As someone who watches a lot of murder shows, I can tell you that most people seem to have some kind of 6th sense when they meet someone they should be running away from – quickly.
I’m not sure how that translates to real life, of course, where there’s drama but not dramatization, but these 18 people have met some pretty scary folks – so let’s see what they have to say!
18. I guess everyone loves dogs.
An extremely notorious gang member. I wondered why bikies had started hanging around the apartments I lived in, then one day I got in the elevator and saw him with the massive dude who was obviously his personal protection that day. Thought to myself, “Isn’t that the dude I’ve seen in the media…?
Oh f*ck, it is.”
We talked about dogs until I got off on my floor. Good guy to talk pets with, but I always checked to make sure no one looked like they were hanging around to do a drive-by shooting before I walked into the building after that.
17. That’ll get your heart going.
A friend of my brother’s, who cornered me in the kitchen in the middle of the night when we were all hanging out at my sister’s place and everyone else was asleep. I was trying to politely sidle around him to get away, but he kept outmaneuvering me.
It was just mildly irritating at first (I was tired and wanted to go to bed) until he finally stood blatantly in the middle of the door and said something to the effect of “god, you’re so uncomfortable, you keep messing with your hair, you can’t even make eye contact with me.”
Irritation turned immediately to fear, because he went from “social idiot who can’t take a hint” to “predator who knows exactly what he’s doing” in a snap. He held that position for just a few seconds, but it felt like hours, until he finally let me go.
I had planned on sleeping on the living room floor (the creep was in the guest bedroom and my brother had passed out on the living room couch), but I was so freaked out went and crawled in bed with my sister. I didn’t sleep that night.
16. Creepy how they can just blend in.
I didn’t want to pop in the thread because of that. Scariest and nicest guy I met was my Dad’s cellie in Tuscon. Named “Red”, 6’8″ about 320 with the requisite red hair and big beard. Confirmed double murderer (his old lady and her boyfriend).
Nicest, kindest guy you could meet!! Very gentle around kids.
15. This is scary as h%ll.
The man who was the dad of one of my childhood friends who molested me, but even worse the wife who put me back to bed during the sleep over. Telling me everything would be ok and not to tell anyone.
You would have never guessed they were these type of people. Total normal church going, hard working business man with a house wife and two kids. They could be anyone’s next door neighbor.
14. Take two steps back.
I met Dan Severn at a small Detroit wrestling show once. I wasn’t really into the wrestling so I wandered over to his table to chat with him. I think I asked one or two questions and he went on for 20-30 minutes. He was incredibly kind to talk to me.
But the stuff he said was terrifying. He described how he could have easily killed everyone in the ring in horrific detail. I don’t know I have ever met someone I was so positive could end my life immediately.
13. Nobody home.
My old boss. I swear he was like, a robot or something. If he wanted to have a meeting with you he would come up to you with a wide grin and say “can we have a little chat in my office? Nothing serious.” His voice would always sound friendly, but there was absolutely nothing behind the eyes, and no actual emotion in his voice, just pretense.
This faux-friendly demeanour would continue throughout the meeting and you could tell that it was covering up for seething anger over whatever tiny fuck up you happened to have made. I hated even seeing him and I was always excited for the two days of my week where he worked on a different site.
12. One day he’s going to do it.
I knew a guy in college who would befriend attractive single women, but only one at a time. He’d then make it his mission to become their “best friend.” While he was with them he’d be super kind and loving, always flirty but never crossing the line, to the point where he seemed to intentionally get them wanting to date him without ever asking them out.
While he was with his guy friends, however, or women he didn’t find attractive, he’d openly talk about his fantasies of torturing and murdering people, particularly women.
On two separate occasions I remember a group of us approaching the woman he was currently hanging out with and asking her to be careful. One just brushed us off and told us we were being ridiculous, but the other actually became furious that we would mischaracterize him like that. I’ll never forget her saying, “We spend all night cuddling and talking. I know him better than anyone and he would never say that!”
Then the next day, there he’d be, joking about how funny it would be to push a woman down the stairs and watch her head split open on the pavement. Eventually he stopped hanging out with us, I assumed because he caught on that we were blowing up his “game.” As far as I know he never actually did harm any of these women, but it was terrifying how he seemed to get off on knowing that he could.
11. Terribly unsettling.
My high school English teacher, I suppose he was the over friendly type of teacher he was friends with all his students on Facebook/Instagram, he would always see your stories , pictures and compliments you , but it always felt as if he was too friendly and too touchy feely.
It finally blew up when lots of female students made an anonymous page sharing tons of screenshots of him texting and sexually harassing them ,some even shared about how he would inappropriately touching them , but they were all to afraid to report him because they thought no one would believe them , he was a very “nice” teacher after all.
I just can’t believe that he was a pedophile , he had a daughter close in age to those that he harassed. It is always make me scared when you find that a person you made frequent contact with is that creepy
10. I honestly have no words.
It was one of my grandfather’s old war buddies who told 9 year old me in great and gruesome details about when he used to sneak into the enemies camp and come back with a bag of fingers
9. Makes you look at it all in a different way.
My high school’s assistant principal was busted for being part of a child porn ring. The news said there were images of children as young as toddlers involved, but he seemed to specialize in adolescent girls. The same age as the kids at the high school where he worked. Thinking that he was probably looking at us with creepy intent, makes me feel so disgusted.
Before he got caught, he had this squeaky clean image. The popular kids liked him. He had helped some religious students start up our school’s chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Most of the students and staff were shocked.
8. Pathological.
I clerked for a criminal trial judge for a year after law school. I’ve met a bunch of murderers and the like, including one who executed a man for reporting his counterfeiting scheme to the police and a woman who killed her child.
Anyway, the scariest person I ever met was at my first attorney job at a firm that specializes in representing home owners associations with debt collection. One associate attorney constantly got excited when he talked about getting judgments against people who didn’t pay their HOA fees and putting liens on their properties, effectively making sure their financial hardships will last for years.
Unlike the murderers I met, He had no soul in his eyes.
7. High five, Dad.
The Santa that would come to my elementary school for years and years was my next door neighbor. Everyone loved him because he looked just like Santa all year round and was a “nice” person.
He molested me and I told my dad and well he wasn’t my neighbor or Santa anymore after that. My dad shoved him down a flight of stairs and he went to the hospital. Never saw him again.
6. You just know you should run.
My wife held the door for a guy that just a few months after this abducted two young girls walking home from school. He butchered one girl at a hog confinement but luckily the other got away.
She said that he had dead black eyes like a shark and every hair on her body stood up and she wanted to get away from this guy asap!
5. That’s quite a story.
Staying at an all inclusive hotel in Sicily, suddenly get our dinner reservation cancelled for reasons out of their control, spoke to reception who gave us cash to eat out.. never experienced anything like it, and were so oblivious.
Fast forward to dinner went down to reception to book a taxi, all staff were nowhere to be seen or avoiding us. Turns out the mafia had called for a wedding party, last minute & that’s it. So many exotic cars, lots of guns, men in suits.
Even more bizarrely they apologised about our dinner reservation & invited us in for drinks, we actually joined the after of an Italian Mafia wedding.
4. That’s not right.
I had a customer with capgrass syndrome. She was convinced that all her relatives were replaced by actors. “It’s just really crazy, they look like them, speak like them, move like them. Ask them something about the childhood and they will know it. It is as if they were your relatives, but they aren’t! It’s all stored in a tiny chip in their arm”.
At that time I wasn’t aware of her condition, I learnt about that syndrome years later.
3. Animal instincts kick in.
I worked in a behavioral management unit in a maximum security prison for a couple years.
It’s a unit that houses borderline personality cases, sociopaths, psychopaths, et cetera. Basically a small unit to house the most disruptive inmates in the DOC. We had an inmate who was in prison for burning down a building with a bunch of people in it due to selling his girlfriend some bad drugs.
He killed at least one of them I don’t remember the particulars. This inmate was usually polite, courteous, hard working, everything you’d want from an inmate.
Hell we’d watch jeopardy most nights and I would be blown away by his ability to answer a massive majority of the answers correctly. Then suddenly he wouldn’t be okay. The most minor perceived slight or minor transgression would change him. He would shut down and become incredibly violent.. and he was so strong. He looked forward to the violence kind of like captured in the Bronson movie. It happened intermittently but when it did he was a force to be reckoned with.
We never had it out, but I was always aware that when I was speaking to him, it wasn’t like I wasn’t having a normal conversation… it was like he had programmed responses that were designed to be exactly what I wanted to hear. Then there are the eyes, you hear the saying often inside the walls “nothing behind the eyes”… he was the only one I ever really felt that. His glare felt dangerous, and I can’t really compare it to anything I’ve ever experienced before or since.
He made it through the program… eventually. The carrot that they dangled was a choice of what prison they would like to transfer to. He choose one that had a particular staff member that crossed him too many times years and years back. He was going there to kill them. He waited years for the opportunity. Luckily he slipped up and someone caught on before he could make it there.
Without a doubt the most dangerous person I have ever meant. There was no doubt in my mind that if he had the opportunity and he felt like he needed to he wouldn’t hesitate to kill me. I am so glad he’ll never see the streets again.
2. Too many zombie movies.
I didn’t know him but when I was in a shopping centre, there was a guy who genuinely looked like a zombie, to describe what he looked like: yellow and black teeth (most already gone) greenish wrinkly skin, weird posture, white hair that was falling out, and a weird smile that terrified me.
I know the guy was probably sick or something but he still terrified me.
1. Something in you knows.
I worked as an EMT for four years (I didn’t quit, now I’m a paramedic).
My partner and I were sent out to an extremely sketchy hotel to pick up a patient for PD. Basically, this guy had been arrested for something was now sweariing up and down that he had chest pain to waste the time of as many people as possible. An ambulance crew had to be dispatched to take him to the hospital in restraints, an officer had to sit with him there until he was cleared etc.
When we arrived, he was crying loudly, sitting on the sidewalk between two cops. I took exactly one look at him and I was terrified. I could feel my heart rate jump and my hands start to shake.
My larger male partner said he’d sit in the back with him. So this guy cries the whole time we put him on the gurney and restrain him (if you’re arrested or a danger to us, you get soft restraints tying your wrists and ankles to the gurney). He sobs loudly, talking about how much his chest hurts and how he didn’t even do anything. My partner at the time, being better than the rest of us, was polite, professional and kind.
The moment the cops were out of sight and he was shut in the back of the ambulance for the ride to the hospital it was like a switch flipped. His face was utterly, perfectly neutral. He stopped making any noise at all. I will never forget the way he looked at my partner. I’ve read a lot of books talking about a “calculating” gaze but I’d never seen one before.
So a couple of weeks later we find out why he was being arrested: He had flung bleach into the eyes of a cashier for “disrespecting him”. She was now permanently blind.
If you’re scared of someone for no reason, you’re probably not scared of them for no reason.
I find all of this just so fascinating – humans are so complicated.
Have you ever met someone terrifying? Tell us about the experience in the comments!
