Ever had a bad feeling about someone who everyone liked? These people had those same feelings and those feelings turned out to be right. Content has been edited for clarity.
Uncle’s Boyfriend
“About half a year ago, I received an invitation from my uncle to go to the west coast. He offered me a job at his small business and a trailer to live in on his property. I’d be charged a reasonable rate and be allowed to live out my dream of moving west.
I took the offer and moved out there just over three months ago. Things went well for about a month and a half.
To explain the backstory, my uncle has been in a three-year relationship with a guy I’ll refer to as ‘Bob’. According to most, he’s good-looking, but personally, I find him unattractive and creepy. He takes duck-face selfies and hangs out with teen girls, despite pushing 40.
I digress. They’d been fighting a lot and my uncle didn’t want me to see it. So he made Bob move out while they puzzled through their problems.
I saw Bob off and on during this time. I got a really bad feeling about him but shoved it aside and gave him the benefit of the doubt. My family and coworkers said nice things about him, so I figured I was the problem. I even shared some personal things with him in the hopes of bonding.
I should have listened to my gut.
Bob started to act crazy. He came by one day while my uncle was out and I was distracted in the barn with my weights. He utterly destroyed the garden. My uncle responded by changing the locks. Bob responded by physically removing the locks, leaving big holes in the doors.
This was when I realized how unhinged the guy was. I no longer felt safe. I tried to encourage my uncle to call the authorities, but he didn’t. A grave mistake…
We were both caught off guard when Bob came back one day and tried to forcibly re-enter the house. My uncle attempted to make him leave and they scuffled. Bob slashed up his arms with his nails. My uncle bit him in return.
Bob ran away and called the police. And whoever calls the police first wins. They took his side and removed my uncle from his own property. I feel I should add that a large portion of his business depends on the work he does on this property, utilizing tools that can’t be easily moved. The cops didn’t care.
Bob came to me in my trailer and tried to get me on his side. He told a story about how my uncle was an addict. Apparently, this was all a part of Bob’s plan to make him seek help (somehow). He justified his earlier vandalism by saying it was ‘his’ garden too—a total load of bull. My uncle constructed and planted the garden entirely by himself during the time Bob was gone. I worked more in the garden than he did.
The amount he’s contributed to the house and its restoration is minimal at best. My uncle bought and renovated the place almost single-handedly, though they were together at the time, so common law dictates it’s Bob’s as well.
Bob didn’t drive before meeting my uncle—who helped teach him. My uncle bought him a car and helped him set up insurance. My uncle paid his phone bills. My uncle paid for his tuition so he could pursue a career in health care.
What I’m getting at is that everything Bob has is thanks to the blood and sweat of my uncle. And his intent was to steal it out of a sense of entitlement—one the law unfortunately backs.
The amount of disgust I felt for this sorry excuse of a man was inconceivable. But I needed to live there—my uncle was still the legal landlord, despite being barred—so I nodded along with Bob’s BS. And it worked for a week.
This is where I did something stupid. When Bob was out for a weekend, I went into the house to use the laundry. While in there, I noticed he’d taken down a portrait of my dead grandmother and put it in a pile of trash.
So I took the portrait and the keys to my workplace.
Bob didn’t like that. Apparently, he had a hidden camera watching me. It also picked up audio of a phone call with a friend, in which I said ‘mean things’ about Bob.
He knocked on my trailer, trying to force his way in when I took more than five seconds to answer. Thankfully I always locked it, even when inside. He told me I had 24 hours to leave.
Even if he was the landlord, he wouldn’t have that ability. But did I really want to take the chance with someone willing to lie to the police? Additionally, my tenancy agreement was mostly verbal. I knew I was in peril.
I made several useless calls to the police, who told me to talk to the landlord-tenant relations people, who told me they couldn’t do anything. My manager rescued me and helped me take my essentials to my grandparents’ beach house 40 minutes away.
I came back the next day with my uncle’s scary ex-bouncer friend to get most of the remainder. Bob sashayed over and tried to threaten me with trespassing, but backed away when he saw I wasn’t alone. I got the rest of my stuff and left.
I spent most of the following weeks in depression. I didn’t think I had a way out. I’d used most of my savings to drive out west and already transferred over a lot of my documentation. All of my plans depended on the deal with my uncle—and he was unlikely to get the property back for months because of how slow the courts were. I couldn’t see any options.
Bob was making things unpleasant beyond the illegal eviction. He was going online and crying victim about how he was the victim. Whenever someone called him out for stealing a hard-working man’s house—a man who’d paid for his tuition, cellular plan, car, etc—he would call the offender an enabler.
He was also refusing to hand over my uncle’s tools and stored merchandise belonging to the shop. A court order was needed to force the issue.
He was also getting creepy. Despite filing a restraining order against my uncle and telling everyone how utterly terrifying he was, Bob would walk his dog past my uncle’s shop. He did this once while I was working and just stared at me. I tried to ignore him to focus on my customers, but I didn’t feel safe, so I went back home to my parent.
I’m safe now and settling into my old—yet new—life. The issue is ongoing. I’m sorry I don’t have a happy ending to give you. My uncle has already decided to sell the property and cut his losses. He wasted three years of his life on a narcissistic sociopath who stole his house and libeled his name.
I will never forgive him.”
Brother’s Girlfriend
“A couple of years ago, my older brother started dating this lady, ‘Emilie’ and almost immediately I had a bad feeling about her. After meeting her, I got a feeling she didn’t seem like a genuine person, and unfortunately, I was right.
This month has been more obvious that my brother was no longer himself. He seemed more on edge because Emilie was on his case about the amount of effort he was putting in to see her and her 3-year-old child from a previous relationship. And when he does put in the effort, she still gets mad.
One time when she had a seizure, she got annoyed at him for going to see her with flowers, a book, some movies, a card, and some ice cream. She said she ‘just wanted to rest’ which is fair, but come on!? It seemed like he can never do anything right.
Recently, he moved into his friend’s place to help with bills, and Emilie got annoyed because he would live a further 5 minutes away from her. But when he and I lived together, she never came over here to visit our home, he always went to hers, so not sure why she thinks that would change.
This Friday was his birthday, and he went out with Emilie and his roommates. The next day, he called me. I could tell he had been crying.
Turns out that Emilie’s ex, who was the baby daddy, had turned up on his birthday and ended up looking after the child.
My brother was annoyed at first, but since he was there for the child, he let it go. But then Emilie went on and on all night about how good of a dad her ex was and talked about how much time he spent with the child. The more she chatted, the more she revealed things. Apparently, the day my brother went over to check on her after her seizure, she said her ex was there. Hence why she forced my brother out of her house.
It was clear something was going on between them two, but my brother just wanted to enjoy his birthday and figured they would talk later. Welp, the next morning, Emilie broke up with him.
She outed herself saying she had been cheating on him with her ex, and used her child as a cover-up for the many times he tried to visit her. And the ex was actually staying with her for a couple of days.”
Next Door Neighbor
“I once used to live in a small block of studio flats and my kitchen and bathroom windows faced the balcony walkway that all residents walked down, so I would see the two guys that lived in the two flats that were beyond mine. I never spoke to either of them but one of them, just from seeing him walking past my window, I got dark and sinister vibes from him. He didn’t even look in or anything. There was just something uncanny about him.
He lived at the end of the row so nobody walked past his windows and he had a chair outside so he could sit there. I used to go to the supermarket on Fridays and come back with bags and in the summer he would be seated outside his flat always when I got back. It’s silly but I felt scared and like I had to open the door and get in as quickly as possible. It got to the point where I used to stop further down the street and get my keys out and ready so there would be no fumbling to find them at the door when I got home because I felt like I was exposed and unsafe. And I’d never spoken to him and I don’t think I had ever even passed him on the stairs or on the corridor and I didn’t know his name. I used to refer to him as my creepy neighbor to my friend.
Then, at some point, there were several incidents. I can honestly write an essay on the horror of it all, but suffice it to say, in the first incident, late in the evening during thunder and lightning, I realized there was a hooded figure crouched outside my front door (which was top half swirly glass bottom half wood) watching me through the glass/my letterbox. I had noticed a shadow/shape and had spent quite some time with my nose pressed to the glass, trying to figure out what was outside my door (and only didn’t open my door because the outside light wasn’t working) thinking it was something innocuous when I realized it was a person. I didn’t know who it was.
I taped bin bags all over the glass and letterbox after that. A month later I was in the shower early one morning and heard a noise of something falling off the window sill. Thought it might be a bottle of something leaking all over the floor, so I pulled the shower curtain back and put on a towel to check, and guess whose entire body filled the outside window and had his arm through trying to take it off the latch? Yes, my neighbor. I have never been so frightened.
Eventually, he gave up and pretended to leave but because it was a sunny day and the sun was behind him, I could see from his shadow that he was actually just standing to the side of the window, out of view. I didn’t move for a long time, and he went away. After my family contacted the police, they gave him a warning and we got the landlord to terminate his rental agreement—the police had had to go see the landlord to find out who he was—so they knew something was up and it was a rental that could be terminated with a month’s notice. Oh, and it turns out that he had a girlfriend (who didn’t live with him). It unsettles me to think that you could be so close to someone yet know close to nothing about their true nature.”
