I Was Stalked For 47 Years
Would you like to have a man obsessed with you?
In the picture above, the year is 1972 and I am 17 years old. I am playing Rose in the play “Meet Me in St. Louis.” In the script, Jim is supposed to bend over to kiss me. Before he kisses me, I’m supposed to slap him. I had so much trouble slapping Jim. I was afraid I’d hurt him. My slaps were tepid swipes across his face.
We had to practice again and again with the director saying “Harder, Karin, harder. You don’t have to leave a mark, but you do need to slap him.”
On opening night, Jim changed the script and kissed me before I could slap him. I’m no actress but I was genuinely surprised and gave him a good hard smack.
After the performance, my boyfriend, Ted, and his largest friend Mike, warned Jim that if he kissed me during the next performance, they would beat him up. I didn’t know of Ted’s threat until Jim told me. He asked what I thought of Ted’s behavior.
I looked at him silently and thought, “What did you expect? Did you think Ted would sit by quietly while you kissed me off script?”
Jim’s kiss was no big deal. To tell you the truth, I was flattered, but that same year another man started behavior that would terrify me for most of my adult life. As the years went by, I became increasingly frustrated by his unwanted and threatening behavior. I often asked what I had done to deserve such treatment and felt very angry that he frightened me for so many years.
To a very real degree, all women are at risk from male predators. It is my experience, however, that women who enjoy pretty privilege are targeted more frequently by this very ugly problem.
When I started writing about my life, I counted 8 incidents when I was physically threatened by a predator. Each time I managed to get away by running, talking my way out of situation, or enlisting the help of a kind stranger. This doesn’t count two stalkers who threatened me multiple times, or catcallers on the street, run-of-the-mill sexual harassers, or men who showed up at my door at all hours because they wanted to date me. Much of the time I felt like prey, but when I complained, most people thought I was exaggerating.
Phil was a casual friend of my father’s and 10 years older than me. At first, he seemed like one of the nicest guys you could ever meet. Then Ted noticed that Phil followed us when we were on dates. We didn’t know much about stalking back then. I didn’t even know that word. The second strange behavior occurred when I was kissing Ted in my living room late one night. Someone banged on the window. When my boyfriend jumped up to see who it was, he recognized Phil’s car.
My parents didn’t believe me at first. Phil was such a nice guy. It just made no sense. I wasn’t sure I believed it myself even though Ted had seen Phil with his own eyes.
Our house was in the country and the windows of my bedroom faced the back. We had curtains but never bothered to shut them. There was no one around to see into the house. We were surrounded by pastures and fields.
One night I was in my bedroom getting undressed. It was late. Ted had just dropped me off and my sister was already asleep in the bed we shared.
I faced the window as I started to take off my bra to put on my nightgown when I had an eerie feeling that someone was watching me. Telling myself I was being silly, I ignored the feeling and undressed anyway.
A few months later, one of Phil’s friends saw me in town. He told me one night he had been with Phil driving ATV’s, a 3-wheel recreational vehicle. The tires were large and could go almost anywhere. This friend told me they were riding together when Phil took him to the quarry behind my house. Then Phil parked the ATV, walked through the fields to my house, and positioned himself by the window to my bedroom.
“Come watch,” Phil whispered. “We can see Karin undress.”
Phil’s companion was horrified and said, “You should never do this to Karin.”
In response, Phil laughed in a silent but maniacal way. He couldn’t stop laughing.
“Be careful,” this man told me. “There’s something wrong with Phil. He’s not right in the head. I fear you could be in danger.”
I told my parents what this man said, and they still had trouble believing Phil had behaved that way. They simply couldn’t imagine anyone doing that, especially someone they knew to be a nice person.
Unlike my parents, I believed. From then on, I vowed to listen to my intuition.
Phil continued to show an obsessive interest in me. Whenever he saw one of my family, he grilled them about me. My family started calling these events “Phil sightings.” After I moved out, Phil often stopped by my parents’ house to ask about me. He’d stay for hours talking about me. He seemed to have some kind of imaginary life with me. Phil didn’t seem to realize his questions were inappropriate. At this point, my parents realized Phil’s interest in me was not normal.
If I went to an event at my high school, Phil stuck to me like glue. I stopped going to school events. This made me sad because I loved my hometown, but I hated running into Phil. My friends’ husbands told their wives that Phil stopped by to ask them the latest about me. I begged these friends to ask their husbands to stop giving Phil information. Their husbands thought I was overreacting.
When I moved into an apartment of my own, I had an unlisted number because I didn’t want Phil to call me. Somehow Phil got my number and called me anyway. I was polite because I didn’t want to anger him. At the time, he idolized me. If he got angry, I feared he might want to harm me.
I moved several times and each time had a new unlisted number. One time Phil called me and triumphantly recited every one of my unlisted numbers. Then he told me the number of my license plate as well. There was a mocking tone to his voice that made my stomach churn. Each time he called I was polite but did my best to keep the call short.
When I started getting regular obscene phone calls, I wondered if they were from Phil. It scared me to think there might be another man out there contacting me. Who might it be? Was it someone I knew? I bought a big whistle. The next time I received an obscene phone call; I blew the whistle loudly into the phone. That was the last obscene call.
When I married Dave, I thought Phil might finally give up. I was wrong. Instead, something even more frightening happened. I had a miscarriage. The day after my miscarriage, Phil called my mother and said he had a dream that I was crying in a nursery. He asked Mom if I had lost a baby. The only people who knew about my miscarriage at that time were my husband, my parents, and me. Phil told my mother he would try to find a baby for me. My mother told him no. She was sure I would get pregnant again.
It was very weird for Phil to think he could find a baby and give the baby to me. I became even more concerned about his mental stability.
The miscarriage was very sad and knowing that Phil and I had some weird psychic connection made things even worse. Why was this man having accurate dreams about me? Were we connected in ways that I didn’t even know?
Then Dave and I were blessed with a beautiful baby girl. My attention was dominated by our daughter, and I was so full of joy that I stopped thinking much about Phil.
One day, when my daughter was 3, we drove out to visit my parents at the farm. There was a man standing by the door with his back to us. His form looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place him.
As I walked up to the door, the man waited until I was only a few feet from him. Then he spun around and exclaimed, “Hi!”
He said hi the way someone would say “Surprise!”
My daughter was in my arms as I jumped and pulled back. Phil was just leaving, and his truck was running, but as I walked into the house, he couldn’t resist following me.
He looked at my daughter intently and said, “Your daughter looks a lot like you, doesn’t she?”
My blood ran cold. I told my mother I wasn’t feeling well and took my daughter home.
Phil’s odd visits to my parents continued and they noticed his appearance was disintegrating. He dressed in sloppy clothing, was unshaven, and stopped getting haircuts. Their concern deepened. Sometimes Phil stayed for hours asking inappropriate questions. My parents were too polite for their own good. They simply couldn’t bring themselves to ask him to leave. I decided to help them out. One day I called Phil and told him he needed to stop visiting my parents.
Stalkers love any kind of attention. After that call, Phil sent me a letter professing his love. The letter was 8 pages long, included sexual fantasies about me, and was bound in a plastic sleeve. He sealed the letter with a scrap of fabric from one of my prom dresses. He must have picked up the fabric from my sewing area when I lived at home. Did he go into the house when no one was home? Had he entered my bedroom undetected during one of his visits before I left home?
He wrote, “This letter is sealed with a memento from a time when you were at your finest.”
Had he been following me when I went to the prom too?
The letter was addressed to “Dr. Karin Flodstrom” and mailed to my office. I showed the letter to my husband, Dave.
Dave said, “You need to know that this guy has been by our house and your office. With the kind of obsession he has, I would find it hard to believe that he doesn’t watch you every chance he gets. We will put this letter in a safe place. If you show up missing someday, at least I can take the letter to the police so they will know where to start looking for you.”
My husband’s words scared me even more.
I was on high alert and wondered if Phil was hiding around every corner. Dave often traveled out of town for business. I was terrified to be alone in the house. Sometimes one of my sisters stayed with me so I didn’t have to be alone.
I talked to my therapist about Phil. She knew a police officer and explained my situation.
He suggested the following: “Tell your client that if this man shows himself to her, this is sign that he plans to snatch her. If he stays hidden, she is relatively safe. If she ever sees him in a place where he does not belong, she is to react immediately. She shouldn’t try to talk to him and normalize the situation. It would already be too late for that. Instead, she needs to scream as loudly as she can to surprise him as she runs to her car, the nearest house, or whatever form of safety is available.”
It was not much fun living under this cloud of fear, but after a while, I became used to it. I carried a can of Right Guard spray deodorant. That’s nasty stuff and legal. I figured if he came after me, a blast of Right Guard in his face might slow him down.
After my divorce, my daughter and I moved to a different house. I closed my practice to be a stay-at-home Mom. Phil sent a letter to our old address. This reassured me that he thought I was still living in the marital home.
Even so, without Dave to protect us, I was afraid not only for my sake but also for my daughter’s. My daughter sensed my fear and talked about “robbers breaking into our house when Daddy isn’t here.” To create some added protection, I did something that might seem silly to most of my readers. I bought a dozen beautiful pink roses and put them in a vase. As the petals dropped, I collected them in my favorite crystal bowl. This bowl was from my Swedish grandmother who was deceased. I saw Grandma Flodstrom as a protective angel.
When all the petals had dropped and been placed in the bowl, I told my daughter we were going to play a game. We went out one night just after dark. There was snow on the ground. We scattered the pink petals all around our house and down the path to my daughter’s school. I imagined these petals were a protective shield of love that would keep us safe.
The next morning, I woke up feeling safe and at peace. Because I felt safe, my daughter felt safe too.
After my daughter left home for college, I reconnected with my college sweetheart. We had planned to marry after college, but I didn’t feel ready to settle down, so we broke up. I always wondered if I had made a mistake by not marrying Dan. He was such a good guy – kind, smart, handsome, and an engineer. We were best friends as well as lovers.
I sent Dan a message on facebook. He was also divorced and thrilled to hear from me. We hadn’t seen each other for 30 years. The next weekend Dan showed up at my door with a dazed look in his eyes. We quickly picked up where we had left off, and in three months, I moved to another state to live with him. I felt safer after moving farther away from Phil.
To my great sadness, after five wonderful years, Dan died suddenly of a heart attack. We didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye. I was shattered and in shock. He was a young man, only 60 years old. I can’t begin to describe how devastated I was the first days after he died.
My sisters and best friend came right away to be with me. Dan’s family showed up too. My daughter flew in and when I saw her, I felt so much love and comfort. My daughter stayed with me for a week and was the last to leave.
After I drove my daughter to the airport, I was alone in the house for the first time. I was still fragile but some of the shock had passed. The reality of Dan’s death had begun to sink in, and I found a way to be grateful. I told myself that if being with Dan meant that I would have only five years with him, our joy when we were together was still worth it. He had been a wonderful man and we loved each other deeply. Because of him, much of my earlier trauma with men had been healed.
That night, the landline phone I used for my psychologist practice rang. It was a local number that I didn’t recognize.
I answered and said, “Hello.”
The caller was silent.
“Hello,” I said again. “Who is this?”
There was a pause then a voice said, “This is the man you have been waiting for.”
I slammed down the phone. How could anyone do this to me? It was only a week after Dan’s death and the first night I was alone. I sensed this person had been watching the house.
Our house was like many farmhouses. Not all the doors had deadbolts. Two doors had locks that offered no real protection.
My fragile composure shattered again, I frantically called my parents and told them about the call. I called Dan’s daughter, and she was very concerned. We tried to imagine one of the local men calling and drew a blank. This made no sense. I didn’t call my daughter because I didn’t want to worry her.
I put chairs under the doors with flimsy locks. I was shaking when I went to bed that night and didn’t get much sleep. The next day I paid an exorbitant fee for a locksmith to come on a Sunday and add deadbolts. I felt safer after that. With time, the fear from the call faded.
Then something weird happened. I had a favorite forest preserve where I loved to go for walks. It was so beautiful, and I always felt safe even though I walked alone. If I passed a single man or a group of men, I felt no fear. My intuition told me all was well. These blessed paths through the trees were my personal sanctuary.
The strange thing is that the next time I went to my woods, I didn’t feel safe. As I walked the old trails, I felt afraid. A single man passed me, and I recoiled from him with fear. The man looked shocked, confused, and sad that I was so afraid of him. I got out of that woods as quickly as I could. From then on I found new, more populated places to walk.
A year later Mom and I were talking and I mentioned that strange call. Mom told me Phil called her when he found out Dan had died. He said he wanted to help me. Mom begged him to leave me alone, saying that what I most needed was the company of my sisters, daughter, and friend. Phil was insistent and asked her again to think of a way he could help me. Mom was insistent too and said the best way for him to help was to give me space to grieve on my own.
Mom said, “That man who called you the night after your daughter left? I’m sure it was Phil. I didn’t tell you at the time because I didn’t think you could handle knowing that he was after you again.”
She was right. It was probably better I didn’t know.
I drove to the forest preserve I used to love and imagined that Phil had parked his truck there and walked to my house to observe the people coming and going. Maybe I felt his energy when I was in the woods after Dan died. There was a large thick stand of shrubs across the street from the house. Maybe Phil hid in those shrubs as he watched me drive my daughter to the airport and return home alone.
Maybe he bought a burner phone, found a pay phone, or stayed in a hotel with a local number?
I’m not sure if this is what happened, but as I traced what I imagined could have been his actions, my fear of the forest preserve disappeared. I was able to walk there joyfully again.
A few years later, Phil died by suicide. He had been molesting underage girls, and one had reported him. The police were on their way to arrest him. Phil had been even sicker than I knew. My fears about my daughter had been more justified than I knew. I was in shock for several days.
I felt sad for his tortured soul and prayed for him, but I also felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. For 47 years I had been afraid of him. If only I’d known for sure he would never really hurt me or my daughter, I could have spared myself decades of worry. Even so, my intuition told me I was in danger. Of course I needed to listen.
Now I was finally free. I can hardly tell you how wonderful that freedom felt.