Have you ever had a bad feeling about someone? Nobody seems to see it, but you just feel it in the pit of your stomach. Maybe you're wrong, and they turn out to be great. But sometimes... sometimes you're right. Well, these people were right in BIG ways. If you'd like to read more of their stories, check out the source link at the bottom of this article.
NOTE: This article may be disturbing to some readers, as it deals with themes of drugs, death, and abuse.
At my previous job, the CEO wanted to bump the newest member of the team to manager. I always had a strange feeling about the guy and I made my thoughts very clear to my boss. We were on good terms, in fact I helped bring the company up when it was about to go under, and I just felt that this guy was trouble for the company's future. No one else felt the way I did about him, but the feeling was so strong I told my boss that if they promote him to manager, I'm leaving. I would not stand to see the company fail after I worked my butt off to save it from the dumps multiple times.
In any case, they promoted him to manger, and as promised, I quit. They tried to ask me back, but I was firm, as long as he's manger, I cannot work there.
Fast forward 18 months I get a text from one of my former colleagues. Apparently they had all showed up to work as usual, and the place was locked up. Turns out company got shut down for tax evasion and fraud.
Don't know the details and don't really care for them, but that was one of the biggest "I told you so" moments I've ever had.
I had a very good friend who had a crush on her roommate. We all hung out and got along fine. Problem was, he gave me the chills. We all joked that the friend was like a star who just radiated heat. He, on the other hand, took the heat out of the room.
They ended up with multiple children, moved a few states away, moved back, got married, and I just never was okay with him.
He actually murdered her over a year ago. Now he's in prison for life.
There was a guy who was super popular at the hospital I worked at. He worked in all the "cool" units, like the trauma ICU, ED, and rapid response.
I always got a weird vibe from him.
Turns out he was stealing Fentanyl and dealing it on the side.
When I was 8 my parents invited a family over who had two sons. My mom loved both sons and worked with their mom. The whole family came over for dinner.
The two boys were monsters. I showed them the playroom in the basement and they both proceeded to smack me around and break my toys. My mom didn't believe me when I told her and told me to go downstairs and keep the boys busy.
About twenty minutes later I went back upstairs. My Dad asked why I was up there. I explained that both boys said I was boring and went outside and I didn't know where they were. Both sets of parents spent two hours looking for them. They finally found them several blocks away. My mom blamed me because I was supposed to keep these two older boys entertained in the basement. My Dad refused to let them come over again after hearing from me what happened. These guys were hugely popular with both other kids and parents. No one thought they could do anything wrong.
Later in life? Both guys were arrested for dealing meth. The younger one was arrested for assaulting his girlfriend, he then died a few weeks later from an OD. The older one is currently on parole and lives in his Mom's basement.
I used to work in TV production and I had to write the transcript for an interview for a TV host interview program. By the end of the transcript after watching him speak, sometimes rewinding over and over parts to get the transcript right, it was clear something was off with the guy being interviewed. I'm not going to say the name of the guy, but he was a pretty big celebrity where I live, in Australia.
The whole interview was a performance, the way he gestured and spoke about himself and his illustrious career, and his benevolence and humble beginnings, it was acting. Having watched the interview so closely, I could see he was not being natural at all.
After the program went to air the next day there was a general buzz at the station. It did well. The guy that was interviewed was considered a national treasure. Everyone loved him.
One of the producers at another program at the station was chatting to me about how brilliant the interview was. I was just honest and said what I wrote above. That he didn't seem right, his movements and words were too measured and not sincere and that he seemed to be performing rather than just talking. The producer said to me, "Well he is a performer."
But I never liked him after that. He gave me the creeps.
A few years later he gets charged for a string of sexual assaults, using his celebrity to get away with it for pretty much his whole life, some dating back in the 60's. He's an old man now.
So that's my story.
Oh man, when I was in 7th grade, my former best friend started hanging out with this "cool" guy who had just moved to the area, we'll call him "Nick".
Nick had a tough guy, "I don't care" attitude that she really gravitated to. I couldn't shake his attitude for some reason, and I remember telling her that I didn't trust Nick. She stopped hanging out with me in favor of him.
Nick grew up to be a total crapwipe, got in trouble all the time throughout school, and was eventually expelled from our high school for fighting. She still kept hanging out with him.
3 years later, Nick broke into her and her boyfriend's home with 2 others, and assaulted them.
Soon to be ex brother in law.
He was always cool, had nice watches, a couple of bikes, car etc. Just a little too friendly and felt to me like it was forced.
It turns out he's a narcissist who is walking out of his third marriage as the baby is getting more attention than him.
There's this one woman who is like the stand in grandmother for a large amount of people in my community. She lives on social media so she is 'there' for everybody. Everybody knows her, she knows everybody. Everybody loves her. Everybody tells her things. She's old enough to be a young grandmother or old Aunty to me, so due to her age she is seen as harmless.
However, she stabs people in the back. She will gossip like there's no tomorrow and you bet if you've told her something then everybody she knows will also consequently know about it. If she gets in a position where she needs to take sides she will side with the biggest amount of people. If she doesn't like you, then subsequently everyone else she knows won't like you. But, you know, they will all pretend to like you. It turns into a high school type situation sometimes.
I don't much like her. She's nice enough to me, but I've seen what she does. I'm just glad I see through it all. Social media can really bring out the monsters.
My mom always hated my 5th grade teacher. Everyone really liked him especially my bff's parents. When we were in college, the police discovered that he was really into cannibalism (fantasy, never actually did it himself). Everyone was shocked (small school) but my mom just nodded and said "I told you something was off about him."
In my early teens my aunt was best friends with this guy from her workplace. He seemed nice enough, he spoke softly and he always made decent food. I was constantly telling my family something was wrong with him, to the point of getting in trouble for it. Well he's in jail now, for a crime so bad I don't want to mention it. Sometimes, your gut just knows.
My old drama teacher. Everyone loved him but I knew something wasn't right. Sure enough, he was fired for inappropriate behavior with a student.
Alcohol reveals a lot. I've known several people like this, but one friend in particular: Fine, upstanding family man. Good friend of mine for a while. But when he got drunk, he got belligerent. To everyone. I found out later that his "perfect life" included physically and mentally abusing his wife and children.
To this day, I factor in how people act when intoxicated into what I think about them as people. Happy drunks are generally great people. Sloppy drunks are okay too. Mean drunks have that meanness in them. I don't buy the "alcohol made me do it" mentality. No, alcohol lets you release your true self.
I worked as a supervisor at a waterpark, there were something like 7 other supervisors and 3 managers (let's give them names- Matt, Jess, and Cassie) overseeing 200 lifeguards. One year we had a lifeguard we'll call Kevin. Everybody loved Kevin. Kevin was the coolest. and All the girls loved Kevin. Kevin's such a great lifeguard. The thing was I thought he was a terrible lifeguard, he was always sloppy, shirt untucked, way too relaxed in his chair, and I constantly had to yell at him to focus.
One day while I was trying to explain why he needed to do better I realized he wasn't really listening to me and then said, "Whatever you say, babe." That just struck me as odd and then I started to notice how disrespectful he was to all of the female guards and supervisors, but everyone just wrote it off as playful. I brought it up at the next management team meeting but everyone disagreed with me about it. That was when I found out one of our managers was fast tracking Kevin for a supervisor position and they had already started training him.
About a week later Kevin decided to test his power at the top of a ride by telling the lifeguards he was in charge and to speed up the release times of guests so the lines would move faster. This made the ride super dangerous because people were crashing into each other on the ride. A bunch of people got hurt. After a certain number of people getting hurt from tubes colliding the general manager ran up to the top of the ride to shut everything down, they called in maintenance to shut off the water to that side of the park thinking something was going wrong if people were going that fast down the ride. The General manager with the three managers in tail hoofed it and get there to find what Kevin had done. Our GM (a woman) starts yelling at Kevin and Kevin says to our manager Matt in front of everyone, "Who does this [string of expletives] think she's talking to?" Jess starts to tell Kevin that it's our GM who is everyone's boss and Kevin cuts her off and says, "Honey, why don't you let the men speak."
Our GM lost it at that point, called security and had him escorted off the property. She told Matt he should be fired for giving any sort of responsibility to someone willing to put other people's lives at risk, but Matt was always a good employee so instead, since he was the one that wanted to hire Kevin, he now had to fire him and would lose any rights he had in choosing any future higher level employees. I found out all this at the closing meeting that night. They asked me how I saw through Kevin when everyone else loved him. Honestly, I didn't know how other people couldn't see it.
There was a guy in school that was always pretending he didn't know when tests were and that he barely studied, and then got high 90's in everything, even specialist mathematics.
Turns out he had a near eidetic memory and literally didn't forget any of it and knew exactly when everything was. When confronted he said he pretended because he said he wanted people to be envious of him instead of friends so his marks wouldn't be lowered due to study time lost socialising.
That sounded somewhat reasonable in a sad way, until we found out he actually had a seething hatred for everyone there, and he didn't even study much, but used it as a cover to get away from people he thought of as too dumb to talk to. So weird.
When I was little I didn't like my grandma's new boyfriend. Everyone thought he was great, but I made a face and avoided him.
After months of them getting together, my grandma was at her condo and he comes over unannounced, stone cold glare, says nothing, walks toward her slowly. She keeps calling his name, but he's not answering. She gets a horribly bad feeling and asks, "Are you going to kill me?" ..no answer.. He started coming at her faster, and there was no way to get around her couch, so she jumped it like a hurdle and ran away. She called the cops and he was gone.
She moved very shortly after and never heard from him again.
There was this guy who had moved to my town and started working at the bar. He gave me a bad feeling from the beginning. Fellow bartenders hung out with him, gave him hugs, etc. He was nice, but he always had this Eeyore attitude. Like "Oh poor me" with puppy dog eyes. I hugged him once and it felt wrong and I couldn't figure out why.
Well, turns out he is a repeat woman beater. I read 3 separate arrest reports of him abusing 2 different women. Then we found out he was actually hurting one of our coworkers. I'm glad I googled him!
I haven't seen him since we found out and I'm not sure what I would do if I did.
One time this new girl started school and everyone made friends with her right away because she was into the same kind of music as us and she'd lived abroad and stuff, so she was "interesting". However, there was just something I really didn't like about her, and I took no steps to hide it.
Sometimes I wondered if it was jealousy, that I was worried she was stealing my friends. But I thought no, there IS something about her, but I realized that it probably came off that way to everyone else.
She would always make sly little judgmental comments about people that seemed to slip by unnoticed, and sometimes it was the way she looked at people, and how she laughed at people when they were being picked on. She was one of those girls that did/said things to get attention from boys, and revelled in the attention, and thought herself "higher" because of it, but would slag off other girls for doing the same.
The one thing that cemented it for me was when this other girl, who was kind of like a walking target unfortunately, was getting teased by some boys. She dropped her yogurt pot lid (I think she missed the bin, it was a windy day) and the girl I had bad feelings about, who was laughing along with the boys thought it would be cool to join in. She picked up the yogurt lid, walked up behind her and said something implying the other girl was a bin and stuck the lid (which had a little bit of yogurt on it) on her arm.
I saw this and went ballistic. I shouted "Hey!" then stood between them and said some stuff, like calling her pathetic, calling her out for showing off for the boys, said the other girl was one of the nicest girls in school (which was true) and didn't deserve to be treated like a bin. I took the lid off the girl and threw it at the rude girl.
I felt kind of proud of myself, because everyone had stopped laughing and I guess they were taking what I said really seriously. I think I looked like I was about to attack that girl (I was very close). Instead I just ended it with "c'mon [yogurt girl], let's go." and I walked with her to the library, where my other friends were hanging out.
She tried to thank me on the way there but I was still really tense and I was like "It's ok, you're the nicest girl in school, you don't deserve to be treated like that" but I was still very angry, so I didn't like, look at her or smile at her or anything. I felt kind of guilty because I know deep down, my stepping in wasn't really about the injustice of seeing an innocent girl being picked on, it was more about proving that the rude girl was everything I knew she was, and getting it off my chest, which isn't cool. I stepped in but for all the wrong reasons.
My kids' football coach. We make a habit of not discussing coaches or teachers in front of the kids, but I've disliked the guy from day one. He was this cocky, rough dude that would only respond with short 'that's the way it is' type of answers.
He won a few games with a school that hadn't won a game in years so parents talked highly of him. I recognized the year he'd won a couple games also happened to be the first year that every kid had grown up through the local youth football program, as the program had only begun about 8 years earlier. The next year the number declined and no games were won. The 3rd year we saw further declines and all the JV games were cancelled until the very last game of the season.
Well, during the game, this jerk coach spent the entire time riding around on the golf cart, putting away practice equipment for the season, leaving the coaching to his assistants. It was the only game we had even a chance of winning.
I later found out the youth football team still had a couple weeks of their season, but this guy had put their equipment away and locked it up, effectively hindering their practices.
The 4th year, they let him go, and everyone was upset because they thought he was our only hope. Well, happy to say that with a new coach, this has been the best season we've had in years.
This kid on my track team, lets call him Brad. Everyone liked Brad. He was popular and seemed really charming he was that kind of guy that kind of just looks like he's successful just for standing there, so most people were drawn to him. I always got slimy feeling from him. I never hopped on Brad hype train. A few months later, during the summer, he got sent to jail for selling heroin.
I wouldn't say this was a cool person. He had friends, but as far as I'm concerned he was far from popular.
I was in the army at the time, I was actually on my way out. This not-so-popular, but pretty middle-of-the-road guy came to my unit just as my contract was nearing it's end. Most nights during the week, he would come to my barracks room to visit my roommate who was also a new guy. Our barracks room had two separate rooms for each of us, but we shared a small kitchen and a bathroom. Outside in the hallway we had a placard with our names on it and a doorbell next to each name. This dude would ring my doorbell at 10 at night on a weekday (I would be asleep or trying to fall asleep, because we had really early mornings) and ask if my roommate was there.
The first couple times I let it slide, then I told him that he needed to stop ringing my doorbell, that it was clearly marked whose room was whose. He would just laugh and apologize, but I was growing increasingly annoyed with him and started to question his intelligence.
Finally, one night he did it again and I threatened him. I said, "Dude, you keep making the same mistake every night. The next time you ring my doorbell I'm gonna blow up. It's not that hard." Him being him, he just laughed about it. To him, this whole thing was a joke.
Well, sure enough he did it again, so I opened the door, punched him in the face, and slammed the door on him. Anyhow, I get out of the army and quickly forget about him. Then a few years later I'm scrolling though my news feed on Facebook and I see someone I know post a story about an incident in my old unit.
I open it, lo and behold, this guy killed a dude because he was drunk in the barracks and playing with a gun (guns are strictly forbidden in the barracks). I don't know how he didn't know better. I mean, he was in the infantry, so was I. Gun safety is highly impressed upon you, to the point where you're robotic about it. Not only that, but by the time this happened, he done a tour in Afghanistan. You'd imagine he'd have matured a little bit and realized that a gun is a deadly weapon.
I knew this guy was a moron. He should have never been in the infantry, let alone the army, in the first place. From day one, he gave me such a bad feeling. He was just a stupid, irresponsible kid to whom everything was a joke. He's in prison for the better part of 12 years.
Comments have been edited for clarity.
