To start this story off, this took place last year around Halloween if I remember correctly? I live in a pretty shady suburb in Ohio, our crime rates and mental health rates are pretty haywire and there’s constantly emergency vehicles in our area. My friend and I, who I’ll call Gale, would always go walking around the lake near her house after school. Normally we’d just go to the little playground next to the swimming area and just goof off and chill for half an hour. This day we were just joking around and playing in the road since there weren’t any cars coming through. I had been doing this thing which we both thought was funny, I don’t remember exactly what I was doing but I was essentially walking in a ridiculous way backwards towards this house she and I had visited before.
Just for some more spooky backstory, we had stopped near this house weeks before all of this. The house is right on the road we were on and an old lady and her cats live there. We believed the house was abandoned and almost went inside but the woman had stepped out and started chatting to us, both of us believe she might have been mentally ill because she kept repeating herself and overall was acting unusual. Now back to me still walking backwards to this lady’s house, my friend had fallen on the ground from me making her laugh so much. As I kept inching backwards she had this shocked look on her face and she was motioning behind me and trying to make me stop, I looked behind me and saw the old lady scurry back towards her house away from me. This freaked me out so I ran back to my friend and helped her up.
After I helped her up we began walking the opposite way to head home, we were trying to laugh the situation off and just thought maybe the lady thought we were up to no good, I looked behind me just to make sure we weren’t being followed and so did my friend. As soon as I turn I see this dark figure emerge from behind a house, we were far from the old woman’s house so it wasn’t her, as soon as I saw the figure I told my friend we had to go so we began speed walking up the road and stopped at a stop sign before getting a closer look at our pursuer. From what I remember it was a man in about his 40s wearing a typical hat and trenchcoat. We turned on the intersection and went halfway down the road and the man continued after us, so we began to run all the way back constantly checking behind us only to see he was still behind us.
Eventually we got back to my friends house and she walked me home, the sun was setting and it was pretty dark out by this point. My friend and I hugged and said our goodbyes and she walked home. We haven’t really talked about this since it happened and we don’t hang out much anymore since we’re so busy lately. In general, I’m just glad we both acted accordingly and weren’t harmed.