Did you ever get weird vibes from someone and couldn’t explain why?

[Queequeck]

I probably sound totally insane, but I’m hoping that there are others like me so I don’t feel like a total freak.
I have one colleague in my team direct team who somehow gives me the creeps. He hasn’t done anything specific, or made crude comments, or anything but I just can’t help feeling that something is off. I know that this sounds mad because I can’t even explain why, and this is driving me nuts.
It really got to me today and it made me wonder if there is something wrong with me or if other people get these vibes too and if they ever found out what caused their reactions.
I passively commented on it today to someone and I feel like I’ve made a big mistake because I can’t even explain my reasoning and I should have kept my mouth shut but what’s done is done.

It can be unconscious bias/prejudice. Sometimes people are judged for characteristics they can't help, or because they don't behave in a "normal" way for neurotypicals. Or they might remind you of someone-you can be reminded or another person who looks/sounds like them, and effectively think they're going to be bad if that person was.

I've known an eight year old boy who I am quite sure will end up being convicted of heinous crimes.
He is a psychopath, and it is obvious.

He's the only child I've ever come across who really scares me.

Read The Gift of Fear.

Yes, it’s happened a few times. Interestingly, they all turned out to be sexual offenders of some sort.

One guy applied to be a volunteer with a charity I worked for that served vulnerable children. He would have had direct 1 to 1 contact with the children in our service. I met him twice during the screening process and my body just said, no absolutely not. I managed to convince my supervisor to reject him even though we had nothing concrete other than he gave me a knot in my stomach.

He actually filed a complaint with the head office about us rejecting him and said it was discrimination (I mean, if that’s not a red flag 🙄). I nearly got a disciplinary but my line manager stepped in to support me and made up some song and dance about how he had points on his license and they were very recent and we couldn’t make a call about his safety as the position might require some driving.

6 months later, I was sat there reading the paper and drinking my coffee (this was back when people still read the morning paper 😂) and there he fucking was the perverted little entitled shit! Arrested for grooming a 14 year old after her mum found the messages and the police set up a sting to catch him with an undercover officer. I nearly fell out of my chair. I marched right into work that morning and slapped that right on my manager’s desk. I got a thank you from the head office for making a fuss and an apology that they didn’t initially take my concerns seriously.

It’s happened another time with a guy I went on a date with. He made me so uncomfortable that I made my excuses after 20 minutes and left. Found out he committed a violent rape several months after that and was sent to prison. Another was a partner of someone close to me. It bothered me for years. I couldn’t put my finger on it. There was just something wrong about him. I was so sure of it that every 6 months or so I’d google him to see if anything came up. For years, nothing, but he still just didn’t sit right with me. Finally, one day I hit on some old court records, that led me to do a bit more digging once I had some dates, turns out he was convicted of child sexual abuse.

Clearly, my gut instinct is strong for these sort of pervs. 😳 If something feels off, 100% trust it. Our bodies know even when our minds can’t make sense of it. It’s evolutionary.

Yes i do and have done since childhood , i am very rarely wrong , i think it's a blessing but it's certainly awkward at times.
I work with someone at the moment and from day one i knew they are not to be trusted ,already proven me right, but these types come and go so i don't think it will be too long .
I tend to let these types trip themselves up , they usually do.
I agree with a pp you do have to be careful who you talk too ,it's difficult to understand when someone just cannot see/feel what you can when the vibe is smacking you in the face but i suppose we all have our different strengths and superpowers 😊

When we bought our first house, we had a plumber to come round to fix some pipework. I really didn't like him, he just seemed like a creep but I couldn't say why. DH didn't get it, he thought he was perfectly OK. I decided that we would never use him again. A month later he battered his poor wife to death. I've trusted my gut ever since, but luckily have never felt such bad vibes.

I’ve had a visceral reaction of repulsion and fear upon meeting people twice in my life. Once was a man I met as part of an internship with a criminal lawyer when I was in my early twenties who I felt such a horror of that I was sick after the meeting - he was accused of horrific abuse of his own children so it’s hard to know how much that knowledge affected my reaction to him, of course, but I was astonished by how strong and physical my revulsion was.
the second time was a friend (or friendly acquaintance, really) of my mum’s we ran into when shopping in town. She was with another friend of my mum and the four of us stopped for a coffee. I could hardly bear to sit next to this woman, and I could feel that I was physically shrinking from her. I was trying to shoot my mum urgent looks to say that we had to leave but she was oblivious 😂
To this day I can’t explain it. As far as I know this perfectly ordinary woman had never done anything horrible and she seemed to have no particular dislike for me (though I’m sure she must have thought I was a bit stand offish). It’s been 15 years and my mum’s lost touch with her so I don’t know if anything came out about the woman but I suspect not. Still baffles me how I could respond to someone perfectly fine in a similar way to a person who is so evil.
Luckily it’s never happened again as I don’t know what to think of it now!

I used to work with teenagers who’d been excluded from school. This one boy always made me feel quite nervous. His eyes were empty. Twenty years later and I found out he’s recently gone to jail for multiple offences including attempted murder of his partner.

I've known an eight year old boy who I am quite sure will end up being convicted of heinous crimes.
He is a psychopath, and it is obvious.

He's the only child I've ever come across who really scares me.

Me and dh call it 'dog senses'
Bith if us get bad person vibes. Dh is a huge bloke, can be intimidating looking but soft and a friend to nearly everyone. However if he gets a bad feeling about someone he wont back down. He has never been wrong.

Yes, I was in a restaurant and a man sitting at a table next to me gave me the creeps very very badly. I couldn't explain it or justify it to myself and just thought I was being anxious for no reason. We were sitting quite close but I managed to mentally block out most of his conversation. When he got up to leave he was speaking very aggressively to his partner and when he turned round I saw his eyes and was absolutely repulsed. His eyes were dead like a shark's eyes. It's hard to describe how awful it felt looking at him. My DH said later he'd overheard him talking about his prison sentence. As soon as he left I relaxed and I realised it was him that made me feel so awful, not random overwhelming anxiety.

I read sometime later that the heart gives out an electrical field of around 5 feet that can be perceived by others. I did look it up and there's some research to support this. I don't know how true that is but I do know that some people are more sensitive to 'vibes' or 'the electrical field of the heart ' whatever you want to call it. I can 'zone it out' but generally I'm quite sensitive to other people's vibes. It's one of the reasons I hate public transport, being squashed in with other people. On the plus side I absolutely know lovely, good hearted people when I meet them.

I know that feeling of visceral reaction, I've experienced it twice ,once meeting the new boyfriend of a friend and the second one was a vicar -he was terrifying.
The only way i can describe it is like being pushed as far backwards as you can go with the face of the person and the strength of the bad vibe they give off looming into your face , i know how mad that sounds !
I am fascinated reading about these kinds of experiences, everyone should listen to their gut instincts.

I had an RE teacher who made me uneasy. Can you say first letter of your school? And county? (Can't remember teacher's name).

Totally get this. Do you have ADHD (like every other mumsnetter 🤣) by any chance?

I’ve heard that people with ADHD are often great judges of character because they are adept at picking up on micro-signals that even they consciously aren’t aware of.

I would try to keep having an open mind (definitely don’t say more to your colleagues!) but always keep in the back of that open mind what your gut told you.

T in the Midlands?

Deffo get that vibe from some and for sure it's worth listening to and these people wise to keep at arms length.

Also sometimes I get the measure of people quick despite said person giving little away, I think it's because I have already met this type of person before and can tell how they are going to act in the future. It annoys my other half because after a few months of getting to know said person, my measure turns out to be correct.

Trust our reptilian instincts!
Our gut knows long before our brain does.
Our instincts kept us safe long before we learned to talk ourselves out of what our gut knew all along. Who here has ignored their gut feeling and lived to regret it, I know I have. Now I trust my instincts and intuition and listen to them x

I get this kind of gut feeling, especially as it relates to creepy men in the workplace, and I’m NEVER wrong.

Look for how they interact with female bosses versus male bosses. Tells you literally everything.

OK, not the same one.

Not sure that's good!

No. Never felt this way before about anyone. And I absolutely accept being told that I’m weird.

All the time

When people mask they can come across as inauthentic. This is what people pick up on. Could be autism, could be social anxiety, could be a psychopath. Other signals will give more context. But a lot of autistic people experience being othered by virtue of masking.

Can’t say too much as outing but worked in a big office pre pandemic and one guy was just… nope.

He was “well integrated”, had people to talk to etc… when he left and the card went around: something made me refuse to sign it. As a manager that was a) poor form and b) groundless apart from this Nope-signal.

Not long after he made the national press and was jailed for grooming and abusing underaged girls. The comments they printed that he made to the police showed how twisted and entitled he was

An acquaintance's son gave me the creeps from the first time I met him a few years ago. It later emerged he a child sex abuser

Me too! Love it!