Real life stalking

So, first FatCat and BrownSuga' both had unpleasant stalky/harrassy experiences..  and then my entire neighborhood went off stalking each other. This made me think of some real life stalker experiences...  - do you want to hear it?

I was working in Switzerland, and one day my best friend C comes to the lab all freaked out, with a letter she found in her mailbox that morning. The letter went something like this.

Beautiful girl, you don’t know me, but our eyes met in the metro on your way home, your smile hypnotized me and I had to write you this letter. You are the most beautiful woman I ever saw I could tell from your smile that you have a great sense of humor (etc.. – y’all know how to write these better than the real thing) Would you like to meet? I will be at McDonalds downtown at noon tomorrow with a magazine.

So C was freaked out obviously. She had NOT noticed that somebody followed her 15 minutes walk through town from the metro station in the centre up to her rather deserted dark street... Her house is an old apartment house at the end of the street, where she lived alone on the 5th floor up under the roof. The mailboxes are at the ground floor, so the stalker would have had to see which one she checked.. or seen what landing she stopped at (no elevator) in order to leave the letter in the right box...   This totally freaked her out. From where had he watched her? So everybody told her to tell the police, but she decided she wanted to know what this dude looked like so she could pick him out of a crowd another time... so she went to McDonalds to meet him.

That meeting went all right, he had been creepy, and she told him she wasn’t interested, and he didn’t seem to mind that... and somewhere along the talk, she had taken a chewing gum from her bag and offered the package to him as well..
So half an hour after she gets back to the lab he calls her (how did he get her number?) to tell her he is still chewing on her chewing gum and what a wonderful girl she is and yada-yada-yada...   so she gets mad at him and gives him an earful and then she never hears from him again.

Months later, I sit across from a guy in the metro who keeps staring straight into my eyes... that’s a bit disconcerting, so I smile and look away and my ears go red and stuff like that... because that’s how I am, right?
I was on my way to work, so I just get off at my station and hurry off. As I get into the parking lot of my building the metro guy catches up with me and starts asking me who I am and what I do, and he’s a foreign student and hasn’t had anybody to speak English with for years and what a pleasure to finally have somebody to talk to and would I have a cup of tea with him some time...  So I end up having a cup of tea with him and being just frosty enough to keep him from getting any ideas and he never bugged me again...  but we often ran into each other in the metro and did some small talk to pass the time.
One thing about him freaked me out. He could remember every little detail he had been told. He asked me whether I had pets and what they were called the first time I talked to him and I told him my tortoise’s name... which I have told you lot as well, and I bet none of you remember it... he asked me how she was... by name... ages later...  I was very careful to not give him any specific information after that.

So then one day C and I both meet metro guy and realize it’s the same guy that had been stalking C ! So he’s probably been randomly stalking everybody on that metro line. He wasn’t enjoying that encounter btw.... he was actually trying all he could to shrink into the floor and get out of there. Anyways, he never harmed any of us, and he ended up getting a girlfriend. (We kept running into him/them in the metro) and although he was weird and creepy, he didn’t seem dangerous. He seemed like he was just majorly clueless about boundaries... and proper courting behaviour...  but otherwise reasonably harmless...  Most importantly, we felt loads safer knowing who he was and what he was doing, where he worked and lived and who else he hung out with.