My Stalker Story//October 134th, 2023

This is a story I've contemplated telling here for a long while now. It's very long, and more personal than I usually get here about certain things. But in the spirit of Valloween, I feel like now would be the perfect time to tell the tale of a "dating" horror story, would it not? 

My initial inspiration for talking about this was the existence and popularity of characters like Corey Cunningham from Halloween Ends, and that one character from the Necro episode of American Horror Stories. I realized I knew someone quite like them, and the experience was certainly not some fantasy come true. 

I'm also going to say, I refer to this person as a stalker, and while I know maybe it's not quite to the exact same level that other people experience stalking, please know I'm not trying to undermine anyone else's stories or experiences. This was my own experience and in my opinion it was definitely stalker behavior, even if it didn't reach the same level that it may have for someone else in a similar situation.

If you've made it this far and want to know more, settle in. It's gonna be an interesting ride. 

I have to start by taking you back to the year of our gourd, 2018. 2018 was a very transitional period in the life of Yours Ghoul-ly. My parents decided, somewhat abruptly, to retire to Daytona Beach, Florida. And, if you know me at all, you know I absolutely hate sunshine and summer weather, and thus could never be happy in such a place. At the time, I was in a rapidly decaying relationship, but one I'd been in for almost eleven years. I was unhappy, there were many red flags that I ignored in the interest of not being completely alone, but I was finally coming to the realization that it needed to end, partially due to the fact that I'd started developing feelings for someone else. But all of this couldn't have come at a worse time, because my now-ex and I lived in my parents' house. 

One of many issues with my ex was, he barely worked. That's a long story in and of itself, but he'd gotten fired from the job he'd had for over a decade and had trouble finding a new one, and when he eventually did, he worked about fifteen hours a week, hence why we were never able to move out on our own. I was working close to forty hours every week, while still being considered part time, and my lack of driving ability, which was partially caused by my ex's insistence that I wouldn't need him anymore if I had a driver's license, made it hard for me to pursue getting a second job or even changing jobs altogether. When this talk of moving happened, I got serious fast, and tried to discuss with him ways we could afford to move somewhere, how we could work out maybe each getting a second job, or something, but he refused to budge, continually telling me I was worried about nothing, and that if my parents actually did follow through with moving, we'd just move into his mother's condo. His mother's condo is two bedrooms, and his twin brother was living with her at the time. We wouldn't have even had an actual bedroom of our own. This was the final straw for me in this relationship. Suddenly I could see everything clearly, how in the wrong he was about this and everything that had come before. So in April of 2018, I ended the relationship. 

At that point, I had a very close male friend that I'd known for about a year and a half. As we got closer, I started to develop feelings for him, but never acted on those feelings due to the relationship I was already in. I was happy to just have the friendship and figured he likely didn't feel the same about me, anyway, and he had his own situations going on as well. But around the time I officially decided to end things with my ex, we started to talk about our feelings and realized how badly we wanted to be together. And right around this time, my father finally kicked the moving thing into high gear. Within a week or so of having this discussion and coming to this realization, my parents were pulling the house apart, selling things on Craigslist, repainting rooms...everything you can imagine to try and set the stage for a realtor to come in.

I'm not going to get into the details of the next part, as parts of the story really aren't mine to tell and I want to protect the innocent, but just as it looked like things were coming together with my new blossoming relationship, they all fell apart, for very personal reasons. To say I was absolutely destroyed would be an understatement...It was one of the hardest things I've ever had to deal with in my life. To be so in love with someone, find out they feel the same, just like in a movie, and then have the rug pulled out from under me, was a truly devastating experience, and I'm still not fully over those feelings despite how things ended up. But anyway, to go through such a heartbreak on top everything else that was going on in my life at the time, with my parents' move and drama with my ex, was a truly overwhelming experience. I felt like I had no safety net, no support system. I hated being at home. I didn't want to be with my ex. And my best-friend-turned-lover was distancing himself from me. But these people were all I had in my life at the time. I couldn't bring myself to talk about my situation online, despite the fact that I had friends there. And there was no one else in my offline life that I trusted enough to talk to. 

And then I met "Liam". (This is not his real name or anything close to it, I don't want to say it here just in case, but I need something to call him for the sake of telling this story.)

Liam started working in our store at some point in the spring, but I didn't start getting to know him until he changed departments, closer to the summer. He was that super friendly, smiley type of person that seemed to make everyone around him laugh. He struck me as very caring, the kind of person you'd want as a friend, at least at work. We started out just having work related interactions, but talked more and more as time went on. One day I was having a particularly rough time and while I wasn't ready to tell him any real details; he listened to what I was willing to tell and did his best to make me feel better. We wound up exchanging phone numbers that day and texting a bit that evening. Keep in mind that even though I didn't tell him specifics, I made very clear that I was going through some tough times; particularly relationship-wise, and was only looking for a friend, nothing more. 

To this day I don't believe I actually did anything to lead him on. I will admit there was a part of me that hoped I would catch feelings, for the sole reason that it would have made everything a lot easier, but I don't believe I did anything to make him believe that I had those feelings, at any point in time, and I figured out very quickly that I wasn't going to be interested in him in that way. I was just thrilled to have a friend outside of the situation at home, and with both of the men in my life at the time. I will also say, though, that I'm not always the best at judging when someone is interested in me in that way. I was in a relationship for over a decade, from the time I was nineteen until I was over thirty, and everyone knew it, so I didn't often have to deal with anyone thinking they could pursue something with me. And I've never been picky about the gender identity of friends. Before Liam, it never occurred to me that I shouldn't pursue a friendship with someone of the opposite sex because they could develop feelings for me and not know when to let go. It was unfamiliar territory. 

After about a month or so of Liam and I casually texting and talking at work, I felt that, while he could be a little goofy at times, he was a good person, and very caring. He was the kind of friend that continually checked in, often asked me to text when I'd gotten home, offered rides and help whenever he could. I never really thought of him as a best friend, but he was someone I seemed to be able to count on and someone who could give me a break from all the chaos elsewhere in my life. 

One night in very early June, Liam and I made plans to go and see a movie together. I was once again very clear about it being as friends, but almost more in a joking way as we seemed to be past the point of needing to have that discussion. The afternoon beforehand we were texting like any pair of friends would, in fact he kept busting my chops about Chris Pratt hopefully being shirtless in the movie (it was whatever Jurassic World film was out at the time) as I had a huge crush on him back then (largely due to the fact that Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty much the only non-spooky interest that has ever really stuck for me). I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing, and once again happy to have a distraction, as people were constantly coming to look at the house and, I don't remember how, but I think my actual real-life crush had pissed me off pretty badly earlier that day.

So we went, and I felt a little weird about going to the movie theater and pizza place that I used to frequent with my ex, but things like that are going to happen. Still, it gave me a little anxiety, which Liam picked up on and decided the best way to cure it was to grab my hands (while I was eating the pizza, no less) and start reciting some sort of affirmation about the sun setting. I was weirded out by it, but he was a hippie-ish kind of dude, and I figured he was just one of those people that was kind of touchy with friends. It didn't feel inappropriate, at that point, just strange. But, as someone who's not a big socializer, I figured it was just the type of person he was. I had always known he was a little quirky. 

We got to the movie theater, and gourd help me, he took a selfie of us which actually still exists on his Instagram page (which I found by accident one night, much later, on a list of another coworker's followers). 

It's just now occurring to me how uncomfortable I look here. Possibly like I've been crying, which I had been, at some point that night. And the fact that he never deleted it disturbs me for some reason. 

Anyway, it was before the movie started that things began to take a turn. He started to get very handsy in a way that could no longer be equated to a "huggy" sort of friend. And the real kicker came when he went to show me something on his phone, and I saw a conversation he was having with one of his best friends (He had two best friends who were both female, another reason why I didn't see any red flags about befriending him in the first place.) within which he actively was telling her we were dating. After over a month of communication and constant reinforcement of the fact that I wasn't looking for anything more than friendship. He was literally telling people he was dating me. 

I freaked out and asked him what the hell he was thinking, and he responded by saying that he refers to more or less every outing he has with friends as a "date". I found this suspicious, along with the way he was acting, but seeing as how I was unable to drive myself, I had no real way of getting away, so I once again attempted to reiterate the fact that I was only looking for a friend and he knew that, and tried to write off his behavior as just me not being used to certain types of social interaction. We made it through the movie, though I was tense the whole time, and I have no real memory of what was said on the ride home or when he dropped me off, but I survived the night, albeit very confused and weirded out. Despite all of my attempts to set boundaries, Liam seemed to be in a genuine state of shock that I wasn't coming around to his advances.

I tried to avoid him a little bit after that, but it was hard, because we worked at the same place, and he also of course had my number. The day after the alleged "date", I overheard him telling someone else in his department how confused he was by the way I was acting, when I didn't feel like I'd given him anything to be confused about. He eventually must have realized how pissed off I was because he texted me a long-winded, sort-of apology, during which he stated that he was as confused as I was because he had sworn off relationships and hadn't been in one for several years, and wasn't expecting to "like" somebody in that way ever again. He also had this weird connection to a certain Marvel character and would often refer to himself as that character and base his interactions with people on what he thought said character or other characters within that universe would do. This didn't start until after the "date", and it was very strange, being told I was in his life and essentially had to be wrong about my feelings because some character that didn't actually exist sent me to him. I mean, I've been very attached to, and heavily related to, many characters in my life but come on. I've never gone so far as to believe a fictional person was having any real effect on events in my life. He also had a fictional character that he related to me, which was Ariel, the Little Mermaid. Keep in mind I didn't have red hair the time so I have no clue where any of that came from. Though to be fair he did refer to my other coworker as Cinderella.

It's probably worth mentioning that during this time period, Liam invited another girl we worked with to his house, because he supposedly "felt sorry" for her because she was on the autism spectrum, and then nearly had a heart attack when he found out she was going around saying she was dating him. I could not help but find the humor in that, especially when he would text me to vent about it. 

Things calmed down for a bit, with Liam and I just exchanging the occasional text or having a short conversation at work (I couldn't bring myself to completely cut him off as I have a tendency to give people too many second chances.) but then one day in mid-July, I called out sick. I got into an extremely bad place mentally overnight and just couldn't bring myself to go to work that day, with all that was still going on in my life. So I stayed home and in bed for most of the day, and then, late afternoon, I got a weird text from Liam claiming he was outside my house with a "get well" care package. I don't even know how he knew I was out sick, as I don't recall telling him, but I guess he figured it out when he didn't see me all day. On some level it was a nice gesture I suppose, but I found it almost wildly inappropriate, considering the state of our relationship at that point. He'd crossed a line at the movie and we hadn't seen each other outside of work since then, and were barely even talking to each other, otherwise. Nonetheless he came and stuck chicken soup and a cheap Guardians of the Galaxy coloring book in my mailbox and sat there waiting until I came out, never mind the fact that I could have been asleep or contagious or whatever else. The only reason I went outside was to get rid of him, and I didn't want my parents to have to stress out more because some weirdo came knocking at the door. I was as short with him as I could be, but a thousand times more weirded out than I had been at the movies. Like I said, it was a nice gesture in theory, but given our history, it was bordering on creepy. 

Liam started talking to me more and more again after that. It was as if he thought the grand gesture of chicken soup and a coloring book that included four crayons that didn't even match any of the characters, when I wasn't even sick in that way, was suddenly going to make him a hero in my eyes. The texts got weirder, more and more about his Marvel character and destiny and fate and all that, and I was to a point where I didn't know whether to be weirded out or just laugh. At this point, my actual crush and I were talking more again; we hadn't really defined anything at that point but were more or less, at the very least, best friends again, and he actually pulled Liam aside one day at work and told him that he was crossing many lines with me and I didn't need the extra stress in my life with everything I'd been through in the past few months. Liam didn't know that this guy, specifically, was the one I'd mentioned being interested in and struggling with, but he knew we were close at least as friends, and the conversation seemed to help, at least for a little while. My conversations with Liam went from strange and heavy to more lighthearted and friendly again, and things seemed semi-normal. I never felt 100% relaxed in my friendship with him after everything that had gone on previously, but I thought he was a decent enough person, just a little odd and maybe more emotional than some people. As someone who was trying to process my own trauma, I just thought, hey, maybe he's going through his own stuff, and has to process it in his own way. 

By mid-August, I was comfortable enough that I let him back into my life a little more. There was a week where my parents had gone away to look at houses in Florida, and I was struggling with being home alone. My crush and I were in the process of getting back together at this point, but there one night where he had a family emergency and couldn't be there for me. Liam and I had been texting that night, goofing around about something in his department at work, and I mentioned how bad I was feeling, so he offered to stop by when he got out of work. We only sat out on my old deck, just talking for maybe an hour or so, but it helped. Looking back on it, I think it was the one and only time I ever saw him act so real, and not controlled by whatever weird fantasies he always seemed to have in his head. That night he wasn't a fictional superhero, or some quirky guy with a crush on me. He was just a friend, and I thought the tide had turned for good. If only I realized that I may have quite literally been talking to a different person. 

 

A few days later, Spirit Halloween opened for the season, and Liam suggested taking a ride there one night. I was honestly having an awesome time, but I could have fun in a Halloween store with anyone, or no one. After playing around with the animatronics, we wandered into the costume section and I put an avocado hat on my head as a joke. Liam took a picture, I assumed just to be silly, but...I wound up seeing that he had sent it to his best friend...and the conversation I saw, once again, confirmed that Liam was telling people that we were dating. For all I knew, this friend of his thought we'd been a couple for the past few months. I was furious, and he tried to write it off as an inside joke that came about after the initial disaster at the movies. I didn't buy it, though, and remained uncomfortable for the rest of the outing. 

I don't remember how, but we wound up somehow not going straight back to my house. (I may have still not wanted to be alone despite how pissed I was at him. It was a strange time.) We pulled into a shopping center not far from work, and he just started going off on this long rant about how whoever the guy was that I was interested in was always going to lie to me and I would never be able to trust him, and how he himself had been in situations in the past that led to him having an alter ego who was violent and angry and did bad things. It went on and on. All of these stories...I don't even know if some of them were true, or what, but it was terrifying. The only one I vividly remember was about a girl he believed was his alter ego's soulmate. He truly believed in another version of himself and was justifying its violent existence, while basically trying to brainwash me into thinking he was the only person I could trust. He didn't just want a relationship with me, he wanted me to idealize him in some way. At some point I texted my crush telling him where I was, in case things got worse (my parents were still away at the time), all while I cursed myself for not driving, but Liam did eventually end up bringing me home safely. However, that was the absolute end of me giving him any sort of chance. I was honestly scared of him after that. 

Shortly after that, my crush, now officially my boyfriend, had a talk with him about how he was the guy that I'd wanted to be with the whole time, and how he had no right to say the things he had said to me about him or anything else. He had no issue with Liam or any male being my friend, but if he couldn't get the message, and couldn't stop behaving so erratically, it wasn't safe for me. That night, Liam basically exploded and kept sending me paragraphs of word vomit, most of it about how he wanted to go and drive himself off of a cliff because he didn't know what to do now and just felt empty and like he had no purpose...also while trying to claim he knew who I was really interested in the whole time, when he very clearly didn't. And perhaps the most weirdly disturbing thing of all...he sent me a private playlist he'd made on YouTube, literally about a week after he'd started talking to me outside of work, describing our relationship. A relationship that didn't exist. Between this and other things that were said that night, I realized that my instincts were right when I saw the conversation he was having with his friend at Spirit Halloween. This guy had literally been walking around, for about three months at this point, fabricating an entire romantic relationship with me in his head. In his mind, we had actually been together since that first day of texting. It was like everything I said about my ex, my crush, and just wanting to be friends, never actually happened for him. I was absolutely floored. To this day I feel extremely lucky that nothing worse happened to me in this guy's company. 

After it was officially confirmed by the person I was actually pursuing a relationship with Liam and I would never be together in that way, Liam went off the absolute deep end. I don't know if he just absolutely snapped or started doing hard drugs or something, but he started acting even more erratically, and would stop showing up to work for days at a time without contacting anyone, or anyone being able to get ahold of him. One day he came into the store to shop after not having been at work for about three days, baffled as to why people were asking where he'd been. He then claimed to be attempting to join the military, but it never happened, and texted me once out of the blue concerned that the alter ego he'd told me about that night was trying to "escape". Then in October, he started "dating" a girl at the store who was very openly asexual, and he was very obviously convinced that he could "change" her.  I'm not sure what ever happened with that, as the girl in question didn't work the same shifts I did, and no one that would have talked to her believed me when I said I believed that Liam was actually dangerous. 

Some time in February of 2019, Liam just randomly up and drove himself to California, with about twenty bucks and a cat to his name. The last I heard his car broke down somewhere in Missouri. He did leave me a bag of things he wanted me to have (dropped it off on my old office at work one night), including a very generic shirt of the Joker and Harley Quinn that he claimed people would try to buy right off his back, and some kind of African rain stick. I didn't keep any of it. 

I don't really know what's going on with Liam now, nor do I care to, as I certainly don't need the stress in my life, but I do hope that he someday gets the help he needs. And that he's not terrorizing anyone else with delusions of a relationship that doesn't exist. 

Sometimes when I look back on this whole crazy situation, it feels like a dream, or like the plot of a movie I saw once but can't quite remember. But it has definitely left me with some trauma and has changed the way I deal with potential male friends (and certain females in some cases). I've even gone so far as to block people online if they remind me of Liam in even the slightest way. Maybe it's extreme, but, protecting one's peace is important. I don't want to ever find myself in a situation like this again.

And so, there it is, basically the long version of the story of why I don't like Halloween Ends. 

Stay spooky, my friends.