This is a story about something that actually happened to me when I was in about the first grade. My parents had divorced, and I was living in an apartment complex with my mother. Since the complex was right near the elementary school, a lot of elementary and middle school kids lived there.
My mom worked as a single mother, so she wasn't home yet when I got back from school. After school, I spent my days like any typical kid—playing with friends, doing homework, watching TV, or playing video games.
One day, I didn't have any plans to play with friends and was doing homework at home by myself when the intercom suddenly rang.
The complex didn't have a secure main entrance back then; the doorbell rang directly outside our front door. My mom had repeatedly warned me, "When I come home, I use my key, so I'll never ring the bell. Never open the door for delivery drivers or strangers." Because of that, I always just checked through the peephole.
Looking through the peephole that day, I saw a man standing there with his head cast down, wearing plain work clothes and a hat pulled low over his face. In his hands was a cardboard box with no shipping label or slip attached to it.
The moment I saw him, an inexplicable dread washed over me, and I rushed to the back of the apartment to hide. I waited quietly until he left.
About ten minutes later, I peeked through the peephole again, but the man was gone.
A few days later, there was a neighborhood kids' club meeting for the elementary schoolers in our complex. When I casually mentioned, "A weird delivery guy came to my place the other day," to my surprise, the other kids started saying, "He came to my place, too."
After the meeting ended and I was walking home with my mom, the middle schoolers living in the complex were coming back from school.
We went around asking any older kids we could find, "Did anyone like this come to your apartment?"
But every single middle schooler answered, "No, nobody like that ever came."
Later, when adults checked the intercom visitor logs, it turned out the man hadn't visited a single household that only had middle schoolers—he was exclusively targeting homes with elementary school children.
Luckily, one of the families with elementary school kids had a video intercom that recorded photos of visitors. His face was hidden beneath his hat and wasn't clearly visible, but you could still make out his silhouette and general appearance.
When a middle school girl living in the complex was shown the photo, her expression changed the instant she laid eyes on it.
"That's him. One day when after-school club was canceled, I saw the younger kids walking home together in a group. This was the guy who was following right behind them the whole time."
With those words, the mood in the room instantly froze.
The complex didn't have security cameras back then. There was talk about whether to report it to the police, but in the end, they just settled on stepping up local neighborhood patrols.
To this day, nobody knows who that man was, whether he was actually a delivery driver, or if he had a completely different motive all along.