3 Hours of Disturbing True Stories (With Rain Sounds)

A woman recounted her upbringing in an isolated family unit led by her psychologist mother, Mama Charlene, who subjected her and her siblings to a 'thesis' – raising them without love, under arbitrary rules (e.g., no orange food, shed confinement), and with fabricated narratives (rewritten books, 'Daddy Cobbleton' demon). The goal was to introduce love and reality at 18 to create 'fulfilling lives.'

Mama Charlene told me that what I was about to hear was going to be hard. Nothing I learned growing up was real. The world was a cold, harsh place, and she was a radical psychologist who had found a willing family to help her with her thesis. She believed that raising children without the concept of love and following a set of incomprehensible, inexplicable rules, and then introducing them to the concept of love and reality at 18, when they were old enough to understand it, would lead us to live the most fulfilling lives possible.

A listener experienced severe harassment after a misinterpreted tweet about a K-pop band's color scheme. The online backlash escalated rapidly to doxxing, death threats, exploitation of phobias, and real-world incidents like a dead pigeon left at her door, car vandalism by an adult man, and a fan seducing her boyfriend.

All of this pales in comparison to the really terrifying event I got myself into, though... The hashtag I saw was a color combination... I posted #ban name effing sucks... they'd found my Instagram, my Facebook, my poor old mom's Facebook, my LinkedIn. They found the coffee shop where I worked... Someone had shoved a dead pigeon halfway through my letter box... I found a black and pink ribbon tied around its neck... my car had been spray painted... The cult remembers, is what it said on the windscreen... This time, the K-pop cult member wasn't some tween girl, but was in fact an adult man... One of their nut job fans has seduced my boyfriend right in front of me.

During a late-night bus ride, the narrator and two punks engaged in a verbal altercation that escalated to physical assault and a knife threat against the driver. The bus driver, known to the narrator, intentionally crashed the bus into a wall to disorient the attackers, preventing a stabbing and allowing her to subdue one of them.

This bigger punk... told the driver he was going to make her wish that she'd never been born. And that's when he pulled an honest to God hunting knife out of his belt... the bus driver had taken an unconventional emergency approach and crashed the bus directly into a wall in an attempt to disrupt the punks from stabbing her or me. And was kind of a genius idea, if extremely reckless.

While walking through Covent Garden tube station, the narrator was stalked by a suspicious young woman. A seemingly normal businessman appeared and, with a single glance, caused the stalker to scream in terror and flee. The narrator later questioned why the stalker was so profoundly terrified of the businessman, leading to the unsettling conclusion that the 'savior' might have been a more dangerous individual.

This girl was like that. She pretty much crept around the corner looking for all the world exactly like a stalker... The girl looked at me and then looked at the businessman and genuinely froze on the spot. Then, honest to God, she let out an actual small scream as she looked him in the face. And then my stalker spun on her heel... I'm now convinced that I saw a look of recognition on her face when she saw him... I can't shake the feeling that my savior that night could have been way more dangerous than the person he saved me from.