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Enjoy the episode. Was he thinking about me that
whole time? Unbeknownst to me at the time,
Dave had followed me back there and as I was opening the door I
felt a solid shove from behind from HV Studio.
This is unnerved. Welcome back to the Unnerved
podcast. It's where normal people share
their abnormal stories. And if you enjoy true stories of
the strange and terrifying, and you're in the right place, I'm
your host, Chris Fricke. If you've ever worked at a
restaurant as a server, you know that kindness can go a long way.
After all, you are there to serve the customer and make them
feel comfortable in that environment.
You may even have regulars from time to time, but what if
they're not there for the food or drinks?
What if you're the only reason they keep returning?
In today's story, Joe shares a series of encounters she had
with a man that showed an abnormal amount of interest in
her. At first, she brushed off the
lingering stairs, chalking them up to the hazards of the job.
But as time moved on, he began acting on his obsession.
This is her story. My name is Joe.
This story happened to me in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho during my
first and second year of college, and it happened at a
bar called The Beacon. It was where I was working and I
was like cocktail waitress at the time, and occasionally a
bartender, but mostly cocktail waitress.
I tended to pick up a lot of the daytime shifts in the summer
when I wasn't in school, and that's also happens to be when
Coeur d'Alene gets to be the busiest.
We have a huge tourist season that comes in and out of Coeur
d'Alene, so very busy with the lake life in the summer and lots
of visitors. I that day had picked up the
daytime shift covering the outside tables at the Beacon,
which is about 10 tables. And if anybody has ever
waitressed before, you know that's a lot of tables to cover.
But it happened to be one of the slower days, and I had a man
come in and sit down at a table. A lot of times when somebody
came in on their own, I would give them a little bit more of
my time, a little bit more conversation, a little bit more
attention, just so that they felt involved and, you know,
paid attention to. He had a book and a newspaper
with him. He was very much ready to sit on
his own. He didn't seem to need a lot of
my time. So we have some of the basic
conversations, like what's your name?
So I told him my name and he told me his name was Dave and he
talked about what we did. Well, he talked about what he
did and I told him I was a student, But being smart, I
didn't tell him where or what I was studying on purpose.
He worked for BNSF, which is a railroad company, and he was an
engineer on one of the trains. The one thing that stuck in my
head from the first meeting was that he told me his work
schedule, which was kind of odd. He worked two weeks on and two
weeks off. That was my first encounter with
him. Another two weeks went by and
Dave came back to the Beacon. He asked to sit in my section,
and that's not particularly unusual.
And he ordered a gin and tonic and he sat there and he was
asking a little bit more personal question, like
relationship scatter. Then I started to get busy with
the dinner rush. And so he kind of picked up on
that and the fact that I was getting busy.
And he closed out and he left for that day, and then he was
back the next day, did the same thing, ordered his drink, had
some conversation, did it again the day after that, day After
that it went on for the two weeks straight that he was in
town. So he came back in every day
that he was in town off of his shift, ordered one drink and
stretched it out. You know, just kind of nurse the
drink for hour, hour and a half, two hours, and basically tried
to make me have conversation with him the whole time.
I didn't get to see what did you do.
Still not raising a ton of red flags at this point for me as a
cocktail waitress at kind of a popular bar in a touristy town.
And you're young, and there's always going to be older male
patrons that take a liking to you, and it's just kind of part
of the territory. He did kind of start to figure
out the bar rhythms. We got slow somewhere between
1:00 and 2:00 PM, and then we got busy again between 4:00 and
5:00. That was when everybody started
to come in off the lake. And he figured that out pretty
quick. And so he would make sure that
his timing was somewhere between that two and four window so that
he had as much of my attention as possible.
He left for two more weeks, went back on a shift, and then he
came back and he started the same cycle, but he stopped
ordering anything. He would just order water and he
would sit there and wait for me to come have conversation with
him. And it was getting really weird
at that point. He did that every day,
continuing to ask for my section.
The other waitresses began to kind of pick up on my discomfort
and his weird tendency. It was probably honestly only
the last two days of that two week cycle, so like day 13 and
14. And they took his tables and
said, oh she's busy or oh, she's about to get off, even though it
wasn't true. And he picked up on that
immediately, really quickly at this point, towards the end of
that last two week cycle is when I truly started to ignore him.
Like, I just wouldn't make eye contact, you know?
I wasn't going to talk to him, trying to give him the message,
if you will. He left on another shift for two
weeks at that point. And I think the hardest part
about this whole thing for me emotionally was that I'd be
stressed out for a couple of weeks and then he would be gone
for two weeks and life just kind of went back to normal.
And I willfully forgot about him.
I was young and I I didn't want to think about bad things and I
just willfully forgot about his existence until he came back.
The next time he came back, he'd pick it out the game of course,
and he did not sit at the tables.
The bar was a rectangular race track and it basically went all
the way around and we had three sides that were operational as
the bar. And then the short fourth side
with the opening into the bar was where there was like the bar
back and kind of the dish area, but there were still some stools
over there and that was where he would sit.
There was a computer right at the end of the long arm of the
bar, and that's where the waitresses all had to enter
their food to send to the kitchen.
He figured out that I had to stand there, and so he sat in
the closest chair that was about 5 feet to the right of the
computer and he would turn his body 90° and face me in the
stool and just stare at me. I wouldn't turn my head and I
wouldn't look at him and I wouldn't respond to him.
When he figured that out, he then moved to the stool that was
straight down the bar from the computer.
The computer was at about 5 feet high.
I'm 510. So as I'm standing there I'm
slightly looking down and when I glance up I'm making eye contact
with whoever straight down the bar in that stool.
And he somehow, in the creepiest fashion possible, figured that
out and sat in that chair. And then at some point in this
Phase I had a table that was assigned to me that was directly
behind that stool that he was sitting in.
And I went to go walk past him, go to that table.
And as I got past him, he reached out his hand and grabbed
the back of my apron and pulled me back towards him like like he
was trying to pull me onto his lap.
And I whacked him on the arm and I said don't touch me.
And then I turned back to my table and ignored him and I was
facing my table and I was like extremely embarrassed and I know
that I had no reason to be. And they saw everything happen
and they assured me that I had done nothing wrong.
So I took, I took the table's order and by the time I had
turned around, my manager watched him do the apron string
thing. And that was kind of the final
straw for my manager, and he had a conversation with him while I
was taking that order. By the time I turned around,
Dave was gone and he had been exed out of the bar.
My manager, you know, organized to make sure that somebody would
lock me to my car at night, especially if I was working
late. I often ended up getting the
parking spaces that were right in front of the Beacon, so it
made it really easy fast forwarding to the following
Friday, sometime around like 9:00 or 10:00 on Friday and
Saturday we went from being a a slightly kid friendly family bar
to being kind of a meat market trashy bar.
So that was the point in time when we had, I don't know if we
ever really called them bouncers, but we had door guides
that were handling the doors. There was a front door and a
back door, and the back door was kind of towards this area where
there was a pool table. And the man who worked the back
door, he kind of had become a friend of mine while I was
working. We chatted all the time when he
was working and he was actually a cop during his normal life and
was just doing this on the side for some extra cash.
But I think he watched me pretty closely when I was working and
stuff and kept an eye on me. My bar manager and I, we did not
have a photo of Dave or anything to reference.
The door guys didn't know any better and Dave got in, my
manager and I. Neither one had noticed.
When we got busy, you could hardly walk through the bar.
There's a lot of bodies in there, so keeping an eye on
every single one that comes in the door is not possible.
That busy and loud. And he made it in.
I don't know how long he was in, probably not very long, but I
think I probably would have picked up on him.
The bar back have let me know that we needed more tequila.
There's a little side area where there's a pool table, and off of
that pool table is a short hallway.
And in that hallway is a door to the left that goes to the men's
restroom and a door to the right that takes you to the storage
room of the Beacon. But it's actually a door that
opens onto a stair landing, and then the stair takes you down
into the basement, and that was where extra liquor and such a
store. That door opened with a key and
it locked upon closing. So I had gotten the key from the
manager and I went to that back hallway to go into the storage
room. Unbeknownst to me at the time,
Dave had followed me back there, and as I was opening the door, I
felt a solid shove from behind and I sort of stumbled into that
stair landing. Stumbled in there, and I
stumbled down a stair or two and kind of caught myself.
And by the time I turned back around and got that door open
and the lights on, the door guy that I had mentioned to was my
friend. For whatever reason, his radar
pinged when he saw this man follow me back into that hallway
and he had grabbed him by the back of his shirt, like the
collar of his shirt, right as he shoved me through that door and
hold him back. And then of course, not so
gently escorted him outside and topped him out the door.
But by the time I had scrambled around and gotten myself back
out of that doorway and told the doorman that that was him, he
was long gone. I'm assuming that he probably
had nefarious reasons. Maybe he just wanted to talk.
I highly doubt that he wanted to talk to me in a 200 year old
unfinished basement of the bar, but not really shook me up.
I don't know if I was just hopeful or what, but I assumed
that that was the end and I got more hopeful as time went by and
I hadn't seen him for or heard from him for a month probably at
this point. I was getting geared up for like
fall semester of school and some stuff like that we were getting
towards the end of the summer. I was standing in my mom's
kitchen and I got a text message notification on my phone.
I went to open it and look at it and it it was an unknown number
of course, and it was Dave, he said.
Hi, Joe, it's Dave. Long time no see.
Flapped my hands over my mouth and had a small panic attack.
I checked that phone as hard as I could against the fireplace in
my mom's breakfast nook, cracked it in half and broke it.
I don't even know if this was the point in time where I could
have blocked someone, but my solution at the time was that I
needed to change my phone number.
I shut down my e-mail. I had a Myspace at this point
that I shut down, and I deleted that.
This whole situation, and particularly the text, is
actually what finally spurred me to pick my undergrads study
course and get transferred into a big university.
Fast forward a few years, I haven't heard from him at all.
No text, no in person contact, nothing.
And I finally towards towards the end of my degree so probably
two or three years after all this happened I finally did open
a Facebook. I kept it pretty anonymous and I
I had nothing to do with Coeur d'Alene on there.
I had nothing to do with the Beacon wasn't friends with any
of my girls that I worked with at the Beacon.
None of that and I had just moved to Portland after
graduating. So this is probably 2012 and I
have moved in with my now husband into our first
apartment. And I was sitting on the couch
and I got a Facebook friend notification and he had tried to
add me as a friend on Facebook and found me five years later.
And again I squeaked and I tossed the laptop.
I didn't toss it on a fireplace, it tossed it on a pillow into
the couch, but I threw it away from me.
Was he thinking about me that whole time?
Did it. I just randomly pop into his
head that day And he said I think I'll search for her on
Facebook. How obsessive was this person?
And that has been the last time finally that I have heard and or
seen Dave. When Dave's obsession turned
into actions with no set boundaries, Joe was able to
escape without being physically harmed.
But unfortunately, she couldn't escape the haunting fact that
her stalker would someday find her again.
And she is not alone. An obsessive stalker is a dark
reality that haunts many others just trying to live their daily
lives. Continuing our coverage, around
7.5 million people in the US are stalking victims every year.
That number could actually be larger, as stalking incidents
tend to go unreported. When it comes to protecting
ourselves, safety experts say that we need to really listen to
our own intuition. What's happening with that other
person's behavior that's making you feel this way?
Why is it inappropriate? Most of the time we have fear
when somebody has violated a social norm.
These are the questions Cheryl Michaels wants you to ask
yourself if you think you're dealing with a stalker.
She's the director of safety and security at Seattle Pacific
University. Michaels says.
If you find yourself trying to talk yourself out of believing
in your gut feeling, consider that a red flag on its own.
The trauma, the fear of what could happen, really is a strong
motivator to how we respond to it, and often it's to try to
ignore it and make it go away. Ignore our feelings, our
intuition. That is telling us something's
wrong here and we need to act. That act should be reaching out
to friends and family, or, if it escalates, calling law
enforcement. Stalking, by definition, is
repeated, unwanted attempts at communication, contact or even
harassment. The worst thing we can do is
ignore our gut feeling that says don't answer that call and after
30 attempts we're like, OK, if I if I just answer this phone call
after 30 times, then maybe they'll stop and all that's done
is taught the person who's obsessed.
Then all they have to do is be persistent for 30 times and then
eventually they'll get to make that connection.
Michael says once you make a decision not to engage, you need
to stick with it. Consistency is crucial with
people who display obsessive behavior.
If they continue to pursue contact, keep a record of what
they're saying, because that often is what makes the contact
a crime. With stalking and the the law
that's written for stalking, it has to be something that has
more criminal intent involved, like threats to damage your
property, threats to harm you or a friend.
It can't just be the mere phone call or text message, because
then we just have harassment. According to the National
Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, one in every
three women and one in every six men have been stalked at some
point in their lives. Even if you don't have an in
person stalker, you could have one online.
The Internet has made it easier than ever to stalk people and
being careful with what you share on social media and help
protect you from unwanted admirers because you never know
who might form an obsession with you.
Thanks again for listening to Unnerved.
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