around as they were making

their getaway. They wanted to see if they could spot who was running at them, but it was too dark, they couldn't see anything or anyone, so they never knew who charged at them that night. This freaked my boyfriend out so much that he couldn't sleep when he got to my place. When he told me the story, it creeped me out as well. I felt as if I went through all of it. Funnily enough, that was also around the time when I watched all of Mr. Balland's videos about people who went to places that they shouldn't have or went

missing. The Missing 411 series. So all I could think about were horrible things that could have happened to him, if they weren't vigilant and didn't get out of there safely. I remember asking him, do you want to become an unsolved mystery? I was just so scared for him. We're grateful about how it turned out, but back then it really freaked us out a lot. I'm currently a 40-year-old female. I went to the University of Buffalo fresh out of high school in the early 2000s.

At that time, the online world was a bit like the Wild West, which included having to do quite a bit more digging to find some specific information. The internet in those days differed from the split-second Google searches of today. As such, it was much easier for colleges and universities to conceal or spin campus crime statistics to make themselves look better for prospective wallets, I mean, students. Case in point, I was at orientation a month or two

before my freshman year, and one of the mass presentations I had to attend was about campus safety. Bright-faced upperclassmen orientation aides enthusiastically boasted about how the North campus was in, at the time, the safest town in the country, Amherst, New York. They shared that the only murder in recent history occurred nine years prior to one unfortunate student who was murdered on the campus' bike path during a lone early morning run. It was a fate that we were assured would be avoided by simply not hitting the bike path alone.

They conveniently didn't reveal that a. the killer hadn't been caught and b. the victim wasn't their only victim. They were a serial rapist and eventually a serial killer who had been active in the area for at least 25 years, specifically in downtown Buffalo and on the secluded bike paths in the Buffalo suburbs. In retrospect, had this information been as readily accessible as it is now, it probably would have kept me from the most bone-chilling encounter I've ever had. Fast forward three years later.

I was a very depressed 20-year-old who was struggling with her own sexual identity and her parents' reaction to it, as it was a much less accepting time than it is now. I had left school to avoid being home and shacked up with the woman who promised me the world. But then she rejected me in favor of her ex-girlfriend on the night that I moved in. She eventually turned out to be a felon who trained the bank accounts of vulnerable, would-be love interests. Though that's a very convoluted story for another time.

So I was unhappy as a young adult. I was desperate for love and a sense of belonging, sometimes to my own detriment. Despite my new roommate's many unkind and hurtful gestures, I stuck with it in the naive hopes that she would eventually come around and fulfill the pie-in-the-sky promises that she made to me. On one particular July night, that hope fell completely flat. I was at Roxy's Green Room, a now-defunct lesbian bar and club that many wayward Buffalo lesbians like myself flocked to at night to feel a much-needed sense of community

while hoping to land a special someone. Since the latter just wasn't happening for me, and since I didn't know yet what kind of person she really was, I stuck with my roommate. She liked to dangle emotional carrots overhead, as she got some kind of sick joy from making me hang onto hope while also hurting me. After a promise to hit Roxy's alone with me and talk about us, she showed up with her ex, turned current girlfriendfriend and shut me out. I was wounded and upset enough to leave at around 1am, well before the 4am last call, that I was still young and spry enough to endure. I left pretty impulsively, which meant I was without a ride home, which was contrary to

my usually wiser self. Under normal circumstances, I was good at securing a ride. While my apartment in Delaware was within walking distance from Roxy's, it was a good half-hour walk. Being as emotionally charged as I was, though, I angrily hoofed it down the main street sidewalk. I was still managing to follow the pedestrian rule of walking against traffic despite ignoring another rule that I knew well from years of watching forensic shows. If you're a woman, never leave a bar alone at night, especially if you're going to be

walking by yourself. I got exactly halfway home when a dark-grain sedan started driving toward me. I didn't think anything of it until a car slowed down near me as I walked. A lone middle-aged man was in the driver's seat. He had dark hair and, most importantly, almost impossibly dark eyes that seemed to hold no light of good intentions. Now, I was used to guys being pigs. I had been catcalled by downtown construction workers,

when an ex-girlfriend and I shared a kiss, and I had received all kinds of wholly unwanted graphic and ham-fisted advances from dudes at school. And although I'd never take the stance that I was asking for it, I was young and thin, dressed in a tight red crop top with the flared-legged black spandex pants. The get-up was meant to turn women's heads, so I wasn't exactly surprised when I caught the

attention of the wrong gender. I paid it very little mind, past being mildly irritated that a guy old enough to be my dad would look at me like that. As I drove off and turned at the next intersection behind me, my walk resumed. I quickly put the guy out of my mind and continued my trek, but the peace didn't last. About two or three minutes later, I saw a familiar green car coming up on me again. This time, the guy's window was down a bit, and he shouted, hey, in a beckoning manner.

He also gestured in a way that made me wonder if he was assuming I was a lady of the night. I ignored him, focusing forward. Then he sped off again and turned off the main street again. At that point, it was clear to me that this guy was casing me like a cat burglar would a house. This was before the time of Uber. It was even the time before the widespread use of cell phones, and there were no cabs

passing by, so I had little hope of getting one. Public transit existed, but it was both sparse and not running nearby. The stretches between intersections on Main Street were long, and I figured I'd probably be spotted again by him anyway since the guy was circling. Being fifteen minutes away from both Roxy's and my home. There was also no way I could get anywhere near either place before that green car came back around again. Meanwhile, quickly thumbing through my mental Rolodex of true crime-inspired safety tips that should have kept me

out of this situation in the first place, I thought that I should find an open business, inform the employees of my situation, and stay put while having him or her call the police. This seemed like a good option, as it would likely result in the guy either talking to the police or giving up. I was coming up to a convenience store on the opposite side of the street where I had bought a pack of cigarettes earlier that night, but as I got closer, the desolate blackness through the windows told me that it was closed.

I looked around for something else, another bar, a gas station, anything. But the street was flanked by shuttered brick buildings and a locked up church. Then came the headlights, and it was the green car again. The guy slowed down as he approached me, but his demeanor had shifted again. He put his palm out, impatiently, as if he were incapable of understanding my lack of complicity. Come on, the guy yelled through the now open window. His face was an equal picture of aggression, intimidation, and frustration. I kept out of arm's reach on the sidewalk and once again ignored him, but

this time I was properly shaken. He angrily punched the gas and was off on his familiar circuit back around me. I knew then that I was in trouble. This guy's behavior was escalating and I was genuinely scared of his next move. Would he grab me off of the sidewalk and pull me into his car? From there, God only knew what I was in for. I scrambled through my memory for another safety tip which made me remember that making myself both impossible to ignore and obviously in distress would get me much

needed attention from an outside party. So I ran into the middle of the main street and started frantically waving my hands over my head and shouting at every car that was coming my way. The first car drove by, then the second car did as well. The terror in me was palpable. As I thought of other stories of city dwellers, I thought of the women who were left to their horrible fates at the hands of monsters while jaded throngs of people who heard the attacks perpetrated on them and their cries for help did nothing, both out of assumption that someone

else would step up and a reluctance to get involved. Would I be the next victim of the bystander effect? Snatched away to an early end due to big city indifference? As I was beginning to lose hope, but still determined to keep trying, and while thinking of my next bold move, a van pulled over that had four men in it. I was relieved. In a game of numbers, a van full of guys was exponentially safer than the single stalker in the green car.

I opted to take the gamble. I frantically told them about the man in the green car who kept circling the block and following me, and begged them for a ride home. The driver asked if I had any money in exchange for the favor. I didn't. Then he asked if I had any cigarettes. Now I may be one of the only people you'll ever meet who actually had her life saved by smokes.

Though I had never been a smoker before, I briefly picked up the filthy habit because New York State bars still allowed smoking indoors, and it was a weird part of Buffalo lesbian bar culture that I emulated to fit in. Yes, I answered urgently. I just bought a pack, and you can have the whole thing if you get me home. Admittedly, I was initially a bit miffed that the driver wanted something in exchange for not letting me get abducted off the street, as well as the implication

that he may not have helped me if I had nothing. Still, I had the marble rose and he had the vehicle, so I felt that the stars had aligned. Regardless of how it went down, I had help. I just needed him to agree and the rest of the details didn't matter. After a second or two of thought, which seemed like an eternity to me, the driver agreed, and one of the dudes in the back opened the side door for me and got out so that I could slide into the seat behind the driver.

As the door to my safe carriage full of impromptu nights shut, and I got buckled in, I looked out the window just in time to see the green car creeping past the van and proving to my saviors that the very disturbing story of what was going on was true. Until my dying day, I will never forget that man's eyes. Feeling safe, surrounded by a closed van full of young, tough looking rescuers, I looked that bastard dead in the eyes. Part of me was rightfully terrified, but another part of me wanted to look right at him defiantly, and

tell him with my eyes, I got away from you and I won. I was repaid with the most evil, hateful look that I've ever seen, let alone had directed at me. His eyes were black, black like a cat's eyes when it sees a bug in the house or its hunting instincts cause its pupils to expand to allow more light in. But at least there's just a hint of playful mischief in a hunting cat's eyes. The set that I was looking at were those of a pure unadulterated predator. The vitriol that practically oozed from them as he glared at me let me know exactly how

he felt about his prey having the audacity to elude him. He drove off into the night, and so did we. I was then driven home in a bit of a less direct route to make sure that we lost him. Then I was delivered home, one pack of cigarettes short but alive and in one piece. The first thing I did when I got through the door was check the locks on absolutely everything. After that, the adrenaline started to wear off and the pure fear set in. I was so terrified that the man in the green sedan was searching the area where I got dropped off that I grabbed the cordless phone and lay completely flat on the living room floor

for hours to keep totally out of sight from any of my apartment windows. As I laid there, I called the Buffalo Police and relayed my terrifying tale in as much detail as I could give them. Being playfully aware of the prevalence of hate crimes against the LGBT community at the time, I told the cops that it was possible that the man was cruising near Roxy's to prey on vulnerable queer women who were out and about. In hindsight, I think the guy just saw who he thought was an easy mark. He saw me out by myself and availed himself of the opportunity to strike.

Fast forward another four years. I moved away from New York to Chicago to live with my then-girlfriend. For about half of my four years there, I was pretty homesick. I had never lived anywhere except for my home state of New York. I went there knowing no one except the woman that I moved there for, who wasn't exactly an empathetic soul which added to my feelings of isolation. I coped by keeping up on upstate New York news so I'd feel less far away. On a chilly mid-January morning in 2007, I was at our computer looking up headlines from my home state when one popped up that immediately snatched my attention.

The bike path rapist has been arrested. By then, I knew the moniker well. The internet had since aged into a somewhat beautifully organized repository of knowledge. Despite the lack of transparency from my alma mater, I became familiar with the Buffalo Area Mystery Man and his active status throughout my time in Buffalo. And now I had a name for the specter responsible for that bit of eeriness that was always in the back of my mind when I was a student. The bike path rapist was revealed as Altemio Sanchez, a middle-aged native

from Puerto Rico, who coached his son's sports team and was affectionately referred to as Uncle Al in his neighborhood. As with many other killers, his disguises were his community involvement and just being ordinary. The man was estimated to have been responsible for nine to 15 sexual assaults around the Buffalo area since 1975. He had confessed to three murders, though, one in 1991, a second in 92, and a third, which had occurred only three and a half months prior to his capture. I don't know if you've ever felt your heart somehow get wedged up into your voice box

while getting dropped into the depths of your stomach simultaneously, but believe me when I say that it's possible, given the right catalyst. For me, that catalyst was the printed proof that the man was active while I lived in Buffalo and frequented Roxy's. More so, I knew that serial killers rarely take breaks as lengthy as the one between 92 and 2006. He had to have at least been attempting to satiate his evil impulses during those fourteen years.

That realization gave me a very bad feeling that I had crossed paths with someone much more dangerous than I realized. The news article didn't have a picture of Sanchez, but this sickening feeling in me prodded me to find one. It was almost as if I knew what I would see before I even looked at him. I searched his name on Yahoo because that was still a respectful means of finding things on the internet in 2007. I was horrified, though not surprised, to see those same black soulless predator eyes that I looked into four times on that summer night in Buffalo in 2003. The timeline fit and my profile as a victim fit, especially if he did, in fact, mistake me for a downtown

sex worker. Barring all else, I knew those eyes. I had a potentially deadly close encounter with Altemio Sanchez, the bike path rapist, aka the bike path killer. My lack of sense put me in this orbit, and a van of angels pulled me out of it. Though many of the assaults fell victim to statutes of limitation, Altemio Sanchez pled guilty to the three murders and he was sentenced to 75 years to life in prison. Sanchez stayed in prison until he committed suicide in 2023 at the age of 65.

Hey everyone, don't forget I'm taking Let's Not Meet on the road this year. Tickets for my next Let's Not Meet Live tour dates are available now. On August 10th, I'll be at the House of Blues in San Diego, California. August 11th at the Moroccan Lounge in Los Angeles, California. August 18th here in Sacramento, California at Harlow's. And on September 19th in Salt Lake City, Utah at the Metro Music Hall. Links to tickets will be in the show notes as well as at letsnotmeetpodcast.com. This is a great opportunity to hear your story in person.

So if you're a local who's able to make it out to the show, make sure you let us know in your story submission so that we can add it to the set list. Write to us at letsnotmeetstories.gmail.com. I'll see you there. This took place about six years ago. I was on a five hour drive and it was already dark. After about three hours of driving, I started to get tired so I bought myself a coffee and

some snacks at a gas station before continuing. But, since coffee and snacks can only keep you awake for so long, I started to feel tired again. I was driving in an area along the road where there was nothing but a thick, dark pinewood forest around me. There was nothing else there. There were no other cars on the road or anything. a thick, dark pinewood forest around me. There was nothing else there. There were no other cars on the road or anything.

There were only insects smashing against my windshield now and then on this empty road. The solitude was making me extremely tired. So tired that at one point I nearly drove off the road since I almost fell asleep. I remember thinking, I have to sleep now. I can't wait for a gas station. I need to stop as soon as I see a place where I can park my car. I'll stop anywhere that's suitable.

I knew I needed to find somewhere to stop and rest fast. When I'm tired, I fall asleep fast. It's uncontrollable. Sometimes if I'm tired enough, I can fall asleep in the middle of a sentence, even when I'm the one talking. I could feel my exhaustion getting to the point that it was a bit urgent for me to find a place. I felt like I was searching for a place to stop for an hour, but honestly, I think it was just five minutes before I spotted this little pocket in the road to stop at.

This space was essentially a parking space for quick stops, so it wasn't really a resting area. But I knew I needed to stop, so I went ahead and stopped there. I rolled down my windows and turned my music down to get a feel for my surroundings. I wanted to check if I could hear any strange noises, but I didn't hear anything. It was completely silent. So I rolled my window back up. I figured nothing bad would happen since I hadn't seen another car for about half an hour. The road was empty, and if anyone stopped to check my car, I assumed that they would be the police checking to see if I was all right.

I left my keys in the ignition and they would be the police checking to see if I was all right. I left my keys in the ignition and locked the doors just to be safe. Then I adjusted my seat a bit to make it more comfortable to sleep in. I also took my shoes off and I put them in the passenger seat. It felt nice to settle in and relax. I closed my eyes and instantly fell asleep. Now I'm not sure why, but something ended up waking me up. When I snapped awake, I couldn't see anything because there was a bright light shining in

my eyes. At first I thought it was a flashlight, but then I realized it was the high beams of another car in my rearview mirror. It was blinding me. I then looked in the rear view mirror to my left and I saw a man walking towards my car. Maybe he wants to help with something, I thought. Should I make it clear to him that I'm in here?

The next thing I knew, he was right beside my left back door. I was contemplating stepping out and asking him what he was doing, but I didn't because this guy proceeded to jerk on the door handle in an attempt to pull my back door open. I was freaking out when I realized that he was trying to force his way into my car. My seat was adjusted for me to lie down and I had pushed it back to the max so I couldn't reach the pedals to drive away until I resituated myself. So I slammed on the car horn which broke the silence with an ear-splitting hunk, which was jarring to begin with, even more jarring in our silent surroundings.

This startled the man, so he jumped away from the car, which gave me the two seconds that I needed to reposition myself to reach the pedals. My seat was still lying flat, so it wasn't supporting my back and I had to kind of pull myself up to the steering wheel. But I didn't care because I needed to get out of there, so I quickly started my car and drove off, kicking up a cloud of smoke from my screeching tires. It was hard to drive without anything holding my upper body up, but I managed. As I was tearing down the road, I looked in the rearview mirror and

I saw that the man was standing there and watching me as I drove away. Then I saw two more guys coming up beside him. I could only see their silhouettes as they were standing in front of their high beams, but I could tell that one of them had something in their hand. Something that looked like a wrench or a crowbar. When I saw that, I punched the gas, and I went way over the speed limit. My whole body was trembling with adrenaline and fear. I drove like that for half an hour before I stopped at a gas station to fix my seat

and put my shoes back on. After I really hashed out all of the timing, I figured out that I had only been asleep for 10 minutes. I was wide awake after this, though. I didn't feel the need to sleep again until I arrived at my destination, which was surrounded by heavy-duty fencing and an alarm system. I told my boss what happened the next day. Then he said that there had been an influx of problems with, what we call in Sweden,

road pirates. They're criminals who hang around desolate areas, they look out for cars who are stopped, or they try to force the vehicles to stop on the road so that they can rob them of everything, including their cars. My boss let me know that this was a relatively frequent occurrence in the specific area that I had stopped in. Please be safe, everyone. Thanks for listening and stick around after the music if you're a patron for your extended ad-free version of this week's episode if you'd like to get access to that, as well

as ad-free versions of all of our episodes and hours and hours of bonus content with stories you won't hear anywhere else, head over to patreon.com forward slash let's not meet podcast to sign up and support the show today. This week you have heard I was kidnapped at four years old by 2000s girl. Utah is a strange place by ego dram. Two guys tried to lure me into a dark alley by Sabby Dab. Trespassing by Grumpy Cliff Bar. My boyfriend almost became an unsolved mystery by Lila Mami.

Almost nabbed by a whole beer. And finally, Don't Park on the Side of the Road by Plutonium Horse. All of the stories you've heard this week were narrated and produced with the permission of their respective authors. Let's Not Meet, a true horror podcast is not associated with Reddit or any other message boards online. Make sure you send your stories in

to letsnotmeetstories at gmail.com to hear them on the show. Finally, make sure to check out the new episodes of my other podcasts at crypticcountypodcasts.com. You'll hear shows like Odd Trails, my true paranormal podcast, the old time radio cast, and my new up and coming show, Cryptic Encounters, premiering in July. We'll see you all next week. Everybody stay safe. This happened about three months ago. For context, I am a university student.