Let's Not Meet~ Reddit Horror Stories

Fishing hooks and lures

This went on over the course of a year, with the last incident taking place in December of 2016.

I used to own this Green, 1998 Toyota Camry. It was my grandmother's until she gifted it to my parents, who eventually gave it to me as my first car. It was nice and reliable, but I have a bad habit of letting my cars accumulate a bunch of stuff before cleaning them out. Because I still lived with my parents, they would use the car from time to time if they needed it.

One day, I notice a bunch of fishing lines with hooks on them in the back of my car on one of the rare occasions that I clean it out. A bunch of the hooks are embedded into the upholstery, and more are between the creases on the seat. It takes me a while to get them all out, and I almost prick myself several times doing it. I have no idea how long they were there, as the last time I'd cleaned this much of my car out was months ago. At any rate, I'm annoyed.

At first, I thought that my dad had put them there, as he had recently used my car to transport a bunch of old junk for a garage sale. I ask him about it, but he told me he's never seen any fishing hooks or lines in any of the old stuff of ours, and nobody in my family even fishes so it wouldn't make any sense for us to have it. He's also the only other person that has used my car at all in the past year or two.

I'm the kind of person who locks up everything, every night. I triple check my car doors, and if I'm even a little uncertain as to whether or not I locked up I will go back to my car and check, no matter the inconvenience. I also park it where I can see it from my bedroom window, and hear if anyone tampers with it, so I doubted anyone could have broken in and just assume my Dad missed it, and didn't think anything more of it, until a month later when I found even more fish hooks in my back seat.

At this point, I ask my Dad about it again, but he figures I'm either pulling a weird prank on him or someone is breaking into my car. I wonder though why anyone would break into my car, not steal anything out of it, and leave fishing hooks instead. It just didn't make sense to me.

To give you an idea about how weird this is, I live in a neighborhood where everyone knows everyone, we all talk and even have a private facebook group that started due to a drug house at the end of the street cropping up (though at this point it wasn't active), and as a sort of "neighborhood watch" group, that always posts whenever somethings suspicious happens. So I don't have any neighbors I don't know for miles, and none of the ones I do know are this shady.

Again, without any explanation or clear motive, as the days and weeks pass, it fades to the back of my head. I get a new job selling mattresses, as I'd been unemployed focusing on school for a while, and move out of my parents' house to live with my girlfriend. This is where things turn from weird, to extremely unsettling.

One night, we decide to go to a nearby WinCo to get something to make food with, and I notice my back seat has a bunch of fishing lines and hooks in it again. Startled, I look around for any sign of someone being nearby. I tell her to get back in the house, and I sit up and stare at my car until morning comes from our bedroom window (after triple checking every door and window to ensure they were all locked, but I don't see anyone or anything. I get ready for work and she gets ready for her college courses, and we leave.

The store I was working at during this time had a weird L-shape design to it, with 2 different entrances and a cafe taking up the space between them. There was one entrance that was easily visible from the front desk, and another that you would have to get up to go see. As I was closing up the night after the last incident, I go to turn off the open signs, and see in the center of the obscured hallway an entire roll of fishing line, coiled up but with some of the line leading to the door, where a pile of hooks sat. I had no customers that day, and never heard the door alarm go off. I then noticed someone had turned the door alarms off, but neither I nor my only coworker had ever tampered with the device before then, and it was behind the front desk.

I was shaking. Someone had been stalking me and leaving these lines, but I had no idea what to do. Call the police? Other than the fishing lines and hooks, there was really nothing to trace back to anyone. My store had no cameras, and corporate would never agree to installing them. Neither my family nor my girlfriend's could afford security cameras either. I figured the best I could do would be not to appear as frightened as I was, in case whoever was doing this was watching me. I thought that if seeing something like this didn't make me go about my day any differently, and I didn't give whatever reaction this person was looking for, that they would give up and go away.

For several more months I would find fishing lines and hooks in my car, despite it being locked and my parents (being the only people with extra keys) being much too busy with the construction of their new house and their jobs to take time out of their day to prank me. Once or twice I would leave notes in my car asking whoever it was why they were doing this, and to stop, and I would find the notes gone whenever the lines and hooks appeared but with no response.

Eventually, after a series of misunderstandings and disagreements with her family, I decided to move out of my girlfriend's house and moved in with a couple friends into their apartment until my parents' new house could be completed. The very last time I had an encounter with the lines/hooks, I came home from work to find them strewn about the living room. Stuff was knocked over, and a few things broken, but nothing was taken. My friend, his girlfriend and their baby were all gone at the time, so no one was home when this happened, save for his cats which were absolutely spooked and wouldn't come out from under his bed for hours.

I still don't know what this person wants/wanted, why they were stalking me in the first place or what the fishing lines and hooks meant. No one I know is huge into fishing, and I specifically go out of my way not to make enemies or cross people, even purposefully giving people more than I take from them so that I don't seem like I'm out for myself. I really don't know if it was someone I know or a stranger really good at covering their tracks, and freaking people out.

All I know is that I will have anxiety over this for the rest of my life, and I routinely stay up until 4 or 5 in the morning because in addition to several other traumatizing experiences, this has made every bump in the night a potential threat to me. It's been almost 9 months since I've seen anything more from this person, but instead of feeling better, I feel more uneasy that someone followed me through that many changes in my life and didn't do anything further than breaking into my work and my friend's house, but that any time they could because no safety measures seemed able to deter them.