I’ll never forget that sinister laugh in a darkened room. It sent chills down my spine, it brought goosebumps out on my arms, I could feel the hairs on my head stand up. I was gripped in panic, fear, surprise. Any negative feeling you could ever imagine being gripped by, I was feeling it. But that sinister laugh in the darkness is also the thing that saved me. I was 20 years old, a university student, and I was the only one home in our back-section, student-flat property. It was after midnight, with no hope of anyone else being home for hours, if at all. I wouldn’t have even known he was there, had he not laughed sinisterly, from somewhere in the darkness.

That day, one of my male flatmates, we’ll call him Science Guy, had been the last in our flat and group of friends to finish his exams to wrap up the year. The rest of us had finished days if not a week before, already celebrated and celebrated again as other friends got done. Most flatmates had already moved out and moved on to summer plans. He and I were the only flatmates home the night he decided to bring five random people back to our place for a booze-up, because nobody in our circle was keen or around for yet another mid-week night out on the town. I call these people he gathered random on purpose, for although they were known to him through his Science Degree classes, they weren’t people he (to my knowledge) had ever socialised with before, and I had certainly never laid eyes on them in my three years of knowing him. They were people keen to get on the booze some place, celebrate the end of exams with whoever was offering, and in my mind were (judgement alert) people who didn’t have any better offers. My flatmate just wanted a party, and I genuinely think he didn’t care who with.

The party kicked off pretty early. I kept out of their way, staying down in my room. I had packing to do. I took a shower, and watched a dvd. At 11pm, with the party still going strong, I decided to occupy myself by ringing my friend who was living on the other side of the world. We had one phone, corded and plugged into the phone jack in the kitchen – in the open plan living space the kitchen adjoined the living room – at this time, this was party central. We’d bought an extra long cord for the phone, so flatties could drag it to a private, quiet spot no matter who was home. It reached our undercover carport via the kitchen window, but alas not as far as my bedroom which was at the very end of the house. So I made myself a coffee, and popped the phone on the kitchen windowsill so I could grab it from the outside.

That was my only interaction with this crowd across many hours. A few niceities as I got myself set up for my call, and putting everything back afterwards. They were all pretty drunk but they seemed nice enough, if not a very odd bunch of cohorts. There was Science Guy, then two very young seeming (perhaps just immature) girls who were obviously friends together outside of their class, add to the group a male in his early 40s, and two others who for the life of me I’ve never really been able to recall with much clarity – but then, I didn’t have to deal with them later, so that makes sense I guess. The guy in his 40s stuck out the most – I mean … weird, right? He was rough looking. I remember thinking he looked homeless, and not in the young-uni-student-I-don’t-care-about-material-things hipster way, but like a person who rough slept at night. He was probably the most polite though in my interactions, smiled a lot, though didn’t seem to be able to maintain eye contact well – he seemed jolly enough. As weird as he was, this anomoly in an otherwise non-descript group of uni-student, I thought – not my party, not my guest, so not my concern. My mistake.

If I’m honest, and it’s relevant in a bit, Science Guy was being a bit of a douche that night, a right dickhead. I might have been the only flatmate home, but I was home … and it was my home. He was yelling unnecessarily about every little thing that popped into his head, pumping up the volume on the stereo at regular intervals (perhaps that explains some of the yelling), drinking way too much (he was not usually a big drinker), acting like ‘Mr Cool’ for his audience, and being pretty awful to me. I’m not sure why he was being a rude-douchey-dickhead, perhaps I had done something to upset him, or perhaps it was just because he was drunk, who knows. I’m not sure I ever will. At the time I didn’t much care, we were never particularly close and he was a sozzled state of intoxicated afterall. His behaviour however set a tone that would later change a harmless party into something scary.

Sometime after midnight I heard the stereo go off. Science Guy continued yelling on and off, it seemed he was rounding up his strange-band of partiers to head off to the pubs and clubs. Thank goodness, time for bed! I waited till I heard the front door slam and the sound of the group making their way down our long gravel driveway. After changing into my nightwear and a stop to brush my teeth, I walked down the hallway in darkness. I got to the living area and tried the front door in darkness – unlocked, not a total surprise there, pushed the lock in, click. Moved to the sliding door from the living room to the backyard – locked it, click, deadbolt, click. I was just tightening the blinds to the fully closed position when I heard that sinister laugh. Behind me, somewhere in this dark room. What the hell! My whole body reacted in that moment, it was the kind of sudden and visceral change that can only be likened to physical acts, like jumping from a hot deck into a frigid pool. I will never forget it, never.

It seemed to me, in slow motion, I moved in one fluid movement from facing the door to turning to face the presence, the ominious presence behind me, while similtaneously turning on the light switch to my left. There moving from a lying to a sitting position on our couch was the 40 something year old man. He was kicking a blanket over the edge of the couch as he brought his legs and feet around. This guy, we’ll call him Scary Guy, was obviously making himself at home for the night. I stared in disbelief, I’m not sure for how long, but it seemed a while. Here I had been wondering how Science Guy could leave his solo, female flatmate in an unlocked house, without even checking if I were awake or asleep, but in this moment it dawned on me that, that was not even the half of it. Science Guy had left his solo, female flatmate in a house with a random, 40-something male, who I did not know – who he barely even knew, in fact.

With a croak in my voice, I stumbled out the words, ‘Ummmmmmm, can you please leave’. That long ‘Ummmm’ sounded so weird in my head, this wasn’t an ‘Ummmmm’ moment, but then I think I was still just trying to grasp the situation. It seemed very real in my body, but on some other universal plane in my head. He laughed again, and drunkenly slurred ‘Why? I’m just going to sleep’. His face looked different than I had remembered, it seemed harder, cooler. He didn’t seem to have any problem making eye contact now. Panic began to rise from my belly, this wasn’t a negotiation ‘good guys’ would dare make, ‘good guys’ would get up and leave. Scary Guy was negotiating, and I could feel the blood rushing to my head. I’m sure it was visible, too. More directly this time, ‘Please leave now’. Even as I finished the sentence I was wondering why I found the need to be polite … please, why do I feel the need to say please? He looked me squarely in the eye, ‘Science Guy said I could stay here’. ‘Well you can’t,’ I said ‘Please leave’. There I go with the bloody please again, stop it.

He started rambling then:

‘I’m just going to sleep.’

‘Look, I’m just sleeping on your couch.’

‘I won’t do anything. I’m not going to hurt you.’

‘What are you so worried about?’

‘Science Guy said I could stay.’

‘What’s your problem?’

‘I’m actually married, and I have kids.’

My skin was crawling with each thing he said, little jolts of electricity shooting up my arms. But when he got to that last statement the signal was more like a lightening bolt. If he was married with kids, why on earth would he think staying on a couch in some random person’s house was okay. In that instant everything pulled into focus.

He is old enough to know that staying in an empty house with a young female (at least half his age), who does not know him and does not want him there, is NOT okay. Why feel the need to tell me he’s married with kids? Am I supposed to trust him more? If anything I now just completely mistrust your intentions, Buddy. They are not good intentions, Scary Guy. And while we are at it … people who have no intention of doing anything to harm you, don’t feel the need to tell you that they’re not going to do anything to harm you. Also, Buster, there is NOTHING wrong with me.

As these thoughts fired through my head in tune with the electricity moving my body, I made it to the kitchen and switched a second light on, on my way. We now had the kitchen bench/breakfast bar as a barrier between us, but I was feeling very conscious now in my oversized tee shirt, and nothing else. He got up and moved a bit closer, he seemed to physically change again, and I don’t think it was too long before he started swearing and muttering, going on about me and my obvious problems. Nice work Scary Guy, that’s definitely not going to help your cause?! What he did achieve though was to make me more scared – Scary Guy definitely planned on staying put. Despite the rising fear, I was trying to remain practical, quickly assessing my options, while repeatedly telling him to go. The corded phone, the only one in the house, was in the middle of the bench/breakfast bar – he was as close to it at this point as I was. I knew the house behind us was empty, and I had a feeling the house in front might be too. I started to wonder how fast I could run down the very long driveway, and where would be the safest place to head to. With next to no clothes on, the idea of running to the all-night Mobil garage 300 metres down the road was freaking me out more than just a little.

In his ranting and my panic, I had obviously missed the sound of drunken feet making their way up our gravel driveway. All of a sudden I could hear the voices of the Immature Girls, they were at the front door. I faintly heard them trying the handle before they started banging at the glass. A rush of relief was instant, but sadly it was to be short-lived. I moved around the partition wall from the kitchen, spied them through the glass door, turned on the entrance light, and let them in. They had, luckily for me, forgotten something, and they casually informed us that their taxi was now waiting at the bottom of our long driveway for their return.

Unbelieveably, they didn’t seem to notice anything odd with the scene they had walked into. They pushed past me heading towards whatever item they had forgotten. I moved back, drew myself as tall as I could, and I asked them to please take Scary Guy with them (there goes that bloody please again!). I heard him say ‘Yeah, she wants me to leave’. All of a sudden Scary Guy had gone from muttering threateningly to sounding like the wounded party, and that cold hard eye contact withered away. They seemed to turn without a pause and immediately launched into me with a verbal attack. Without a moment’s thought, they decided I was on the wrong side of this. Still blows my mind to this day. The Immature Girls began trying to argue with me, going on a rant that Science Guy had said he could stay, it wasn’t up to me, I should just let him stay. They even asked me what was my problem? I was rendered pretty speechless at this point. My head whirred with their contribution to this situation, and I started to wonder if I was somehow missing something, if they in fact had a point somewhere in their ranting. But I wasn’t to be put-off for too long, and I realised two things in that moment. 1. Immature Girls 1 and 2 did not want to take him with them – I mean who wants a homeless looking, 40-something man cramping their style at the club – they did not want him to be their problem, and 2. the fact that Science Guy had been a douchey, douche bag towards me, had somehow given these strangers the idea that I was someone who could be treated badly, maybe even deserved it.

With the Immature Girls in the house, despite their siding with Scary Guy and doing their best to bully me from their perch on too-high, platform shoes, I felt a bit empowered now (relatively safe) and made my move for the phone. I rounded the wall, launched over the benchtop, grabbed it up, turned and put my back to the kitchen sink to face them all. To hell with it, they can attack me if they like, but Scary Guy is not staying here. I’ll fight if I have to. He won’t win. No way. I consciously chose to ignore him entirely now, and directly to the girls I said, ‘Either he leaves with you now, or I will call the police’. I picked up the receiver and placed it between my ear and shoulder, my hand poised over the buttons.

There was a moments silence, the very definition of a pregnant pause, but I didn’t flinch. They started to carry on once more like the drunken idiots they were, expressed themselves loudly in a limited vocab (if you get my drift). One teetered over to jab a finger in my face, and they seemed to be trying to console Scary Guy with what a heinous person I must be. But all the while I could sense all three of them had made up their mind and were moving to leave. I was right. I didn’t breathe again until the door slammed shut, and I had made it over the distance it took to feel the door and hear the click.

I returned to the kitchen, gathered up the phone, and slumped to the floor. I called your G’ma, my mum, and it wasn’t until I heard her voice that I started to cry. I became a blithering mess. I’m surprised your G’ma could understand anything I was saying, but she stayed on the line with me until I was calm enough for her to hang up and call me a taxi to take me to a motel. I was petrefied, and in my post-traumatic state, I was convinced that Scary Guy could come back, maybe never left at all and was lurking somewhere in the shadows outside. Mum was about 350km away and it was after midnight, that call must have haunted her as much as it haunts me.

Telling you this story, and sharing a lesson that is all about how the Boogeyman exists, how my very real Boogeyman manifested in my early life, is not done with the goal to scare you. Absolutely not. I don’t aim to generate fear in your daily life, in fact I would hate to make you you worry about this stuff happening all the time, despite being in normal and safe physical surroundings, with no threat present. But what I do want to do, is to tell you that when you feel fear, real fear, generated by things that are happening in the ‘right here and now’, when you sense in that moment you are at risk – listen to it, and act on it!

Sometime before this night, before Scary Guy laughing sinsterly behind me in a dark, empty house, I watched a ‘good guy’ called Gavin de Becker on the Oprah show. He is a survival expert, and a man who has made a life’s work in studying the stories and events of victims and survivors of attacks, rapes, kidnappings, murders – doing this so that women everywhere can learn and perhaps avoid the same or similar fates. He knows his stuff, so much so he wrote a bestselling book, The Gift of Fear. His message is so simple – if alarm bells go off, if your intuition kicks in, if you feel fear in the moment – listen, act. At the very moment I would need the knowledge he has shared with the world, with me, it kicked in. I am so grateful for that. I wasn’t thinking at all consciously of Gavin de Becker, or the Oprah show I had seen during my encounter with Scary Guy (I wouldn’t even connect those dots until much later), but at that very moment I sensed something bad was happening, and I felt it in my body, I knew that I had to listen to that instinct and act on it. And with 20/20 hindsight, I realise that my instincts kicked in long before the dark room and that sinister laugh. My instincts hummed a little just laying eyes on Scary Guy, a tiny whisper that said he was ‘out of place’ an oddity, but as we often do, I didn’t listen to that first whisper, instead I squashed it down thinking it wasn’t my problem.

Today, there is no doubt in my mind that Scary Guy intended to harm me – no doubt. In that moment, however, I was stunned, blindsided, and my mind was overloaded and conflicted. Although I was definitely scared, at times I did feel self-conscious, second guessing myself here and there within the situation as it happened. It was so fast it was all over in ten to fifteen minutes, but the level of thinking and feeling that happened in that short space of time could have filled an entire week. Luckily something in me woke up, and I knew that right or wrong in my assumptions that Scary Guy meant me harm, it was better to listen to my fear and act on it than to take that chance.

So many things could have gone differently that night. Had I not decided to check the doors, I would have gone to bed totally unaware of his presence in the house. Even the girls coming back to get whatever they forgot might not have happened. And though it did, they had just tried the handle before they banged on the door – I might not have heard them at all had they tried to keep quiet, on finding the door unlocked, so as not to disturb Scary Guy. I only heard them talking once they got to the front door, and by that stage they would have seen all the lights back on in the living area, and they wouldn’t have been worried about disturbing anyone at that point. Even with my decision to lock the doors as I did, if he hadn’t laughed that awful laugh, I would have had no idea he was there as I’d walked the house in darkness. How long would he have taken before he followed me down to my bedroom. With locked doors, how long would the girls have waited, even with banging on the door for an answer, before they gave up? So many possible different outcomes, and I still shudder to think what might have happened. But they didn’t. I was lucky.

On the flipside, I now know I could have also listened to that very first whisper, the low hum I felt on meeting Scary Guy at first. I could have packed myself out of the house to go stay with friends while it was still sociable hours. Or I could have spoken to Science Guy and asked that he make sure everyone left and the house was safely locked before he went out. These what-ifs were my way of growing from the experience, and I know now to try and take notice of the low hum, the smallest whisper.

This experience changed me. This gift of fear is something I have made sure to speak to other women in my life about ever since that night. Sadly, most of my sisterhood, I found out, have had their own experiences, their own Boogeymen and Scary Guys. They have had those horrible moments or situations that taught them this very same lesson. It is scary how prolific the danger is, just how many women have these stories – you only need to google some quick stats on this stuff to get a very clear idea. It’s scary.

The lesson here, darling niece, is that while the Boogeyman does sadly exist, so does a thing called the gift of fear. Our bodies are amazing things – we have primitive yet highly effective functions that kick into gear to try to keep us safe at the very moment danger is present. In the deepest part of our being, visercal, deep instincts that have been with us since the dawn of time, and we should try to never override them with our head. When we feel real fear, and it is there in the moment, some bodily signal that all is not right – whether it’s a whisper or a lightening bolt – listen, act. Unfortunately, we live in a world that is not entirely safe. Unfortunately the Boogeyman exists. I truly hope that everyone you encounter in your life is part of the 99% of humans who are nice, normal, good, and well-intended people. But if you should ever cross paths with one of the others, the ones that fall into the 1% – the Boogeymen, the Scary Guys – then I hope that something in the recesses of your brain might just remember this lesson, drive you in the moment, and get you to listen to your fear and act on it.

You are coming of age in the #metoo era, my sweets, so I’m sure you’re not totally unaware of the dangers we can face. While it is a sad state of affairs that this conversation even needs to take place at all, especially in this day and age, this #metoo movement is so critically important. I truly hope that it will serve to empower more women to know that any type of violence, harm, abuse or control perpetrated against them is not okay, it’s never okay. That it’s never their fault should anyone victimise them, and they have a right to choice, voice, safety, life, and when all else fails – they have a right to be heard, to be supported, and to get justice.

No matter what happens from here on out, no matter what Boogeymen might come your way (although I pray they never, ever do), no matter what outcomes you may face in life if you encounter that 1% – I need you to know, to the root of your being, it won’t be your fault, never, ever! If someone chooses to attack, threaten, abuse or harm another person, that’s on the attacker, not the victim/survivor. As much as I wish I could protect you from any possible harm (anytime, anywhere) the best thing I can do is to share the wisdom and the knowledge that I have gained in my life so far. Especially the stuff learned the hard way, in the hope you might not have to. This wisdom and knowledge that has helped to keep me safe. And to keep me safe on more than this occasion, by the way. Maybe, just maybe, it will do the same for you.

So while this is a tough lesson to offer you, I feel so strongly that it’s an important one. I would ferociously protect you, my sweets, from any possible danger if I could, as all of those who love you absolutely would. But in case we’re not there when danger is present, have faith in your instincts, they may just save you. If you ever feel real fear in the moment, know it is a gift, my darling niece, a gift you need to listen to and act on!

Love always,

Aunty xo