BUZZFEED
Every month, I ask BuzzFeed readers to share the creepiest things they’ve ever experienced. I’ve been doing this for a while now, and I started to notice that a truly shocking number of people were sharing stories in which they or someone they knew had a run-in with a serial killer. This got me wondering just how many people have actually had an experience like this, because it seems like it’s waaay more than I’d previously thought. So naturally, I turned once again to BuzzFeeders like you and asked people to share their serial killer encounters. Here are 19 of their stories:
1. “One of the Hillside Stranglers — Angelo (Tony) Buono — lived in Glendale, California next to a teen center in 1968. For a while, he was a volunteer councilor at the center. After closing, he would often invite a few teens to sit on his porch and drink beer. I drank many a beer on that porch with him. He told stories about being some kind of mobster. He was dismissed from the center because of a few girls complaining of ‘creepy’ behavior, including my 16-year-old sister.”
2. “My great uncle witnessed serial killer Wayne Nance leaving the home of two of his victims (the parents were murdered, while the children survived) in the middle of the night. My uncle, a secret smoker, was having a cigarette on his porch and noticed a truck leaving the house across a field from his home. As this was a rural area where everyone knew everyone, it was odd to have anyone coming or going at that time of night. My uncle is mentioned (briefly) in the Wikipedia article about him. Nance is known to have killed at least six people but is suspected of killing more. He was killed by one of his intended victims less than a year later.”
3. “When I was a teenager, I was in a band in Atlanta. My partner, who was Black (yes, this will figure into this later), and I were the lead singers, and we had different backup musicians. Right after graduating high school, we were approached by a local producer who had aspirations of signing us as a duo to include recordings, promoting, and gigs. We went to his studio downtown to meet with him and discussed our future. After about an hour or so, we left without a contract, but he stated he’d like to meet with my partner later to discuss details. We both looked at each other to try and figure out why he wanted to meet with him and not both of us. We talked about it later, and we decided that he wasn’t a good fit for our style of music and never met with him again. About a year or two later, the producer was arrested for murder. The producer’s name? Wayne Williams: the Atlanta child murderer.”
4. “I’m not gonna mention the name of the killer, but this happened to my friend when we were in our early 20s. My friend lived with her parents in an apartment building. A guy in his 50s moved into the same building. My friend started getting these weird notes in the mail that were like love letters. They were so poorly written that at first she thought a kid had written them. Pretty soon the letters turned threatening. Someone also started coming to their door when my friend was alone. This someone tried to take a peek through the peephole a few times. My friend and her parents went to the police, who did nothing.”
“Finally, one day, in the middle of the day, this someone tried to break in through the door, thinking my friend was home alone. Luckily, her dad was there, too, and they called the police. The police arrived and found and arrested her 50-year-old neighbor who turned out to be the intruder. He had leather gloves and tons of rope with him. My friend and her parents found out during the trial that this guy was a serial sex offender and had killed people by asphyxiation. He had also been classified as a psychopath. What makes me super angry was that he got a super light sentence. That kinda person has no business living around regular people.”—whale_tail
5. “Bruce Mendenhall was naked in the bathroom of the truck stop I worked at, washing himself from the sink. I was alone, with one entrance in/out and away from the main building, as a 24-year-old woman, cussing out a serial killer for lewd behavior. Found out from news after his arrest who he was. I’ve been more careful with strangers ever since then.”
—Anonymous
While the actual number is uncertain, Bruce Mendenhall, aka the Truck Stop Killer, is estimated to have been involved in the deaths of as many as nine women.
6. “It was 1974 in west Seattle, and I was staying overnight at my girlfriend’s place. She lived in her parents’s rental house with a roommate. At about 2 a.m., someone knocked on the front door. The bedroom was situated so that I could peek out the bedroom window and see the front porch. I didn’t recognize who it was, so thought nothing of it and went back to sleep. A couple days later, her roommate answered a knock at the door to some guy saying, ‘Oh you’re not the one,’ and proceeded to ask her where the other girl (my girlfriend) was. He didn’t know her name, just called her the other girl. With that on top of other odd things going on at the time, my girlfriend and I decided to move her out of that house and into our own place.”
“A few months later, I was back at the rental doing some repairs with my future brother-in-law. The couple that had moved in after we left had moved out already. Turns out, the female tenant had been abducted at Lake Sammamish State Park and murdered by Ted Bundy. She looked very similar to my girlfriend, with long dark hair.
In the mail we gathered that’d been delivered to the house after her partner moved out, we found letters addressed to Ted Bundy. The guy I saw at 2 a.m. that one night I now recognized as Ted Bundy.” —Anonymous
7. “My dad was born and raised in the Bronx and was in his 20s when the Son of Sam was active in the ’70s. One night, he and his girlfriend were sitting in their car after he picked her up from work. They noticed a car slowly drive past them. A few minutes later, he saw the same car pull up behind them with no headlights on. He wasn’t able to make out who was in the car, but after a few minutes of seeing no movement, he got nervous because the Son of Sam was targeting couples sitting in cars.”
“He pulled away, but quickly noticed that the driver started following them, so he pulled up to a local bar that had a crowd gathered outside. When he did, the car slowly drove past them. They waited there for a few hours before going home and thankfully didn’t see the car again. He obviously doesn’t know for sure if it was the Son of Sam, but he said after that, his gut always told him that there was a good chance it was.”
—ejt263
8. “My aunt was a nurse at the prison Son of Sam was an inmate at in Upstate New York. She told me a story about the time he either got attacked or got into a fight. After it was over, she had to sew a piece of his ear back on.”
