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

A few years ago in my social group I became friends with a woman who was absolutely lovely to me, we got quite close and I began to realise that there was nobody there - she was just mirroring me. I gently distanced a little, I was still friendly to her but she knew somehow that I was no longer on the hook. She went scorched earth on me, made up lies about me and tearfully spread them. I lost a number of friends and she nearly destroyed the whole group. I still see her unfortunately and I know she is waiting for another opportunity to take me down. I make sure I am never alone with her so if she lies about me again, it won't stack up. She is creepy as fuck with a sweet face and a devil's heart.

I think it’s this that we feel. Nothing woo, but picking up a lot of small things about a person. It’s in their facial expressions, body language, voice, smell, the way they approach us and respond to us.

I’m sure some of us pick up these nonverbal cues more than others, just as some people have very sharp eyesight or hearing. Others don’t pick them up very well at all - these are the people who say “aw, he’s just being friendly” while your creep radar is telling you to run. Children often have this sense very strongly, but as adults we are socialised to ignore our feelings in favour of social conventions. When a child says “I don’t like that man” we shouldn’t tell them not to be silly and rude, we should respect what they are feeling.

I’ve had this feeling quite a few times. As a pp said, they give off a vibe of rage and hate, or at a lower level they seem to have something unhealthy going on inside their head.

There’s a man at work who is hardworking, polite and seems generally quite popular, but he makes me very uneasy and I don’t like being near him. I sense suppressed anger and violence in him.

The only time I’ve ever had something similar has been watching Paul on the traitors lately. My goodness he made my skin crawl.

OMG I came on to say this exact thing! I thought I was being unfair as obv he’s been turned into a bit of a cartoon villain as always happens with reality tv and I thought was probably being edited to look extra bad but from his first appearance in the Traitors he made my skin crawl. There’s something about him that gives me seriously bad vibes - a deadness behind the eyes. I’m convinced, given his massively high sense of superiority, that he has a degree of psychopathy. Not saying he’s actually dangerous!

I would be so freaked out. I'm sorry that happened to you.

Yes but you’d be safer with a man who was pretending to be insane to evade his taxes than with a man who was genuinely insane, wouldn’t you?

A pp mentioned it's in people's eyes. Dodgy.

Jimmy Carr
David Walliams

Oh yes, I get creepy vibes from him...

A local bloke who wanted to take me out. When he came to the house my kitten hissed and his fur stood on end. Went out with him for a while but it never felt right. Ended things but was (in my teenage naivety) persuaded to go out with him again. He cheated on me constantly then gave me a black eye. Cunt. I see on SM he is now married with two adult children and I wonder if he’s still beating up women. I’ve never ignored my instincts since x

Bear in mind that most of the 'I met someone and got the creeps and they turned to be a very famous murderer' stories are oft-recycled urban myths.

I was also approached by who I'm now fairly sure was LB at a bus stop when I was 15. I've given my info of this encounter to the police in case it helps any future enquiries. Like your friend, he made my skin crawl.

Yes! The last guy I dated. He seemed sweet but I would inexplicably hide scissors and string when he visited… my gut was sending red alerts. He turned out to be really volatile and would explode out of nowhere. Was weirdly drawn to him at the same time as being scared. Finally ended it but clearly triggered some sort of childhood trauma (or perhaps even past life?!?). I now listen to my gut!

Oh I think children are better at this, much better. You felt this with your uncle, and your family told you to stop making a fuss. This is what happens - adults teach children to ignore their instincts because it’s socially expected that we don’t rock the boat.

I've told this story before on a similar thread . Was about 16 and had a part time job in a shop . Once off the bus had to walk through a slightly dodgy estate . A man used to sit outside his house , bare chested ( it was summer ) and perve at women walking past . I would get a weird feeling walking past the house but no other way to get to work.
One day walking past two policemen were stood in the garden on watch.
It turned out the man had been long term sexually abusing his children and one daughter ( around the same age as me ) had told her boyfriend and he had gone around to the house and stabbed him to death .

I feel that way about Dominic West and not just because he played Fred West (though he was spectacularly good at it). He looks like he'd kill you for sport if he thought he could get away with it. Those dead eyes and bared teeth he-man smile. Boak. Absolutely gives me the creeps.

Someone gave me the heebie jeebies about 25 years ago. We were in the pub when this guy came and sat at our table - perfectly pleasant, friendly and chatty but with a real sense of evil about him. Sounds weird but it was so bad you could almost taste it.

I had DH with me, thankfully, and we left soon after. He had a woman with him, who seemed perfectly OK. I kept checking over my shoulder on the way home just in case.

It felt like a run in with the devil, which I know sounds completely over the top but the feeling was so intense.

Regular encounters don’t make good reading though.
I’ve met plenty of people and just thought eurgh get me away and never seen them again. I wouldn’t bother telling anyone about it. If I’d met a notorious killer, rapist then I’d be more inclined to comment.

Yes a few times. My friend’s ex-husband who turned out to be abusive. Pillar of the community! I found him creepy from the very first time I met him. It’s an instinct built into us and I would never ignore it!

Happened to me once - met a guy in work who gave me the heebie-jeebies for no reason. He was perfectly nice and yet every time I was near him I felt as though I was in danger and I couldn't wait to get away.

Later I was re-watching that BBC Sherlock show and realised that the poor bloke's sin was looking and sounding like Moriarty... As soon as I had that realisation my discomfort around my colleague vanished.

Point being quite often there are subconscious reasons for these "gut feelings".

There are other people who make me uncomfortable for no reason I can really put my finger on, but in all cases that feeling has come on me gradually, rather than being instant as with the poor Moriarty lookalike. There I think it's probably just an accumulation of little behaviours that are slight on their own but enough to put me on edge in combination. And no, none of them have turned out to be abusers or anything like that, just people I don't get on with.

Same but it was my friend being offered a lift.

I haven't had this with any strangers. It's been with people I had to interact with.

My dh worked with someone who made national news for murder. Acreally shockingly horrible one. Dh said he was lovely and it's only on reflection that he had any kind of personality faults. But that only finding out lies from the news.

I also knew a high profile criminal that made national news. She seemed lovely and swore to me on her kids life it was all lies. Then admitted it all a week into the trail when all the evidence was against her.

So on reflection I think if you ever meet a properly evil person they would be working hard to charm everyone around them. Or they really are just normal people that go on to commit horrendously evil crimes for no real reason at all.

Have to agree. Never met the guy but even when I saw him on TV with his programme -Jim'll Fix it!-something about him did not feel right and I was a child at the time. But years later his story comes out and my feelings were right.

@FictionalCharacter I completely agree with you. We, especially women, are taught to "shut up and put up" with a smile on our faces, from an early age. It was in the era of Jimmy Saville etc when children weren't really listened to and you had to be respectful towards all adults, no matter how weird they were, just because they were adults.

So in fact he was the least afraid you should have been of 🤷🏻‍♀️

Not quite scared. But something was... off. Met him this December at a pre-NYE bash.

Everybody seemed to like him. He was very chatty, a bit of an ironic flirt (in the sense that he didn´t mean it), sort of self-depreciating humour. Quite handsome.

But something in me was somehow repulsed for no apparent reason. I was rather tipsy (definitely not in a state of mind to be particularly detail oriented) and there was just this voice inside my head screaming NO. I somehow managed to be reasonably polite but it was surprisingly difficult.

My "instincts" have however missed some quite... massive red flags in the past.

We had the exact same feeling. He was at a party we were at and my dh just couldn't go near him, he said his skin was crawling. I had a definite wariness of him too. Yet the mutual pals who were throwing the party thought he was lovely !

There is someone in my office who makes my skin crawl, and I know he has the same effect on some of my colleagues (male and female) too. Nobody has a single example of anything inappropriate or weird that he's ever done, but lots of us for some reason find him creepy. The poor bloke is almost certainly perfectly harmless but for some reason I can't shake the notion that he must be a massive wrong'un. DP (who works at the same place as me) once said 'I'm convinced that one day I'll see that man on the front page of the papers for his part in setting up a weird new age cult where all the members are convinced the apocalypse is happening next Tuesday'.

The 'gut instinct' thing, where we subconsciously pick up on small cues without realising it that tell us someone is dangerous, is all very well. Sometimes it's absolutely correct. But it has a massive flaw, which is that we also all have unconscious biases and subconscious recollections that we're not even aware of, and these often make us nervous of people for completely the wrong reasons.

For example, people are unconsciously biased in relation to things like race, neurodiversity, age, appearance, religion and all manner of other things - we think we aren't, but we are. And those unconscious biases mean the 'cues' we're picking up without realising it are often completely skewed.

Similarly, we all have associations in our heads that we're not even aware of. Often when we find someone a bit creepy and 'just can't put our finger on what it was, but just had a bad feeling about them' it's actually because they're wearing the same kind of shoes as someone we were scared off as a toddler or something. For every time someone is massively creeped out by someone who turns out to be a murderer, there are 1,000 times that someone is massively creeped out by someone who is perfectly harmless.