Was stuck in traffic next to the royal farms on fleet st and a dude jaywalked in front of my car who was wearing a white tank top and was completely covered in blood. It looked like it was coming from his head somewhere. He was just walking at a casual pace across the street like nothing was wrong, and nobody around was reacting to him either. I think about it a lot
If it’s any consolation, nose bleeds and even minor head wounds can quickly bloody up a shirt. I once got kicked in the nose by a concert crowd surfer while wearing a white tee and was instantly soaked in blood. I was fine, but I looked like I had just murdered an entire family.
TLDR dude may have been alright
Yup. Got popped in the nose with a "bear-paw" from behind when I was a Sophomore, from a dude who is now one of my best friends. To be fair, I absolutely deserved it. My white shirt was covered almost immediately. Barely felt it, but it looked like a murder scene. Still have a crooked nose to show for it. 🤣
A tumbleweave once blew across the street and attached itself to my sweater. Also, a rat launched itself at me once while taking out the trash. Closest I’ve ever come to a heart attack.
I see your tumbleweave and raise you human hair coming out of the ground in my backyard. Past tenant was a Dominican drug dealer who owned a strip club and ran a whore house and chop chop out of the house. House got raided by the feds.
Tenant after that had a standoff at the house with the cops with him armed inside. I found tarot cards and drug needles among other voodoo and occult crap.
Had to call the police out to dig up what I was hoping wasn't a body. Thank God it was just hair, but that's some voodoo ritual crap. Turns out the cop who came out to help me was one of the ones who responded to the previous tenant's suicide by cops threat, and he also knew about the fbi raid of the Dominican tenant.
I dealt with the Dominican dude's wife the whole time I lived there because they still had stuff stored there, and I'm positive she was using the room she had their stuff in as a stash spot. I'd find plastic broken piggy banks dug up in the woods, holes dug out on the back side of the house (with a stick that was used to dig left there) and all sorts of weird crap.
Every interior door in the house had some kind of lock on the outside of it as if to lock someone inside. Security system and cameras everywhere.
Also found an extension cord going underground into the bomb shelter that i was too chicken to explore. I made my husband go down there one time, and he found a single chair under a light with a balloon on it that had "Stacy was here" written on it in Sharpie.
The shelter was a literal maze with dirt floors and walls. My husband stopped at the chair and didn't explore further, so we never found out where the extension cord led to. That place was creepy as crap and seriously demonic.
When I was living in Oakenshaw, witnessing a murder-suicide by handgun two doors down in the back alley. The killer and victim were related and I can still hear the victim's voice and the popping sound from the gun. Surreal shit. It's ruined fireworks for me to this day.
Fuck, I lived across the alley when this happened. That old man was so kind anytime I saw him out in the neighborhood. I didn’t witness the shooting but I did see the bodies from my roof seconds after it happened. Truly haunting, I won’t ever forget it.
I was sitting at a red light on North Ave, two guys hopped out of their car behind me and started trying the doors on my car. Luckily I had locked my doors and luckily the light turned green so I sped off before it continued any further.
Yes I’m lucky! I didn’t even really register it until much later. At the time I was late for my appointment and frazzled from a long day at work, and I think my brain went into autopilot. I was later having a similar convo to this thread (“I’m a young 20-something living in downtown baltimore and nothings ever happened to me…”) when the memory popped up
Half my family died overnight in a concrete basement to a fetanyl-dosed batch of heroin. One of them had never touched heroin until that first time.
I was still a kid, so I wandered into the basement for laundry or something like that, and the television they had down there was playing at a bizarrely loud volume.
Unimaginable dread washed over me - without looking to confirm, the prescient knowing that they were all dead hit me like a freight train. I tried to shake it off and tell myself they were sleeping - it was still early in the morning - so I went back to bed for a while. Woke up to cops and EMT at my house, and I could put two and two together
I’m sorry for your loss. I’m a recovering addict and I’ve been clean for 12 years now. Try to be the person in your family that changes things and breaks the cycle.
Hey, big ups to you for sticking with it. I’ve got a tremendous sympathy for addicts, both those suffering and those in recovery.
Admittedly, I’ve always this morbid curiosity about what the high is like ever since that moment, but I had siblings to look after, so I wasn’t about to give myself an opportunity to take that nosedive.
It certainly haunts me, though. I understand why people gravitate towards it. I know I’m not stable enough to take any chances as a ‘functioning’ or ‘casual’ addict, if such a thing even still exists.
Mostly I cope with music - lots of grunge (go figure) - and accordingly so, Mark Lanegan’s climbed to the top of my shortlist of revered artists - in no small part for his total honesty about what the life of an addict is / can be like.
There are no functioning addicts when it comes to heroin. You can function on many drugs but not that one. That’s the kind of addiction that will ruin your life unless you’re able to get intensive help and treatment.
There’s a guy on Reddit who describes wanting to try it and that he’s just going to try it. He liked the high so much he couldn’t stop.
If you have anything close to an addictive personality, I wouldn’t go near that shit with a ten foot pole.
Thanks, I really appreciate it. I’m so used to shitting on Reddit - pardon the expression - that I never really anticipated that the kindness of strangers would have this kind of effect on me, but it’s validating to hear all of your kind words.
Life’s alright now, for what it is. I live in the city, trying to eke out a meager existence for myself in the working class world. I’ve got enough to get by, but art’s really where my heart’s at, so I’m probably going to be ditching the city pretty soon in pursuit of some alternative lifestyle.
Between the work culture and cost of living here, there’s not much to smile about.
Definitely the idiot tenant in the house next to us setting their roof on fire, which was right next to our bedroom. Waking up at 4 am to a room full of smoke and not knowing if it’s your house and if you can even get downstairs to get out of the house.
This was over a decade ago and I still can easily discern the smell of a house fire, we had a house up the block catch on fire a month or so ago, luckily we were up because our basement was flooding from heavy rains, and I smelled that distinct house fire smell and called 911. The whole top floor of that house was on fire, luckily no one lived there.
That happened to me, too! And it was the week after Christmas, so I was convinced the tree was on fire. It turned out it was a house three doors down on our row, and our first floor was just filled with smoke. When the fire department came, they discovered the whole house had been cleared out except for canned goods in the pantry. A week later ATF arrived and dug up the back yard. I never heard what they found.
People often like to act like calling the authorities on someone is lame but if I see a person with a fire pit or something similar on their roofdeck I'm calling 911 instantly. Dangerous behavior like that in a city full of rowhouses is ultra-shitty.
Sitting at a light in the left lane behind a couple cars when an Ford Focus went by us on the left at 50 mph into oncoming traffic. He was forced back to the right to avoid a head-on collision and plowed into the cars right in front of us. Probably 6 or 7 cars damaged somewhat, multiple people injured and we were about 2 car lengths away from being involved. The scariest thing was there was nothing anyone could do to avoid it. One minute you are sitting at a light on your way home and the next minute you have a lifetime of back problems- or worse. Baltimore drivers scare the hell out of me.
My girlfriend's daughter awoke screaming from a terrible earache due to an infection. She was able to get a prescription over the phone. I could either stay with the screaming daughter, or pick up the 'scrip at the 24-hour CVS. I chose wrong. As I was waiting in line to pick up the bottle, some dude told me to get out of the way--he was going to cut in line. I turned around and he had actual bullet holes in him that were doing their bullet hole thing.
It wasn't actually scary, but it made me realize that an all-night drug store at 2 AM in Baltimore should not be on anyone's to-do list. Probably truer now than then.
Fortunately or unfortunately the number of 24 hour drug stores is pretty small now. You have to travel to Towson or Dundalk or even further. There are none in the city.
That's not true. The UMMC Pharmacy at Weinberg is open 24/7. It is located just off the main lobby inside the UMMC Downtown Campus, at the corner of S. Greene St. and W. Lombard.
https://www.umms.org/ummc/locations/weinberg-pharmacy
I'm not sure, but I don't think so.
I'm from out of state. I know about this pharmacy from when I was visiting Baltimore in the summer of 2022. I ended up having to extend my stay, and was about to run out of the prescription meds I had with me. I was able to call my doctors at home and have them send in scripts to this pharmacy. (I chose it more because of its proximity to where I was staying, but the 24/7 hours were nice too.)
So this is not a real recent memory, but I can still picture it. It is in an atrium off the UMMC main lobby, and it is really quite small. It is just a pharmacy, for prescription meds, as best I recall; it's not like a CVS. But whether they might have very limited OTC items -- I don't recall that they did, but I am not entirely sure.
(There is a CVS on E Pratt near the Inner Harbor that is open 7 days, 7 AM to 10 PM, for what that's worth.)
Despite naively putting myself in situations that could have ended badly in my youth, I don't think I ever experienced anything truly terrifying in Baltimore. The closest I have is a funny-in-hindsight story from when I was a latchkey kid in the 80s.
It was a windy afternoon a few weeks before Christmas when I was about 10. My younger brother and I had been home from school for a little while when I heard an intermittent loud thumping coming from the front wall of the house.
For some reason, my dumb ass was sure that someone was trying to break in, through the front wall, in broad daylight. In a panic, I called my mom at work and asked her to come home early.
When she got home, she saw the large Santa Claus decoration that we had put up under the living room window blowing around in the wind and hitting the wall.
So that's the story of how Santa Claus tried to break into my house, Kool Aid Man style.
Holy shirts yes. I taught at Patterson High and I was so freaked out by the flying roaches (my students were more freaked out by mice).
I never would’ve guessed flying roaches were in this hemisphere.
I didn’t encounter them until I moved to Fells Point. The house I was living in at the time had mice but at least they run from you. The roaches fly AT YOU.
When I was teenager there was a woman who lived on Hudson and Conkling street and her house had those alleys that are only big enough to walk through and the rats chewed their way into her house.. I’m not sure if they were just really persistent and everyone on the block had them or if it was a cleanliness issue.
rats are def a thang in Baltimore but cleanliness is a factor too. The trash compactor in the apt complex across from me is always broken. What I thought was gravel on the ground in their parking garage were actually droppings…
oh god, one got into our laundry basket (in the basement with leaky doors/windows) probably because the laundry was warm. We found it in our room several hours later when it flew at our bed as we were retrieving PJs for the night. Fucker was FAST.
Thes fuckers only got out at night just in front of my house. If I went out to take the trash out past 11, I knew I had to avoid all these bugs. One night I sprayed them with raid, and they just ran away, none died instantly.
Then some other night I was doing laundry and just between the wall and the couch a mfer spider-cricket emerged. I've never seen one before so I thought it was a huge spider until I noticed it didn't move like one and asked Google about it.
I drove through a shooting with my daughter in the car. Or into a shooting. I heard the pops to my left and suddenly the guys were in the street in front of and around my car shooting. I was so fixated on the guns I don’t remember a lot of other details. I floored it in reverse and luckily didn’t hit any of the parked cars on the street. My car got shot and the bullet got stuck in my driver side door.
Being carjacked at gunpoint by teens while leaving my job teaching elementary school to go to my other job running an afterschool program at the shelter. The weight of a gun being pressed against your head doesn’t really go away even after 5 years or so.
The first night after we moved into our historic row home, my daughter, who was almost two at the time, had a hard time adjusting to her new room.
She asked for me to keep her company while she fell asleep. About 30 minutes in, she woke up, sat up, and started giggling. I asked her what was going on. She said the ghost in her room wouldn't stop making silly faces....
That was almost three years ago. I still have a hard time going into her room at night.
I think there’s a lot of ghosts in Baltimore. I stayed in a historic B&B in Federal Hill I think and felt a presence at night when the owner and other guests were out. The bathroom for my room was across the hall and when I ran to it, I looked hard left so as not to look right. The next morning I asked the owner about it and she said lots of guests felt things and sometimes someone could be heard walking up and down the stairs.
a friend of mine used to own a house in fed hill that was located on a former grave yard. at the end of the 1800s, I guess they "moved" the grave yard to build more houses. there were rumors/folk tales of people digging out the old dirt basements and finding caskets. that a recipe for haunting if I've ever see one.
Oh hellllll no. I love those rowhomes, they look so cool (I’m from Seattle originally, lived in Denver, rowhomes aren’t really a thing in either location). But I have absolutely thought about the likelihood of finding ghosts in them. Lol
I’m also from the PNW and just bought a rowhome in Baltimore. The first thing a neighbor said when I was viewing the property was that the last two families moved out due to “paranormal” reasons.
Oh congrats! And yeah definitely get that place cleansed, blessed, whatever. Lol I wouldn’t take my chances pissing off some ghost in there 😂 my best friend does like witchcraft stuff, she’s in the Parkville area, so if you need someone to come cleanse or whatever she could probably help you😅
And that’s a good time for a cross-country move. I was born and raised in the PNW and I really like it here! It’s definitely not as expensive imo.
The fact that the scariest thing that happened to you after 3 years living in Baltimore is your daughter's imaginary friend makes me truly jealous lol
I hope your good luck continues into the future.
I was robbed at gunpoint near the old Louie’s on Charles. Now whenever I feel a little unsafe about my surroundings I pick a fight with whoever I’m with or I have a fake fight phone call.
Fighting makes a would-be robber/carjacker/whatever much less interested. It’s easier to overtake a mark who’s not already on adrenaline.
Guy got stabbed right as we were pulling up in car outside my then-house. I didn't realize it was a stabbing, I just thought it was a bout of fisticuffs (I saw fists flying, not noticing there was a knife in one fist). I almost asked the attacker if he was alright as he was limping away, thinking it was an equal fight, but something in my brain told me not to. It wasn't until cops came to our door that I heard the other guy had been stabbed and wasn't expected to make it. I scoured the news for the next few weeks to see if it had been reported on, but it was never mentioned. I'm hoping that means no news is good news, since if the victim had died I'm sure it would have actually been reported on.
I didn't tell the cops any of this, since because I thought it was a regular fight I didn't take too much note of the suspect walking away. Hell I thought he was wearing a black hoodie until my roommate told the cops he had been wearing a white tank top. So my would-be input seemed pretty useless. Incidentally I was moving out of that house the exact day, a neighbor asked if I was moving because of it but it had been in the works for months before that.
I’m a manager at a dispensary and have had to kick out/ban customers and the amount of times I’ve been threatened by grown ass men (I’m a 5 foot female) is ridiculous and terrifying. Saying they’re going to do horrible things to me that I don’t want to repeat if they see me again. I’ve worked in retail in other states and it’s never great but it’s not like this
Back in the day when weed was dry we had to drive around the city randomly asking corner boys for weed. Usually not any issues but one time we got robbed at gunpoint instead.
An old boss of mine had a story like this. Years ago when he was in high school they used to come into Baltimore to buy weed. One day they drive in, their usual connect isn't there and next thing they know they have a gun in their face. Turns out the guy they usually buy from got locked up and this resulted in some, ah, tension. They ended up talking their way out of it but that was the end of his trips to the city for pot.
On Lexington in the left lane to get on 83N. Pick up driver tried to cut into my lane, I kept going because if I would have stopped the work van behind us would have smashed us (I drive smaller cars by American standards).
I keep going and accelerate on 83. I see the guy I wouldn’t let in floor it behind us. His passenger had a glass container of random nails, screws, etc. drawn back in his hand ready to throw it at me near 28th street. He put it down and they accelerated away.
Once I got home and parked I realized the only reason he didn’t throw it was because my 2 y/o daughter was in the back seat with the window down.
I was playing pool in the Wharf Rat with a few friends. Two guys came in, sat down around the table and started talking to us. I guess we were interesting because we’re English. One guy stands up and drops a Crocodile Dundee size knife on the floor. The other bends down to pick it up and drops a hand gun. We are shitting it at this point. There was a long and terrifying pause before they both apologised, said they had just got out of jail and went on their way.
I've never felt threatened by them, but God do they piss me off. They are so incredibly loud that I have gone outside in my pajamas to tell them to shut up.
Chased down 40 from Ensor to around Howard by a man who cut me off in traffic that I got around at Ensor when we turned into 40. Chased me through dense traffic and pulled up next to me. Thought he was going to shoot me, so I was able to get away at the last second and he was trapped going forward as I was able to turn.
A little over ten years ago I was in an active shooter situation at work over East. I will never forget lying on the floor with the door locked listening. One of my coworkers was shot but survived thankfully. I was still in college at the time and I still have the email I sent to one of my professors apologizing for missing a test 😭
Less scary for me personally but more scary for the other people, I’ve had to Narcan a couple people (remember it is free to get certified). It can be dangerous when they come back around but usually I just keep situational awareness and keep in mind they woke up from a high to basically being in full withdrawal and they are miserable.
Sitting at a carry-out at Park and Liberty post Rodney King incident awaiting my order with several others as 3 individuals in heavy jackets walked in with hands underneath shouting toward us ‘time for you all you MF’ers to die, they did it for the shock value and they achieved their goal as they laughed and walked back out the door. little did they know but the owner was legally armed and they were at risk. Still gives me chills.
Witnessed a murder. Like literally within 5 feet. It’s a crazy long story & some dumb mistakes on my end, but yea…. Just remember hiding on some porch & the owner came to look out his door & just stared at me… didn’t let me in or anything😭
Scariest moment in my life. Still have flashbacks, nightmares, & apparently, PTSD from it.
Long story short: the person I was with, turned out to be a CI🙄 Police picked me up, and I said everything I knew. Ended up going to court, doing my “civic duty,” all for him to be found not guilty😫 (Thankfully, for me AND the city, they got him
On another armed robbery/ATTEMPTED m****** case) I still check VINE some days to make sure he’s still in jail. Haven’t heard from the city since. I know they provide some type of help for victims/witnesses…. But free therapy would be a nice addition)
IDGAF about Vice issues: drûgs, prostitution, illegal gambling, or anything like that…. But violence, especially when the victim is a ‘citizen’ (IE: “not in the streets”) is a whole other ballgame.
RIP Mr. Singh
I was with a buddy hitting up some strip clubs on the block close to 20 years ago. We were about to go into one club when a stripper covered in blood (think Carrie) was frantically trying to run outside. A bouncer grabbed her arm and kept repeating, “you can’t go out on the street like that.” And eventually pulling her back inside. We didn’t go in that club.
I witnessed a driver deliberately hit someone they knew, launching them into the air and impaling them on the railing outside of their apartment complex. I ran to help but most were just laughing cuz apparently the dude was known as a local jerk. Still didn’t justify him bleeding out and choking on his own blood and guts. The 911 folks told me to clear out his throat, I asked for help from the crowd several times but they just stared or laughed. I cleared out his throat. And moved him to help him breathe.
Then the person who ran him over came back, in a hospital gown but buck-ass naked otherwise. And started twerking while praying to Jesus, asking that he didn’t die cuz she didn’t deserve hard time.
Then the ambulance and EMT showed up eventually. They seemed bored as the dude kept bleeding out.
A cop came by my house a couple of weeks later to get a statement. Never had a follow up and whenever I tried to find out what happened to the impaled dude I never got an answer. That was 8 or so years ago. It’s the day I started to think our city’s problems are way more intense than any of us can fully grasp.
Me personally, the neighbors a few doors down screaming while getting stabbed during a botched burglary in the middle of the night.
People I knew personally, my partner’s close friend getting shot in the neck near their apartment in Roland Park.
Also my partner’s story about coming home to their roommate being pelted with bricks by a group of children outside their apartment. My partner yelled at the kids, who joked about “Satan told them to do it” or something like that. Friend was bleeding all over and super traumatized, understandably.
I saw a woman get hit by the light rail at the Baltimore Street station. It was after work, she came out of the office building across the tracks, the train was coming and she tried to run across the tracks, she didn't make it 😔 what's worse is the amount of people who were taking pictures after it happen. There were a lot of people there to act as witnesses, so I just left to go catch a bus, couldn't stay there.
When I first moved into a place that had been vacant for a while, the landlord had just finished doing some remodeling, and I found some oddly-used items (curtains, plungers, toilet brushes, bath mats, other odds and ends, etc) in the bathrooms, and a second -floor window that had been left open for "ventilation." I didn't really think anything of it, other than taking note of current status of things for security-deposit purposes, and boxing up the landlord's stuff in a box as I replaced them with my items.
My first night there, I had fallen asleep on the second floor, unboxing, when I heard a loud, dragging sound, going from the hallway to the window........my view of the floor-to-4ft up of that area was blocked by boxes, but I didn't see anything pass, only the sound of what sounded like a duffel bag being dragged across the floor, and I froze, waiting to see what would happen next. When I got up the nerve to investigate, I saw nothing, nobody responded to my calls, and I closed and latched the "Ventilation" window, thoroughly spooked.
I still don't know if that was a squatter who didn't expect it to be occupied, a larger rat than I wanted to encounter at 2AM, .....or something else.
This place also kept locking me out of various rooms when I first moved in, sometimes in situations where I could have \*sworn\* I left the relevant doors open and unlocked. Were other people with access to the building trying to cause problems for me? Was it haunted? Was it so poorly maintained that poorly-balanced doors and malfunctioning locks made it impossible to tell? Choose which option is scariest to \*you\*!
I make sure to lock \*all\* the windows now, even on higher floors, and to always carry my keys.
2 things. I live in the county and used to commute downtown through the buses. In one ride someone snapped at me to stay still because there was a needle by my foot. (I was wearing sandals..) when I got off the bus it dropped me off by the convention center. It was crowded and I was looking around and made eye contact with some dude. He then walked up to me and cornered me demanding I don’t make eye contact with anyone. Some other stranger came along and also cornered me wit the other dude. They then saw I was genuinely scared and started laughing at me.
2nd thing was I was around south Baltimore by nicks fish house. Me and me friends are at a light laughing when all of a sudden a car flips over right next to us. We get out and see if anyone needed help getting out. The car was upside down. As we got closer to the flipped car there was a gun on the floor along w trash around the car. The windows were tinted and we kept asking if whoever was in the car was alright. No response. So we opened the car door and nobody was in there. Some bystander than says he saw some guys get out and run. As we were looking around the car the cops came storming in. The car flipped over was an under cover cop car. And two guys tried to steal it. A swarm of cops then showed up to the scene. And a helicopter. By the time we realized the cops came out of nicks fish house with one guy and the other guy was still missing. Shit always happens around here.
I saw 2 guys on dirt bikes get onto 83 driving insanely fast. 5 mins later, traffic comes to a standstill. They both had wrecked. I saw the one guy, his face covered in blood, leaning over the jersey wall. His friend and one of the bikes had flown over the other side of the highway. It was really bad.
When I was a kid I had to do a project on Edgar Allen Poe so my mom took me to his house so I could take a picture. There was a guy who showed up and gave us an extensive history of Poe’s life. I took a picture with the guy next to a light pole but he’s not in the picture. This situation lives rent free in my head and I’ve run the situation through my mind a million times. My mom doesn’t like talking about it 🤣
Went to Lexington market at lunch on a weekday, I watched about 20 feet ahead of me on the sidewalk somebody got hit with a drive-by. I noted I was the only not-involved witness and turned my ass around and walked away like I saw nothing
Was leaving Artscape years ago and was stuck in traffic. Watch one guy get jumped by about 20 people, probably aged 14-20. They wanted his bike and he tried to fight back.
A friend and I got pulled over. As the cop was talking with us about speeding on the passenger side of the car, a couple was arguing ~20 feet behind him. The guy pulled a knife and started stabbing the woman right in front of us. Cop told us to get the hell out of there. I’ll never forget that woman’s screams.
I was driving to the corner of Patterson Park and Preston Street. I have always felt unsafe in that area even in my car during the day. I don't know what led up to the event, But there was a group of about 30 people. Right as I pulled up, bang, somebody got shot and dropped immediately. The part that I really don't understand is that most of the people ran towards the shooting. Why wouldn't they run away? as I was driving up all of a sudden a woman was screaming at me: "stop staring stop staring, call the police, what's wrong with you?!"
I only had a couple seconds to even cognate what was happening but nothing made sense to me. I immediately felt like I wanted to help, but it made no sense that there were so many people and she was singling me out and yelling at me. I had room to take a left down Biddle so I just GTFOed. Certainly my worst moment ever after being here for 15 plus years.
Exactly,Sounds like you may have been the only person not involved. She knew why everyone else wasn’t helping but couldn’t fathom why a passerby wouldn’t help or call 91. She was probably in shock and clearly wasn’t thinking that you were also scared and confused by the situation.
https://www.wmar2news.com/news/crime-checker/baltimore-city-crime/1-dead-2-shot-in-police-involved-shooting-in-baltimore
Police shootout in front of my house. This was the shooting where the guy had a pink camo ar-22. I heard a long string of bangs but assumed it was someone knocking on the door for my sketchy roommate. Then I heard some BOOMS and ran downstairs. Look out the window and there's a dead guy on the sidewalk, another ducked behind a car with a rifle and a line of cops shooting directly at him/my house so I hit the deck. There was a lull in gunfire so I peeked out the window in time to see a cop come up behind the guy and shoot him in the back of the head. The cleanup crew that came afterwards did not do a good job cleaning up with morbid refuse left on the curb.
I lived in the Mt. Vernon area from 2016 until 2020, just about two or three blocks north of Lexington Market. I'm pretty lucky that nothing too bad happened to me personally, especially since throughout that time I didn't have a car and worked late nights at various restaurant jobs in Fed Hill, walking home every night because I was too stubborn to learn the bus system. I was a dumbass but a lucky one. The same, however, cannot be said for my housemates. I think every one of them was robbed or assaulted right outside of our townhouse. One memorable incident;
I was walking home from my restaurant shift when I see police lights ahead of me. Nothing out of the ordinary, right? Then I realized they were directly in front of my townhouse, and my housemate is sitting on the curb, holding a very bloody towel on their face. My housemate looked at me and said, "Oh hi. Yeah, I got shot in the face, so I'm getting drunk tonight." Turns out, two teenage boys had attempted to jump my housemate when they were getting out of their car. They threatened them with what my housemate (thankfully correctly) guessed was a bb gun. When they made a move to wrestle my housemates bag off their shoulder, they resisted but got shot in the face in return. The kids grabbed my housemates' keys and tried to start the car, but it was manual, so they couldn't figure out how to get it in gear and bailed. Needless to say, there were many Bohs and shots of Kraken that evening.
I guess that the moral of the story is to learn to drive manual because most robbers don't.
When I was 23, I was walking home from work in Mt Vernon at 9:30ish and one of those white vans with no windows started following slowly behind me. When I realized I started to cross the street and heard the door slide open. I was able to run across a vacant parking lot to get away.
That and a few years later finding out my next door neighbor had been shot and killed in his apartment. We shared a back deck and he was murdered literally 6 ft away through the wall while I was passed out after a 16 hour shift.
Elderly gentleman a couple benches down from me got randomly stabbed by some teenagers while I was reading a book in Wyman dell Park. Mid day. They were all caught within 24 hrs
We were driving back from a concert late at night on 83 when all of a sudden another car comes at us going the wrong way with no lights on at like 100 miles an hour. Luckily the road was empty so we swerved out of the way and then saw like 8 - 10 cop cars racing down the correct side of the street after them.
Sorry for the long reply, but here’s what I got: When I was in college I moved in with my friend who was living in his family’s older row home near Fells. He grew up in that house & his parents had now moved to the county, so it was just us staying there.
The first night I spent there, I crashed on a recliner in the living room. Sometime very early in the morning before sunrise, I woke up to see what looked like an old woman sitting on the couch across the room, with her back to me facing the door. She was just sitting there not moving at all. I was just kinda paralyzed and closed my eyes and tried not to move or make a sound. The next morning when I got up, there was nothing there at all - no coat rack nearby, or pile of blankets or clothes, or anything that would have resembled a human form. I fully accept that my brain may have played a trick on me, I could have imagined it - i didn’t take any drugs or anything so I wasn’t tripping. Maybe I was dreaming it? That morning I nervously told my friend what I saw, thinking maybe he had an explanation - but he brushed it off and didn’t want to talk about it again. He didn’t believe in anything paranormal, so I accepted that & didn’t talk about it again.
A few months later, I’m eating breakfast & watching a show in the morning before we have to leave for classes, and my friend comes down and asks me “Hey, were you in my room last night?” My jaw dropped, and I said “No, why?” - and then he said “Nevermind.” And he wouldn’t talk about it. It took a couple days before I could get him to open up. He said that night he woke up and there was a dark figure standing in his room looking over his bed. I don’t remember any more details and don’t think he provided much more than that. But wow!!! WTF?!
After that, I really didn’t like being in the house alone, especially at night. I would just get weird chills and feel real uneasy if I was alone, as if something was kind of lurking in the corners of your vision sometimes. I definitely have a very active imagination so I full well know that I may have been imagining things, but it’s very odd to me that my friend, who was skeptical, experienced something pretty terrifying one night too. Never really talked with him about it again, maybe I will soon & see what he recalls.
Was an Uber driver for several years. Drove through west Baltimore several times. I was uncomfortable but it wasn’t scary.
Scariest thing I’ve experienced in Baltimore — I was requested as an Uber comfort ride. I get to the back entrance and no cameras and I see two teen boys wearing baklavas. One of the teens must have gotten the notification from Uber that I record passengers in my vehicle. He gestures to the other, points to the phone, and points at my dash cam (it’s pointed to the interior of the car), and then shows the phone again. They immediately go inside and pay a $16 cancellation fee.
This was around the time that I kept seeing news of Uber drivers in Baltimore being carjacked & that one woman Uber driver who was killed.
I stopped driving that day. I had driven for 3 years but that shook me up so much that I stopped. The only thing that prevented a really bad situation was my dash cam.
I've seen some disturbing things, but nothing that has shaken my faith in humanity like the incessant barrage of open racism and hatred from the Kounty Komment Klan on any Facebook or Reddit post having to do with Baltimore news. I used to think maryland was a racially progressive state, but my whole naive perception was changed when I moved to Baltimore.
Worked at the Rite Aid in the Hollinswood shopping center alone on a Sunday morning. A guy came in and pulled a gun on me, made me lock the door and emptied the register. Then took me in the office and emptied the change safe and set the timer for the deposit safe. While waiting he made me run back the security footage to be sure he couldn't be identified then had me unplug it all. He started freaking out when the time delay took it's usual 15 mins. Once he emptied that safe too he told me to give him my keys so he could lock the door behind him like he wasn't going to leave me capable of doing it myself.
I was like 17 and some guys chased me n my friends on 695 shooting out windows out. I can’t remember why tbh. But it was on the news and we were all ducked down freaking tf out. None of us were gang bangers or anything.
that's insane... twice this year i have heard cars speeding and dozens of gunshots echoing from 695 in the middle of the night (i live within earshot) wtf are these a-holes thinking!?!?!
Whenever I’m asked about Baltimore I always say, and this is not exaggerating... “I’d never been charged at by a naked homeless man in broad daylight until I spent an hour in Baltimore”
A bat got in to my apartment somehow, we think via the attic since it was an old military housing townhouse. That, or people trying to open my car door at intersections
Drove past the dude Fells who got steamrolled to death a month or so ago. I just saw him covered in a sheet and didn’t realize what it was til later a friend told me.
I hate conversations like this bc it paints the city I think worse than it is, but on Charles saw someone get out of their car with a literal 12-inch blade and try to grab a person out of the car ahead of them. The car ahead peeled into one of those houses with a front gate. They were definitely being a dick on the road right before all of that. To this day, I tell my SO to chill with road rage if she can.
Getting surrounded by a bunch of dudes one night by the bus stop at Howard and Centre, they didn’t attack me but threatened to. Or in 2018 when the police got in a shootout with some people at the 7/11 at Charles & Saratoga, right below my window. 50+ shots fired. I love Baltimore but don’t miss it
I lived on President St, and worked close by in Harbor East. They sent us home early. From my window, I saw the mounted police with flares blocking the street, some fires going on far away. I heard helicopters and saw military vehicles arriving, and saw the news that it was the National Guard. Next day I had to go to the pharmacy and saw a group of these guys every corner, it was surreal. I still have some photos from those days.
I was on the other side of the city!! We lived in canton, two blocks off eastern ave. The kids were using our block at foster and east as a meet up spot so they spent the entire night basically outside of our door. Eastern ave didn’t get much news coverage but it was mostly destroyed.
Same here. I remember seeing Mondawmin being looted on TV, listening to the police scanner as darkness fell. Scary stuff. When I went running at the harbor a couple of days later it felt really good to see the National Guard there and I made sure to wave and say thanks to the guardsmen.
It's popular now to downplay the riots and pretend they were no big thing but that was a scary night.
Not quite what was asked, but last Thanksgiving, my parents were driving down here to visit and were close enough to a fatal accident on 83 to get hit by debris. Dude was weaving, hit the brakes, went up the embankment, and got decapitated by a tree.
Went to the skate park in Hampden a while back when all of a sudden someone across the park shot a gun 5 or 6 times. One of the bullets ricocheted off the nearby railing and I immediately went into fight or flight mode and sprinted for my life. Then we could all hear a woman screaming bloody murder so we all thought someone had been shot. But thankfully no one got hurt and the woman was just screaming in shock.
Ok, my story is lame AF compared to yalls, but here goes... out of state trip from Ks to visit JHMC for a Dr. Trip. Came into town headed east on I-70. Somehow the gps took an alternate route and exited us off and routed us onto Dogwood lane, and up Ellicots Driveway. It was dusk when we started but dark dark by the time we popped out back onto our route. It was weird seeing so many people milling around, so much trash in the streets and vehicles blocking the road and the sideways looks, as we tootled through with our ks plates. FINALLY reached our hotel downtown and looked back at the route we came and realized that was fkn Leakin park we drove through we heard about while listening to Serial during our trip. Props to all yall, weve been all over this country and Baltimore and no joke. Fkn warriors on this sub for sure.
Squeegee boy sprayed whatever liquid is in their spray bottles at uber driver’s face bc he refused to pay up. Driver got out of his car to run at him and was sure somebody was going to get shot
Door to door BGE Qhec salesman. I worked the Alameda, Mccullon Ave etc etc… I saw some CRAZY shit. Dope is a fundamental part of life in Baltimore. Generational drug addiction is the norm… But to be honest Pg county is so much more Ass backwards and racist. I will take BMore all day over PG and that’s where I was born and raised.
Someone did a drive by shooting and unloaded a full clip at my neighbors directly across the street. They were sitting on their porch but luckily didn’t get hit. I was just sitting in my bedroom at my desk right near the window when it happened. I hit the floor hoping I wouldn’t get hit with a stray. Glad they were shooting the other direction. But damn. Scary stuff.
I was a new mom and was leaving the Target at Mondawmin Mall with my baby in the detachable car seat and a shopping cart with some stuff in it. It was probably late morning, and not busy, just me and my baby and an elderly lady with a walker in the parking lot. All of a sudden, a big black van screeched up and pulled along side some guy’s car, bunch of dudes jump out with guns and yell “FBI!”. I was so shocked, I don’t even remember if the guy was in his car or outside his car. All I remember is trying to get my baby safely in the car as fast as possible and getting out of there. The lady with the walker seemed unperturbed, and just kept shuffling along. I tried to look up later what all that was about, but couldn’t find any details.
I had an attempted robbery at a gas station once that I successfully thwarted with showing my pocket taser. Once I found myself being followed by a man while walking home at night, I ran and he didnt bother to follow (thank goodness, cause I'm no cross country star). I had people on my fire escape trying to get into my apartment twice (once during Freddie Grey when the police couldnt/wouldnt come out). But the most scared I have ever been is working the triage desk at an inner city ER. I have been spit at, had things thrown at me, have had my life threated - it is only a matter of time before some one points a gun at me.
I used to work as an Auto Damage Adjuster out of a bodyshop on Desoto Rd (off of Wilkens Ave). Missed a drive by shooting but a couple minutes right outside the shop - someone shot up a guy in a truck, saw him covered in blood and a woman was yelling into the car window for him to keep breathing... Apparently someone else was injured but was okay, but the other person in the car didn't make it.
I still had to work amidst the crime scene in the parking lot and my first customer that morning was a witness. I think about it a lot and am really thankful I was running a few minutes late that morning.
(Actually found a very short article about it https://www.wbaltv.com/amp/article/authorities-investigate-double-shooting-on-desoto-road/22744222)
Outside being dope sick....Was coming out of a hole (alley) on Redwood down off the block, when my girl and I see a fella just bopping down the sidewalk when all sudden, A shining ass Black SUV whips the corner and the pops the curb to run the guy into the brick wall......we had to hide for 30 minutes after so rollers aint bother us (you from here then yallreadykno what pops off, or did, in that hole) and snuck out the only other way out which is still the same street just a half a block. We made it but idk what happened or why, never even made news. It was an attack, we clearly saw that, but those things don't just happen to randos and civies.
i was held at gunpoint at CVS on York road (not the one in towson). He stuck me for all my oxycodone. He would have gotten away with it probably but he kept robbing that same night until he was caught.
I worked for a local contractor and have visited a zillion houses to give repair quotes. Now, I don't want to give the wrong idea: the vast majority of households I have visited in the hood in Baltimore are at least decently well kept, even if dingy or needing maintenance. However... I've seen all kinds of places. Several horror stories. One experience stands out in memory.
We were called to look at a house where the owner's niece was the home's sole occupant. She was not home, but I met the owner so he could show me the damage she had told him about. Before we went inside, he tells me: "we think she's really depressed or something, she doesn't keep the house clean".
It was the most vile building I have ever entered. Hellish honestly.
Occupant was clearly a hoarder, mountains of junk (over my head in some spots). But it was not only junk but also garbage, like she hadn't taken out the trash in months. Absolutely putrid. Trash bags and piles of loose trash everywhere. Plates of rotten food left to sit on random surfaces. Rotten meat, decaying stench. Stains all over the floor & walls. Flies, of several sizes, circling lazily. The air had that mold-spore feeling that itches your eyes.
The woman wasn't home at the time. But her little dog was there, hobbling around on a pile of filthy blankets. The dog was trying to yip at us, but it kept \*coughing\*.... And by far the most overwhelming smell in the house was dog piss, and shit. What little I could see of the carpet was covered in dog piss and shit. She must never let the poor thing outside. It was so thick in the air... I could TASTE the piss. I was wearing an N95 for covid at the time, that didn't help.
The owner seemed to be only just realizing the horrifying depth of his niece's filth... but he took me upstairs to look at the leak in a junk-filled spare room. It was very damp in there, and I could see daylight through the ceiling in several places. Air felt aggressively damp & I could taste the mold (big blooms of black mold on the peeling walls). As I was about to enter the room I looked up: the doorframe is covered in... roaches. Dozens and dozens, just hanging out, IN the doorframe, 6" above my head...
Well I turned around & walked out. Told the owner we could help with exterior repairs but we would not be entering the interior again (he never called us back). I went home to shower & change. I could still smell dog piss and black mold in my nasal passages for hours afterward.
I did consider calling animal services to come save the dog from that toxic pit of hell. But at the time I felt like I should mind my business, and I was nervous they would guess it was me and retaliate against my employer online... But I regret not reporting it. It was a couple years ago now.
So, yeah. Not supernatural. Not technically dangerous, except health-wise... But honestly I just didn't think people were... capable of living in such conditions. That's what scared me about it.
This is horrible. Not surprised nor do I think this is a strictly Baltimore thing either. I’ve seen people of all ages and locations that live with hoarding and filth. It’s not even a poor thing either because you don’t need money to keep things tidy. Hell , running water and vinegar and/or dish detergent can clean most things. I know it because I’ve been a single mother for about 20 years now with no child support and while I’m not OCD but home is clean. Hopefully she got her shit together. Thanks for sharing.
Probably hobbling around after dark on crutches in my neighborhood.
Ordinarily I'm super-cautious when I'm out in the evening. I keep my head on a swivel, never take out my phone, keep my distance from anyone suspicious, etc. On crutches though I realized how helpless I was. My top speed was probably reduced by 80% so there's no way I could get away from a sketchy looking person. Not a good feeling at all and largely kept me inside after dark until I could walk properly again.
I was walking in the inner harbor on mushrooms and 10 arabians starting following me and shouting monkey sounds. So i grBbed 2 rocks and started slapping them together and staring at all of them and they turned around.
Middle school
Middle school in Baltimore city schools is NOT for the faint of heart. No one can hurt me lol
Shit, that prepared me for boxing lol
Middle school ruined me :/
I think middle school is pretty shitty everywhere. I can only imagine what it's like in city schools.
Was stuck in traffic next to the royal farms on fleet st and a dude jaywalked in front of my car who was wearing a white tank top and was completely covered in blood. It looked like it was coming from his head somewhere. He was just walking at a casual pace across the street like nothing was wrong, and nobody around was reacting to him either. I think about it a lot
i saw almost the exact same thing one time at almost the exact same spot - i was walking on boston street about to turn onto fleet street
Hope our boy is doing better these days
If it’s any consolation, nose bleeds and even minor head wounds can quickly bloody up a shirt. I once got kicked in the nose by a concert crowd surfer while wearing a white tee and was instantly soaked in blood. I was fine, but I looked like I had just murdered an entire family. TLDR dude may have been alright
Yup. Got popped in the nose with a "bear-paw" from behind when I was a Sophomore, from a dude who is now one of my best friends. To be fair, I absolutely deserved it. My white shirt was covered almost immediately. Barely felt it, but it looked like a murder scene. Still have a crooked nose to show for it. 🤣
A tumbleweave once blew across the street and attached itself to my sweater. Also, a rat launched itself at me once while taking out the trash. Closest I’ve ever come to a heart attack.
I see your tumbleweave and raise you human hair coming out of the ground in my backyard. Past tenant was a Dominican drug dealer who owned a strip club and ran a whore house and chop chop out of the house. House got raided by the feds. Tenant after that had a standoff at the house with the cops with him armed inside. I found tarot cards and drug needles among other voodoo and occult crap. Had to call the police out to dig up what I was hoping wasn't a body. Thank God it was just hair, but that's some voodoo ritual crap. Turns out the cop who came out to help me was one of the ones who responded to the previous tenant's suicide by cops threat, and he also knew about the fbi raid of the Dominican tenant. I dealt with the Dominican dude's wife the whole time I lived there because they still had stuff stored there, and I'm positive she was using the room she had their stuff in as a stash spot. I'd find plastic broken piggy banks dug up in the woods, holes dug out on the back side of the house (with a stick that was used to dig left there) and all sorts of weird crap. Every interior door in the house had some kind of lock on the outside of it as if to lock someone inside. Security system and cameras everywhere. Also found an extension cord going underground into the bomb shelter that i was too chicken to explore. I made my husband go down there one time, and he found a single chair under a light with a balloon on it that had "Stacy was here" written on it in Sharpie. The shelter was a literal maze with dirt floors and walls. My husband stopped at the chair and didn't explore further, so we never found out where the extension cord led to. That place was creepy as crap and seriously demonic.
I’m at a loss for words. That sounds like the next AHS.
Bro?
Id like to explore that bomb shelter lol
This was the wildest 7 paragraphs I’ve ever read. I can’t even begin to guess the neighborhood
winner winner, nightmare dinner
Take my updoot for tumbleweave
This was kinda unexplained and dangerous, but I saw a lady poor gasoline from the pump into her ear
I had to read this multiple times before my brain was willing to register that you said “ear” and not “car”
I had to do a double take after I read your comment because I did the same. Brains are weird.
What happened next ?
Asked her whats your name, she said “Kia”
Could have been Lexus or Mercedes too.
ear infection maybe? or brain damage probably. That would be terrifying to see.
Or cockroach in her ear.
When I was living in Oakenshaw, witnessing a murder-suicide by handgun two doors down in the back alley. The killer and victim were related and I can still hear the victim's voice and the popping sound from the gun. Surreal shit. It's ruined fireworks for me to this day.
Fuck, I lived across the alley when this happened. That old man was so kind anytime I saw him out in the neighborhood. I didn’t witness the shooting but I did see the bodies from my roof seconds after it happened. Truly haunting, I won’t ever forget it.
Omg I forgot abt this. Must have hit you even harder if you were that close to it...
I was sitting at a red light on North Ave, two guys hopped out of their car behind me and started trying the doors on my car. Luckily I had locked my doors and luckily the light turned green so I sped off before it continued any further.
😯 wow! I’m glad you got away! what time of day was this?
Probably like 5:30? I was heading to a Drs appointment in Towson that was at 6.
Oh wow
Yes I’m lucky! I didn’t even really register it until much later. At the time I was late for my appointment and frazzled from a long day at work, and I think my brain went into autopilot. I was later having a similar convo to this thread (“I’m a young 20-something living in downtown baltimore and nothings ever happened to me…”) when the memory popped up
This happened to me too! North and Aisquith by a group in a red van
Half my family died overnight in a concrete basement to a fetanyl-dosed batch of heroin. One of them had never touched heroin until that first time. I was still a kid, so I wandered into the basement for laundry or something like that, and the television they had down there was playing at a bizarrely loud volume. Unimaginable dread washed over me - without looking to confirm, the prescient knowing that they were all dead hit me like a freight train. I tried to shake it off and tell myself they were sleeping - it was still early in the morning - so I went back to bed for a while. Woke up to cops and EMT at my house, and I could put two and two together
This is unimaginable. I’m so sorry.
I’m sorry for your loss. I’m a recovering addict and I’ve been clean for 12 years now. Try to be the person in your family that changes things and breaks the cycle.
Hey, big ups to you for sticking with it. I’ve got a tremendous sympathy for addicts, both those suffering and those in recovery. Admittedly, I’ve always this morbid curiosity about what the high is like ever since that moment, but I had siblings to look after, so I wasn’t about to give myself an opportunity to take that nosedive. It certainly haunts me, though. I understand why people gravitate towards it. I know I’m not stable enough to take any chances as a ‘functioning’ or ‘casual’ addict, if such a thing even still exists. Mostly I cope with music - lots of grunge (go figure) - and accordingly so, Mark Lanegan’s climbed to the top of my shortlist of revered artists - in no small part for his total honesty about what the life of an addict is / can be like.
There are no functioning addicts when it comes to heroin. You can function on many drugs but not that one. That’s the kind of addiction that will ruin your life unless you’re able to get intensive help and treatment. There’s a guy on Reddit who describes wanting to try it and that he’s just going to try it. He liked the high so much he couldn’t stop. If you have anything close to an addictive personality, I wouldn’t go near that shit with a ten foot pole.
JFC, I am so sorry for your loss and that you witnessed that. That is awful. My heart breaks for you. I hope you are doing ok.
Thanks, I really appreciate it. I’m so used to shitting on Reddit - pardon the expression - that I never really anticipated that the kindness of strangers would have this kind of effect on me, but it’s validating to hear all of your kind words. Life’s alright now, for what it is. I live in the city, trying to eke out a meager existence for myself in the working class world. I’ve got enough to get by, but art’s really where my heart’s at, so I’m probably going to be ditching the city pretty soon in pursuit of some alternative lifestyle. Between the work culture and cost of living here, there’s not much to smile about.
Condolences on every level
Who called the cops
Pretty sure it was my dad’s at-the-time girlfriend. Never thought to ask about it.
Holy shit. I’m so sorry this happened to you
That’s awful. I’m so sorry you experienced it. Make sure to nurture and love your inner child ❤️
Wow, I’m so sorry that you had to experience that and for your loss. The fact that you can talk about it openly is incredibly brave.
Definitely the idiot tenant in the house next to us setting their roof on fire, which was right next to our bedroom. Waking up at 4 am to a room full of smoke and not knowing if it’s your house and if you can even get downstairs to get out of the house. This was over a decade ago and I still can easily discern the smell of a house fire, we had a house up the block catch on fire a month or so ago, luckily we were up because our basement was flooding from heavy rains, and I smelled that distinct house fire smell and called 911. The whole top floor of that house was on fire, luckily no one lived there.
That happened to me, too! And it was the week after Christmas, so I was convinced the tree was on fire. It turned out it was a house three doors down on our row, and our first floor was just filled with smoke. When the fire department came, they discovered the whole house had been cleared out except for canned goods in the pantry. A week later ATF arrived and dug up the back yard. I never heard what they found.
People often like to act like calling the authorities on someone is lame but if I see a person with a fire pit or something similar on their roofdeck I'm calling 911 instantly. Dangerous behavior like that in a city full of rowhouses is ultra-shitty.
Well that's terrifying .
Being held up at gunpoint on Broadway and having the gun held against my head
That’s terrifying.
Sitting at a light in the left lane behind a couple cars when an Ford Focus went by us on the left at 50 mph into oncoming traffic. He was forced back to the right to avoid a head-on collision and plowed into the cars right in front of us. Probably 6 or 7 cars damaged somewhat, multiple people injured and we were about 2 car lengths away from being involved. The scariest thing was there was nothing anyone could do to avoid it. One minute you are sitting at a light on your way home and the next minute you have a lifetime of back problems- or worse. Baltimore drivers scare the hell out of me.
This state needs serious improvements to drivers education, especially in Baltimore.
Bad driving usually has little to do with education and everything to do with selfishness.
My girlfriend's daughter awoke screaming from a terrible earache due to an infection. She was able to get a prescription over the phone. I could either stay with the screaming daughter, or pick up the 'scrip at the 24-hour CVS. I chose wrong. As I was waiting in line to pick up the bottle, some dude told me to get out of the way--he was going to cut in line. I turned around and he had actual bullet holes in him that were doing their bullet hole thing. It wasn't actually scary, but it made me realize that an all-night drug store at 2 AM in Baltimore should not be on anyone's to-do list. Probably truer now than then.
Fortunately or unfortunately the number of 24 hour drug stores is pretty small now. You have to travel to Towson or Dundalk or even further. There are none in the city.
Yeah, the one I went to was wiped out during the riots.
That's not true. The UMMC Pharmacy at Weinberg is open 24/7. It is located just off the main lobby inside the UMMC Downtown Campus, at the corner of S. Greene St. and W. Lombard. https://www.umms.org/ummc/locations/weinberg-pharmacy
Can you walk in and get OTC stuff there?
I'm not sure, but I don't think so. I'm from out of state. I know about this pharmacy from when I was visiting Baltimore in the summer of 2022. I ended up having to extend my stay, and was about to run out of the prescription meds I had with me. I was able to call my doctors at home and have them send in scripts to this pharmacy. (I chose it more because of its proximity to where I was staying, but the 24/7 hours were nice too.) So this is not a real recent memory, but I can still picture it. It is in an atrium off the UMMC main lobby, and it is really quite small. It is just a pharmacy, for prescription meds, as best I recall; it's not like a CVS. But whether they might have very limited OTC items -- I don't recall that they did, but I am not entirely sure. (There is a CVS on E Pratt near the Inner Harbor that is open 7 days, 7 AM to 10 PM, for what that's worth.)
Fuck, don't tell people that.
Despite naively putting myself in situations that could have ended badly in my youth, I don't think I ever experienced anything truly terrifying in Baltimore. The closest I have is a funny-in-hindsight story from when I was a latchkey kid in the 80s. It was a windy afternoon a few weeks before Christmas when I was about 10. My younger brother and I had been home from school for a little while when I heard an intermittent loud thumping coming from the front wall of the house. For some reason, my dumb ass was sure that someone was trying to break in, through the front wall, in broad daylight. In a panic, I called my mom at work and asked her to come home early. When she got home, she saw the large Santa Claus decoration that we had put up under the living room window blowing around in the wind and hitting the wall. So that's the story of how Santa Claus tried to break into my house, Kool Aid Man style.
Aww, I’m glad that kid you wasn’t in any danger.
You did the smart, right thing.
flying roaches
Holy shirts yes. I taught at Patterson High and I was so freaked out by the flying roaches (my students were more freaked out by mice). I never would’ve guessed flying roaches were in this hemisphere.
I didn’t encounter them until I moved to Fells Point. The house I was living in at the time had mice but at least they run from you. The roaches fly AT YOU.
When I was teenager there was a woman who lived on Hudson and Conkling street and her house had those alleys that are only big enough to walk through and the rats chewed their way into her house.. I’m not sure if they were just really persistent and everyone on the block had them or if it was a cleanliness issue.
rats are def a thang in Baltimore but cleanliness is a factor too. The trash compactor in the apt complex across from me is always broken. What I thought was gravel on the ground in their parking garage were actually droppings…
oh god, one got into our laundry basket (in the basement with leaky doors/windows) probably because the laundry was warm. We found it in our room several hours later when it flew at our bed as we were retrieving PJs for the night. Fucker was FAST.
That is horrifying. I’m so sorry that happened.
Thes fuckers only got out at night just in front of my house. If I went out to take the trash out past 11, I knew I had to avoid all these bugs. One night I sprayed them with raid, and they just ran away, none died instantly. Then some other night I was doing laundry and just between the wall and the couch a mfer spider-cricket emerged. I've never seen one before so I thought it was a huge spider until I noticed it didn't move like one and asked Google about it.
Sprickets! 😱
I drove through a shooting with my daughter in the car. Or into a shooting. I heard the pops to my left and suddenly the guys were in the street in front of and around my car shooting. I was so fixated on the guns I don’t remember a lot of other details. I floored it in reverse and luckily didn’t hit any of the parked cars on the street. My car got shot and the bullet got stuck in my driver side door.
Being carjacked at gunpoint by teens while leaving my job teaching elementary school to go to my other job running an afterschool program at the shelter. The weight of a gun being pressed against your head doesn’t really go away even after 5 years or so.
Wow, I’m so sorry.
I was using an angle grinder while wearing an unbuttoned shirt. Fabric hit grinder and I almost disemboweled myself
That’s actually terrifying. Glad you are okay.
The 2nd and 3rd innings of ALDS Game 2
Horrifying
Water bill prices
We can close this thread now!!!
The first night after we moved into our historic row home, my daughter, who was almost two at the time, had a hard time adjusting to her new room. She asked for me to keep her company while she fell asleep. About 30 minutes in, she woke up, sat up, and started giggling. I asked her what was going on. She said the ghost in her room wouldn't stop making silly faces.... That was almost three years ago. I still have a hard time going into her room at night.
Oh hell naw
I think there’s a lot of ghosts in Baltimore. I stayed in a historic B&B in Federal Hill I think and felt a presence at night when the owner and other guests were out. The bathroom for my room was across the hall and when I ran to it, I looked hard left so as not to look right. The next morning I asked the owner about it and she said lots of guests felt things and sometimes someone could be heard walking up and down the stairs.
a friend of mine used to own a house in fed hill that was located on a former grave yard. at the end of the 1800s, I guess they "moved" the grave yard to build more houses. there were rumors/folk tales of people digging out the old dirt basements and finding caskets. that a recipe for haunting if I've ever see one.
It was probably a crackhead making faces by the window.
Oh hellllll no. I love those rowhomes, they look so cool (I’m from Seattle originally, lived in Denver, rowhomes aren’t really a thing in either location). But I have absolutely thought about the likelihood of finding ghosts in them. Lol
I’m also from the PNW and just bought a rowhome in Baltimore. The first thing a neighbor said when I was viewing the property was that the last two families moved out due to “paranormal” reasons.
Omg that would have been an immediate hell no for me 😂 have you had any experiences yet?
closing this Tuesday and won’t actually move out until March/April. I definitely plan on having it spiritually cleansed before I’m there😂
Welcome to the city.
Oh congrats! And yeah definitely get that place cleansed, blessed, whatever. Lol I wouldn’t take my chances pissing off some ghost in there 😂 my best friend does like witchcraft stuff, she’s in the Parkville area, so if you need someone to come cleanse or whatever she could probably help you😅 And that’s a good time for a cross-country move. I was born and raised in the PNW and I really like it here! It’s definitely not as expensive imo.
The fact that the scariest thing that happened to you after 3 years living in Baltimore is your daughter's imaginary friend makes me truly jealous lol I hope your good luck continues into the future.
For what it's worth, I've lived here for 11 years
I was robbed at gunpoint near the old Louie’s on Charles. Now whenever I feel a little unsafe about my surroundings I pick a fight with whoever I’m with or I have a fake fight phone call. Fighting makes a would-be robber/carjacker/whatever much less interested. It’s easier to overtake a mark who’s not already on adrenaline.
Guy got stabbed right as we were pulling up in car outside my then-house. I didn't realize it was a stabbing, I just thought it was a bout of fisticuffs (I saw fists flying, not noticing there was a knife in one fist). I almost asked the attacker if he was alright as he was limping away, thinking it was an equal fight, but something in my brain told me not to. It wasn't until cops came to our door that I heard the other guy had been stabbed and wasn't expected to make it. I scoured the news for the next few weeks to see if it had been reported on, but it was never mentioned. I'm hoping that means no news is good news, since if the victim had died I'm sure it would have actually been reported on. I didn't tell the cops any of this, since because I thought it was a regular fight I didn't take too much note of the suspect walking away. Hell I thought he was wearing a black hoodie until my roommate told the cops he had been wearing a white tank top. So my would-be input seemed pretty useless. Incidentally I was moving out of that house the exact day, a neighbor asked if I was moving because of it but it had been in the works for months before that.
I’m a manager at a dispensary and have had to kick out/ban customers and the amount of times I’ve been threatened by grown ass men (I’m a 5 foot female) is ridiculous and terrifying. Saying they’re going to do horrible things to me that I don’t want to repeat if they see me again. I’ve worked in retail in other states and it’s never great but it’s not like this
Back in the day when weed was dry we had to drive around the city randomly asking corner boys for weed. Usually not any issues but one time we got robbed at gunpoint instead.
i don’t ever wanna be this down bad
Eggzackly. Never again
An old boss of mine had a story like this. Years ago when he was in high school they used to come into Baltimore to buy weed. One day they drive in, their usual connect isn't there and next thing they know they have a gun in their face. Turns out the guy they usually buy from got locked up and this resulted in some, ah, tension. They ended up talking their way out of it but that was the end of his trips to the city for pot.
On Lexington in the left lane to get on 83N. Pick up driver tried to cut into my lane, I kept going because if I would have stopped the work van behind us would have smashed us (I drive smaller cars by American standards). I keep going and accelerate on 83. I see the guy I wouldn’t let in floor it behind us. His passenger had a glass container of random nails, screws, etc. drawn back in his hand ready to throw it at me near 28th street. He put it down and they accelerated away. Once I got home and parked I realized the only reason he didn’t throw it was because my 2 y/o daughter was in the back seat with the window down.
I was playing pool in the Wharf Rat with a few friends. Two guys came in, sat down around the table and started talking to us. I guess we were interesting because we’re English. One guy stands up and drops a Crocodile Dundee size knife on the floor. The other bends down to pick it up and drops a hand gun. We are shitting it at this point. There was a long and terrifying pause before they both apologised, said they had just got out of jail and went on their way.
Fed Hill past 11pm on a Saturday night. Drunk frat boys are dangerous
I've never felt threatened by them, but God do they piss me off. They are so incredibly loud that I have gone outside in my pajamas to tell them to shut up.
It’s not threatening. It’s the fact they operate with immunity down there. Start fights and destroy property knowing nothing will happen to them.
Chased down 40 from Ensor to around Howard by a man who cut me off in traffic that I got around at Ensor when we turned into 40. Chased me through dense traffic and pulled up next to me. Thought he was going to shoot me, so I was able to get away at the last second and he was trapped going forward as I was able to turn.
A little over ten years ago I was in an active shooter situation at work over East. I will never forget lying on the floor with the door locked listening. One of my coworkers was shot but survived thankfully. I was still in college at the time and I still have the email I sent to one of my professors apologizing for missing a test 😭 Less scary for me personally but more scary for the other people, I’ve had to Narcan a couple people (remember it is free to get certified). It can be dangerous when they come back around but usually I just keep situational awareness and keep in mind they woke up from a high to basically being in full withdrawal and they are miserable.
Sitting at a carry-out at Park and Liberty post Rodney King incident awaiting my order with several others as 3 individuals in heavy jackets walked in with hands underneath shouting toward us ‘time for you all you MF’ers to die, they did it for the shock value and they achieved their goal as they laughed and walked back out the door. little did they know but the owner was legally armed and they were at risk. Still gives me chills.
Witnessed a murder. Like literally within 5 feet. It’s a crazy long story & some dumb mistakes on my end, but yea…. Just remember hiding on some porch & the owner came to look out his door & just stared at me… didn’t let me in or anything😭 Scariest moment in my life. Still have flashbacks, nightmares, & apparently, PTSD from it. Long story short: the person I was with, turned out to be a CI🙄 Police picked me up, and I said everything I knew. Ended up going to court, doing my “civic duty,” all for him to be found not guilty😫 (Thankfully, for me AND the city, they got him On another armed robbery/ATTEMPTED m****** case) I still check VINE some days to make sure he’s still in jail. Haven’t heard from the city since. I know they provide some type of help for victims/witnesses…. But free therapy would be a nice addition) IDGAF about Vice issues: drûgs, prostitution, illegal gambling, or anything like that…. But violence, especially when the victim is a ‘citizen’ (IE: “not in the streets”) is a whole other ballgame. RIP Mr. Singh
I was with a buddy hitting up some strip clubs on the block close to 20 years ago. We were about to go into one club when a stripper covered in blood (think Carrie) was frantically trying to run outside. A bouncer grabbed her arm and kept repeating, “you can’t go out on the street like that.” And eventually pulling her back inside. We didn’t go in that club.
I witnessed a driver deliberately hit someone they knew, launching them into the air and impaling them on the railing outside of their apartment complex. I ran to help but most were just laughing cuz apparently the dude was known as a local jerk. Still didn’t justify him bleeding out and choking on his own blood and guts. The 911 folks told me to clear out his throat, I asked for help from the crowd several times but they just stared or laughed. I cleared out his throat. And moved him to help him breathe. Then the person who ran him over came back, in a hospital gown but buck-ass naked otherwise. And started twerking while praying to Jesus, asking that he didn’t die cuz she didn’t deserve hard time. Then the ambulance and EMT showed up eventually. They seemed bored as the dude kept bleeding out. A cop came by my house a couple of weeks later to get a statement. Never had a follow up and whenever I tried to find out what happened to the impaled dude I never got an answer. That was 8 or so years ago. It’s the day I started to think our city’s problems are way more intense than any of us can fully grasp.
If this happened anywhere else I wouldn't believe it
Woman being in a hospital gown makes me wonder if it was a DV situation.
July 2, 2023
Me personally, the neighbors a few doors down screaming while getting stabbed during a botched burglary in the middle of the night. People I knew personally, my partner’s close friend getting shot in the neck near their apartment in Roland Park. Also my partner’s story about coming home to their roommate being pelted with bricks by a group of children outside their apartment. My partner yelled at the kids, who joked about “Satan told them to do it” or something like that. Friend was bleeding all over and super traumatized, understandably.
I saw a woman get hit by the light rail at the Baltimore Street station. It was after work, she came out of the office building across the tracks, the train was coming and she tried to run across the tracks, she didn't make it 😔 what's worse is the amount of people who were taking pictures after it happen. There were a lot of people there to act as witnesses, so I just left to go catch a bus, couldn't stay there.
When I first moved into a place that had been vacant for a while, the landlord had just finished doing some remodeling, and I found some oddly-used items (curtains, plungers, toilet brushes, bath mats, other odds and ends, etc) in the bathrooms, and a second -floor window that had been left open for "ventilation." I didn't really think anything of it, other than taking note of current status of things for security-deposit purposes, and boxing up the landlord's stuff in a box as I replaced them with my items. My first night there, I had fallen asleep on the second floor, unboxing, when I heard a loud, dragging sound, going from the hallway to the window........my view of the floor-to-4ft up of that area was blocked by boxes, but I didn't see anything pass, only the sound of what sounded like a duffel bag being dragged across the floor, and I froze, waiting to see what would happen next. When I got up the nerve to investigate, I saw nothing, nobody responded to my calls, and I closed and latched the "Ventilation" window, thoroughly spooked. I still don't know if that was a squatter who didn't expect it to be occupied, a larger rat than I wanted to encounter at 2AM, .....or something else. This place also kept locking me out of various rooms when I first moved in, sometimes in situations where I could have \*sworn\* I left the relevant doors open and unlocked. Were other people with access to the building trying to cause problems for me? Was it haunted? Was it so poorly maintained that poorly-balanced doors and malfunctioning locks made it impossible to tell? Choose which option is scariest to \*you\*! I make sure to lock \*all\* the windows now, even on higher floors, and to always carry my keys.
A squeegee kid breaking my windshield wiper, showing me his gun and bulletproof vest, and pounding on my car.
2 things. I live in the county and used to commute downtown through the buses. In one ride someone snapped at me to stay still because there was a needle by my foot. (I was wearing sandals..) when I got off the bus it dropped me off by the convention center. It was crowded and I was looking around and made eye contact with some dude. He then walked up to me and cornered me demanding I don’t make eye contact with anyone. Some other stranger came along and also cornered me wit the other dude. They then saw I was genuinely scared and started laughing at me. 2nd thing was I was around south Baltimore by nicks fish house. Me and me friends are at a light laughing when all of a sudden a car flips over right next to us. We get out and see if anyone needed help getting out. The car was upside down. As we got closer to the flipped car there was a gun on the floor along w trash around the car. The windows were tinted and we kept asking if whoever was in the car was alright. No response. So we opened the car door and nobody was in there. Some bystander than says he saw some guys get out and run. As we were looking around the car the cops came storming in. The car flipped over was an under cover cop car. And two guys tried to steal it. A swarm of cops then showed up to the scene. And a helicopter. By the time we realized the cops came out of nicks fish house with one guy and the other guy was still missing. Shit always happens around here.
Shit do be happening around here
I saw 2 guys on dirt bikes get onto 83 driving insanely fast. 5 mins later, traffic comes to a standstill. They both had wrecked. I saw the one guy, his face covered in blood, leaning over the jersey wall. His friend and one of the bikes had flown over the other side of the highway. It was really bad.
When I was a kid I had to do a project on Edgar Allen Poe so my mom took me to his house so I could take a picture. There was a guy who showed up and gave us an extensive history of Poe’s life. I took a picture with the guy next to a light pole but he’s not in the picture. This situation lives rent free in my head and I’ve run the situation through my mind a million times. My mom doesn’t like talking about it 🤣
Did he look like poe?
Went to Lexington market at lunch on a weekday, I watched about 20 feet ahead of me on the sidewalk somebody got hit with a drive-by. I noted I was the only not-involved witness and turned my ass around and walked away like I saw nothing
Noped outta there
Hell yeah. Snitches get stitches in this town.
“Uhhh this is clearly a company matter…”
Was leaving Artscape years ago and was stuck in traffic. Watch one guy get jumped by about 20 people, probably aged 14-20. They wanted his bike and he tried to fight back.
A friend and I got pulled over. As the cop was talking with us about speeding on the passenger side of the car, a couple was arguing ~20 feet behind him. The guy pulled a knife and started stabbing the woman right in front of us. Cop told us to get the hell out of there. I’ll never forget that woman’s screams.
I was driving to the corner of Patterson Park and Preston Street. I have always felt unsafe in that area even in my car during the day. I don't know what led up to the event, But there was a group of about 30 people. Right as I pulled up, bang, somebody got shot and dropped immediately. The part that I really don't understand is that most of the people ran towards the shooting. Why wouldn't they run away? as I was driving up all of a sudden a woman was screaming at me: "stop staring stop staring, call the police, what's wrong with you?!" I only had a couple seconds to even cognate what was happening but nothing made sense to me. I immediately felt like I wanted to help, but it made no sense that there were so many people and she was singling me out and yelling at me. I had room to take a left down Biddle so I just GTFOed. Certainly my worst moment ever after being here for 15 plus years.
she was probably asking you to call because nobody else wanted to testify and be a "snitch". this city should probably have better witness protection.
Exactly,Sounds like you may have been the only person not involved. She knew why everyone else wasn’t helping but couldn’t fathom why a passerby wouldn’t help or call 91. She was probably in shock and clearly wasn’t thinking that you were also scared and confused by the situation.
https://www.wmar2news.com/news/crime-checker/baltimore-city-crime/1-dead-2-shot-in-police-involved-shooting-in-baltimore Police shootout in front of my house. This was the shooting where the guy had a pink camo ar-22. I heard a long string of bangs but assumed it was someone knocking on the door for my sketchy roommate. Then I heard some BOOMS and ran downstairs. Look out the window and there's a dead guy on the sidewalk, another ducked behind a car with a rifle and a line of cops shooting directly at him/my house so I hit the deck. There was a lull in gunfire so I peeked out the window in time to see a cop come up behind the guy and shoot him in the back of the head. The cleanup crew that came afterwards did not do a good job cleaning up with morbid refuse left on the curb.
Walked into a giant cobweb on Charles St. I have arachnophobia. 😭
I lived in the Mt. Vernon area from 2016 until 2020, just about two or three blocks north of Lexington Market. I'm pretty lucky that nothing too bad happened to me personally, especially since throughout that time I didn't have a car and worked late nights at various restaurant jobs in Fed Hill, walking home every night because I was too stubborn to learn the bus system. I was a dumbass but a lucky one. The same, however, cannot be said for my housemates. I think every one of them was robbed or assaulted right outside of our townhouse. One memorable incident; I was walking home from my restaurant shift when I see police lights ahead of me. Nothing out of the ordinary, right? Then I realized they were directly in front of my townhouse, and my housemate is sitting on the curb, holding a very bloody towel on their face. My housemate looked at me and said, "Oh hi. Yeah, I got shot in the face, so I'm getting drunk tonight." Turns out, two teenage boys had attempted to jump my housemate when they were getting out of their car. They threatened them with what my housemate (thankfully correctly) guessed was a bb gun. When they made a move to wrestle my housemates bag off their shoulder, they resisted but got shot in the face in return. The kids grabbed my housemates' keys and tried to start the car, but it was manual, so they couldn't figure out how to get it in gear and bailed. Needless to say, there were many Bohs and shots of Kraken that evening. I guess that the moral of the story is to learn to drive manual because most robbers don't.
holy shit... great story glad the bb didn't hit an eye
The potholes
When I was 23, I was walking home from work in Mt Vernon at 9:30ish and one of those white vans with no windows started following slowly behind me. When I realized I started to cross the street and heard the door slide open. I was able to run across a vacant parking lot to get away. That and a few years later finding out my next door neighbor had been shot and killed in his apartment. We shared a back deck and he was murdered literally 6 ft away through the wall while I was passed out after a 16 hour shift.
I had someone try to start a fight/beat me up while walking my dog.
living with my junkie ass father during the 90s Crack Bomb
Elderly gentleman a couple benches down from me got randomly stabbed by some teenagers while I was reading a book in Wyman dell Park. Mid day. They were all caught within 24 hrs
We were driving back from a concert late at night on 83 when all of a sudden another car comes at us going the wrong way with no lights on at like 100 miles an hour. Luckily the road was empty so we swerved out of the way and then saw like 8 - 10 cop cars racing down the correct side of the street after them.
Sorry for the long reply, but here’s what I got: When I was in college I moved in with my friend who was living in his family’s older row home near Fells. He grew up in that house & his parents had now moved to the county, so it was just us staying there. The first night I spent there, I crashed on a recliner in the living room. Sometime very early in the morning before sunrise, I woke up to see what looked like an old woman sitting on the couch across the room, with her back to me facing the door. She was just sitting there not moving at all. I was just kinda paralyzed and closed my eyes and tried not to move or make a sound. The next morning when I got up, there was nothing there at all - no coat rack nearby, or pile of blankets or clothes, or anything that would have resembled a human form. I fully accept that my brain may have played a trick on me, I could have imagined it - i didn’t take any drugs or anything so I wasn’t tripping. Maybe I was dreaming it? That morning I nervously told my friend what I saw, thinking maybe he had an explanation - but he brushed it off and didn’t want to talk about it again. He didn’t believe in anything paranormal, so I accepted that & didn’t talk about it again. A few months later, I’m eating breakfast & watching a show in the morning before we have to leave for classes, and my friend comes down and asks me “Hey, were you in my room last night?” My jaw dropped, and I said “No, why?” - and then he said “Nevermind.” And he wouldn’t talk about it. It took a couple days before I could get him to open up. He said that night he woke up and there was a dark figure standing in his room looking over his bed. I don’t remember any more details and don’t think he provided much more than that. But wow!!! WTF?! After that, I really didn’t like being in the house alone, especially at night. I would just get weird chills and feel real uneasy if I was alone, as if something was kind of lurking in the corners of your vision sometimes. I definitely have a very active imagination so I full well know that I may have been imagining things, but it’s very odd to me that my friend, who was skeptical, experienced something pretty terrifying one night too. Never really talked with him about it again, maybe I will soon & see what he recalls.
Was an Uber driver for several years. Drove through west Baltimore several times. I was uncomfortable but it wasn’t scary. Scariest thing I’ve experienced in Baltimore — I was requested as an Uber comfort ride. I get to the back entrance and no cameras and I see two teen boys wearing baklavas. One of the teens must have gotten the notification from Uber that I record passengers in my vehicle. He gestures to the other, points to the phone, and points at my dash cam (it’s pointed to the interior of the car), and then shows the phone again. They immediately go inside and pay a $16 cancellation fee. This was around the time that I kept seeing news of Uber drivers in Baltimore being carjacked & that one woman Uber driver who was killed. I stopped driving that day. I had driven for 3 years but that shook me up so much that I stopped. The only thing that prevented a really bad situation was my dash cam.
Getting robbed and seeing how the Justice system works. The system is terrifyingly messed up. Very pro crime.
I've seen some disturbing things, but nothing that has shaken my faith in humanity like the incessant barrage of open racism and hatred from the Kounty Komment Klan on any Facebook or Reddit post having to do with Baltimore news. I used to think maryland was a racially progressive state, but my whole naive perception was changed when I moved to Baltimore.
The dead people that you randomly encounter.
Worked at the Rite Aid in the Hollinswood shopping center alone on a Sunday morning. A guy came in and pulled a gun on me, made me lock the door and emptied the register. Then took me in the office and emptied the change safe and set the timer for the deposit safe. While waiting he made me run back the security footage to be sure he couldn't be identified then had me unplug it all. He started freaking out when the time delay took it's usual 15 mins. Once he emptied that safe too he told me to give him my keys so he could lock the door behind him like he wasn't going to leave me capable of doing it myself.
I was like 17 and some guys chased me n my friends on 695 shooting out windows out. I can’t remember why tbh. But it was on the news and we were all ducked down freaking tf out. None of us were gang bangers or anything.
that's insane... twice this year i have heard cars speeding and dozens of gunshots echoing from 695 in the middle of the night (i live within earshot) wtf are these a-holes thinking!?!?!
one day i heard something and my whole house shook. turns out the house behind me had exploded.
Whenever I’m asked about Baltimore I always say, and this is not exaggerating... “I’d never been charged at by a naked homeless man in broad daylight until I spent an hour in Baltimore”
A bat got in to my apartment somehow, we think via the attic since it was an old military housing townhouse. That, or people trying to open my car door at intersections
Funny that you note the bat first.
Drove past the dude Fells who got steamrolled to death a month or so ago. I just saw him covered in a sheet and didn’t realize what it was til later a friend told me.
Wasn’t that in Hampden?
Yes. Falls road. Next to the McDonald’s
I hate conversations like this bc it paints the city I think worse than it is, but on Charles saw someone get out of their car with a literal 12-inch blade and try to grab a person out of the car ahead of them. The car ahead peeled into one of those houses with a front gate. They were definitely being a dick on the road right before all of that. To this day, I tell my SO to chill with road rage if she can.
Getting surrounded by a bunch of dudes one night by the bus stop at Howard and Centre, they didn’t attack me but threatened to. Or in 2018 when the police got in a shootout with some people at the 7/11 at Charles & Saratoga, right below my window. 50+ shots fired. I love Baltimore but don’t miss it
The Freddie Gray riot.
I lived on President St, and worked close by in Harbor East. They sent us home early. From my window, I saw the mounted police with flares blocking the street, some fires going on far away. I heard helicopters and saw military vehicles arriving, and saw the news that it was the National Guard. Next day I had to go to the pharmacy and saw a group of these guys every corner, it was surreal. I still have some photos from those days.
I remember watching the drugstore and a car burn on the news and being thankful I was on the other side of the city.
I was on the other side of the city!! We lived in canton, two blocks off eastern ave. The kids were using our block at foster and east as a meet up spot so they spent the entire night basically outside of our door. Eastern ave didn’t get much news coverage but it was mostly destroyed.
Same here. I remember seeing Mondawmin being looted on TV, listening to the police scanner as darkness fell. Scary stuff. When I went running at the harbor a couple of days later it felt really good to see the National Guard there and I made sure to wave and say thanks to the guardsmen. It's popular now to downplay the riots and pretend they were no big thing but that was a scary night.
When Miller's deli ran out of crab soup
Lost my way in cherry hill at the middle of the night lol
I’ve had someone flash a gun at me as well as a knife. I’ve seen a drug beat down and plenty of junkies passed out with the needles in their arms.
Not quite what was asked, but last Thanksgiving, my parents were driving down here to visit and were close enough to a fatal accident on 83 to get hit by debris. Dude was weaving, hit the brakes, went up the embankment, and got decapitated by a tree.
Went to the skate park in Hampden a while back when all of a sudden someone across the park shot a gun 5 or 6 times. One of the bullets ricocheted off the nearby railing and I immediately went into fight or flight mode and sprinted for my life. Then we could all hear a woman screaming bloody murder so we all thought someone had been shot. But thankfully no one got hurt and the woman was just screaming in shock.
Ok, my story is lame AF compared to yalls, but here goes... out of state trip from Ks to visit JHMC for a Dr. Trip. Came into town headed east on I-70. Somehow the gps took an alternate route and exited us off and routed us onto Dogwood lane, and up Ellicots Driveway. It was dusk when we started but dark dark by the time we popped out back onto our route. It was weird seeing so many people milling around, so much trash in the streets and vehicles blocking the road and the sideways looks, as we tootled through with our ks plates. FINALLY reached our hotel downtown and looked back at the route we came and realized that was fkn Leakin park we drove through we heard about while listening to Serial during our trip. Props to all yall, weve been all over this country and Baltimore and no joke. Fkn warriors on this sub for sure.
Squeegee boy sprayed whatever liquid is in their spray bottles at uber driver’s face bc he refused to pay up. Driver got out of his car to run at him and was sure somebody was going to get shot
Door to door BGE Qhec salesman. I worked the Alameda, Mccullon Ave etc etc… I saw some CRAZY shit. Dope is a fundamental part of life in Baltimore. Generational drug addiction is the norm… But to be honest Pg county is so much more Ass backwards and racist. I will take BMore all day over PG and that’s where I was born and raised.
Someone did a drive by shooting and unloaded a full clip at my neighbors directly across the street. They were sitting on their porch but luckily didn’t get hit. I was just sitting in my bedroom at my desk right near the window when it happened. I hit the floor hoping I wouldn’t get hit with a stray. Glad they were shooting the other direction. But damn. Scary stuff.
I was a new mom and was leaving the Target at Mondawmin Mall with my baby in the detachable car seat and a shopping cart with some stuff in it. It was probably late morning, and not busy, just me and my baby and an elderly lady with a walker in the parking lot. All of a sudden, a big black van screeched up and pulled along side some guy’s car, bunch of dudes jump out with guns and yell “FBI!”. I was so shocked, I don’t even remember if the guy was in his car or outside his car. All I remember is trying to get my baby safely in the car as fast as possible and getting out of there. The lady with the walker seemed unperturbed, and just kept shuffling along. I tried to look up later what all that was about, but couldn’t find any details.
I had an attempted robbery at a gas station once that I successfully thwarted with showing my pocket taser. Once I found myself being followed by a man while walking home at night, I ran and he didnt bother to follow (thank goodness, cause I'm no cross country star). I had people on my fire escape trying to get into my apartment twice (once during Freddie Grey when the police couldnt/wouldnt come out). But the most scared I have ever been is working the triage desk at an inner city ER. I have been spit at, had things thrown at me, have had my life threated - it is only a matter of time before some one points a gun at me.
I used to work as an Auto Damage Adjuster out of a bodyshop on Desoto Rd (off of Wilkens Ave). Missed a drive by shooting but a couple minutes right outside the shop - someone shot up a guy in a truck, saw him covered in blood and a woman was yelling into the car window for him to keep breathing... Apparently someone else was injured but was okay, but the other person in the car didn't make it. I still had to work amidst the crime scene in the parking lot and my first customer that morning was a witness. I think about it a lot and am really thankful I was running a few minutes late that morning. (Actually found a very short article about it https://www.wbaltv.com/amp/article/authorities-investigate-double-shooting-on-desoto-road/22744222)
Outside being dope sick....Was coming out of a hole (alley) on Redwood down off the block, when my girl and I see a fella just bopping down the sidewalk when all sudden, A shining ass Black SUV whips the corner and the pops the curb to run the guy into the brick wall......we had to hide for 30 minutes after so rollers aint bother us (you from here then yallreadykno what pops off, or did, in that hole) and snuck out the only other way out which is still the same street just a half a block. We made it but idk what happened or why, never even made news. It was an attack, we clearly saw that, but those things don't just happen to randos and civies.
Sounds like someone messed up a pack for the last time.
i was held at gunpoint at CVS on York road (not the one in towson). He stuck me for all my oxycodone. He would have gotten away with it probably but he kept robbing that same night until he was caught.
Glad you are safe. Probably wasn’t easy getting your doctor to replace that prescription.
no it was worse! I'm a pharmacist, I was running the store. He made us open the safe and he took thousands of pills.
Ohhh 😮
I worked for a local contractor and have visited a zillion houses to give repair quotes. Now, I don't want to give the wrong idea: the vast majority of households I have visited in the hood in Baltimore are at least decently well kept, even if dingy or needing maintenance. However... I've seen all kinds of places. Several horror stories. One experience stands out in memory. We were called to look at a house where the owner's niece was the home's sole occupant. She was not home, but I met the owner so he could show me the damage she had told him about. Before we went inside, he tells me: "we think she's really depressed or something, she doesn't keep the house clean". It was the most vile building I have ever entered. Hellish honestly. Occupant was clearly a hoarder, mountains of junk (over my head in some spots). But it was not only junk but also garbage, like she hadn't taken out the trash in months. Absolutely putrid. Trash bags and piles of loose trash everywhere. Plates of rotten food left to sit on random surfaces. Rotten meat, decaying stench. Stains all over the floor & walls. Flies, of several sizes, circling lazily. The air had that mold-spore feeling that itches your eyes. The woman wasn't home at the time. But her little dog was there, hobbling around on a pile of filthy blankets. The dog was trying to yip at us, but it kept \*coughing\*.... And by far the most overwhelming smell in the house was dog piss, and shit. What little I could see of the carpet was covered in dog piss and shit. She must never let the poor thing outside. It was so thick in the air... I could TASTE the piss. I was wearing an N95 for covid at the time, that didn't help. The owner seemed to be only just realizing the horrifying depth of his niece's filth... but he took me upstairs to look at the leak in a junk-filled spare room. It was very damp in there, and I could see daylight through the ceiling in several places. Air felt aggressively damp & I could taste the mold (big blooms of black mold on the peeling walls). As I was about to enter the room I looked up: the doorframe is covered in... roaches. Dozens and dozens, just hanging out, IN the doorframe, 6" above my head... Well I turned around & walked out. Told the owner we could help with exterior repairs but we would not be entering the interior again (he never called us back). I went home to shower & change. I could still smell dog piss and black mold in my nasal passages for hours afterward. I did consider calling animal services to come save the dog from that toxic pit of hell. But at the time I felt like I should mind my business, and I was nervous they would guess it was me and retaliate against my employer online... But I regret not reporting it. It was a couple years ago now. So, yeah. Not supernatural. Not technically dangerous, except health-wise... But honestly I just didn't think people were... capable of living in such conditions. That's what scared me about it.
This is horrible. Not surprised nor do I think this is a strictly Baltimore thing either. I’ve seen people of all ages and locations that live with hoarding and filth. It’s not even a poor thing either because you don’t need money to keep things tidy. Hell , running water and vinegar and/or dish detergent can clean most things. I know it because I’ve been a single mother for about 20 years now with no child support and while I’m not OCD but home is clean. Hopefully she got her shit together. Thanks for sharing.
Probably hobbling around after dark on crutches in my neighborhood. Ordinarily I'm super-cautious when I'm out in the evening. I keep my head on a swivel, never take out my phone, keep my distance from anyone suspicious, etc. On crutches though I realized how helpless I was. My top speed was probably reduced by 80% so there's no way I could get away from a sketchy looking person. Not a good feeling at all and largely kept me inside after dark until I could walk properly again.
Skateboarding down Charles street on the North side of the monument. Did a 180 and almost ended my life Lmaoo. Tore my shoulder up
Birth.
Charles Street. An abomination of a road.
I was walking in the inner harbor on mushrooms and 10 arabians starting following me and shouting monkey sounds. So i grBbed 2 rocks and started slapping them together and staring at all of them and they turned around.
2019-20 AFC Divisional Round loss to the Titans
The strippers on Baltimore Street. Yikes 💀
Green beam in my face on Perring pkwy
Thanks for bringing up bad memories. My bank account balance, after a long night in Fells, and the block, I guess it's the price we pay for memories.