I was visiting Belgium with my dad a couple of years back. I love arcades, and we were staying in Ostend, so I found one and spent a couple of hours there while my dad watched football in a sports bar around the corner. I was playing pinball when I noticed a guy hanging around near me, not doing anything, just staring off toward some other games. I finished my game and started to leave.
He followed me. I noticed and stopped, pretending to browse the prizes you could win with tickets. He stopped too and pretended to look around. That was all I needed.
I walked straight out of the arcade. He followed, and as soon as we hit the street, another guy leaning against the wall joined him and trailed me from about three meters back. These two were the worst muggers ever. I picked up on them right away.
They probably figured I was local and would walk home, waiting until we got out of the city center to try something. I went around the bend at the end of the road and stepped straight into the sports bar where my dad was. They didn’t follow me in. They just kept walking past.
I breathed a sigh of relief and enjoyed the rest of my evening. Here’s one about my dad. He was a nuclear engineer. That tells you where this story is headed for Ontario Hydro.
He had filed several complaints that the Pickering nuclear power plant wasn’t updating its inspections of the heavy water containment. Nothing was done. My father knew there was going to be a high pressure test scheduled for August. So what does he do?
He schedules his three-week summer vacation to begin at the end of July. On August 2nd, 1992, Pickering had a heavy water leak. I’m watching the evening news, and the president of Ontario Hydro is giving a press conference saying everything is fine. Then, as soon as that press conference is over, my phone rings.
It’s the president of Ontario Hydro asking where my dad is. They need to figure out how to clean up this mess. I said he’s camping way up in the Cape Breton Highlands of Nova Scotia. He asks if my dad brought his cell phone.
I’m looking at the cell phone sitting right there on the kitchen counter. Obviously not. And even if he did bring it, there’s no way the mountains of Nova Scotia had cell coverage in 1992. He tells me to call all my relatives in Nova Scotia to track him down.
I tried. No luck. Big nuclear spill, not his problem. When my dad finally turned up two weeks later, he was all like, not my circus, not my problem.
He knew exactly what was going to happen, and the people who ignored him could deal with it themselves. This happened about twelve or thirteen years ago. I was about ten. My father and I were sitting in our car eating food from a food truck when some drunk men pulled in and parked right in front of us, blocking our way.
After a while, the car behind us honked so they could leave. My dad honked at the car in front of us. They just waved at us and said they weren’t moving. My dad got out and told the car behind us.
There were two young men in that car too. They went and asked the drunk men to move, but the drunks made some vulgar gesture and told them to get lost. One of those young men straight up punched the window and broke it. The drunk men came out to fight, and my dad just picked me up and walked away from the scene.
We watched from a distance when the guy from behind took out a gun and shot one of the drunk men at point blank range. Then he and his friend calmly walked back to their car, backed up, and drove off while everyone else ran away. A few years ago I was talking with a friend, and I asked him about a part of Dublin where he came from, if he ever saw violence there. The area had a terrible reputation and always put me on high alert at night.
His response was, you’re a 27-year-old white man. There should not be a street in the world you’re afraid to walk down. I mistakenly took that advice with me to Rio de Janeiro. While there, I became friendly with some international guys who had insight into underground parties.
I was going to join them at a party in the Santa Romano favela one evening. At the time, the favela was unpacified. I was supposed to take a bus from the bottom to a location at the top of the hill. I didn’t see the bus, so I decided to walk up.
There was lots of shouting, but none of it seemed directed at me until a woman who appeared to be working the street, older, in a tank top, mini skirt, and high heels, began pointing at me and shouting. Then I realized everyone was looking at me. People got out of their bar seats, some to come shout at me, others to enter their homes. Motorcyclists began circling me, shouting in Portuguese like the men and women by the roadside.
I turned around and, without running but walking at a fearful pace, made it far enough back down the hill without any violence. Given the increasing claustrophobia of the incident, I gather if I had stayed on that route, I would have at the very least been forcibly removed from the favela, if not worse. Mine happened about eight years ago. I was getting ready to leave for work and headed down a U-shaped street to reach the main cross street.
At one corner, as I turned left, a truck turning right made the turn incredibly wide and almost sideswiped me. We exchanged a look. Neither of us looked happy. As I turned the second corner, I checked my rearview mirror and saw the truck moving toward me at an increasing pace.
Coming up to a stop sign, he tried to pull up on my left side, but I made the turn. He kept following me, tailgating hard. At the next stop sign, he jumped out of his truck, one hand on his hip, flashing a badge with the other. I clearly remember him yelling, California Highway Patrol, get out of the car.
He was in an unmarked car, wearing civilian clothes, and possibly carrying a firearm. I had no intention of complying. I sped off and called the police department. He ran back to his car and sped toward me, driving recklessly.
For some reason I still don’t know, he suddenly slammed on his brakes, made a U-turn, and drove off in the opposite direction, almost causing an accident. I never knew what his issue was. I’ve never seen him since. When I was in high school, one of my teachers offered extra credit for seeing an artsy film shown in Jack London Square.
We lived in the suburbs about thirty minutes from Oakland, and my best friend and I saw this as a chance for adventure. We were sixteen and I had just gotten my license. It would be the farthest and most city-like place I had ever driven without my parents. This was before smartphones and GPS.
Every car we owned had a Thomas Guide in it. We found the theater and parallel parked on a side street not too far away, no problem. We saw the movie and afterward decided to walk down by the water and smoke, seizing that brief golden moment of teenage freedom. On our way back to the car, we noticed a twitchy individual following us.
At first we thought we were imagining it, but we made a couple of extra turns, crossed the street erratically a few times, and sure enough, this weirdo was still back there. He was out of earshot, so we could at least mumble to each other and figure out what to do. My friend wanted to get the keys out and make a run for the car. I decided that was a bad idea, grabbed her elbow, made a sharp turn, and dragged her into a bar.
The music stopped. Everyone stared at us slack-jawed as two nervous teenage girls stumbled in. It was later than happy hour, but it was a nicer bar, and some of the after-work crowd in ties was still there. Panicking, I asked the bartender where the bathroom was.
We went in, hyperventilated a little, and got up the courage to ask for help. I walked up to the bar and started telling the bartender we were being followed and parked around the corner. Before I could even finish, a bunch of guys jumped up and offered to help. We exited first.
Sure enough, the creepy dude was crouched close to the bar exit, waiting. What he didn’t expect was that when he stood up, he came eye to eye with a bunch of chivalrous men. They asked us if he was the guy. We confirmed, thanked them profusely, and hightailed it to our car.
As we walked away, I heard one of them say, so you think it’s cool to follow young girls? I bet that guy’s night did not end well. I’ve always been grateful I didn’t listen to my friend and sprint to the car. I work as a software developer at a company.
It’s basically a two-man show, me and my boss, who owns the place. I do customer support, write code, and manage the servers, which means I work twelve to fourteen hours a day. Most of our clients are in the US, so my schedule is adjusted. I come in at 11:00 a.
m. and leave as early as 11:00 p. m. or as late as one or two in the morning.
My regular interruptions are basically two: lunch around 3:00 p. m. and dinner around 9:00 or 10:00 p. m.
, which I always eat at a sandwich and coffee shop across the street. One day, no different from the others, I went out for dinner still baffled by a programming issue. With my head down, I crossed the street toward the bank, trying to solve the problem in my head. When I got next to the bank, I looked up.
The bank was literally on fire. A group of people wearing masks held big metal sticks and were pummeling the bank’s window glass, which already had a hole in it. Once there was another hole, a Molotov was thrown inside. Everything was on fire.
I was standing right in front of the bank. The Molotov was thrown by a guy standing five meters from me. I looked at the burger shop across the street, trying to figure out if I could make it there and still eat. I was starving, and my brain wasn’t assessing the situation properly.
In the middle of the road, a masked guy stood in front of a car. The driver, clearly frustrated and probably terrified since his car was next to a burning bank, started moving. The masked guy raised a metal stick and threatened to break his windshield. That’s when it hit me.
I need to get out of here. I slowly stepped back, turned, and crossed the street. Ten or fifteen minutes later, the masked guys were gone, and a fire truck was extinguishing the fire. Fifteen minutes after that, I was eating my gyros.
I was slipped a roofie when I was overseas. I was chatting up a beautiful German girl and having a good time with a small group: two other Americans, this girl, another female friend of hers, and her male friend. The male friend was really cool and assured me they weren’t an item. The group slowly dissipated until it was just me, the girl, and her male friend.
Something made me think, okay, these two are a team, and he’s offering her as bait to rob me or whatever. Then I started feeling really, really out of it. I almost passed out from the drinks. I had the presence of mind to grab my friend, who was about three meters away, and tell him, don’t let these two out of your sight.
Don’t let me out of your sight. Get me out of here safely. I’ve been drugged, and I think I’m about to pass out. They’re up to something.
I was in and out of consciousness as my buddy stopped the German guy and his female friend from pulling the old, we’ll take care of him, don’t worry routine. I paid for all my buddy’s drinks for the rest of the trip. He got me out safe and sound, and I woke up in our hotel with no idea how I got there. In June of 2000, I graduated high school in California.
That weekend I flew to Athens, Greece, to spend a month with my cousins and aunt and uncle, who worked for the State Department. Being eighteen and suddenly legally able to drink, I got very drunk on the flight over and had a few more during the layover in England. When I arrived, my uncle took me straight to the US Embassy to meet my cousin Ian, who was seventeen. Security was tight because the British Ambassador’s attaché had been killed the week before in traffic by terrorists on mopeds.
This was pre-Olympic clean-up Greece, half Balkans, half EU. My cousin and I immediately left because he had tickets to see Rage Against the Machine. This ended up being like their final tour for a long time. I’m eighteen, out of the USA for the first time ever, thrown into a foreign capital, and it’s a blast.
Eight-year-olds wander the streets selling beer. Official vendors at the venue sell Heineken in bottles, bottled water, and handmade sandwiches wrapped in plastic. The venue is on a hilltop, and the stage is set up about eighteen meters in front of seating that looks like the remains of an ancient amphitheater. Great show.
The crowd isn’t nearly as packed as a US show, so we push to the front. Only it’s all US security in a foreign country, so there’s no pulling down crowd surfers and kicking them out. They won’t let anyone over the rail, except one bleeding, crying girl getting crushed. I actually got to crowd surf to the front, got pushed back, then locked my heels on the rail and got pushed up at a 45-degree angle with Zack singing straight at me.
One of the best concerts of my life. Then things turned. Rage made comments about the US government, and the crowd took protesting injustice as a sign to hate America. My cousin and I got out of the pit to take a break.
A few songs later, we were buying fresh beers when the music cut off. The band jumped in their van and got out of there. We wondered what was going on. We saw black smoke coming up from the one entrance to the venue, so we climbed the hill to the chain-link fence to look.
The enclosed area sat at the top of a long winding road, the only way in and out. Right at the entrance was a restaurant. It was on fire. There was a car flipped over and on fire in the street.
I found out later the restaurant was hit with a Molotov cocktail by a terrorist. It was carnage, people running, looked like a war zone, at least to an eighteen-year-old. A huge security guard came up and asked if we were American. We said yes.
He was clearly American too. He told us to get off the hill because he heard on the radio that the cops were about to tear gas the place. We asked where to go. He said get out through the front.
We started making our way through the chaos. As we approached the exit, we noticed a lighter smoke haze. The cops had tear gassed the only exit. We took off our shirts and covered our mouths and noses.
By the time we got to it, it was mostly dispersed. But the crowd was throwing beer bottles at the riot cops, who had shields, batons, and helmets. We got out the gate, went about twenty-three meters, and stopped to find my cousin’s friends. We both kept our shirts off.
I tucked mine into my pants. My cousin rolled his up and was carrying it. Out of nowhere, a riot cop bulldozed him to the ground with his shield and started screaming in Greek. My cousin was confused as hell, no idea why he was about to get beaten.
I had a bizarre moment of clarity, ripped the shirt out of his hand, unrolled it, and showed the cop it wasn’t a weapon. The cop kicked my cousin once and moved on. We found two of my cousin’s friends from school, a guy and a girl. We were talking about the craziness, thinking we were safe.
Then people started screaming and running down the street from the venue, and we heard a loud clacking. I stepped onto a car bumper and looked back. The riot cops had cleared the venue, formed a line, and were marching down the street, beating their shields with batons. An all-out stampede started.
We ran about four hundred meters with a crush of people barreling down on us. The group got separated. I grabbed the girl’s hand and ducked down an alley once we lost sight of my cousin. So, about six hours out of the US: kick-ass show, terrorist attack, tear gas, almost getting beaten by a riot cop, stampede, and now I’m lost in the streets of Athens with a girl I don’t know.
My only link to anything familiar. Luckily, she knew where my cousin would go. We walked several blocks, took a cab to a park not far from my family’s house, got in touch with my cousin through someone else’s cell phone, and refreshed our buzz while waiting for him. One of the most memorable nights of my life.
I stayed barely one step out of serious trouble the whole time. When I was twenty, I had a boyfriend, Paul, thirteen years older than me. It was long-distance, and he had visited me before I decided to spend my summer holidays at his place in France. I lived in Germany, and he was half English.
Over the weeks there, he got more and more aggressive, angry over little stuff. Finally, at his place, he freaked out and shouted insults at me. As he raged, I slowly put on my shoes and put my phone and wallet in my small purse. He had a small apartment, so it wasn’t hard to do undetected.
Plus, he was busy raging. Once I had everything, he was busy throwing chairs. I dashed for the front door. I just got it open, but he was right behind me and tried to slam it shut.
Lucky for me, his downstairs neighbor, a petite French woman, was already waiting on the other side. She put her foot in the door and pulled me out. I barely spoke French, but she let me into her apartment, where I stayed the night after calling my parents. All night I heard him rage right above us.
I couldn’t sleep, but at least I was safe. I’m eternally grateful for that brave French lady. This happened when I was maybe thirteen. There was a beautiful secluded pond behind one of my neighborhood friends’ houses.
My sister, the neighborhood kids, and I used to swim there in the summer. It was surrounded by trees, had a nice dock and a few picnic tables. Our own little paradise. One day we were swimming when a creepy, shirtless, heavily tattooed dude in his mid-twenties showed up.
I didn’t want to go near him, but my sister and a few kids were talking to him, and curiosity got the best of me. He said he was some kind of psychic, into witchcraft and voodoo. We listened until he pulled out a pocketknife, cut off some strands of my sister’s hair, and swallowed them. We got out of there while he stood and laughed like a deranged lunatic.
That night, someone set off fireworks under my window and scared us half to death. Pretty sure it was him. When I was seventeen, my dad was dating a woman. She was very nice.
The sad part was that years earlier she’d had a couple of kids with a complete nutjob, a garden-variety scumbag wife beater. He abused her for years. My dad, being the nicest bloke I’ll ever know, tried to help her escape. The police had been useless, so they filed a restraining order against the guy.
He wasn’t supposed to go anywhere near her or the kids anymore. At least that was the plan. I think it was that same night that my dad, his girlfriend, her eight-year-old, and I were at my house eating pizza. Our elderly housemate was watching the news in the living room.
Our house sits back from the road, and we saw a car with high beams on turn into the driveway. We wondered who it was when he floored it, drove through the garden beds, and smashed right through the front door. The loudest noise I’ve ever heard. He was there to attack my dad and anyone else in his way.
I found myself being chased by this guy with a kitchen knife. I was like a scared animal. I wanted out. When you’re being hunted like that, you go into a hyper-alert state about everything around you.
He never caught me because my dad came out of nowhere and threw himself at the guy. He was stabbed, but he survived. The police chose that moment to arrive. Otherwise I might not have gotten out unharmed either.
I started working as a maintenance manager at a drug and alcohol rehab center. It was ninety percent inpatient, a thirty-day program, maybe longer if needed. From the start, something felt a bit off. A few weeks in, I noticed that the same five to seven people never acknowledged my presence.
Never said hello, goodbye, or anything. It was late summer or early fall, and I was outside a lot with the maintenance team, oblivious to what was happening inside. As the season wound down and our focus shifted indoors, things got weird. New housekeeping materials and cleaning supplies were coming in, and we were looking for places to store mop stations and chemicals.
The facility wasn’t large but was spacious. Forty dorm rooms for four to six people, five large classrooms, six counselor offices, eight staff offices, and the usual common areas. Each classroom had two smaller closets. One of my maintenance guys asked about converting one into a janitor’s closet.
Great idea. We started sorting through the closet and found boxes stacked on boxes stamped cos/hubbardbooks. Interesting. Sounds like L.
Ron Hubbard. I’d heard that guy wrote a lot. The bottom box was open. We saw a book titled The Way to Happiness by L.
Ron Hubbard. My guy said, is this a self-help book? It wasn’t. A few days later, my wife and I watched the HBO documentary Going Clear about Scientology.
That was my awakening. We were lying in bed when the show started. People were talking about life in the church, and all I could think was, oh, that’s weird. They say that at work a lot.
They have a similar system at work. It wasn’t until later when a woman used the word ethics that it hit me like a runaway semi-truck. I work for Scientology. My face went completely deadpan.
My wife looked at me. I had a real breakdown. It all came into focus. The things that seemed off suddenly made sense.
The discipline program was called an ethics cycle. The counseling was done by sitting across from each other and talking through your issues. Intake was processed through evaluation similar to auditing, but without the meter. Energy drinks and medications were frowned upon.
Mental health practices were ignored in favor of Hubbard’s teachings. They constantly made people recite their fears and weaknesses. I looked at my wife and said, I can’t do this. I have to get out.
I work for Scientology. I walked in the next day, conveniently payday, and without saying a word, left my keys, badge, and access card on my desk and never came back. Met a guy online when I was around twenty-two. He was thirty-five.
He flew out to see me twice. Things were cool, and we started long-distance dating. He was weird, intense, but super sweet and seemed harmless. After maybe a month, I flew to Utah from the East Coast to spend a week with him during my summer break.
That time made me realize some of his quirks were more unsettling than I initially thought. I was counting the days till my flight home. One day I pissed him off and he flipped. A total over-the-top reaction that exposed his instability.
I didn’t feel safe, so I grabbed my phone and went outside. I was at a point in my life when I would have done anything before asking my parents for help, but I’m not ashamed to say I called them, bawling in the parking lot of his apartment, and asked what to do. I had two days left before my flight, couldn’t afford to change my ticket, was halfway across the country, and was fully convinced I’d be a statistic if I stayed. His personality had done a 180.
It was scary as hell. After the necessary lecture, my dad booked me a hotel room by the airport until my return trip, called a local taxi to come get me, and didn’t give me too much grief when I got home. In retrospect, I don’t think he would have actually hurt me, but the sudden realization of how completely vulnerable I was terrified me.