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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/midsummerstarlight on 2024-09-10 03:56:45+00:00.
Right off the bat, let me inform you that I am a content creator. I won't reveal my identity for obvious reasons, but I will say that I focus on true crime stories. My channel isn't the biggest, but it's definitely not the smallest. My most recent videos have been reaching over a million views on a regular basis, which feels utterly crazy to me. I'm incredibly grateful for all the love and attention, especially because I really enjoy what I do, but I'm also incredibly nervous about all of it. Admittedly, for someone who's always researching and talking about scary stuff, I get scared easily. I'm the type of person who jumps at the smallest sound and when I get creeped out, I start looking over my shoulder and watching every shadow in the dark. Maybe it wasn't the brightest idea for someone like me to start a job where I look at things that scare the shit of me on a daily basis, but this is just the way that I've always been. And recently, I've come to the conclusion that I have good reason to be this way.
It started about a year ago, when I hadn't quite reached a million views yet. I got this really concerning comment. This is the internet, so, obviously, there are going to be hundreds, if not thousands, of absolutely absurd comments from people ranging from trolls to spam bots to just plain immaturity, and as someone who focuses on true crime, the nature of these comments can be even worse than usual. I've gotten a lot of comments in the past about how people are “living under my floors” or “saving a spot in their basement” for me or, occasionally, how I look “especially submissive and breedable in this one,” so it's safe to say that nothing surprises me anymore. But there was one that crossed the line over from playful to threatening. It was that dreadful sort of moment that I think everybody on the internet, especially those of us with any amount of fame, prayed would never happen to them. Someone posted a comment that revealed the address to my house.
I immediately removed it after making note of the username and metadata, hoping to God that no one else saw that. It had been posted right as I was scrolling through to read the early comments, so I doubt it was seen by many people, but I know that once it's on the internet, it's there forever. I always knew that something like this was a possibility, but for it to actually happen shook me to my core. In passing, I had imagined what I might do if someone ever put my personal information out there, but I never really thought my imagination would become reality. The comment had no extra details, no extra words, nothing. It was just my address, in full, plain as day, posted on the internet for everyone to see. I don't know if that was more or less comforting than if it had had some sort of context behind it. The context that I did gather just made me feel way worse. The user who had posted it was someone under the name YourOwn PersonalNightmare. They had a default icon, default banner, and no videos of their own. Their profile was over ten years old and it was completely blank except for one public playlist, which was titled “Sleep.” In this playlist was every single video you could find on YouTube with me in it. All of my own videos, plus every podcast I'd been on, every collab I’d done, every livestream, every fan edit; if the video featured my face and my name, it was in that playlist. I know I have fans who love me and some people fall asleep to my videos, but this was something so much more intense. I scrolled for a long time before giving up. I'm not sure what I was looking for; they all met the same criteria. The playlist had well over 2000 videos. It was hundreds upon thousands of videos of just… me.
I would have posted the link to it here to see if someone could look through it for me, but it's gone now. After I deleted that comment, I contacted the police. I know the local police force probably wasn't the best choice, but I didn't know who else to call. I told them how someone had put my address online and the woman on the other line told me there wasn't much more they could do now that I deleted it, that it was more of an internal issue with YouTube, but she would at least talk to the detective unit and see if one of them was interested in looking into it for me. By the time a detective had gotten back to me a few days later, the whole channel was gone. I mean, completely gone. After getting the detective up to speed, I went to share the link to this person's profile with him and found that the link now went to an error page I had never seen before that just said, “This user does not exist.” I even tried looking it up on the Wayback Machine, especially since their profile was well over a decade old, and it came up with nothing. When I told the detective this, he said they probably got banned and bet that I wasn't the only one whose address they were sharing around. This made perfect sense to me, but something still just felt off about the whole thing. He told me that if it “makes me feel any better,” he would look into it and try to find more information, but he “couldn't make any promises.” Typical. He gave me his extension and told me to call him in case anything happens.
Several months went by and nothing happened. The profile was still gone and the detective never did find anything else. Since my channel was getting bigger, I hired a moderator team to keep track of comments for me, and they do a really good job, but no more concerning comments have come up (unless you count shitposting and spam as concerning). I figured it was just one of those things; one of the consequences of putting yourself out there. I figured that the detective was probably right, it was probably just some punk who decided to dox a bunch of people, and then they were either banned or just decided to quit, for reasons I would never know. It's not uncommon at all for people to just abandon things on the internet, out of nowhere, with no explanation, as eerie as it may seem. I would never know what happened and, as long as it didn't happen again, I would be okay with that. The whole thing would just fade into obscurity, and I would start to settle back into my life, finally putting it behind me, finally feeling safe and secure in my own home once more.
Then, just a few weeks ago, I got a strange email. After publishing a video that I had worked very long and hard on, I spent the following day looking over emails sent to my business inbox. By this point in time, I was getting dozens of emails a day from all sorts of companies asking if I would be interested in advertising their product or service in exchange for their sponsorship. Fielding these emails is an all-day affair, so I block out one day a week to go through all of them, and by the time I'm done, I can see nothing but huge blocks of text every time I close my eyes. It's an incredibly monotonous task, wading through mountains of mail that are all pretty much the same. On that day, I was looking through that week's inbox, and clicked on one email that looked just about the same as all the others.
Subject line: “Can I count on your support?”
“Dear (my name).
I'm writing you concerning a sponsorship opportunity with Yosemite Parks Network. We are excited to announce our ne
Please tell me you remember me. I'm not going to talk about (my wife’s name). I'm going to keep her out of it. I promise. Tell me you remember me. You need new camera. I’ve been watching, so I know the”
That was it. The email was sent from someone with the name “Catherine,” no last name, and the email address was catherine@(censored for privacy) - a domain which, at the time of writing this, doesn't go anywhere if I type it into my browser. I tried to reply back, basically just to tell them to fuck off and that this email is only for serious business inquiries, but it bounced back. I'm assuming the email address itself isn't real either. I didn't know what to make of this. I wanted to brush it off, chalk it up to some troll trying to mess with me. I know that there's a way to send emails from spoofed addresses and it wouldn't be the first time I've received some weird, creepy message from a fan, even in my business inbox.
That said, this one in particular just really got under my skin. I rarely mention my wife's name in my videos, though I know I've said it a few times, and it's a pretty common name, so I could explain that away. What's weirder is that I had just been at Yosemite National Park not that long ago and I hadn't said anything online about it yet. On top of that, the camera that I was using to film died in the middle of recording the night before I got the email. The more I thought about it, the more conflicted I felt. I could come up with a dozen ways in which all of this could just be coincidence, and on the flip side, I began thinking of all the ways someone might have found their way into my phone or computer. Anxiety is something I've always had trouble with since I was young. After struggling with it for a long while, I figured out that it's easy to spiral when you're in your head about something, especially when you spend all day filling your head with scary stories. Eventually, you have to come to accept that there isn't a clear answer to every question and sometimes it's better for you to just leave a thought be. So, the longer I sat there contemplating this email, the more I felt compelled to just forge...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1fd917e/yourown_personalnightmare/