I’m going to lay out what’s going on to someone I know in the second-person sense and you let me know what you’d do. I may add results and more info to posters replies to show you how things worked in the given situation.
So my neighbor has been having trouble with a stalker. I have no idea what she’s done with him or what history they have but I assume that they don’t have one and that he just found her randomly.
I say this because before she moved into this place, the stalker was doing it to a different girl–one whom I did know and used to talk to regularly–and she’d say that she didn’t know the guy well and he just started talking to her and then appearing everywhere.
But here’s the main thing about him:
He whistles.
He has a very distinctive and loud whistle. One that he seems to have patented himself. You can’t mistake this whistle as a regular one because it’s not just your regular whistle, it’s more like a short tune. Suffice to say, you can always tell it’s him by the whistle.
So this stalker, he’ll whistle randomly when he sees the girl (my neighbor). He’ll whistle from down the block, he’ll walk by her door and whistle from right outside it, he’ll walk by her windows and do his whistle while going passed it. Sometimes he’ll just stay in one spot and continuously make this whistle.
He does it at least once every other day.
He’s been doing it for at least 5 months.
Before this current girl, he did it to two others (including the one I used to talk to, above)…so it’s not like this stalker actually has a history with any of these girls, he’s just finding them randomly, it seems.
He’s scaring the girl out of her wits on a regular basis, as did he the others before her. I regularly hear his whistle most nights, ranging from far away to right outside.
So the questions are…
What can be done?
What would YOU do if this were happening to you?
Seriously, I want to know what you’d do…gender doesn’t matter.
Tell me what you’d do and I’ll reply (if it applies) with what the result is/was.
Has he done anything menacing (that implied he might be dangerous) other than the creepy whistling? If she’s particularly brave, would she be willing to confront him and say, “Dude, what’s with the whistling?” Maybe he’s just socially inept. Alternatively, enlist a large male friend to accompany her when she does this?
Of course, if she has any other reasons to believe he’s dangerous this isn’t a good idea. But it seems weird that he’s done it not just to your neighbor but also to other women, and hasn’t done anything else. Is he mentally ill, perhaps?
I have no idea what his mental status may be. My previous neighbor told him to cut it out a few times and she told me he’d just laugh and make that whistle to her face as a reply.
As for this current stalkee, I don’t talk to her directly,…but I hear the whistling on a regular basis (again) and have heard her talking to other neighbors about how she’s scared and afraid yet also fed up and wanting it to stop.
As for enlisting heavy males, already been tried. The stalker just runs away.
What would you, personally, do?
Run my cellphone’s built-in video camera to capture the whistle and his face, as often as possible, to give a copy to the cops as evidence. Definitely have it out if I’d confront him so I could get his reaction.
If it were me, I’d probably call the police and ask them if there’s anything I can do about it legally (like get a restraining order that prevents him from getting within X feet of me). The other option I might do, depending on how much the guy scared me and how much I was confident that he wouldn’t retaliate, would be to go out of my way to let him know that his whistling wasn’t bothering me. Maybe whistle back, ask him what the tune is or what the lyrics are, laugh, etc. This is iffy, though, and really hard to gauge without seeing the guy personally. If he gets off on a feeling of power over the women he scares, then this might at least cause him to move on (which isn’t an ideal solution, of course, but if there’s nothing else that can be done…)
ETA: Yeah, and the picture idea is a really good one too.
My practical, reasonable advice would be to ignore it. Take reasonable precautions of course, but if he hasn’t done anything actually threatening, to her or to either of his previous targets, then why get terribly worked up about it? Eventually he’ll find someone else to whistle at.
Of course, I personally would have killed him months ago, but I have a thing about unnecessary noise.
The first was actually tried (capturing the whistle many times on record) with the neighbor I used to talk to. The police said “It’s not against the law to whistle”.
The second (capturing his face) was never successful. For one, he never stays long enough for you to get his picture while he’s actually doing it. For two, by the time he’s walking passed the apartment door and whistling, he’s gone before you can get to the door, unlock it, open it, and shoot a photo.
It just doesn’t work unless one happens to be ready, at any given moment, for the whistler to come by.
Like I said, there doesn’t seem to be anything anyone can actually do to make it stop. Many things have been tried from talking to the apartment managers (the stalker just insists he’s visiting a friend who lives there–which he really does) to calling the cops many, many times (at least with the neighbor I knew). They couldn’t do anything either unless he actually broke a law.
And yes, banding together big guys and people with ass-kicking degrees was even tried…you can’t ever catch the guy, though. Like I said, he’s there and gone before you even are ready, unless you’re ready 24 hours a day at any given moment. People have even tried chasing him down but he runs too fast.
Anyway, my neighbor friend moved away a year ago, but seems whistlestalker has found a new person to constantly harass. So I’m just sitting here wondering how much longer I have to listen to him whistling every other night and probably scaring this girl before something can be done…
…because it seems to me nothing can be done.
No and no. The police have already been given evidence he’s constantly and regularly whistling. They’ve said (according to my old neighbor) that it’s not breaking any laws.
Now see, this is what a lot of my other friends told my previous neighbor…to just ignore it. It’s really the only thing I can see possibly working. I’d just hate to be the person to have to ignore it, especially if I’m scared out of my mind.
What would I do, honestly? I know I’ll hear it from the peaceful nice people here but I’d have the everloving shit beat out of him. Sometimes the “call the cops, ask them to stop” thing doesn’t work and you have to just deal with a situation the hard and fast way. People like that live for frightened reactions and get off on making the person they’re targeting uncomfortable. I’d make sure **he **was plenty uncomfortable.
I’m not advocating illegal activity here, but the OP asked what I would do and that is exactly what I would do.
Get the landlord to evict his ‘friend’ on the grounds that he (landlord) doesn’t like his (tenant’s) friend (The Demon Whistler) annoying his other tenants. Enlist the other tenants in annoying the landlord on the subject until he takes action. Friend and Whistler can either move on, or Friend can then put pressure on Whistler to stop causing headaches with his landlord.
So would I, but honestly, I think that even if I were scared at first, I’d have a hard time summoning up much fear after five months of him doing this, and nothing else. Rage, sure. Fear, not so much.
To expand on my last post - you may not be able to catch the Whistler, but you know where Whistler’s Friend lives. He’s the weak spot. Make his life difficult (in a thoroughly legal manner, of course) until he reins in his obnoxious guest.
Has anyone talked to the friend about it? Is anyone else in the neighborhood close to the friend? You might be able to get a full name (if you don’t already have one) and you might be able to make it clear to this friend that the whistler isn’t welcome in the neighborhood if he’s going to stalk the girl. If the friend is a helpful type, you could solve this through him. If he’s not helpful, though, it might not be much of a solution.
Since this is an apartment I’d think the landlord could ask him to stay off the premises. After that, he’s be trespassing. My next thought would be to talk to the landlord (that is, have everyone who hears him complain to the landlord), I assume there’s something in the leasing contract that talks about behavior of guests. That could work, OTOH, he could just keep showing up, but not as a guest of the other renter.
Also, how do you know he’s specifically targeting this person? You mentioned that you can some times here him from down the block. Are you sure he’s whistling at stalkee from down the block or is he whistling at someone else?
Lastly, if all he’s done is whistle, at three people now, and it has yet to progress beyond that, I’d assume that other then being obnoxious and creepy, he’s probably not really a threat.
I know it’s pretty much SDMB standard issue by now, but I’ll recommend Gavin DeBecker’s The Gift of Fear. Quick, easy read, tons of stuff on stalking and threat assessment, and encourages victims and potential victims to trust their gut (since gut feelings are usually subconscious observation).
Hopefully this is just a case of a scared little prick who likes creeping out women and feeling an iota of power while not doing anything technically illegal (pretty typical). At the very least, you’re a good person for realizing the little things creeps can do, rather than someone else who might react with a simple, ‘What’s so bad about whistling? It’s a compliment!’
You could set up a surveillance camera that’s always on, so you didn’t have to rush to the door when you heard him. Or hire a PI to investigate him.
My first reaction would be to ignore him, but if it kept going on, I would want to know why, so I’d try to talk to him. Not tell him to stop, just talk. If he doesn’t want to talk to me, then I would whistle back, or play his whistle back, like it was a game we were playing, rather than being all one-sided. I might ask his friend about him, too. If he really didn’t want to talk at all, then I’d go back to ignoring him, or maybe think of him as a secret admirer, or an exotic bird. I guess what I mean is I would try to reframe it in my mind as something non-threatening, because if it doesn’t stop and doesn’t escalate, there may be nothing you can do, but you don’t need to worry about it either.