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This is the scariest thing I've ever written. Originally published June 2021
I’ll try to keep it simple, even though this story is almost as weird and uncanny as any paranormal account. UFOs are easy to believe in when Reality is as messed up as what follows.
Stalker #1 goes like this:
CK and I were officemates when I started teaching at KU in, what was then, the Western Civilization program. I was starting graduate school; she was 2-3 years along in her program.
We hit it off immediately, finding common cause in feminism, philosophy (one of my majors and her principal course of study), WC curriculum development and politics generally.
I respected her experience and her disciplined but rather daring way of teaching and I think she respected my ability to keep up with her far ranging intellectual tirades. She was always ranting about something.
After my first year in the WC program, CK was promoted to a supervisory, senior position over the other GTAs. She began to exercise more authority in curriculum meetings (she was allowed) and organized various enrichment activities for students and the instructors under her. Some folks liked this, some didn’t—mostly due to time restraints and partly due to her bossy personality.
Our friendship continued, but over time, I began to notice some odd things.
She started to try to monopolize my attention using any available excuse for us to be together. She would get really weird and passive aggressive if the two of us were present at a party or staff get together and was obviously really jealous if I spoke to anyone else.
I visited her in Lawrence where she lived with her husband a few times and on each occasion she would make various excuses to try to get me to stay longer.
One time she, I and her husband traveled into Kansas City to see a movie and just relax. She acted out all day—being dramatically pouty, whiny and loud in public for no good reason I could see. I asked her husband if she always acted like this in front of strangers and he said, “Only around you.”
She began to find reasons to hang out in my office while I had to work and started trying to pit me against all the other instructors in the program, implying that she and I were “special,” smarter and more creative than the rest. When speaking to others she sometimes referred to me as “her protégé.”
Then she started buying me clothes. Nobody buys me clothes except my mother and intimate partners and then only by request.
Finally, my partner, to whom I was married at the time (legality in Kansas be damned), revealed to me that CK had been calling her and telling her that she was a terrible spouse and wasn’t good enough for me.
It took me that long to see what the rest of you have probably figured out reading this.
So, I tried talking to her, first nicely, then I had to confront her. I had already given the clothes back. I changed my schedule, quit meeting her for lunch. Eventually, I had to begin backing out of the relationship altogether.
For Christ’s sake she was my boss.
As I feared might happen—she began to retaliate. She tried to keep me from being rehired in the program and bad talked me when I applied for another position in a different department once my WC tenure was up.
In order to protect myself, I had to go to the Program Director and tell him everything. He already knew because he’d been watching her behavior (now why he hadn’t intervened earlier is another question), but he is the one who named it, “Yes, she is in love with you.” It was like being shot dead in the street.
He took action once I’d talked to him and I was able to get rehired and transferred to that new teaching position.
She was eventually removed from her position and the job description was changed so that no subsequent holder of it would have the kind of authority she did.
But that was not the end.
But now, Stalker #2:
MB had the misfortune of being in relationship with me as I hit my alcoholic bottom. She’d been a high school friend and I took up with her because she was there. That’s all. I treated her just about as you can imagine a drunk might. Shitty, but it’s true.
I left her in 1981, so completely disgusted with myself that I lived on the streets of KCMO for almost a year. In 1991, after I’d gotten some of my own crap together, I was able to make amends to her, the way one is supposed to in those 12 step programs.
But she wouldn’t have it. In her mind, I was this flawed, but still precious angel that she adored. She claimed to remember nothing that I know I did to her. It freaked me out—so I did the best amends I could and got the hell away from what seemed to me to be her very creepy delusions.
Back to Stalker #1:
For several years after I graduated from KU (2001) I would get these really weird prank calls. They would come in clusters, most of which I eventually recognized as occurring on the approximate anniversary of when I had to tell CK that I was putting a moratorium on our friendship (I never did officially “end it” because her behavior toward the end was too scary for me to be alone with her to do so).
On a weekend stint at the KC Renaissance Festival, during my lunch break, I ran into a guy who had been one of her colleagues in the Philosophy department at KU and my officemate during that last troubled semester before my tenure in the WC program ended.
He told me the rest of the CK story: that she admitted to him she had been stalking me (which explained why he curiously started walking me to my evening class that same last semester), her husband had left her (turned out he was gay—like who knew?), she’d had a nervous breakdown, had threatened one of her professors and been thrown out of her program. He also said that she admitted she’d “done other things,” but hadn’t elaborated.
I suddenly realized that she had to have been involved with a violent burglary that had occurred at the house my partner and I were renting during that period in 1992. The only things taken were items of specific personal value to my partner and me—while items of economic worth, such as electronics and my guitar and computer were left untouched.
After the investigation, the sheriff had told us that this crime “was personal” it was not just a break in.
Not only were only personal items taken, but a great deal of pointless vandalism was done to the property and whoever did it had to have been in the house at one time (she had) and known our two very complicated schedules (she did). At the time it didn’t occur to me that she might be involved (she would have had help). Now it just makes sense.
Eventually, of course, I left Kansas City and moved east.
In my first year at the Naval Academy (2005/6) I got a series of bizarre emails on my official USNA account. They were vaguely threatening, accusing me of duplicity and sexual misconduct. They threatened to “out me” at the Academy (I was a civilian so it wouldn’t have mattered). The writer knew details of my personal life (at least my life prior to moving) and called me a hypocrite and all kinds of other things.
The username of the email, the language used, the type of accusations rendered were virtually identical to the kinds of things Stalker #1(CK) said to me once in the heat of her anger at me for backing away. (At one point following my withdrawal from the friendship, I’d unwisely allowed her to rant at me over the phone for about 5 hours--I watched the clock-- because I felt so guilty about drawing this boundary—and I’ll never forget some of the awful things she said to me—including how I was treating her just like “your buddy Bob treated people”—the serial killer Bob Berdella, that I’ve written about in previous blogs).
So obviously, I assumed it was CK.
Since the messages had come through a Federal military server, and were harassing and threatening in nature, I had to report them, again having to tell the whole story to my Chair. He took the appropriate actions and assigned MPs to me whenever I was on the USNA campus for a year, as well as a periodic patrol of my residence. JHFC!
But surprise, it was, apparently Stalker #2:
Almost exactly one year (2011) after I’d moved to the Hudson Valley and begun working at one of the community colleges here, I again got a series of emails at my school inbox.
These, however, claimed to be from MB (keep in mind the last time I’d seen her was in 1991) and she was proudly proclaiming that, since getting on medication, she’d realized what an asshole I was and was concomitantly admitting that she’d sent the previous batch of emails (at USNA) and was broadly forgiving me anyway even though I didn’t deserve it.
I did write back to these emails, briefly made amends again, and told her I’d talk to her if she wanted. We had a couple of phone conversations, but she was so delusional on her end about any number of things and so clearly disoriented due to her meds, that I doubted she could have written the USNA emails—although she was clearly tracking my movements through time and location.
I don’t know. Did they somehow meet online in the late 1990’s or early 2000’s on an incest survivor’s chat board (they are both survivors and there were only two large scale national boards like that during this period)? Did they figure out they had both known me? Is it all just coincidence that at one point in my life two people were stalking me?
These are the head-places traumatized people are forced to go.
I’m not usually this paranoid, and I can just hear CK saying that my entertaining of these notions betrays that I am really secretly thrilled that someone is paying so much attention to me.
Fuck no. And I’m not afraid of Stalker #2 (MB) even if the two of them have somehow been in cahoots (MB tried to contact me via FB as recently as 2015. I did not respond).
CK is one of two main reasons why I’ve chosen to remain, more or less, until recently, out of the public eye. I have been completely terrified of her.
This is someone who, while my boss, and when apprised of the fact that I wasn’t in love with her and that my responses to her had been based in friendship and not sexual desire, harassed my partner, tried to keep me from being rehired and blackball me throughout the KU GTA system, probably paid someone to break into my home, accused me of being like a serial killer and admitted to others that she was stalking me.
She is proud of the fact that she worked in Army intelligence and when I knew her, was equally proud of her inventory of True Crime books. She was obsessed with murder.
But I’m done with being afraid. In the shadow of #MeToo, it would be more difficult for her to convince anyone that I was in the wrong—even if I didn’t always know exactly what I was doing. She tried to use her power over me to force an outcome.
The saddest part of this is that, due to my fear of her, I’ve had to keep track of where CK is—following advice given to me by law enforcement.
I know where she’s been teaching (she did manage eventually to get her PhD as well in a different program), approximately where she lives and that she’s probably semi-retired. She’s made me a mini-stalker too. It’s like living with a permanent stain on one’s soul. It’s really difficult to express how scary this kind of thing is.
A FB friend has referred to an even worse series of stalking events in her life as “The Fuckening” but since she’s trademarked the term, I’m not going to use it here—but it is all of that. Thank whatever gods rule the physical universe that there was no public internet when this all started.
The only thing I can think of doing is putting it into the public. So, this rather long account. Thank you for sticking with it my friends. Such shadows need to be exposed to the light.
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