Hello all,
Very interesting thread with hair-raising experiences. My incident occurred a long, long time ago, but it was a nightmare, so I never forgot it.
It was my first year living abroad, in Munich, because I had a fellowship to study at the university. I was young then and definitely more naive than I am now. I also had a tendency to get homesick during holidays.
It was coming up on Easter, and I had met a man in Munich who, upon learning that my family was all in the States, invited me to come to an Easter-season get-together at his house. He said some of his family members and his neighbors would be there. He lived south of Munich in a small town, the name of which escapes me now. In any event, he said he needed to pick up some items for the party in Munich and could give me a ride to his house. It would be much speedier than public transportation. He also said he was inviting me because so many other students would be at home with their own families, that he didn't want to see me spending the holidays alone. Long story short, I accepted.
Easter came early that year, and winter had been reluctant to leave. There had been a huge snowstorm and I was glad for the chance to ride door-to-door in a heated car. Being very German, he picked me up right on time in the evening, and we rode out to his place.
At this point, you will probably not be surprised to learn that when I got to his house, there was no one else there. He told me that he had wanted to "surprise me" with an event just for me. He also said he didn't want to "share" my presence with anyone else.
My blood was curdling at this point already. In addition to having lied to me and thereby being so rude to me, he also struck me as someone who was at least a little "off." The warning siren was going off in my head. I felt like I had to handle him carefully because he scared me so much, and I believed him to be crazy.
He put out cheese and sausage and bread in the kitchen for us, and I sat down even though I had no hunger whatsoever. While seated in the kitchen, he told me how wonderful it was that I had entered his life and that henceforth we would be inseparable, and that to "consecrate" our new relationship, we would have sex that night.
Now I was beyond scared. I was frantic to think of some way to get out of his house. In the meanwhile, he wanted to "entertain me" with a performance of his expert knife-throwing skills. My life flashed before me and I wondered how long it would take my parents (or anybody) to know I was missing.
I had an idea. It entailed first pretending to go along with all his "suggestions" about the evening. I laid it on thick. Now, the whole time we were in the kitchen he was chain-smoking. I was smoking, too, in order to have something to burn him with, if it came to that. There was a huge cloud of smoke in the kitchen. So I suggested that we go for a short walk outside to get some fresh air before we would get down to business, so to speak. Amazingly, he agreed. Germans do love going for walks, and he apparently believed my acting job.
Once we got outside, we started walking in the middle of the narrow street. He held my hand tightly. All of a sudden, thank God, a car rounded the bend and started coming slowly toward us. Suddenly I wrenched my hand out of his, ran right in front of the oncoming car, all the time screaming, "Hilfe!" There was an older gentleman in the car and when he rolled down his window, I told him that this man was trying to hurt me. He told me to get in the car, which I did, pronto. This gentleman was a true gentleman and told me he was heading for Munich and would take me home. He asked me if I wanted to file a complaint with the police, and coward that I was, I said no. I didn't trust the police to take me seriously, especially since at that point in my life my German tended to deteriorate when I was under stress. Also the creep hadn't actually hurt me. Although to this day, I believe he would have hurt me, if not worse.
Thanks for reading this long story! I would say that the moral of the story was "don't talk to strangers," except that, once I moved to Germany, everybody was a stranger.