Woman says she thought she might be dealing with more than one stalker — then one clue checked out, but the man showing up at work only got more unsettling

A 24-year-old woman on Reddit said a string of bizarre incidents around her apartment and workplace left her feeling like she could not even tell whether the problem was one person or several. In a post later collected by r/BestofRedditorUpdates, she wrote that over several months she dealt with a man banging on her apartment door late at night, repeated knocks on her bedroom window, a woman claiming a stolen “device” was pinging from her unit, and a GPS tracker found plugged into her car’s OBD port. She said the situation felt especially hard to untangle because some of it happened near home, some at work, and none of it came with a clean explanation.

In the original post, she described the workplace incident as the most immediate threat. She said a middle-aged man started showing up at her university office wearing a hoodie, sunglasses, a surgical mask, and a hairnet while claiming he had questions about financial aid. According to her account, he kept returning, lingered around the office, made coffee without permission, and behaved differently when she was alone than when other staff were present. On one visit, an IT employee stepped between them, and she said the man changed his tone and left almost immediately.

The update cleared up one major clue but made the rest of the story feel worse, not better. She wrote that the GPS tracker turned out to be a device belonging to the car dealership that had serviced her vehicle, not a stalker. She said a representative from the tracker company confirmed it was the dealership’s unit and that the dealership had wrongly denied owning it when she first raised concerns. That explanation crossed one frightening possibility off the list, but it did not explain the office visitor or the earlier apartment incidents.

As for the man at work, she said the behavior escalated. After she reported him, campus police told her her director had already flagged him, and she later learned he had been lingering for long stretches on a bench just outside her office, including while she was there. She said he returned again on March 13, and because she was already in a back room, she was able to avoid him while a staff member spoke with him at the desk until he left. She also wrote that police told her he would be identified and trespassed, but she never saw that reflected in the public records she checked.

Then came the detail that pushed the whole thing back into nightmare territory. She said that on a campus-closure day tied to severe weather, her director went into the office and saw the same man again, this time with four or five other men in the halls. According to her post, they scattered after her director confronted them, but that did little to calm her down. She wrote that the pattern seemed tied to her schedule, that she had started relying on her boyfriend and male coworkers to escort her, and that she was trying to line up her in-office time with other staff as much as possible.

By the end of the update, she had installed a Ring camera, bought pepper spray, ordered more security gear, and said she was still on edge despite solving the tracker mystery. The story landed hard in the comments because it moved in the opposite direction of what readers usually hope for: one clue was debunked, but the man physically appearing at her office kept returning, and then appeared with a group. That left the thread feeling less like a tidy stalking mystery and more like a woman narrowing one fear only to be left with another that still looked very real.

The original Reddit post is here.