Presence of evil

[beachcitygirl]

Aibu to ask if you've ever felt yourself in the presence of evil. Following on from
The intuitiion thread.

I once met a friend of my ex in a coffee shop. The man was nothing but civil & friendly. Soft spoken & was an ex police officer. My then husband was there also.
I went to the loo & spent ages as something about him made me feel afraid. I stress it was just a feeling. Zero untoward behaviour.
Many years later he was arrested & found guilty of violent rape.

Has anyone else ever sensed evil? (For want of a better word)

Absolutely! He was quite upset - luckily the shop owner stuck up for him otherwise he could have got into trouble for upsetting her.

I've had weird feelings about both people and places but have never had anything to confirm they were anything other than random heebie-jeebies, so l'm going wih confirmation bias rather than ESP ...

Walking by the river heavily pregnant and with a 1 year old in a buggy talking to a friend. Through the corner of my eye i could see a man and i didn't feel safe. We upped our walking pace as fast as i could go with my huge belly. He followed. As he gor closer he was all beaten up and bloody and suddenly tried to snatch my baby. I kept turning the buggy and shouting. He said he wanted my babies. Luckily two ladies came along and we happened to spot a police office who took him to one side but said he couldn't arrest him but would hold him long enough for us to get away. Weeks later i read in the news he had raped and murdered.

@Kanaloa never have I seen such projecting you're the one who decided you can't discuss this with me because I'm not all "yes, yes you're so right about everything you believe to be true despite lack of evidence".

Sorry, my last post was @Staffy1

I'm not sure about evil, and no disrespect, but those who were unsettled at auchswitz and similar places, what did you expect? Mardi Gra?

In my career I have been to hundreds, if not a thousand or so peoples homes. There was only once where I met someone and felt a sense of fear/dread that I couldn’t explain. I’ve met a few odd balls and people who have made me feel unsafe, but they are obviously people who are threatening - I’ve done the Suzie Lamplugh Trust courses, I just leave quickly - but only once where the man was almost “evil”. I should have gone back and asked his wife if she was ok. I still think about her 10 years later.

I’m a bit sceptical of some of these feelings people have where they just knew someone was a wrong’un. There are two high profile cases I can think of where two innocent people had their names raked through the mud by the press and people were coming out of the woodwork to say how they had always found them weird and creepy. I hope they felt a bit of remorse when they were found to be innocent.

If you say so. Unfortunately I don’t think we’ll be able to agree to we’ll need to agree to disagree since we have extremely different ideas about this and I think you’re sort of trying to goad me/imply that I’m stupid or immature for not understanding when in fact I’m simply disagreeing.

@Grendalsmum

Absolutely! He was quite upset - luckily the shop owner stuck up for him otherwise he could have got into trouble for upsetting her.

I've had weird feelings about both people and places but have never had anything to confirm they were anything other than random heebie-jeebies, so l'm going wih confirmation bias rather than ESP ...

That’s awful that he could have been in trouble because of someone’s irrational feelings.

I just want to share a good piece of advice that is really basic, and yet I naively didn't grasp this common sense warning in my twenties when I was in graduate school in Los Angeles.

Recently a woman in the USA shared on social media one of the safety lessons her father, a secret service agent taught her. Her father told her to be very, very wary of a man approaching you for help. Men don't ask women for help if they actually need it, they ask other men. So be suspicious if a men targets you when you're alone to ask for help with something.

I know that's a bit of a stereotype and I'm sure there are many genuine instances of men really needing help and asking a passing women. However, stereotypes can also be true. It struck a chord because I had this exact experience years ago. Walking home at 10pm on a dark night a few streets away from my home there was a man looking like he was trying to fix the engine in his car. He called to me and asked me if I could help hold up the hood of his car and despite misgivings I did while he chatted away to me, very friendly. A minute later he asked me if I could sit in the driver's seat and turn the ignition on while he was doing something with the engine. At that point my growing unease and common sense kicked in hard and I said "actually I can't help you but my boyfriend lives on this street so I'll get him right now and practically sprinted to my apartment. After reaching my apartment, my roommate, her boyfriend and me crept back down the street to see if the man was still there. Completely vanished and this was barely 60 seconds after I'd ran away from his "broken down" car. No idea if this was a bad man but as I belatedly realised, a decent man wouldn't ask a woman on her own at night to come help him fix his car.

@woowoowoo100

I met an evil multiple rapist ( 4 rapes of different women in 6 days ) after he had been released from prison. I knew nothing of his past but he gave me a bad feeling. He subsequently said to my husband ( who had no idea of his past either )" Your wife doesn't like me."

I found out about his past and the trouble he has caused his neighbours - he moves frequently. Sadly he is still in the area. Gives me the chills when I see him.

Fuck. Men like that are too dangerous to let out into community. What were they thinking??? I feel bad for you @woowoowoo100

When my child started at school, there was a mum in our group who seemed nice. Didn't like her husband but could never identify anything more than he didn't seem to treat his wife with much respect in public.

Turns out he's a prolific child abuser now serving a long sentence.

The man who was suspected for a short time of the murder of Joanna Yates, Christopher Jefferies. The press presented him as a weirdo, loads of people had 'a feeling' about him. And the poor man was entirely innocent, and from the documentary, rather a nice man.

We have a young adult in the greater family unit and when she was a baby, her grand stepmother (from mixed culture gene pool) said that baby had been born with evil in her, and that ''you can see it in her eyes''.

I thought it was the GSM being her usual mean self, but down the track, I had a run-in with the toddler child and I have never experienced a child (one who had been raised with good parenting and life rules) be so completely blank and shut down when I asked her what she was doing near a spot in our house where she should never have been.

She wasn't asked rudely or the like, just wouldn't answer nor go downstairs to where the majority of the family were and turned her back on me until her mother turned up.

We no longer live close by, and for that I'm very pleased as I started not to ''take to her'' after a while. One of our adult DC's swears she tried to drown them when they were about 8 in the backyard pool!

As she has got older, she has attempted suicide several times and is under long-term treatment by (one of many) specialists. She has had some really exploratory stuff done to her (at her request) but she still has this other ''thing'' going on. She can be very manipulative to her parents and generally speaking, is ok on medication but then will have some sort of personality/thinking spike and off she will go,

I cannot put into words exactly what it is about her, but something isn't right and the specialists, and she has seen a few, haven't been able to offer up any sort of solution at all.

Her parents are really decent people too, it's really worn them down with Mum not being too well. Limited biological family left on either side.

I think that some people have a heightened spidey sense, and some of this is probably based on whether they have met someone "evil" like this before, and can therefore read the micro signals.

An example is a very charming dark triad person I work with. Narcissist and psychopath.

When he first meets people he is very very charming and "love bombs" them. Some people are taken in. Some people immediately see through it and I can see them not warming to him, and backing away.

I think this person is "evil" and some people can sense it, others clearly not.

One micro signal is that although he is love bombing, asking you questions about yourself, seems utterly charming and really interested in you, his eyes are cold, and the smile doesn't reach the eyes.

I had a few cleaning jobs when the kids were small. In one house i had to let myself in early in the morning around 6-6.30 am and clean downstairs while the owner was asleep upstairs. It was a very old house just outside the grounds of an even older castle. It literally made me feel sick with fear walking in there, i had a feeling i was being watched constantly. Its giving me goosebumps just thinking about it as I type this, I only managed to stick the job for 3 days before I refused to go in there anymore.

Yes, we were staying at DDs when she was at Uni. We went into a pub for a couple of drinks and a meal because she was going out to perform at a party. We went into the pub and as the bar was small and busy DH told me to wait where we were while he went to the bar and ask for a table in the upstairs restaurant.
I was waiting when some guys came in and stopped right near me I looked at them and I had this coldness from one. OP I know what you mean you can’t quite explain the feeling but it is there and very strong. His eyes were very dark and staring. It was just the one guy the others didn’t bother me. They were speaking to him in another language which I thought might be Dutch( have been there for a week and the boys had two Dutch Nursery teachers) he didn’t say much but I he looked at me and I just had to move. I just couldn’t be near him. I told DH why I had moved and it wasn’t long before we could go up and I felt relieved.

A few weeks later he was arrested for murdering a young girl before Christmas. They had just found her. Strangely DD, DP and some of his family were out walking the dogs and turned back because two were cold. If they had walked another 250 yards the dogs might have found her a day earlier. She was in the snow. Poor girl.
His expression made sense to me then. I have never felt such a powerful emotion of dread.

@SammyScrounge

The man who was suspected for a short time of the murder of Joanna Yates, Christopher Jefferies. The press presented him as a weirdo, loads of people had 'a feeling' about him. And the poor man was entirely innocent, and from the documentary, rather a nice man.

This always gets trotted out. Thinking someone is a "weirdo" is not what is being talked about on this thread. What people are sensing are micro-expressions and non-verbal signals. I watched a TV series with a friend who is a psychologist about people in prison for life for murders who said they were innocent. My friend was pointing out all the clues that certain people were lying. Lots of subtle non-verbal clues, but once she pointed them out they were obvious. Some people are very good at spotting this kind of thing.

Yes, I have posted this before but it’s the one and only thing in my life that I have experienced and not rationalised (as I usually do). A taxi driver who did nothing odd and said nothing odd, but drove and occasionally glanced at me in the rear view mirror. I was terrified of him. Felt like I’d throw up from fear. And I couldn’t think why, so I didn’t whisper to my then-bf next to me what was wrong. But he must’ve sensed something too, because he asked the driver to pull over before our destination, and when we got out simply said “I didn’t like him”.
I’ve met people I thought were dickheads, or bullies, or just nasty... he was the only one I thought was actual evil. Never want to feel that fear again!

My son's father. I fled on Friday but his whole aura was the definition of being in the presence of evil. I feel physically sick now I can fully sit and think.

@evtheria I have only once felt absolute fear when being in the presence of a stranger. He didn't do anything wrong, but I was absolutely petrified. I just felt like he could murder me.

[quote AllThePogs]@evtheria I have only once felt absolute fear when being in the presence of a stranger. He didn't do anything wrong, but I was absolutely petrified. I just felt like he could murder me.[/quote]
That’s exactly it. And even thinking it I’m like “you can’t know that, he’s just giving off aggressive body language” (you know, while sat there driving...?) but I felt like he would kill me.

Place marking

@AppleBlueberryPie

Over 15 years ago I had a business meeting in London and stayed in some serviced apartments at Dolphin House, part of the giant Dolphin Square complex. I picked it simply because I was familiar with the Pimlico area (used to live in London) but without any inkling of its history.

The apartment itself was nice but the entire building felt empty for its size. There was an "arcade" of small shops in the back but most of the stores were closed giving it an eerie liminal space feeling. One morning the fire alarm went off at 6am. I wasn't sure what to do since it wasn't a hotel with a lobby and people working there, but I just grabbed my laptop & valuables and went downstairs into the courtyard. The inner area was entirely deserted and I didn't see a single person despite the fire alarm blaring away. What struck me most was an overwhelming sense of creepiness and sadness. It wasn't so much "scary" but more oppressive and disturbing. The alarm stopped and I went back to my room but that eerie feeling in the courtyard stayed with me for a long time. I made a note in my mind to never stay there again.

It was only years after that trip that I read in the papers there was a child trafficking ring operating out of Dolphin Square. I was shocked because I usually don't believe in "woo" type things but I experienced the strangest feeling at the location without knowing anything about its history. And as a disclaimer, I've lived in and travel to London frequently so it wasn't a one-off experience due to the architecture/atmosphere of a new country. I usually stay at serviced apartments in big blocks and none of the other places had the same disturbing vibe as Dolphin Square.

Fascinating, I nearly booked in there because of its spy history and access to the river. I shan't be taking a Summer Holiday there now....

@evtheria I know some on here mock this, but I know exactly how you felt. I have no idea at all why I felt like that, but I was absolutely terrified but trying not to show it. It was an electrician who came to give a quote and I refused to let him in. I genuinely thought I could end up dead on the floor for DP or my kids to find me. I am not a nervous person at all, but it was fucking terrifying.