A while back, we wrote about people who had run-ins with killers, and the BuzzFeed Community chimed in with their own terrifying experiences. Here are their horrifying stories.*
*We also used some responses from this Reddit thread.
1.“Several years ago, we had friends over for Christmas dinner: a mom and three daughters. The oldest had just married. Of course, the husband came along. There was something about him I didn’t like — just a feeling I got. He pretty much ignored us all during the whole dinner, instead playing on his phone or playing video games. I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, thinking that maybe he was just shy or neurodivergent. But there was just something that just wasn’t right. In February of the next year, on Valentine’s Day, he tracked down his wife, who had left him because he was abusive. She was staying with friends in a neighboring town. Her friends had an eight-year-old son. The guy broke in, killed the two women, killed the 8-year-old boy, and tried to kill his wife, who was the only survivor.”
“She was stabbed several times — one knicked her heart, but she thankfully survived. He finally was sentenced to life after a deal took the death penalty off the table.”
2.“I had a close call with a serial killer, Leonard Lake. I put a notice on a bulletin board on campus for a room in a house. He called, and I thought it was better to have one roommate than four, so I said yes. I was young and naive. A girlfriend spent the night, and he came into the room at 5 a.m. and photographed us. We were sleeping. One time, I found pictures of myself that he had shared with another dude. Fortunately, my boyfriend of three months visited me and got a creepy vibe from Leonard. He insisted I move out.”
“Ten years later, I was working and got a weird call. Turns out Lake and a friend had tortured and murdered 40 women and children. They filmed this shit. When he was captured, he ate cyanide and died before he could be tried. His buddy escaped to Canada but was eventually returned to the US and got a death sentence. This happened in 1971, and the boyfriend who ‘saved’ me is my husband, and I still love him.”
3.In 1979, … I was driving home at 3:00 a.m., and a Pontiac with a single driver in it started following me. He put a police light on his dashboard and signaled me to pull over. This is around the time of several women going missing and being murdered. I had this feeling that this was the guy. It was before cell phones, of course, so I sped up. He sped up and held up some handcuffs, and I still drove really fast on the freeway, hoping a marked police car would show up, but they didn’t. I kept driving as fast as I could and he finally gave up and flipped me off. A week later, they arrested a guy for the murders of all of the women, and guess who it was? It was the guy who’d followed me — but by the time he’d been arrested, he had killed another woman, and I felt so guilty because I should have called the police and told them.”
4.“I picked up my first and last hitchhiker many years ago. I got a bad vibe. Then he showed me a little plastic doll and told me its name. He wanted me to drop him off not too far away from the freeway exit, but I said something casual like, ‘nah, I really gotta keep moving,’ and dropped him off at a public place, scanning for people nearby and not stopping until we were amongst other people. Before getting out, he asked if I wanted to split a pack of cigarettes. I said, ‘No thanks.’ He lingered, then finally got out of the car. I saw him on the news the next day. He’d murdered someone.”
5.“When I was a young dude, I was hitchhiking in Illinois, from central Illinois to the western suburbs of Chicago. I got picked up by this guy around Joliet. His car was nothing memorable. He had a round, jowly face, a plug-like nose, and a mustache. He was trying to talk me up and offered to buy me a couple of beers at a bar. As a beer-thirsty teen in the seventies, I said yes. We went to a nice, divey bar and had a few Old Styles, which, at that time, you could get in little seven-ounce glasses. He kept buying me beers and then offered to take me back to his house for as much as I wanted. My radar was up at this point, and I thanked him but disengaged. Eventually, I got another ride home, where I was not welcome, but I cast myself down to sleep anyway.”
“This was at a time when there were copies of ‘Have You Seen Me?’ pages taped to the entrance doors of grocery stores. They featured seventies white boys with longish hair — kids like me.
I was eating a TV dinner on a TV tray at my mother’s house when the news came on of this guy getting busted for the torture and murder of teenage boys. They showed his picture on the TV.
I had been picked up by John Wayne Gacy.
I don’t tell anyone this story because I know they won’t believe it. It happened, but I have no proof. I just keep this shit to myself.”
6.“I watch a lot of true crime videos on YouTube, with them typically playing in the background. One featured a girl I went to high school with. I didn’t realize it initially, as I would only glance up at the video occasionally and pick up certain things that were said. They’d said her full name several times, but since she’d always gone by her nickname, it didn’t click until I recognized her last name and initials. She’s currently on trial for murdering her five-year-old daughter and burning her in her fireplace. They found her daughter’s remains in her patio closet. This is the same girl I used to sit at lunch with every day in ninth grade.”
“I still have her number and receive notifications to add her on social media. She’s since pled not guilty, and I’m following her case, but it creeps me out I was close to someone like this.”
7.“I was hanging out with my mom’s cousin once removed (I don’t understand how cousins work). We met that year at the annual family reunion. He lived with his grandma, who was also my mom’s aunt. The reunion was on the family farm, which was still my mom’s aunt’s place. The cousin and I were closer in age to each other than anyone else there. We ran off together, and he let me ride his 4×4 while his dog ran beside us. We got way out into this other field, and suddenly, his demeanor changed.”
“I was young and annoying, so my dumbass being as creeped out as I was, decided the best thing to do would be to talk nonstop. He snapped out of his creepy state and took me back as fast as he could.
On our way home, my mom told me some stories about him. He used to chase her and her sisters around with a sharp knife when he was little, saying he was going to kill them. She told me she didn’t like me hanging out with him. I told her how weird things were when we rode out into the field. I told her he really creeped me out. She told me he was afraid of her, so he would never hurt me because she would kill him.
About a month later, we found out he killed my mom’s aunt.”
8.“I used to shop at Bob’s Bizarre Bazaar in the flea market in KC in the 1980s. I loved the earrings. Bob Berdella sat behind the counter of his shop, and we would chit-chat. That was at the time he was torturing and killing people in his home. Creepy…but I still have a pair of the earrings.”
9.“Recently, I found out my former landlord murdered and dismembered a young girl after a first date. He lived above me for three and a half years. It’s scary to think that could have been me.”
10.“I went to high school with and sat in front of a guy who joined a gang, and the initiation to get in was to rob a house and kill anyone inside. He murdered a mother with a machete and almost her young daughter, who only survived by playing dead.”
—rl19
11.“A friend of my mom’s went on a blind date with a guy who she found really creepy and unnerving — so much so that she said she was going to the bathroom and left the date. It turns out the guy was Michael Sams, who a couple of years later murdered a woman called Julie Dart and subsequently abducted an estate agent in the UK called Stephanie Slater and kept her in a wooden coffin for eight days.”
12.“I went to school with a girl who escaped being a victim of a serial child murderer. She faked an asthma attack, slipped out of her backpack, and ran like hell when he grabbed her. She was the only one to get away from him and the only reason he got caught. My brother and I also used to frequent the movie theater he worked at, and we were the same age as the children he abducted and murdered. I hate thinking that this absolute garbage human might’ve ever eyeballed us.”
13.“I met a woman in grad school and went to her place to drop off a few books. I chatted with her husband for a minute while she was with their baby. He was quiet, but I thought, ‘Typical intellectual.’ Not that uncommon. About a week later, he took the baby to his parents’, then killed his wife and himself. It was incredibly disturbing and sad. I went over the conversation I’d had with him in my mind, trying to find clues.”
“She had been accepted to a PhD program and wanted to take the baby across the country. He didn’t want to go and flipped out. That’s the speculation because nobody really knows why he did it.”
14.“An infamous serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas, tried to get me into his car by pointing a gun at my kid self.”
“He also tried the same shit on my other friend who lived in the area, and she had to escape from him by crawling through bushes and into her bedroom window. … Even when I had my friend’s parents call the police, and I spoke with them, told them the color of the car, the size, and what he looked like, they told me, ‘Next time, get the plate number’ because they ‘had nothing to go by.’ You would think that they would have at least called back or wrote shit down.”
15.“A man tried to block me in with his car and force me into a parking lot. I went to the police after because he threatened to kill me and wouldn’t let me leave the area I was parked. The police did not want to deal with it. Turns out this man beat a woman unconscious, raped her, then stabbed her in the head. She managed to escape from his trailer days later and went to the police. When they searched his property, they found copious amounts of blood in his truck and his trailer. Police found bags of hair, a small box of teeth, knives, saws, guns, handcuffs, leg irons, pornography, computers, and cell phones. His house had no electricity and was gutted with two open areas in the floor where it appeared there had been digging in the dirt foundation.”
“An open crawl space was under the house, and piles of fill dirt were located on the property, along with a burn pit. There were numerous calls about this man to the local police from different women, accusing him of following them, threatening them, and assaulting him. Even after he kidnapped, raped, and stabbed a woman, the police let him go. He only served two months. I fully believe he is a serial killer responsible for at least five murders in my city.”
16.“I lived in a townhouse when I was eight. My cousin and I met this really nice couple walking their dog. They even let us pet him. I can’t remember what we talked about, but I can still picture their warm smiles. At 6 a.m. the next morning, I woke up and looked through the bedroom window. One of our neighbor’s bedroom curtains was wide open, giving me a view of a blood-stained bed, police, and a father just kneeling on the floor, sobbing. Turns out, that night, the couple had a terrible fight. Her boyfriend ended up stabbing her to death. She was an only child. I also saw it on TV and in the newspaper a while later.”
17.“I went to Murray State University in KY back in the 1990s. At a party, I met the infamous ‘Vampire Killer,’ Rod Ferrell. Not long after the party, he and his girlfriend drove to Eustis, FL and killed his girlfriend’s parents, stole their car, etc. He was a pretty creepy dude.”
18.“My good friend was a vet and had a dog brought in by a guy whose soon-to-be ex-wife had been found in pieces recently in garbage bags out on the highway. The story had been in the papers — they’d had an ugly divorce, so he was obviously a suspect, along with his parents, who had apparently loathed the wife. She said being in the small examining room with this guy was the most scared she had ever been. She was a big, strong woman who ran that practice like the military, but she said he just felt so very ‘off.’ It’s been twenty years, but I still remember how shaken she was. And yes, the guy and his parents had killed the wife and chopped her up. Supposedly, it had been the mom’s idea.”
19.“I was walking out of my mechanic’s. I’d dropped my car off for a new tire and was going to get a coffee. There was this guy crouched on the concrete walkway, muttering to himself. I was like, ‘meh, typical for this suburb, I’ll just walk around him’. As I walked around him, he said, ‘Please help me.’ I instinctively turned back, as it seemed he was talking to me. He said, ‘The police are here, and this fucking slut won’t leave me alone.’ He looked up at me and said, ‘Get away from me, you fucking slut!’ And then he lunged at me. Of course, I ran. He went past the coffee shop at a fast walk about ten minutes later. I called the police because he might have done the same thing to someone else who wouldn’t have gotten away so quickly. They didn’t find him. That evening, he was on the news for going home and killing his girlfriend.”
20.“I got on an elevator at UVA’s hospital with my mom, sister, and the hospital ‘people mover’ guy. My mom was a patient and was being moved from the ER to a room, and he was the one assigned to move her. He talked about football and UVA because he saw my Virginia Tech shirt under my jacket. There was something off about him — like he was overly friendly, talking like it was a normal day when our mom was in a lot of pain. All three of us mentioned it once he left her room. Several years later, we saw him on the news in relation to the Hannah Graham disappearance. It was Jesse Matthew.”
21.“My mom … was 15, walking home late at night from a house party in our small town. It isn’t unusual to have empty streets at night where we live; our town is super small. Anyways, some guy was walking on the opposite side of my mother’s street and going in the opposite direction, staring at her. It was quiet. Out of nowhere, he asked her, ‘Where are you going?’ She told him, ‘None of your business, so fuck off!’ He ran towards her, grabbed her, and started dragging her. Out of nowhere, a cop pulled up, grabbed the dude, kicked his ass and took him to jail. The cop knew my mother and told her to go home. It turned out this guy was a serial rapist/murderer and had already nabbed a few girls. This happened in the early ’70s.”
22.“Last summer, when I was 13, a neighbor was going on a camping trip with her daughter (her daughter is in her thirties), and she asked my mom if I could go over to her house to feed her cats and dog. My mom said yes. My neighbor’s husband would be staying behind because he was disabled and just not in good shape. (He’d fallen over a couple of times, and my dad, who’s a big dude, had gone over there to help get him up.)”
“So I went over there to feed the dog, and I saw the husband on the ground in front of the couch (I thought he was sleeping). As I poured the food into the dog bowl, I noticed the dog was barking and licking him and wasn’t moving. I called my mom and told her she needed to get there ASAP because I wasn’t sure if he was alive or not.
She and my dad came because they thought they would just have to help him get back on the couch. I went with the dog to the backyard, and my mom called 911 because my dad couldn’t find a pulse.
… My neighbor was called right after the police got there. SHE DIDN’T SHOW UP UNTIL 24 HOURS LATER. And it’s not like she was very far away; she was camping about two hours north of our neighborhood. Here’s all the evidence that she killed him: I found him only five hours after she left, he had a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate), she didn’t come back until 24 hours later, and she talked about him like she was sick of him, she had told me the day before that he’d had new breathing problems for a month, AND WHO THE HELL LEAVES THEIR DISABLED HUSBAND HOME TO GO CAMPING????”
23.“In the early ’90s, I worked nights in a supermarket in South West Sydney, running the tobacco sales section. A mustached man used to come in who would always give me the creeps. One night, he asked me what time I finished, and I told him I wasn’t sure but that my boyfriend worked in the store as a trolley collector, and we always drove home together. My boyfriend went outside later and found a black camera case in the car park, with no camera inside. When he looked inside, it had some German Deutschmarks stashed in an inner pocket, probably about $50.”
“It went to the lost property section, and when no one claimed it in 30 days, he got it given to him, promptly cashed in the money, and tossed the camera case.
A few years later, serial killer Ivan Milat was arrested, and it emerged that he liked to keep ‘trophies’ of his victims, who included German backpackers. I called the police with the info, but as the camera case had been tossed and the money was long gone, they really weren’t interested.
I sometimes wonder if that bastard dumped the case outside because of what I said and what might have happened if I hadn’t had a safety plan in place for leaving at the end of the night. With that said, what a fucking shitty wreck of a human — I hope he’s burning in hell.”
24.“I had this incredibly scary road rage incident where we were both wrong; I messed up an oncoming merge as they were speeding way over the limit, and he messed up the off-merge that used the same lane. We were both wrong. Most adults would cuss a little or flip each other off and get over it. This car tailed me for 24 miles, with the passenger leaning entirely out of the window, shouting and throwing trash. All I could do was try to fall so far back in traffic and hide behind other cars so that they had to pass me. I ended up going 40 on the freeway just to ditch them. Then, a very similar-looking kid was arrested for shooting an entire family in a road rage incident.”
“I didn’t have a photo or plate number and couldn’t honestly remember the car make, but it was terrifying.”
25.And finally, we’ll end on a longer story: “It was the dead of winter near midnight, and I was struggling to empty a heavy trash can into a dumpster. I lived in a small town where everything shut down at 8 p.m., so seeing people around late at night wasn’t impossible, just a lil’ unusual — especially with the shitty cold weather keeping folks indoors. But not me — I was a janitor for a few different businesses, and since I wasn’t a morning person, I cleaned at night. The dumpster was about thirty feet behind the building, so I had to tread carefully through the icy parking lot to avoid falling. The sidewalk that ran in front of the building was perfectly paved and salted — remember that. So there I was: struggling to heave the garbage in the can, trying not to break my neck slipping on ice, at midnight when the town was dead…when I heard the crunching of footsteps behind me.”
“I turned around and there was a guy coming from around the building heading towards me (he was about 15 feet away when I noticed him). Instantly, I just froze and stared at him. There was nothing back here except me, a dumpster, the hill the dumpster rests up against (that I can’t scale), and a lot of open icy areas. And I had left my pepper spray inside in my bag. All these facts were hitting me hard in the gut.
The guy saw me see him, and he turned, heading back towards the sidewalk, but he seemed low-key pissed.
‘Hey,’ he said.
Me, still processing what reason anyone but me could have to be there that late at night: ‘…’
‘I said hey!’ He said, now even more pissed.
‘Hey,’ I said back because now I was wondering if I was being standoffish to a dude on a walk. But at the same time, my inner alarm bells were screaming because A) he was holding a sturdy-looking pole that could be used as a weapon, B) he walked back to the paved sidewalk to leave — why wasn’t he on the sidewalk in the first place? Why make a random U-shape around a building with a shitty icy parking lot when the sidewalk is safer/better? And C) I realized as he got closer that he was shorter than me. I don’t think he realized how tall I was from a distance. Just innately, I felt as he was walking away that the reason he didn’t do anything was because he realized I might’ve put up more of a fight than he could’ve handled.
I got my ass back inside and locked the doors. I secretly watched him walk away down the sidewalk, and when he was out of sight, I checked out his footpath in the snow. That’s when I saw prints next to one of the windows. Instantly, my gut sank. I think he had noticed the lights on in the building and investigated. He probably watched me clean inside for god knows how long before deciding to follow me to the dumpster.
It really scared me, I can’t lie. Even though nothing had technically happened, I didn’t feel safe cleaning at night anymore, so I started cleaning in the mornings.
This is not the end of the story. It was years later, when I was checking out the local bulletin board when I saw that guy’s fucking face on a wanted/danger poster. He had murdered two older people (not his grandparents; they were strangers), decapitating them but leaving their dogs alive. He had no real motive other than ‘opportunity.’ I think back to running into him next to that dumpster and get really fucking nervous as there was no goddamn way anyone was coming to help. I wonder, if I was a short woman, would I be dead right now?
The final kicker: he hasn’t been caught. That’s right, he’s still on the loose somewhere. I think he’s got friends/family hiding him somewhere — I don’t know how he’s managing to survive otherwise.”
Have you ever encountered a murderer? Let us know in the comments or via this anonymous form.
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.
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