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The original was posted on /r/truescarystories by /u/Plut0ni on 2025-06-07 21:43:08+00:00.

This happened to me about a few months ago, I don’t remember the exact date but I do remember it was between December-January. I’m a 5’4 (17F) student working part time at a children’s play area, usually in a place like this i’m surrounded by happy moments, cheery laughs, good vibes. I usually host birthday parties and I never get bad feelings or energy about anything or anyone.

I was working on a Sunday and I finished on closedown so it was very late. Im exhausted, I just want to get home. That day I had to walk (taxis are expensive especially as I’m a student and buses stop running earlier on Sundays) as you can imagine after dealing with kids all day I’m exhausted, burnt out and just zoned out in general. I wanna get home and rest, so I open up the maps app and try to navigate myself to my friends place as I was staying there overnight because I live in a town but my job is in a city and as I mentioned buses stop running earlier on Sundays.

So getting to the actual horror of that night, it was about 1h 10 min walk to my friends house and I finished work at 7:30pm, since its winter it gets darker earlier and its very dark out, as sketchy as it sounds I had to walk through a lot of alleys and dead silent areas. I’m estimated about half way to her place because it was past 8pm at that point, oh and not to mention I also forgot my coat at work so I was walking in the freezing cold. I’m walking down this long road and I’m checking my navigation app on 20% and I’ve got to walk straight down until I have to turn a left corner. Feeling sleepy, shivering, and exhausted, I almost get to the end of the road and I get an uneasy vibe that something was not right. I look up from my phone and to the other side of the road was a man that seemed like he was maybe in his mid 20’s, maybe around 5’9 (i couldn’t really tell i think he was just average height) approaching a bus stop (he was walking towards my direction) , and then stopped at that bus stop. I don’t think too much of it I just thought that I’m being paranoid and usually I get a bit scared and worried when walking at night so I brush it off.

I walk past the man and the bus stop, I felt his eyes glare at me as I was walk past him to turn the corner. As soon as I pass him I had the strongest gut wrenching feeling in my stomach that I NEED to run. So as soon as I turned the corner I book it. I ran till I physically couldn’t breathe, I ran for about 3 minutes straight until I decided to turn around…

The man I saw at the bus stop was speed walking in my direction, he was a far distance away but the point is that he was following me. I frantically try to catch my breath as my stomach dropped when I saw him but in that moment I felt so angry. I felt angry at myself, at that man, at life. I started to run. I ran and I kept going until I felt I was about to collapse. It started to feel like I was breathing in thorns, my body was shaking.

I started to see lights from a large road with shops surrounding and I stop for a minute. I look back and the man is stood about 150 metres away from me and I distinctly noticed him frail his arms up, turn around and walked back towards where he came from disappointedly. At least, thats how it seemed.

Thinking about it now, it’s actually very strange that he was waiting at the bus stop because as I mentioned at the start, buses stop running earlier on Sundays…

And every time I walk alone at night I always remember this incident and I think to myself, what if I didn’t get the instinct to run?