From the earliest days of the internet’s incorporation into mainstream life, there have been those who take it upon themselves to be terribly creepy, messaging people the strangest things with bizarre goals in mind.
A Reddit post asked users to share their experiences and tell the story of the creepiest messages they’ve ever received. Some entries are truly bone-chilling, and you can read them all right here.
Just making sure.
“Mine was a phone call.
“I picked up, and some guy just says ‘Are you going to kill me?’ I didn’t recognize the voice, so I immediately just said ‘What?!’ He repeated himself and I said ‘Wrong number?’ He then hung up.
“In hindsight, it was obviously some guy who pissed off his SO and mis-dialed. However, the way he kind of whispered ‘Are you going to kill me’ as soon as I picked up the call freaked me out.”
Looking around.
“This happened when I was around 16 or 17. I was on a bus and in my school’s sport uniform. Then I got a text from an unsaved number asking ‘are you not cold in those thin clothes?’ (It was a chill morning).
“So [I] looked around inside the bus immediately and got another text: ‘stop looking you’re not going to find me’.”
Extreme lengths.
“It wasn’t the message that was creepy it was the details.
“I got a friend request and a message on FB from some dude with a car as his profile pic. The message was just something like, ‘Hey, remember me?’ I didn’t and had to be like who are you.
“It turned out it was this dude from a Chinese restaurant near my house. He remembered my name from my debit card and searched me out.”
Coming from inside the house.
“This happened in 2012-2013 when [my wife and I] were living in an apartment in the city. My wife and I were out shopping one day when I noticed I had a missed call. Checked to see who from and it was from our land-line.
“We didn’t live with anyone else and my phone was brand new so no one even had my new number yet either. I had a voicemail so we checked that. It was just the phone hanging up. Quiet and then the dead tone. Very weird and creepy.”
Analogue love.
“A guy 25 or so years older than me that lived in a room in a shared house I was renting…he was an unemployed alcoholic on disability with liver cirrhosis and jaundice.
“He decided it was appropriate to write a love note ON MY DOOR calling me an angel that came into his life for a reason and saying we were meant to be together. […] I reported him to my [landlord] for being so creepy (had known this guy a week) and he got evicted.”
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Ghosts of the past.
“I received a recycled number and the previous owner had used it everywhere from his bank to shopping websites so I used to get a lot of spam. I even tried to explain to the bank when they called regarding the account.
“One day someone added me on Snapchat through my phone number and upon seeing my Snapchat story, a 35 year old woman replied to my story of watching [Star Wars] by saying ‘I attended your funeral’.”
Fully devoted.
“A man ten years older than me sent me a long message declaring his undying love for me, said he was going to leave his wife and kids for me how he couldn’t stop thinking of me and he wanted to be with me forever and how he’d divorce her so we could be together…I was 18 and barely said a few words to him.”
Strangely specific.
“My mother died in 2016 and a couple weeks later I got a text message from her number that nearly stopped my heart. [It] read ‘KO’ which I found weirdly fitting.”
Granting wishes.
“When I was around thirteen, I got a text message saying something like ‘I’m the tooth fairy, make a wish.’ I asked the person who they were, they kept trying to get me to tell them what I wanted. My mom and I promptly called the police. Still creeped out by it…”
Awkward introductions.
“Used to live across the street from the high school. There was a field out back where the football players would practice. We had just moved there to a new town and so I didn’t really know anyone yet.
“I was just at home one night, scrolling Facebook on the family computer in the main room when I got a FB message from a kid I kinda knew the name of but hadn’t talked to.
“He told me I looked good and he was happy that he knew where I lived. I think he was trying to be funny and break the ice but I often think about how hard he must cringe looking back. It was like the start of a teenage stalker horror movie.”
Magic spells.
“I got it forwarded to me on social media from a girl I knew. There was a girl who went to my highschool, she was obviously interested in me but I had friend zoned her but found her pleasant company at least. […] it turned out she was obsessed and would write to this other girl about her fantasies and told her how she planned to mix a love potion into my coffee.
“I got forwarded all these stories, details and plans she’d been thinking up over a year.”
Shocking results.
“‘Turn around, I’m at the end of the street’.
“A text from a guy who was interested in me. I was walking home from work and he’d asked if I was home yet. I said no so he drove my walk home and then text me when he saw me. I was so creeped out.
“I refused a lift to his surprise.”
A turn of events.
“I took over a friends Facebook account to replace all his pictures with Llamas and change his bio and info to Llama related things for a prank and a girl we were classmates with private messaged him that she still had a lock of his hair that she cut off back in middle school and she was going to make a voodoo doll to make him fall in love with her.”
A message from yourself.
“Idk if this would really count but one day when I was 14 I was getting ready for school and went over to check my iPad to find the notes app open with the message ‘I’m not going over, what are you, I love you’.
“It scared the everlasting [expletive] out of me and I was convinced for months that someone had gone into my room and left that message […]. Of course now I [realize] that I probably just woke up half asleep and typed that out without remembering, but still was pretty disturbing for me to wake up to.”
An anonymous plea.
“I was driving and my phone went off. I don’t answer while driving, it went to voice mail. I got home and listened to the message. It was a woman in a heavy accent begging for (unintelligible name) to help her.
“She was pleading into my voicemail, saying it wasn’t long now and to please hurry. […] I called the number back, I was almost panicking with confusion over what was going on, but it was no longer in service.
“Kept me up for days.”
After all these years.
“I had posted on here previously about a stalker I had in middle/high school. A couple of years ago he sent me a message on Facebook (over ten years after I had last seen him, testifying against him in court) saying that he needed to reach out to me one more time and saying how I had become an amazing woman over the years.
“My stomach instantly dropped realizing that he had been keeping tabs on me via the internet all that time.”
Wrong number, hopefully.
“A random number send me a long sms in which he [argued] that I shouldn’t be [expletive] truck drivers for cheap money while I can hook up with him and his rich friends for much more money. I replied that I am a guy and he probably has the wrong number, to which he replied that he knew who am I and gave me my university dorm address.
“I blocked him instantly but it creeped me so much then. It may be a prank but it didn’t sound like one, and I was an international student there so I didn’t really have friends who would prank me like this.”
Crime and punishment.
“My Mum got a phone call at about 2am one morning. The man on the phone said ‘Mrs _______ we’ve just arrested your son. He’s a sick bastard and he’s going to pay. We have sent people to your other son’s apartment now. Don’t expect to ever see them again, they will pay for their crimes’.
“She called me frantic wanting to check I was safe and then told me that the two nights previous, at around the same time, she had had similar calls threatening to come after my brother and I.”
Long lost twins.
“I once got a random Facebook message from a man with the same last name as me. He was convinced that I was his biological brother or something and that he was put up for adoption but we didn’t live in the same country and he was probably twice my age..
“He kept heckling me for years about getting a DNA test and would say things like ‘I know we are meant to be together again’ […].”
Not a message, but still creepy.
“About a year ago, while I was walking home, a random lady started following me and asking me to pay for her kids’ tuition. She kept following me, telling me that I was handsome in a futile attempt at flattery, and kept doing it for a solid 10 minutes or so, until I reached a police outpost by the intersection.
“Hell, I couldn’t even pay for my own tuition.”
