Were you ever nearly kidnapped when you were younger?

will.i.am wrote: »

Just so ye know I am not the real Will.i.am!:)

You're as real as any other...

candycock wrote: »

i was never kidnapped but i worked on the same building site as larry murphy...

you must be seriously fugly - even your user name did not get you kidnapped

Apologies in advance for the length of this post. It’s my first post on boards actually, but don't blame you if you skip it. Just thought I’d share my own story.

This happened a good few years back. It was just the beginning of the summer, I’d got my holidays from primary school the Friday of the week before.

I live just across the road from a pitch and putt course, which is built around a mental institution/hospital, known as St. Annes. I got up early enough that morning, and since the sun was shining I said I’d go out and knock a ball around for a few holes with my friend. I was only eleven or so a this stage, as I’d just finished fifth class. I knocked on my next door neighbour's door, who was my then best friend at the time, and his mam answered the door. I asked was my friend in and she said he was but that he was grounded and wasn’t going to be let out any time soon. This was a regular enough occurrence. He had three other siblings and the house was always a bit hectic.

Despite him being grounded, I still decided to go across the road by myself and onto the pitch and putt course with my clubs. I played three holes and was really enjoying the nice weather. The next hole I was going to play was at the very bottom of the course, at the bottom of a slope. The tee box so to speak was just beside a road, which never had any traffic as it just ran on towards an unused overgrown football pitch and a derelict church and building. As I was putting my tee into the rubber mat of the tee box, I heard a car come rolling up behind me and stopping off to my right about 20m or so away (the green was facing up the hill from the tee so the road was behind me). I turned and looked to the car, it was and old enough car, 88 reg, but nothing that out of the ordinary at the time as it was only 12 years old. I saw a pair of eyes look in my general direction from the rear view mirror. I could tell from the back of the persons head and from the bit I saw in the mirror that it was a man driving the car, roughly in his forties or fifties I would have guessed.

It was highly unusual for anyone to stop at this spot, as cars would never have any reason to stop here or even be there in the first place. Being slightly unnerved I quickly teed off without any practice swings and ran up the hill towards the green. I was the only one on the course at this stage, probably because it was a weekday and people were at work or something, and the flags weren’t even in the holes . I was scared to look back almost, and tried to ignore the car out of fear of making eye contact with the man. I quickly chipped my ball onto the green and putt it in. This took all of about forty seconds I’d say, from tee off, to getting the ball in. Once I picked the ball out of the hole I took a quick glance down towards where the car had been parked up on the side of the road. It was still there, yet for some reason I couldn’t tell where the driver was.

As I walked over towards another hole ( I skipped one on purpose to get a bit further away ) I could tell that there was definitely nobody in the car anymore. This unsettled me a bit more. I hadn’t even heard a door being closed or anything. The person would have nearly had to purposely close the car door very quietly in order for me not to hear it. I decided to skip another hole again and ran up to a tee box just on the other side of the hospital. I said I’d keep playing and told myself in my head to stop being paranoid and that there was probably a logical or perfectly reasonable explanation behind it all. I usually wasn’t nervous when it came to things like this, but this time something was different. The adrenaline was really pumping .

I teed off away up a bit of a hill. You couldn’t see the green from where I was because of the steep hill but I knew the ball should be roughly around the edge of it. As I got up near the top I was looking for my ball which I thought would be somewhere to the right of the green. It was nowhere to be seen. At this stage I was getting anxious and couldn’t understand where it could have gone, but wondered if it maybe just took a bad bounce or something like that. Then I heard a loud rustling in a large rather thick bush a bit to the left of the green. From behind it, appeared a man, staring at me, smiling. He looked a bad person though, you know the type, a mugshot would me shown on the news of, that kind. He didn’t make any move for me though. At this point I kind of nodded at him (in a scared yet friendly kind of way) then turned and started walking, then running across the course, clubs in hand, towards the far entrance of the hospital and across home. I didn’t look back once.

I told my parents what happened the second I got home. My dad went over to see if he could see anything or anyone. No one was out there on the course, and the car that I said had been parked up was now gone.
The following day, on the echo (cork paper), there was a story of how a man had tried to get a child into his van up by Farranree, an area not too far away, the previous evening i.e. the same day I had my own encounter. The child started shouting and the man took off, however apparently a neighbour followed in their car while alerting the gardai and he was arrested for questioning.

As far as I remember it turned out he had been wanted for a some minor offences already. I can’t help but wonder if this was the same man I saw on the course that day. Although driving an old car rather than a van, maybe not. Maybe he just went around stealing golf balls

Still creeps me out to this day when I think about it though.

dj jarvis wrote: »

Ireland must have the most useless pedos on the planet ,
becasue child abduction in Ireland is extremely rare , in fact other than the case down in cork about ten years back can anyone remember a stranger taking a kid off the street in recent memory ? ( kids in the early 80's from rathfarnham coming home from school is the last un solved one i can think of )

but according to the amount of tales here the streets are just full of kidnappers trying with no success,
so they really must be the worst at kidnapping in the world or its the most under reported crime in Ireland.

Ireland is SUPER safe for this kind of thing - but yet our closest neighbour is another story - go figure

In years gone by there was a different relationship between children and parents. I think a lot of children didn't report these events to their parents out of a fear of being blamed for them happening or having their freedom curtailed because of them. My children tended to tell me just about everything (or at least they did until they reached about 14) to the point where I thought I'd really prefer not to know every little thing that upsets you in your life because I felt that upset for them too.

Yet I never told my parents that my great-uncle* (not such a great uncle to have) tried to molest me when I was about 8/9. I didn't tell them about being bullied unmercifully by mean girls when I was in 6th class. I never told them about how the chief bully and her brother nearly set my friend on fire during a 'game'. I didn't tell them about a completely different set of bullies again during 6th class - a young lad who wanted me to be his girlfriend and resorted to intimidation and violence in order to try and win my little heart. For about 6 months every time I went out, with or without my two friends he was there with his three friends. I was terrified. The entire population of the village knew this was going on but not a soul informed my parents. I also never told them about getting kidnapped when hitchhiking (never reported that to the guards either).

Equally I would imagine that the unlucky children who did accept that lift/invite to see puppies or were dragged unwilling into cars did not tell their parents either but coped and suffered in silence, and if they did tell their parents the damage limitation was carried out in secrecy and never came to the notice of the guards or if it did that they looked the other way.

For most of Ireland anything to do with sex was never spoken about so children could hardly be expected to put two and two together. You knew something was wrong and you either managed to avoid it or not. Paedophiles could operate fairly safely in the days before Ireland acknowledged that there were such people or that there was such a thing. Half the time I'd say they didn't even have to threaten a child in order to gain their silence. Silence was the the usual setting.



*That particular relative went on to try and molest my younger sister and succeeded in molesting/raping my first cousin for years. He had a huge extended family who visited him and his wife. Feck knows how many others he interfered with as well.

A lot of things "nearly" happened to me.

Similarly a lot of things "nearly" didn't happen to me.

Don't believe everything you think.

I've put all the clues and dates together....

It has to be Gay Byrne who did all these attempts. All the failures just proves it was him.

TheBody wrote: »

Can't say I had a similar experience. Guess I wasn't as sexy as a kid as you were.

thopschael4 wrote: »

I wasn't as sexy as a kid as you were.

Been there, posted that. Bit late!

I'm freaked reading about this. I don't want to be thinking that this could happen nowadays, although it would be naive to believe that, as I've two young cousins (7 and almost 4 years). I doubt either would know what to do if someone approached them like this. They know not to talk to strangers, but I just doubt if they'd cop not to.

I had one experience which freaked me out when I was younger. I was 11 or 12, walking my young small dog as usual around the estate a few times. My friend wasn't out so I was alone. There had been a few kids in the area saying to beware of the white van after girl I knew had a man in a white van approach her and try to get her into his van, while she waited outside the garden for her friend. The friends Mam had seen it and called the girl into the house. She went out to the garden to see what the man wanted and he was gone. Anyway, this had most of us a bit freaked for weeks.

I was walking my dog. It was quite dark out and a bit late. I was about 20 houses from mine. The estate is basically a square shape. So I was just near the corner to turn, when suddenly coming towards me was a white van. I looked at it for a second, two men sitting in the front staring at me. It completely freaked me out, and I didn't know whether to run away from it (it would have taken about 7 minutes of running to go around the whole estate, meaning it would have caught me), or run towards home. I continued until I had to cross the road to turn, and the van vroomed upto the path and was now less than a meter from me. The headlights shone in my eyes and I was just freaking. I ran for my house but when I was running across the road the van reversed and ended up just kinda on the path of the next block of houses. I think I picked up my dog then (tiny thing isn't the fastest) and anyway we ran home. I looked back once and knew they'd never catch me as it takes too long to turn cars around in that corner.

When I got home I remember looking outside. My dog and I sat at the window, although I wanted to hide incase they tried to break in or something. The van circled the estate a few times before leaving. I remember wondering if they were looking for me or if they were just lost. It freaked me out.