A guy followed me around the grocery store when I was around 20. I didn’t have a car and didn’t want to walk home with a stranger following me, so I just walked around the store for ages.

At one point some guy asked me if I noticed anything strange about the guy following me. I don’t remember what I said. At another point, a friendly stranger started making small talk with me, and asked my name. I was nervous but that’s really common around here and I didn’t know how to leave the conversation.

I saw both guys reporting back to the guy following me.

Don’t know what they wanted. I ended up hiding in the women’s restroom for a few hours.

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I’m guessing the nurse community probably has some outlandish stories to tell here.

I was sitting in my car in the parking lot of the beer store, playing a game on my phone, procrastinating on my mission to buy beer.

I had locked the door from pure paranoia (I’m just a paranoid guy).

A guy on the sidewalk stepped onto the parking lot and walked toward my car. I thought little of it, but I noticed. He got closer and closer, and then he grabbed the handle and tried to open the driver-side door.

It was locked so he casually kept walking like everything was normal.

It was broad daylight. I still have no idea what he would have done if the door had been unlocked. But I was sitting and in the more vulnerable position.

A stranger trying to grab me by the back of my neck as I rode past on my bicycle. He got ahold of my hoodie but didn’t have a good grip. I got away and pedalled like hell.

I was out in the garden when a dude waked by. One of us waved, I don’t remember which, and the other waved back, sort of neighborly one hand up for a second wave. By the time he crosses the bush, he has turned back to cross my (luckily fairly large) yard, walking towards me. I run inside, and lock the door and yell at my SO to come downstairs there was a scary man at the door. SO confronts the man while I hide. Dude makes up a story about how someone yelled at him from our balcony, and he thought it was his friend. SO says he doesn’t believe him, and he better not show his face around here again if he wants to make it home alive.

While I was working downtown one summer, I stopped off in a CVS in the center of the main part of the city to buy some water.

On my way into the store I walked past a homeless black man. He had on a thigh-length coat with a hoodie under it, jeans, and boots that were half laced. The cornea of one eye was milky, presumably damaged at some point and probably blind or nearly so.

I grabbed my water and went to the back of the line, a few feet from that homeless guy. He got a look at me and said with a giant smile “Hi Death_Equity!” like greeting an old friend. I said “Hey man.” hiding how surprised I was and he walked away. I was too caught off guard to find out who he was, I was reeling that he knew my name. I have no idea who he was, but he somehow knew my name. I didn’t have a name tag on, nobody else was in the store with me that could have said my name, I didn’t have a credit card out that he could have read. He either was a voodoo priest who gave his eye for sight beyond sight, or he is someone who knew me and I did not know or recognize him.

When I got back to the truck, I told my coworker about it and was fairly freaked out about this random half-blind homeless guy that knew me by name.

I have spent hours since trying to figure out who that man was to me. I feel horrible knowing that he must have been someone I knew and have forgotten about him as society has. Maybe I went to school with him as a kid? Maybe I met him through work before he was homeless? I wish I knew, but he surprised the fuck out of me.

Getting mugged/pickpocketed and having my phone stolen - I was in a foreign country, didn’t speak the language well and lost a lot of precious pictures that I didn’t have time to backup (Google was being a fucking bitch and prioritizing storing some long videos I’d tried to mark as excluded from backup). It felt violating, especially for how cheap my phone was.

I used to live in Bogota, Colombia for a couple years. The part of the city I lived in apparently just emptied on New Year’s Eve. It was eerie. The only people around were the various sketchy types.

Well, my friends and I stayed in, tripping on acid. We were just lying around, sitting on the stoop smoking, etc. One of my friends got some coke, went to meet up with a friend and go out.

Well, a couple hours after midnight, maybe 1:30 or so, I get a call from said friend. Now, he was on coke and we were on acid, so the vibes between us were way off. I’m not sure if anyone has ever taken acid and hung out or talked to anyone on coke, but I DO NOT recommend it.

Anyway, he calls in a panic because he’s at the bar up the street, he didn’t speak Spanish very well (and I, my friend and the two Colombian women we were with obviously did), so he called saying some guys weren’t letting him leave the bar, telling him they’d kill him when he came downstairs.

He said the bartender even told him he could stay at the bar overnight. Weird. But, he was on coke and didn’t speak the language, so entirely possible it was a huge misunderstanding.

Anyway, the four of us get this call and talk amongst ourselves about how we really didn’t want to get up, but we kinda had to. So we’re walking the few blocks, the four of us and a dog (she was an excellent dog, Kira. She was beautiful and chill but was protective of us when need be.)

We’re kinda strolling, tripping, laughing as we head toward the bar. A cab stops next to us, asking if we want a ride. We stand there for a second, debating whether or not that would make us safer in case we walked into something dangerous…but really didn’t factor in that there were four of us and a dog and we were going to pick up a fifth person. The cabbie was cool as we all, giggly and stupid, laughed liked maniacs trying to squeeze in.

We explain where we’re going, that we’re trying to pick up another person. Whatever, the guy was cool enough, so off we go around the block. As we pull up, a group of people is walking away. One of the people I’m with knew them, they say hi, and we pull up to an otherwise empty street.

After that group of people walks away, this street is deserted. So we get out, assuming everything is good. We ask the cabbie to pull over a little ways away and we might take a ride back. Well, as soon as he pulls off to park, this insane guy comes running up from behind us, shouting in our faces. Making a lot of noise, gesticulating wildly, generally pulling all of our attention to him.

Kira is barking like crazy, she’s pulling at the end of her leash, my friend holding her back as she clearly sees this dude as a threat. My friend holding her just looks at me like, “what are we doing here? This guy is nuts” with a sort of dismissive expression.

But then I see his eyes look past me, so I turn around, and see another guy on the other side of the street. And another two guys coming up the other street. We’re getting surrounded. Where these guys came from I have no clue. They were just like coming o it of the shadows.

And then there’s this super off-putting, really quiet, just…plain evil looking guy that suddenly slides up from behind us. It felt like he just fuckin apparated next to us. Dude made my blood run cold. No joke. I’ve never gotten such a bad feeling from someone before. I really can’t express to you his vibe. In this weird crew, he just seemed like…the killer. There’s no other way to describe it. He just had that aura about him.

That’s when I realized the first guy was serving as a distraction while we got cornered.

We start edging around these guys to the middle of the street, trying to keep them from backing us into the corner we were initially standing by. They keep trying to get in our way, but they couldn’t get too close because, thank god, Kira was going fuckin nuts. I genuinely think she saved our lives, because she was creating a barrier around us that no one could really get past without getting chomped. But, weirdly, neither of these two that were right in our faces even paid her any mind whatsoever. They avoided her, but they never looked down, they just kept looking straight at us.

So I start waving wildly to the cabbie, who is sitting half a block away, watching all of this. I’m making eye contact with him as he surveys the situation from the safety of his car. There are like six of these guys. All converging on us. And he was definitely considering driving away. I’m actually surprised he didn’t. In bogota, there’s not really any feeling of any stranger ever having your back. I truly felt, in all of the multiple scrapes I got myself in, that I was on my own. Even a few of my own friends stepped back and refused to risk their safety when a different dude tried to stab me (story for another time).

After a few moments too long for my liking, he finally makes a move to come pick us up. The one guy is still screaming at us, the silent guy is still just fuckin staring silently with those fuckin Manson lamps, and the rest are just encroaching more and more from every direction.

We fuckin slip back into the car, get away for a second, this cabbie drives us around the block once, and I call my friend to be at the bottom of the stairs when we circled back around. We pile him in on top of us and just…escaped with our fuckin lives.

It was the most bizarre situation that I ever truly felt like I was in serious trouble. It could’ve gone so wrong if Kira and this cabbie behaved any differently.

Oh, and when we got my friend in the cab? It was that initial group of acquaintances that was apparently doing the threatening. Not the seriously dangerous crew we tangled with. So who knows if it was even true in the first place.

A patient came into the ER for chest pain. He was uncomfortable and a bit anxious but otherwise normal. The guy was a military officer and very athletic. I go in to draw his blood and get some background information, we’re chatting as I get my supplies ready, and as I’m putting the needle in his arm he says “you’re from the government.” in a very cold voice. I look up and his face has completely changed. He’s furious and looks like a cornered animal. Before I can ask “what?”, he screams it again and rips the needle out of his arm. He kicked me backward and then stood up while screaming “you’re from the government” repeatedly. I get to my feet and he charges, easily twice my size and probably trained to kill. I run to the far end of the ward, he keeps running after me, and the only thing that saved me was having my paramedic boots on. I managed to get one good kick with the steel toe into his shin and brought him down after which I got him into a restraint position and the doc sedated him. I had never seen psychosis suddenly come on like that from a completely neurotypical presentation. A switch flipped mid-conversation and he was determined to kill me without any ability to perceive pain or limit the strength of his muscles. I broke his leg and he was unaffected, still trying to get up and attack me again.

I was walking home as a young university student from the karaoke bar, not drunk or anything, and I had to climb a small hill which took about 15-20 minutes. This car was idling at the top and sat there the entire time I was walking. I became utterly certain the man in it was waiting to kill me and I became terrified. I reached the top of the hill, and indeed he was waiting for me “to offer me a ride home”, but I think he decided looking at the terror stricken look on my face that I would be a bad victim. I’m pretty sure I narrowly missed getting abducted or something and if I had run or done anything different he’d have tracked me down.

Question, if I answer being kidnapped for half a week in a guestroom, does that make them still a stranger?

Possibly ambiguous answers aside, I’d have to say it’s a long story that concerns what crazy things people do at a ward.

I was sitting in my pickup outside my apartment listening to the radio and some guy just…got in. I asked “can I help you?” and the look on his face when he realized his mistake was priceless. In his defense Lyft had just started in my area and there was only one other vehicle that looked like mine in that part of the city.

Someone tried to mug me when I was walking back to my dorm room.

Backpacking in a conservation area in Colorado, which means fewer people but also fewer rangers than a national park. Passed a guy and he was a little off but whatever and I kept moving, maybe he’d just been on trail for a while or simply didn’t want to interact.

Then I pause for food and he passes me, whistling and seeming to put a lot of effort into not making eye contact. Then he stops and I pass him again. Then he passes me, then before too long he stops so I pass him again. Over and over, I ended up passing him at least six times despite keeping a steady pace. Every time, he is whistling and not looking at me.

When I’m done for the day, I set up and started prepping to sleep. I heard him whistling in the distance. I packed up and walked as fast as I could with minimal light until I finally stopped around 3am. Setup camp with no light. Didn’t sleep a wink listening for anything that sounded like a whistle. I didn’t see him the next day.

So my take on the man or bear thing: bears won’t track a human through the woods for miles and miles.

I’ve also been attacked by a random dude on a bus that probably had some mental health and/or drug issues. That was scary, but the hours + stalking + mental and physical fatigue of the backpacking stalker was far more draining.