bit woo- but have you ever met anyone you have felt scared of for no reason?

[crochetmonkey74]

I'm fascinated by stories like this- when you meet someone and they don't necessarily do anything - more that you just feel scared- intuition etc

I'm nearly 50 and it's happened once very strongly (was justified I later came to find out) and once not as strongly - so it's not a regular occurrence, but stories like this really interest me

I've posted before about a man who immediately set my spidey senses off when I was with my toddler DD. He clocked her and didn't take his eyes off her and even came over trying to talk to her, completely fixated and ignoring me. There was definitely something very predatory about him.

There was contestant on The Apprentice the other year who gave me the creeps, he had sort of dead eyes and gave me an uneasy feeling like he was the kind of person who could turn. I saw someone comment online that he looked like a man with anger issues, he hadn't shown any sign of it but someone was obviously picking up the same vibes as me.

This past summer I was returning to the tube station after a meal out - it was getting late but but light nights so I wasn't too worried. I clocked a woman pushing a pram on a stoop in front of the house. Her look was oddly aggressive and interested in me. "Come over here and help me with the door," she said, but like she was trying to order me. She didn't look at all like she was struggling - it seemed more like she was waiting for someone? I paused, but immediately felt suspicious somehow. "You open the door and go in first," I replied. "Okay, forget about it," she replied.

V weird interaction - someone genuinely needing help would have been fine with going in first and me just pushing the pram inside. I strongly feel she would have tried to rob me if I went in as she suggested. Also- I didn't actually see any baby in the pram. It was turned away from me but who knows if it was just some sort of weird prop?

I find Ricky Gervais’ and Jimmy Carr’s humour pretty offensive but they don’t give me the creeps especially.

I have noticed that both of them use fake smiles a lot during their acts though. If you make yourself smile, you can consciously make your mouth smile but not the muscles that make your eyes crinkle. That only happens if you are feeling genuine emotion. It’s a kind of “dead-eyed” smile. Maybe that is what people are picking up on?

@Laiste trust your instincts, but hopefully you’ll have put him off. My cousin was involved in a sport as a teenager where the coach turned out to be an abuser who’d been getting away with it for years. My cousin has always said that she believes the reason he never went for her is that he wouldn’t have got past her mother - he groomed the parents first.

Three different ones.
A man I used to come into contact with every couple of months through work. Always jolly, joke for all occasions type. He gave me the creeps. I’d told DP about him, he’d met him through work as well but didn’t see the issue. Turned out this bloke had a serious problem with child porn.

Second was a woman who I met through a group of friends. She got pretty drunk the first time we met and I ended up looking after her. She was very attractive and seemed popular. She was grateful for my help but I couldn’t shake off an uneasy feeling. We met several times over a few months and I still felt the same.
A couple of years later she murdered her partner.

The last time nothing happened but I had a very scary feeling while passing a man in a corridor. I’d been shopping and was on my way back to my car. We passed one another going through a set of doors. The way he looked at me put the fear of god in me. I glanced back and he’d stopped walking and had turned to face me. I went through the next set of doors and down two flights of stairs quicker than I thought possible. He hadn’t followed me but I absolutely knew I was right to run.

I used to work in student support and had regular one-to-one meetings with students in my office. In one occasion a student came in without an appointment (not unusual) and something about him just made me hyper-alert. I manufactured a reason to open the door back up and stayed between him and the door. In all the hundreds of students I'd dealt with this was the one and only time I'd felt that I needed to be on guard. He was very average looking and pleasant but there was just something.

After I'd helped him and he left I went out to the corridor and was surprised to see my manager still in his office as he was due to have left about an hour beforehand. When I asked him why he was still there he just said 'I saw that bloke come into your office and there was just something about him that felt wrong, so I stayed'. I was so glad that he had my back and also was fascinated that we'd both got the same very strong vibe from this student.

Yes there is one man at work that really makes the hair on my arms stand up. I feel real fear when I am in the same area as him. I have been around plenty of creeps and weirdos in my life and can brush it off but this one guy scares me and yet he has done nothing to me.

Go on, tell us his name…

Not necessarily. You can be a dangerous lunatic without being insane.
If someone was a psychopath for example they're not considered insane just due to that.

According to a book I read on the Wests police think there are many more victims whose names will never be known. Imagine if you had a relative who went missing then but you never knew what happened to them? And Rose West is saying nothing.

I hope you reported him. Men like that should be locked up and the keys thrown away.

@gluggle

Very 🤣

It’s not for no reason. Our intuition for danger is very strong and we should trust it.

Wow, that is so scary. Two people thought a man on The Apprentice had anger issues, but didn’t show them. That is pretty spooky. Almost certainly a serial killer.

Erm, opticians you mean? Please explain how they are supposed to examine the back of the eye without getting close enough to look into them. The poster is not describing anything other than a routine eye appointment.

Scary stuff

Yes - at the age of about 3 a man used to come to my Nan’s cafe and try to talk to me - I really didn’t like him. And refused to speak to him.

It was Jimmy Saville. I think everyone thought he was a superstar in those days too.

I wonder with Fred West stories being so consistent, like I've barely left Merseyside in the last 30 years and still here Fred stories from people I've met, but I wonder, just an inkling, but maybe they're actually mostly true because he was always prowling for victims like the filthy bastard predator he was? Or maybe some people he offered and gave lifts to he didn't even attempt to harm so more people than not would have stories of trusting him "not friendly wee Fred" iyswim?
It would make sense, being someone people had stories of trusting him so when he did attack his victims the, "well he didn't put a hatchet in MY skull, he must be great" brigade fought his corner?

Just a wee suggestion but I've heard people in real life have links, although never directly, but someone's cousin/friend/colleagues mums next door neighbour situation

😂

Something about Taylor Swift makes me very uncomfortable.

Well, her habit of writing songs about her exes and washing all the dirty linen in public is an exceedingly uncomfortable one anyway. Reminds me of a female 2020s version of the Beautiful South’s Song for Whoever. Nothing very mysterious about that one.

Mine is an ex-boss (technically not my boss, but still). Despite my always being polite and accommodating to her, I never liked her, and I’m pretty sure she never liked me. She was one of those people who was forever tinkering around the edges of how to do things, convinced she was revolutionising the running of the department, then changing her mind and denying it when her tinkering didn’t work. But that, irritating as it was, wasn’t what made me uncomfortable. It was her oily, insincere manner and slightly fuzzy sense of personal space that made me fairly certain I could never trust a word she said.

No big ‘gotcha’ moment here, but I did get the hell out of that job when I got wind they were going to put me on performance management for mindbogglingly trivial reasons like not putting labels on millimetre-straight.

@clpsmum I'm in a much better place thank you! X

Yeah, they turn the lights off and check the blood vessels at the back of the eye and have to get right next to you. At least they used to, the little machine prior to the eyesight test does it now but it was very normal.

I think the pp was mocking. I mean exactly, a man in a small room breathing whilst performing an eye test is in no way shape or form a reason to call the cops.

No I don't think so. I think people attribute bad vibes if they've crossed paths with someone notorious after the event in most cases. They want to believe they had some control over the situation. If our instincts were so good, there wouldn't be prolific sex offenders, murderers and paedophiles out there for extended periods.

I work just down the road from Houghley Gill where John Taylor operated. @Theyarehere has posted about him. He didn't raise hackles. He seemed normal.

I do think people can make snap judgements about a person and not be wrong. However these threads are always so overheated. There's always so many people who have crossed paths with criminals and just 'knew'.

As it happens, I also know someone who works with the worst offenders in one of the UKs maximum security prison, including delightful people like Steve Wright. He is unequivocal in how normal these offenders seem despite how dangerous they are. He says their most obvious 'tell' is how manipulative they are, not some impending sense of doom that lingers with them.

We want to believe that these people are evil and have a presence because we want to believe that they are different and their differences make them noticeable. It just isn't the case. You only need to look at what goes on during wars, what happens to women and girls during conflicts around the world to know that many, many people are capable of violence and cruelty.

God, some of these posts. I couldn't imagine living with my 'spidey' senses going off because someone looked at me funny.

I reckon it's the smiling charmers we need to be more scared about tbh. Weren't Ted bundy and Dahmer both polite popular chaps?