A chilling story about a cyberstalker. I found it via Broom of Anger – who also has some experience in this arena. She’s got interesting things to say about the people out there, reading your blog, who get obsessed with you or fixated, or … I don’t know what. Like: they can’t get enough. They sit around waiting for you to post next. They build you up in a fantasy in their mind. They feel close to you. They never leave your blog. They are compulsively attached to reading your blog. Shivers!! So creepy.
I had someone get a bit of a fixation on me (definitely not as drastic as the story I just linked to. Thank GOD.) I had been blogging for a year – but I had just upgraded to Movable Type, and so that meant I suddenly had comments on the blog, whereas before there were none. I was in a vacuum. That was when this person’s fixation blossomed, because now he could talk to me, and feel like he was having a real relationship with me. I also made the mistake of responding to one of his emails – but it was early on, and the message was of the “Go, Sox!!” variety. That (responding to his email) turned out to be the WRONG thing to do. I didn’t think it would be opening up a can of worms to shoot back a “Yay, Red Sox!!” email back to this stranger. But I was Way wrong. I had acknowledged him, I had emailed him back, this was enormously important to freak-boy. He must be special to me.
I carry on off-line correspondence with a couple of you guys out there – and frankly, that’s because you have earned my trust, through how you behave in the comments. And how you behave on other blogs that I read. It matters. Civility matters, humor matters … but also, there’s something a bit more difficult to quantify. The alarm bells went off for me, in the situation I describe here, with the familiar tone he used, first and foremost. And then came the sexual references he started throwing into emails, the way he sort of blithely assumed that he knew me … and WELL … all of that added up to a distinctly strange ikky impression.
New bloggers – if you want my advice: try to know the lay of the land as much as you can, if you start up any email correspondence with someone you don’t know.
People are freaks. People are nuts. Especially if you write in a serious way about what’s in your heart, or about your dreams, your hopes, your passions … your old love affairs … as I do. KNOW that people will feel familiar with you. And KNOW that 9 times out of 10, it will be okay that they feel familiar with you, because THOSE PEOPLE ARE NOT FREAKS. But be on your guard for the freaks. Just know that they’re out there, and proceed with caution. Like, sorry – I know I write personally here, but you have to earn that familiar tone with me. This guy, in his fantasy world, leap-frogged over the actual “getting to know you” part, and felt like I was his best friend, and also: (this was the scariest part) He felt like he knew me better than I knew myself. Ew.
Very soon after the “Go Sox” exchange, the red flags started flying. (Thanks to McCabe and Moran, my two guides and protectors through this whole process!) I stopped responding to the emails. I hoped he would just get tired of me, and go away. Back off, dude. Back off. But freaks, in general, need neon signs. They are dense. Not only do they not get that their behavior is making you uncomfortable, THEY DON’T CARE.
I emailed creep-boy: “Do not email me again, and do not comment on my blog again. This is your last warning.” He obeyed – but I knew he was still just hanging around on my blog, at all hours of the day and night. Not commenting … but … what? Scrolling through? Obsessing. Reading every word I ever wrote.
I decided, after much deliberation, to try to embarrass him, shame him publicly. Hence: this post.
A couple months went by – no comments, no emails, but I could see, through referral logs, that he was spending literally HOURS on my site. Dude: what are you looking for? As long as he didn’t comment or email me, I didn’t feel like I needed to do anything about it, even though it was ANNOYING. Then – he got careless. He made a comment. A creepy comment. I immediately told McCabe and Moran that he had re-appeared, and promptly reported him to his ISP. I mean, whatever. The guy spent hours on my blog, so what, right? That means my blog is a success, right? But I’m telling you: it didn’t. feel. RIGHT. He was not RIGHT. I knew it. I just knew it. Call it intuition. His ISP sent him a warning letter. He emailed me one last time – and his email was such a MEAN email – written in such an overly intimate tone – as though he really knew me, and he had a deep personal relationship with me, and I was his dear friend who had let him down, who was going down the wrong path and he couldn’t save her, how he felt like I should “get back into therapy, because clearly you’re not out of the woods yet” – I mean, it was almost comical. He didn’t even know me. His last email to me was an affirmation: that I had been right from the beginning that there was something weird about this guy. He had been hiding it in sweetness and sycophancy – writing emails where he called me “dear lady” or “I am at your service” – you know. Obnoxious. Ikky. Sycophancy like that is a huge sign that someone is NOT QUITE RIGHT. I just could feel that something weird was underneath that, but I couldn’t put my finger on it – and the second I made good on my threats, out came the raging angry freak. My gut had been right for telling me all along: This guy is weird, Sheila. He’s weird.
There are so many ways to have misunderstandings in Internet communication. Things meant to be jokes don’t read right, sarcasm is missed, you need to put smiley faces to show you are benign and unthreatening … You know. All of that. A ton of times I have misinterpreted comments left on my blog … like: either I don’t get the joke, or I mis-hear the tone, whatever. All very common, and just part of communicating in typeface rather than face to face.
Another lesson I learned from the experience.
— Be a hard-ass with weirdos and FAST. Don’t wait. Don’t assume they will go away naturally. Trust the creepy-weird feeling in your gut – if it comes up. Don’t second guess it. You’re probably right. Address it immediately. Be mean. Be firm, in a scary way. And make good on threats. Report them, leave a paper trail, tell someone about it. I forwarded all correspondence from freak-boy to Bill and Jim … it got that weird. But I figure you can’t be too careful.
…and so I read this post after checking and re-checking your blog after the Salinger post because I am not in the mood to do my actual work here at my desk…hmmm, what was that you said – “they are compulsively attached to reading your blog…”….um….I think I’ll go do some paperwork now and…yes…I’ll just be going now…. :) (see…I’m benign.)
Whoa. That is frightening. Fortunately, he was in love with her and wanting her around instead of going down a different dangerous path. It could have gotten much uglier. It makes me shiver.
Jayne – hahahahaha!!!
Funny he should come up again. Last weekend, I was filing some bank statements and came across the folder where I had put his printed emails. I’d forgotten how loopy he was.
There was this guy I knew from college that used to creep me out. We were friends at first, but then he started in with this stuff about being in love with me. I wasn’t interested. I should have ended the friendship there. I was stupid and didn’t. When I left college to come back to LA to take a couple of years off, he came back too (he was from the Valley somewhere). We hung out a bunch of times, but he started to get more and more pushy about being “in love.” I wouldn’t take his calls anymore (which is a funny story. He would call, my dad would answer the phone and, being the guy who can’t stand lying, when I would make the whispered “tell him I’m not here” gesture, he would say to the guy “Emily doesn’t want to talk to you right now.” Hahaha).
I finally returned back to Humboldt, where every enrolled student automatically had a default e-mail account. I didn’t use mine for about a year, but when I finally got around to learning about this internet stuff and opened my box, there were like 15 e-mails from him about how I’d ruined his life, he couldn’t love anyone else because of what I’d “done” to him. I did nothing. NOTHING. I never led him on, never so much as held his goddamm hand. Then he got my phone number and started calling all the time, dumping his supposed “grief” on my roommate. Mind you, this is after I hadn’t talked to him for over TWO BLOODY years. Then he called one day and left a message explaining to me that it was “over.” Good. That afternoon, we watched some lazy TV and A & E had this documentary about stalkers. Freaky. One of the women they profiled had the same stalker for over 20 years. She would move. He would follow her. She had a husband, a family, and this guy was so oblivious, they would interview him and he would calmly explain how it was just a matter of her coming to understand they were meant to be together.
I don’t think my situation was quite as bad as a lot of the examples here, and I really think it had more to do with this guy being a very spoiled, only child who never quite got a grip on the concept of wanting something and not being able to have it. Still, there was a time when I was truly frightened of what he might do to deal with his frustration. I learned a lot from this situation.
Emily – hahahaha about your father. That’s classic!!
Stalking someone for 20 years? God, you would just go NUTS. Like: Get. Over. It. It’s scary, though: because it seems that the stalker has his reasons, and they are clear to him, and he does not feel embarrassed about it…It is a fantasy world. Shivers … again. Potentially terrifying.
I think I would go mad. The scary part about it is how there was very little legal recourse for so long. Like a restraining order is going to keep a crazy guy from killing or harming a person? If they have no regard for an individual’s personal space and life, what kind of regard will they hold some little piece of paper that orders them to stay away? I’m really glad that more and more celebrities started speaking up about this and it really helped get the laws changed so that people – and it’s mostly women who suffer this – have the means to protect themselves. It’s part of what makes living where I do a relief. One peep out of this guy after I’ve made it clear I want him GONE and I can have him #$%^ing arrested in under a day.
In the end, it’s just sad, SAD that there are people whose lives are so empty, so devoid of normal social contact that they are reduced to this sick behavior. They have nothing to anchor them in reality. I’d be really interested in reading some studies on stalker cases to see what kind of insights the pros might have into this kind of illness.
You can see, too, how that’s what the stalker wants. Even if they are wearing you down, and annoying the hell out of you … that’s fine. At least you know they’re alive, and that’s the whole point.
I remember when Fatal Attraction came out and caused such a brouhaha – there were a lot of lengthy articles in magazines and newspapers about this stalker-phenomenon. Most of the articles, though, had to do with situations similar to the movie: either the obsession came out of a one night stand, or it came out of an actual relationship – and one of the parties just couldn’t let go and accept it was over.
A lot of times, if I recall correctly: the majority of post-one-night-stand stalkers were women, and the majority of post-relationship-and-can’t-let-go stalkers were men.
Dominick Dunne’s daughter Dominique was murdered by her ex-boyfriend, because he couldn’t let go of the relationship, he couldn’t let go of HER. He thought he owned her. She reported him to the police, she left a paper trail, her parents knew about it … and still. He murdered her anyway. Horrible.
That’s why Dunne is such a victims-rights advocate, in terms of murder and rape trials. There was nothing he could do to save his daughter.
One other aspect to this is that online, you don’t really get to see the negatives about folks. You read only what they have carefully prepared for public consumption, not the dark stuff as well. It’s easy to idealize someone when you only read things with which you connect.
Dan – yeah, that’s kind of what the woman in the article said. That she knew he was attracted to her PERSONA – a persona she had carefully crafted, for her own reasons.
To most people what you say is common sense … to the freaks, not so much so.
I regret now having sent you a Merry Christmas email in which I think I told you how much I enjoy
your website.
I didn’t realize you had been through something
like this.
Oh goodness. Please don’t regret sending me a Christmas message!!
Only regret it if the message went something like this:
“My dearest lady – YOU ARE SUCH AN ENIGMA. I’ll try not to get frustrated with how much I DON’T know about you. Merry Christmas to you. What was your first kiss like? That would be a great post, I think. Best to you … Freak-boy.”
Damn, she can MONITOR my visits. Note to self: hit-and-run visits, hit-and-run visits. No matter how interesting her posts are—movie, history, communism, founding fathers, quote games, whatever–only stay a little while.
Oh for God’s sake.
hahaha
Come on now … this is a post about one specific person. I’m not trying to passive-aggressively insinuate anything about anyone else.
I started keeping track of this guy’s IP address after the red flags I mentioned, and I knew I had to keep him in my sight.
The rest of you are FINE. :)
Oh and by the way, DBW:
yes, if I wanted to? I could track where you go, what you do, what pages you look at, and how long you stay.
:)
A lot of people spend a lot of time here – I don’t seem to really attract a hit and run crowd.
Carry on as you were before. This post is unrelated to anything going on at the moment.
Don’t be too sure about that, red. >:)
hahaha
“yes, if I wanted to? I could track where you go, what you do, what pages you look at, and how long you stay.” Now, I am chilled to the bone. I feel like George Costanza when his mother “caught” him.
hahahaha
The stalkee has become the stalker, obviously.
“Go, Sox!!!”
(come on, you all wanted to do it, too.)
Yeah, the White Sox need to end this three game skid.
Dang it, Dave, you beat me to it. It seems like any woman who has an online presence, whether it’s a blog, or a personal ad, or a chat account, has to face some form of stalker/moron at some point. I helped out a local blogger buddy with a similar situation to yours – it finally ended when she got an e-mail from the guy’s wife, who was in the process of leaving him. The Mrs. had gotten into his computer, and he was basically spending all his time harassing women. In a way, these guys serve a purpose, because they remind us that we need to be careful on here.
And if you do find yourself being harassed, getting help from friends and people that you can trust is key. Don’t put up with the BS.
Did anybody ever see the old SNL sketch, “Stalk Talk” (an Oprah-like talk show for stalkers), with Christopher Walken? I keep picturing a new version with a bunch of old stalkers on the show complaining about how the internet makes it too easy to stalk these days, and that all these young punks wouldn’t have gotten anywhere in the old days.