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)

Another recommendation to read The Gift of Fear here. There’s a reason we have “gut instinct”.

@Opal8

Of course evil exists!

Read a history book fgs, watch the news!!

For me, personally, stone henge felt....malevolent. very glad to leave.

I remember saying to DH how I felt a sense of peace wash over me when we visited (We were going through a very stressful time then) -almost like a warm blanket had been wrapped around me. Strange how people can feel so differently at the same place!

@Nowayoutonlydown

Yep, one man I met at a friend's house, he turns up, he's talking and talking and talking. Saying lots and lots of good stuff about himself literally bigging himself up and I can't quite put my finger on it, but the more he talked, the more uneasy I felt about him.

I was saying I had to go home. He asked where I lived, I told him that I lived in the vicinity I lived in, but gave an opposite sort of area (for example, I live by the tescos, yeah on the main road infront of it instead of 4 streets behind) he offered to take me home.

Oh that's kind, but my husband will collect me.

I went home and text friend, don't EVER put Mr in a situation where I'm around him again please, and be careful of him yourself.

She text me that night and asked how I knew.

Knew what?

That he had raped and attempted to murder his ex.hes on some sort of lifelong thing where he has to give the details of his crime before he sleeps with someone.

This man gave me serious spidey senses

Why would your friend have allowed him in her house??

I was at an antique fair and saw a photo of a man in a ww2 German Army uniform on one stall.

The stallholder saw me look & pulled out a small pile of photos of SS men - saying "these are the real bad boys, they served in the Ukraine, took me years to get hold of these photos, they're £20 each"..

As I looked at certain of the mens' faces I felt I was looking at men who had enjoyed committing atrocities and felt there was a sense of evil emanating from their pictures.

I'm not superstitious but those photos had been commissioned by & owned by very evil men and I felt the photos were tainted by that evil... I gave the photos back very quickly.

I think a Holocaust museum should have had those photos- but they will probably have been bought by a Nazi enthusiast.

The only other time I felt a sense of evil was when I visited the basement of Block 11 in Auschwitz.

I felt.as if I couldn't breathe when I saw the standing cells and I had to get out of there.

I knew that people were starved to death in the punishment cells but I also learned later that the first gassings using Zyklon B were carried out on 100s of prisoners in that basement, so awful.

Walking on the pavement and young teenage boy (approx 12-13yrs) walking towards me on his own. Something made me feel uneasy so I moved as close to the edge of the pavement as possible. As I walked past him I heard him say”fucking bitch.” I turned around and he was looking back at me, his face was expressionless.

I remember Stuart Hall on the news programmes for the North West during the 80s when I was still quite young and always felt creeped out by him.

Threads like this always end up with people recommending "The gift of fear". I actually bought it and in all honesty its an awful book. Very repetitive and serves mainly to let the author big himself up.
I am old and sceptical but it's almost like a marketing ploy.
And yes, I've worked in a top security mental hospital with many household name child murderers and no, none of them gave Mr the creeps. That's the thing with psychopaths they are bloody lovely, charming people on the surface of it.
The best way to keep yourself safe is not to rely on "spidey senses" whatever they may be, its to raise our boys to be respectful, and to never put our trust into people who we don't really know.

[quote MmeD]@Ozanj

Interesting and weird. Like all those people who say the Krays were lovely and turned out for their funerals. How could they? I do think that my friend must have picked up on the reactions of people coming the other way up the street - perhaps they saw Frankie Fraser behind her and reacted in a way (a start of fear, a slightly wider berth etc.) she picked up unconsciously.[/quote]
If you're around bad people enough, you can get a feel for when they have no interest in being a threat to you - it's like night and day.

I grew up around that sort of people.

@ParkheadParadise

Yes, I have. The Evil bastard who murdered my dd. I hated him from the moment I met him. The next girlfriend after dd he killed her dog and left it on her doorstep. Every Cloud, he died 4 years after he Murdered my beautiful girl. Unfortunately, no one murdered him he died of a drug overdose. I hope every day he rots in hell.

I do believe that there are some genuinely evil people out there. Look up Skylar Deleon and what ‘they’ did.

I think we pick up on things without realising it - the way someone looks at us, even fleetingly, someone being slightly more insistent than necessary about helping you/pouring you a drink, a man sitting close to you on an otherwise empty train (funnily enough if a woman did that, absent anything else, I would presume she wanted to stick close for safety). So what we call instinct can just be us processing the world around us without even realising it and flagging something a bit off. If I flag something a bit off, I'll get out of there/no longer bother being friendly/not pursue a relationship with the person - why would I? There are plenty of people in the world, no need to hang around people my instincts are telling me might be harmful to me. I do think we should all be careful not to judge solely because the person is "other" to us.

I think people who grow up in abusive situations can either have a very very heightened sense of what might be harmful or have one that is so battered it no longer works very well.

A thought struck me reading a pp who talked about her ex MIL basically creating such a toxic family environment that it was like she presided over a cult. It struck me that parents have such complete power and children are really at the mercy of whether that parent wants to be good or wants to be evil. I'm a normal person who lives a normal life and has reared 3 children but if I had wanted I could have singlehandedly ruined 3 lives. There are very few opportunities for an average person to wreck such havoc other than within a family.

@SommerTen

I was at an antique fair and saw a photo of a man in a ww2 German Army uniform on one stall.

The stallholder saw me look & pulled out a small pile of photos of SS men - saying "these are the real bad boys, they served in the Ukraine, took me years to get hold of these photos, they're £20 each"..

As I looked at certain of the mens' faces I felt I was looking at men who had enjoyed committing atrocities and felt there was a sense of evil emanating from their pictures.

I'm not superstitious but those photos had been commissioned by & owned by very evil men and I felt the photos were tainted by that evil... I gave the photos back very quickly.

I think a Holocaust museum should have had those photos- but they will probably have been bought by a Nazi enthusiast.

The only other time I felt a sense of evil was when I visited the basement of Block 11 in Auschwitz.

I felt.as if I couldn't breathe when I saw the standing cells and I had to get out of there.

I knew that people were starved to death in the punishment cells but I also learned later that the first gassings using Zyklon B were carried out on 100s of prisoners in that basement, so awful.

This is the type of thing I meant about saying things like ‘evil presence’ etc. Surely you didn’t feel some mythical evil emanating from the photos and you didn’t just have a ‘feeling they had committed atrocities.’ The stall holder told you they had!

Of course if someone shows you a picture of somebody and says ‘this is the man who killed 40 children’ you’ll think he looks evil because you know what he’s done.

And when we say things like they had an evil presence or imply that they’re ‘very evil men’ to the point that a photo of them is ‘tainted’ years later that does imply some sort of inhumane power and it totally glosses over the actual horror of the Holocaust which is that they were just people. The ss guards, German soldiers, people who sold out Jewish people. They were literally just people, just like us more or less.

I think we’d all like to believe that we’re different and they’re evil terrible monsters because that sort of lifts the responsibility that would press down on us if we have to confront the fact that the difference between an ss guard and someone smuggling Jewish people out of Germany wasn’t some inherent goodness or badness, it was personal choice, probably influenced by environmental and societal experiences.

I haven't, but my mum was once taken on a school trip to Auschwitz (the Communist government of the country she lived in organised tours - more as a 'dangers of fascism' thing than specifically about memorialising the victims). Most of her father's family had been murdered there only about 15 years previously and she said she was just totally overwhelmed and almost fainting with the sense of evil.

I feel an oppressive force in Somerset. There’s just something that feels heavy about it.

I’m ok driving through it but we stayed overnight once and I did not like it at all.

@HippyMoon

This was a really interesting thread to read before the Meghan Markle shite started - pack it in ffs!

Yep!

My best friends dad is a retired police officer and ‘pillar of the community’ so to speak. He stops and chats to everyone, is known by many many people in our town. He’s always friendly, chatty, dresses up as Father Christmas at the local pub every year, volunteers etc. However, I feel so very uneasy in his presence. I cannot explain it, but I get a very strong feeling of disgust when I see him and I feel as though he knows I know something. I just cannot put my finger on it but my gut screams that something is sinister about him.

Somebody piss on your chips @PeopleBakwas ?

@Fluffycloudland77

I feel an oppressive force in Somerset. There’s just something that feels heavy about it.

I’m ok driving through it but we stayed overnight once and I did not like it at all.

The whole of Somerset??! 🙄

A woman I worked with years ago. I took an immediate dislike to her for no obvious reason as she came across as really lovely and down to earth. I tried telling myself I was being ridiculous but I just got a vibe from her I couldn't shake. She ended up being the most devious and malicious person I've ever come across. She played staff off each other, lied, stole all while manipulating everyone around her. She was eventually allowed to leave without being sacked. She's now a psychologist.

In the course of my work I have met violent offenders and criminally insane people - some whose names you would recognise. In many cases they seemed pleasant and I got no "bad feeling" around them. In fact there was a really jarring disconnect between how amiable they seemed and what I knew they had been capable of.

Separately, I can think of two men I've met, in social contexts, neither of whom I have any evidence had committed any criminal acts, who filled me with utter fear and loathing.

I don't know what to conclude from this.

I'm strictly non woo, but two things have happened to me that un nerve me. I lived in a new build, and I was petrified of being alone in it. To the point where I'd bundle baby into her coat and pushchair and take her for long walks, rather than sit in that house.

Another, more kind, but still spooky. I met someone on a training course. They were lovely. On the last night, they asked me to dance with them.. While dancing, they pulled me closer so no one could hear and said "you are blaming yourself for something you didn't do. You have to recognise that it wasn't your fault. You will only hurt the victim of you keep blaming yourself.". I didn't know if I wanted to cry, throw up, or kiss them.

Whatever, they changed my life

@Nowayoutonlydown - She text me that night and asked how I knew. Knew what? That he had raped and attempted to murder his ex.hes on some sort of lifelong thing where he has to give the details of his crime before he sleeps with someone.

This is batshit. Some people a on this thread are just daft.

Why would have been in your friend's house? Why would she have let him in? Why didn't she tell you about him when she saw toy were talking to him?

And there is NO 'lifelong thing where a criminal has to give details of his crime before he sleeps with anyone'! Where's your critical thinking? How would this ever be policed? And why on earth would anyone do this? 🙄🙄🙄

@HunterGatherer

Threads like this always end up with people recommending "The gift of fear". I actually bought it and in all honesty its an awful book. Very repetitive and serves mainly to let the author big himself up. I am old and sceptical but it's almost like a marketing ploy. And yes, I've worked in a top security mental hospital with many household name child murderers and no, none of them gave Mr the creeps. That's the thing with psychopaths they are bloody lovely, charming people on the surface of it. The best way to keep yourself safe is not to rely on "spidey senses" whatever they may be, its to raise our boys to be respectful, and to never put our trust into people who we don't really know.

All of this, especially the very last bit.

A lot of the retroactive "oh! but I sensed that man was evil, & now I've learned he is a paedo/abuser/murderer" are pure confirmation bias.

For every random "evil man" you believe you have spotted, you have missed a thousand others. You don't get to hear about the misses, but the rare hit that you had a feeling about makes you imagine you 'knew' something.

The facts are more about coincidence & statistics than "sensing evil".
Every single one of us has walked past dozens of rapists & muggers in the street, & not known a damn thing about it ...

@MaryAndGerryLivingInDerry

You are wrong. Evil most certainly does exist. Just ask Women's Aid.

As a victim of DV I can assure you that it is all human force that abuses women.

My mum was battered black and blue, she told me years later that it was like something evil entered him, one minute nice and loving, the next a monster.

If evil doesn't exist, than neither can 'Good'

@BurnDownTheDiscoHangTheDJ I had exactly the same reaction in aushwitz. Also in the building where the standing cells are. I physically couldn’t have stayed in there so I pushed my way out past everyone and almost keeled over on the steps outside. I have never had that reaction anywhere else

I always found Rolf Harris really creepy as a child.

I remember saying so to my dad when we watched one of his art shows on TV - my dad told me not to be so silly and that he was a perfectly lovely man.

I reminded him of that conversation when he got arrested, charged and sent to prison!