I was about five or six years old when the family went to Tijuana on a shopping trip. The marketplace was crowded and I drifted away from my parents, but I knew exactly where they were. I guess I must have stood out in the crowd with my (then) white-blond hair. A Mexican woman wearing a colourful shawl came up to me and tried to grab my hand. She kept saying, “Casa? Casa?” I ran back to my parents.
Of course, she may have been saying “queso” and was just trying to sell me some cheese. But I thought she was up to no good.
I don’t live in a “rough” or “seedy” area. The first incident happened in a poorer part of town, but the second happened after we moved to an affluent area.
I dunno, I guess when I was younger I juat attracted trouble. I have a bunch of other stories, but those are the scariest ones.
Thank goodness my run of bad luck seems to have tapered off (the last time was when I was about 19 and had to phone the police to pick me up from the mall late at night, when a jeeps drives over two curbs and a median to try to chase you down, you run. He was still waiting for me to come out when the cops got there, his response “I thought she was someone I know.”)
Jeez.
On the bright side, I am now a very calm, keep your head kind of person in all emergency situations.
Oh my God LunaSea. That’s a terrifying story, and thank you for sharing it. I still think about my episode every so often, and it’s taken on sort of a cinematic quality in my mind. I see the streetlight and shadow in sharp detail, and the red flash of the guy’s brakelights when he stopped to turn around. I don’t, however, recall what he looked like even in the vaguest way. I think it’s because it was so dark, and I was freaked the hell out; now he’s become like this nightmare figure with no face.
Well, I had something like this happen to me too. I don’t want to get into it other than mention that it was the old “naked guy with a map on his lap looking for McDonald’s” trick.
I was such a stupid kid that I was still trying to help him find McDonalds after he whipped the map off his lap. My friend and I had been roller skating and she dragged me off saying, “Oh, look, there’s my dad!” (We are still friends, and I often tell her I owe her my life)
I mostly forgot about this until I was a teenager. I had heard that kids don’t report things like this to the parents because they are afraid they would get in trouble. I didn’t quite get that until I remembered that is EXACTLY what we had done. We told our parents later (at the same time, strangely) and the cops came to question us both, etc.
Like some of you, I remember this very clearly. Almost every word. His mustache. His car. His (pee pee). Very clear detail. I am certain I would recognise him if I saw him…but since it has been twenty years or so, maybe I would only recognise a twenty year old photo.
She may have ben saying “acercarse” which means “come on…/approach”, or if her Spanish is anything like my grandma’s, she may have beens saying “come here” – When my grandma says it, I swear it sounds like one word that sounds sort of like “vengaca.” She may have been a good samaritan who was worried that you were lost (let’s just hope that was the case).
I’m sure there are times when a good samaritan scares the crap out of a kid when they’re just trying to be helpful and protective. I lunged at a little, wee toddler who almost fell face first down an escalator. Scared the crap out of the kid who will undoubtedly remember me as the Scary-Witch-Lady-Who-Tried-to-Snatch-Me. Kid’s mom didn’t seem to mind, it would have been a bad fall.
Very different however from the trauma of having someone try to lure you into a car.
That actually happens to me from time to time nowadays!
Yup. When I was 13, my sister and her best friend and I went to [very large theme park], where they promptly abandoned me to the care of my 17 yo cousin, who in turn promptly abandoned me when she picked up some random guy on the street. RandomGuy’s buddy decided I was fair game, picked me up (literally) and walked off into the park with me. Took me on all the rides, dragged me into every dark corner and “Employees Only” area he could find, and basically worked me over sexually, physically, and emotionally. I fought and screamed and carried on, and watched good American tourists walk right on by…I think he gave them the impression that I was his drunk girlfriend.
Episode #2: This weird guy in my high school (I went to a very small school, graduated with 34 other students) followed me down a hallway one day during class. I didn’t realize it, but he cut through the gym so he could intercept me outside of the dark stage. There I was, booking on down to band, and this big arm reaches out, jerks me into the hallway, and up on the stage, where he got his hands around my throat and commenced to smacking my head on the floor and telling me he was going to kill me. Luckily, some of my classmates in another class saw him grab me, asked the teacher for permission to go to their lockers (!), and came up onstage and pulled him off. Then we brushed ourselves off and all went back to class.
It amazes me, the things I never thought to TELL ANYONE. My parents still don’t know, although almost everyone else who knows me or hears me in a poetry reading does.
~karol
I was in maybe 3rd or 4th grade, walking to school (4 blocks away) with my friend Nick and his younger sister. This guy in a “woody wagon” pulled up next to us and stopped. We continued on our way. As we walked, he’d drive about 20 feet, until he was caught up with us, stop, and then do it again. We thought it was pretty odd. When we got to school, we told the principal, but none of us had bothered to get a license plate number. Though I remember the guy resembled Mr. Rogers :eek:
Oh my god, bodypoet. How awful. I don’t know what to say…just awful.
There’s a kind of music club in my hometown, where local bands play for teeanged crowds, and I used to hang out there when I was in high school. Shows usually ended at about 1:30, and my parents always told me to either get a ride or call them, no matter how late it was, but I usually just walked and lied about getting a ride. It was only about a mile away from my house, and I didn’t want to wake my parents up. Anyway, I’m walking home one night, and this very drunk guy starts following me, speaking to me in a totally incoherent mixture of English and Spanish. He was putting his arm around my shoulders and trying to convince me to go somewhere with him. It was fortunate that he was so drunk, because it wasn’t that difficult for me to cut and run. Still freaked me out big time, though.
This didn’t happen to me, thank god, but a couple young friends of mine were present when their friend was kidnapped. This article in today’s NY Times makes reference to the Polly Klaas kidnapping, which occurred about a mile and a half from my house. If you don’t remember the story (which got about as much press as the Elizabeth Smart case is getting right now, although from my vantage point, the story was on pretty much 24/7), Polly was kidnapped at knifepoint in her bedroom during a sleepover. Her two friends, Gillian and Kate, were tied up with Nintendo cords and bandanas. I didn’t know them at the time, because I was in high school, and they were in junior high, but they were in 9th grade when I was in 12th, and I became friends with both, especially Gilly, who played the flute in band with me. They both testified at the trial of Polly’s kidnapper and murderer, Richard Allen Davis, that year. Nothing weirder than watching the evening news and seeing the courtroom artist’s rendition of your friend on the stand. The next day when I saw Gilly, I gave her a big hug. She looked me like “What was that for?” But of course she knew. I cannot even begin to imagine what that experience was like for them.
When I was nine, my best friend Alison and I walked from my house to the bookmobile parked outside my school a few blocks away, and on the way home we stopped at a park bench to sit down and read our books. A grimy bearded guy who looked about 30 drove by a few minutes later in a blue pickup truck, and kept jerking his head in our direction to stare at us. He drove around the park once more, still staring at us, and then started to head off down a side street, so we took off running. I remember yelling at her to go down the street next to ours so he wouldn’t know where I lived, and on the way to my house we met my mom, who’s been about to drive to the park to take Alison home. We never told her what happened, and afterward I kept reasoning with myself: “He was just looking for his kid” or “Maybe he wanted to buy a bench like the one we were sitting on, and was just taking a closer look”, but I was still scared, and still am when I think about it.