Woman says she thought she might be dealing with more than one stalker — then one clue checked out, but the stranger at work kept coming back

A Reddit user says months of strange incidents around her apartment and workplace left her feeling like she was piecing together a pattern she could not fully prove, but could not shake either. In a post shared to Reddit and later collected by Best of Redditor Updates, the 24-year-old said she works full time as an office manager at a public university, attends grad school at the same school, and lives alone in a first-floor apartment about 10 minutes away. She wrote that the weirdness had been building for months: a man banging on her door after midnight and trying the handle, repeated late-night knocks on her bedroom window, and a woman showing up at her sliding door claiming a stolen device was pinging from inside her apartment.

The thing that pushed it from unsettling to terrifying, she said, was finding a plug-in GPS tracker in her car’s OBD port in December. According to the post, the dealership that had recently serviced the car denied using that brand, and police did not give her much beyond a basic report. She told university police too, since she believed the device was most likely placed either on campus or at her apartment. Already rattled, she said she accepted her director’s offer to quietly reduce mentions of her on the office website and around the department.

Then came the man at work. She wrote that a middle-aged man started showing up at her office wearing a hairnet, surgical mask, hoodie and sunglasses, claiming he had questions about financial aid. She said he kept asking the same questions their office could not answer, made himself coffee from a machine not meant for public use, and returned more than once. What really set off alarms for her was that on one of those visits, he came back within minutes of the office clearing out and tried to start a conversation with her while she appeared to be alone. She said he backed off quickly only after an IT employee stepped out and stood between them.

The update changed one major part of the mystery and intensified another. She later wrote that the GPS tracker in her car turned out not to be a stalker’s device after all. After contacting LandAirSea directly, she said she learned it was the dealership’s tracker, somehow repeatedly unplugged and plugged back in during service visits, despite the dealership previously insisting it was not theirs. That discovery gave her one answer, but not much peace, because by then the office visitor had become the bigger problem. She said campus police told her his behavior was unusual, and her director and coworkers later told her he had also been lingering outside the building near her office at times when she was there.

Things kept escalating. In the update, she said the man returned again on March 13, and she hid in her director’s office while calling campus police. A few days later, her director reportedly saw the same man in the building again, this time with four or five other men, and said they scattered after he confronted them. The Reddit user wrote that she started making practical changes fast: asking her boyfriend to escort her to work and class, setting up a Ring camera, buying pepper spray and a stun gun, and planning more range time with the Glock she said she already carried anywhere it was legal. She also checked with apartment management to see whether her unit had any history that might explain the strange behavior, but the manager found no clear record of anything suspicious.

What makes the story so unnerving is that the answer was not “it was all in her head,” but it also was not the clean, single-villain explanation she feared. One of the biggest red flags turned out to have a boring explanation. The man showing up around her office did not. By the end of the update, she said she was safe, but not relieved, and that feels like the part readers recognized most. Sometimes getting one answer does not calm anything down when the stranger is still showing up anyway.

The original Reddit post and update are both on Reddit, and the BORU compilation currently labels the story as ongoing.

What do you think — does this sound like one unrelated mess after another, or like a situation that still has not fully shown its shape?