Nice to see to in again friend

This is a story I have wanted to tell for a long time. Yes, it is very long. It is as long as it needs to be to say what I need to say. I included a **tldr** at the bottom. This took place between 1995 and 2000

Everyone has had a bad friend or two; I had an epically bad friend. If it hadn't happened to me I would never have known that this strange mental disorder was real or that people could behave this way outside of Lifetime Channel movies.

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I grew up in Northern Indiana. I went to a large high school in the mid 90's and my senior year I met another student named Hannah who had recently transferred from the main local Catholic high school in the area. That was unusual to transition so late from private to public school. Hannah said she had been expelled because of a fight with another student over some drama about a boy.

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She said the other girl had made allegations against her and accused her of attacking her. Whatever had happened, the police had been contacted and she had restraining order placed on her by the other girl. It had forced her expulsion and that was how I came to meet her. Hannah said none of it was true. She said she never tried to hurt her.

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Later I went to college in Indiana; she went to college in Florida. One day, a friend of mine from the dorms ran into a guy she had known from Catholic school back in my hometown. Once he left she told me about this incident that had happened to him where these two girls were fighting over him about which one was his girlfriend. Neither one of them was dating him and yet both of these girls thought that they were in a secret relationship with him. The whole thing had been very strange. Then she said one of them was a girl named Hannah.

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The next summer I was back in my hometown and Hannah was also. I hung out with her casually. I told her what I had heard about her. She said she would tell me what really happened.

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She had a crush on this boy but she had seen him talk to another student named Julie and she became jealous. She said she was convinced that this boy Mike wanted to be her boyfriend. She was sure Julie must have said something bad about her. Hannah said Julie was popular and pretty and a cheerleader and she hated everything about her so she decided she would try to see if she could push her to commit suicide.

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Hannah said it hadn't worked but that she had a nervous breakdown. I asked her what she had done.

We went back to Hannah's house. Up in her bedroom she pulled something out from the back of her closet. It was a set of books. One was a book on how to use dirty tricks to get revenge on people and one was a book with a cartoon character on the front pulling their hair out and it said in big letters *GASLIGHTING!*

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I know it's common phrase now, but back in 1995 I had never heard of it. I asked Hannah what the book was about and she said it was about how to drive someone crazy. She said it was simple, you just make them believe things aren't really true or that things they think are real never happened. She told me what she really did to Julie a couple years back in high school.

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She had pretended to be friends with her. She got her phone number and then she had started making these anonymous phone calls to her. This would have been way before cell phones were common. She had a friend from her church who had a crush on her and she would trade sexual favors with him in exchange for him pretending to be Mike on the phone. He would get a blow job for every time he did this for Hannah. Fake Mike would tell Julie not to talk in school so that they could keep things private. Hannah would put notes in her locker and sign Mike's name to them. Fake Mike would make plans to meet Julie at the mall or the movies and then never show up. It sounds very stupid but they would have been 14 or 15 year old girls when this happened.

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Hannah said she had done something really embarrassing but that it had worked. She had a mix tape and she would whisper nasty little phrases like "you want to die" or "you should kill yourself" between songs and had played it in her bedroom when Julie was over. Obviously she commented on it and Hannah sat there with a straight face and said she didn't hear anything and had no idea what she was talking about. She had set it up with her brother earlier and had asked him to help her play a prank on her friend. He came into her bedroom and said he couldn't hear anything and turned around and told Julie that she must be crazy and hearing things.

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Julie's parents decided to confront this boy and his family about his behavior towards their daughter. He had no idea what was going on. Because her parents had confronted this boy about something he was never doing Julie had been publically humiliated at her high school and everyone was talking about how she was crazy. Hanna loved every bit of it. Until Julie's parents got their phone bill and decided to give it a good look.

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Mike had not been calling their house, but *somebody* had been. They had numerous anonymous phone calls. They checked it out and found out they were all coming from Hannah's home phone number. Julie confronted Hannah about it at school and that was when something violent happened between the two of them in the stairwell. Julie said Hannah had started screaming at her that Mike was her secret boyfriend.

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Hannah was very angry about that. She said Julie made that part up to try to get back at her and embarrass her for what she had done. She said Julie was exaggerating about what happened in the stairwell and it had been an accident. She said she never tried to push her over the railing, she had merely bumped into her.

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Hannah wasn't embarrassed about it. She was proud of it. The only thing that upset her was that she had been caught, but she said that most of the people at her Catholic school still thought that Julie was crazy so she considered it something of a victory.

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Hannah didn't have anything to say in her defense, just that when she liked a boy she would do *anything* to be with them.

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That summer Hannah started dating a guy named Derek. Every time I saw her she told me tales about their wild and crazy sex life and how much he was in love with her. Hannah said it was a secret affair and they were sneaking around behind his girlfriend's back. We saw him once at a party and he screamed at Hannah to stay away from him and leave him and his girl alone. Someone had been making strange anonymous phone calls to him and his girlfriend. He paid to have the number traced back and found out it was Hannah. Hannah admitted that she had been trying to break them up because he was taking too long to do it himself but that she had overplayed it and now he was angry and had broken things off with her.

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She was depressed after Derek so I took her out to a bar. Hannah started flirting with this much older guy in his 40's who was sitting by himself. She had recently purchased a cell phone, this would have been in 96 or 97 when they were still kind of new and novel. The next thing I knew she has this phone out and I thought she was giving this old guy her phone number. Instead he asked her what she wanted him to say? She typed a phone number in, handed the guy her phone and he made disgusting comments to whoever answered about how he was having sex with this guy's girlfriend and commenting on what a whore she was. He hung up and started laughing and handed the phone back to Hannah. Hannah gave him a 20 dollar bill and said the girl was a bitch and deserved it for stealing her boyfriend. She was paying complete strangers to anonymously call people she hated on her cell phone and recite some pre-arranged script to spread rumors about them.

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I ran into a mutual friend later in the summer and mentioned that Derek had broken things off with Hannah. She gave me a very funny look and said that maybe there had never been any relationship to break off.

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A year later we were both temporarily living back with our parents and sort of adrift. Hannah had been kicked out of her dorm over an accusation made by another student and never completed her degree. She had started hanging out with some old friends from high school. One of those former high school friends was a young woman named Kelley who Hannah had been pretty good friends with. Something had happened between the two of them because Hannah went on and on about how much she hated her. It had something to do with Kelley's new boyfriend Dan. Hannah insisted she was using him in some bizarre plot to make another man jealous and was worried that she would hurt him because she had found out about an STD that she had.

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I drove by her house one night and there were two police cars out front. I went home and called her and she said she couldn't talk. I went over and saw her the next day. I thought that their house had been robbed or something. No, the police had been there to talk to her about an incident that had been reported.

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Hannah was upset. She said that she had to tell the police that she had smoked weed and had gotten high because Kelley had made an accusation against her. Hannah said it was an accident and a misunderstanding. Hannah swore she hadn't been trying to hurt her.

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The day after Hannah told me about how much she hated Kelley apparently she had called her up and said she wanted to talk to her about something. She and another friend had shown up and the three of them had gone out to some local overlook to smoke a joint. The other girl waited down below for the two of them to talk privately. Hannah had asked Kelley to look at something and when she turned her back Kelley said Hannah grabbed her and tried to push her off the ledge. They were about 100 feet up in the air and she would most likely have been killed by the fall. Kelley said they fought back and forth, she regained her balance and had took off screaming about what Hannah had tried to do.

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Hannah said it was all a misunderstanding. It was an accident. She had been trying to show her something but then she had lost her balance because she was high from the marijuana and had grabbed Kelley to stabilize herself not push her off the edge. She said Kelley had almost fallen off because she had hysterically overreacted. Kelley had been very upset and insisted that Hannah had done it on purpose and she said that it was because she was jealous over her relationship with Dan. She said it was obvious to everyone that Hannah was obsessed with him. What Kelley had not done however, was tell the police that they had smoked a joint right before this happened and when Hannah did, the police said that didn't have enough evidence for any kind of case. They weren't happy with Kelley for omitting that part of the account.

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That was it for Hannah and most of her high school friends, or at least for a couple of years. Kelley stuck to her version of what happened and her friends sided with her. People began talking about the strange rumors that had followed Hannah around since high school. I thought it was suspicious but I couldn't bring myself to believe that she tried to kill another woman. I thought that sort of thing only happened in the movies, not small towns in Indiana.

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I did not, however, want to be friends with her. She was an embarrassment to be around.

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She had almost no friends left in town at that point. She called me up to tell me she had decided she needed a change and she was going to pursue a different career and move to Minneapolis to make that happen. She moved in 1998 and I honestly thought I would never see her again. I wish I hadn't

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She called me about a year and a half later. She said she was doing really well and that the move had been good for. She said she had made friends and she had met a boy and was completely in love. She said this was the guy she was going to marry. His name was Dan and she told me that he was the guy that had gotten her interested in punk rock and heroin.

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I kind of paused when she said that. I wasn't any kind of angel in my 20's but I never even dabbled in hard stuff like that and it didn't sound very good. Hannah insisted it wasn't a habit. She said it was amazing and easy to control as long as you were careful. This was a complete change in lifestyle and scene. Before this she had been something of a hippie chic but that was all gone now. At that point her life revolved around; hair, punk rock, heroin, and Dan.

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She wanted to come back for a visit. We went to the mall and she stopped at a kiosk and said she wanted to buy a cell phone. She lived 8 hours away in a completely different state with a completely different area code. We got into a small argument about it. Back in 2000, cell phones were purchased and billed from your local area code and you paid through the nose if you were roaming. Hannah said to just drop it because she had done her research and it would be fine.

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She bought the phone and listed her boyfriend Dan as the main user on the registration. She left and I noticed she had left her curling iron behind and I thought I would surprise her by calling her new cell phone. She had set it up at my house and I got the number from the caller ID. No one picked up, instead it went to an answering machine for Dan. The same Dan that had been dating Kelley years earlier and the same Dan that Hannah had been accused of being obsessed with. There was no doubt about who it was.

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I hung up and I wondered why she had lied to me about who her boyfriend really was.

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A couple of minutes later Hannah called me back on her original cell phone. She played it off as a coincidence that I had just called that other number. She said she had run into hometown Dan and his friends and he had lost his phone so Hannah had done him a favor and given him the one she had just purchased. I said how strange it was that she would buy a phone for her boyfriend Dan, only to run into someone else with the same name and give it away instead. Dan's real name is very common. Probably one of the most common names for men of my generation and Hannah joked about how many different people she knew with that same exact name.

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A couple of months later she called. She wanted to visit again in the summer. No matter what she said about being in control of the heroin use, it was very obvious that it had become a full-fledged habit. Things had taken a turn in her life. Her boyfriend Dan had moved to Chicago. Hannah said that he was still in love with her and they were still together but that something had happened with his ex-girlfriend and they were taking a break and only seeing one another privately. Hannah said he was trying to protect her. According to Hannah his ex-girlfriend had refused to accept their break up and had been stalking Dan for months. It was one of the reasons he had moved. She had taken an overdose of heroin and had tried to commit suicide when she found out that Hannah and Dan were together. That was the reason that they had decided that they had to keep their relationship secret. That was why Hannah was really in town. He was going to be coming later to join her and they had set up a get together.

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I wanted to meet him but Hannah said he wouldn't act like her boyfriend when other people were around. I started to question her. She got angry and said she wouldn't let me meet him because I wouldn't understand their relationship. We got into a fight. I ordered her out of my house and made it clear that I wanted nothing to do with her.

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Her mother called me about a year later. She said that Hannah was living with them in Atlanta because something very bad had happened in Minneapolis. Hannah didn't have any friends left. Her mother straight up begged me to please forgive so she could have someone to talk to. She said Hannah had spent 3 months in rehab and was off the heroin, but emotionally not doing well. She said she had to make a trip back to Minneapolis to take care of some things and pick up some of her stuff. Her mother was worried that being back there and around her old friends would trigger her to want to use again. She said it was very important that Hannah not relapse. If she did the consequences would be severe. She wanted me to go with her. I said I would.

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Hannah wouldn't tell me what happened. She just said that someone had almost died and it had been an accident but it had still been her fault. She drove into town to pick me up for our trip up to Minneapolis but said we had to stop somewhere first. We went to the old bar downtown that we used to hang out in when she had lived in town. She said she had to meet someone. Some young woman walked in and Hannah walked over to her and hugged her and started crying. She was apologizing all over the place and kept telling her she needed her to realize that it had been an accident. The woman said she forgave her but that her life had been difficult since what happened and she could not have anything to do with Hannah anymore and could no longer be friends with her. Hannah asked if she had ever spoken to her ex-boyfriend and had a chance to work things out with him. She said no, he was mad at her and he refused to talk to her. Hannah said he had a new cell phone and she gave her the number just in case she changed her mind and wanted to get a hold of him.

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She left. I was sitting there totally confused by what I had just witnessed. I was really uncomfortable with what I had heard. I asked Hannah if the ex-boyfriend she was talking about was hometown Dan. She said no, someone else that I had never met. Hannah said she and *her* Dan had broken up because he was still using heroin and she said it was too painful to talk about him. She said it was so painful that when we got to Minneapolis to please not bring him up. She said her friends knew not to mention him around her and she asked me not to also.

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We got to Minneapolis and the young woman we were staying with turned out to be one of Hannah's former roommates. That is when I found out what had really happened and what Hannah had been refusing to talk about. It turned out that girl from the bar had been the other roommate. The one that had almost died because of something that Hannah did.

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We settled in and Hannah said that she could explain what happened a year ago. A year ago!? That was the first time I realized that this had happened much longer in the past than I thought. The former roommate said that she was happy that Hannah was clean but she needed her to explain why she had tried to kill the other girl. Those were her words. She wasn't calling it an accident. She said she was there, she saw it and Hannah had done that to her on purpose and she wanted to know why.

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This is what she described.

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Hannah had a friend from Indiana that had broken up with her boyfriend Dan after Hannah had told her that she found out he was cheating on her and had gotten another woman pregnant. Hannah invited her to live with her up in Minneapolis to get away from him and start over. She had no idea that Hannah was a heroin user.

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She did not like Minneapolis. She had experienced a run of bad luck the couple of weeks she had been there and even though Hannah kept trying to convince her to stick it out to see if she would like it she had decided she was going to leave and go back home. She regretted her break up with Dan. She wanted to talk to him and see if they could work through it. They had been together for almost two years. She was worried because she had lost touch with him. Hannah had been able to track down his phone number for her through some mutual friends but no matter how many times she called or how much she begged, he refused to answer her calls or call her back when she left messages. She was upset and told Hannah that she was going to stop by his apartment to see him on her way back to Indiana.

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She was supposed to be leaving within a day. Hannah kept insisting that she would like heroin if she would just try a little bit and had been pressuring her very hard to join in with everyone else. The roommate was angry about that. She said Hannah knew she was scared and didn't even want to try it. Hannah had promised her that she would be safe, and promised her that it would be a small dose. Hannah said she knew what she was doing. She gave in.

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Hannah bought the heroin and she bought a lot more than normal which she said was for a party later. She prepared the needles and said she had just used a small amount. Instead, she had used all that she had bought which turned out to be way more than was necessary to kill all of them. Hannah had given the girl the injection and she slumped over immediately and stopped breathing. Hannah had then moved on to the other roommate and told her everything was fine in the other room and that she was enjoying herself. She tried to convince her to take her dose, but she wanted to check on the other girl first. Hannah walked over and had an imaginary conversation with the young woman who was completely unconscious and tried to convince the other roommate that she was fine. She went to check on her herself and immediately saw she wasn't even breathing, panicked, and started screaming at Hannah about why she was lying. She ran for the phone. Hannah ran after her. She dialed 911. Hannah grabbed the phone and hung it up. They called back and she said it had been a mistake and they were fine. Hannah wouldn't let her near the phone and kept trying to tell her that she was being hysterical and that everything was okay. Hannah tried to pin her down and force the needle on her and she fought back and ran out of the apartment and down the hall to a neighbors. They called 911.

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When the paramedics got there the girl was clinically dead. They worked on her and got a heartbeat and transferred her to a local hospital in a comatose state. She lived, but for a while it wasn't clear if she would pull through. Hannah told the police she didn't know why she had done it. After talking with a lawyer she said it was because of heroin psychosis and that she had been temporarily insane at the time. She agreed to a long term rehab stay and a year of drug testing and probation. After that the charges against her were dropped. That had been the reason that it was so important Hannah did not relapse. She would have been looking at prison time.

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Hannah said it had been a strange temporary hallucination that had caused her behavior and that she had never meant to hurt her and the whole thing had been an accident and a misunderstanding. The same excuse she always used.

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I am going to spell this out, since the morons who work for the Minneapolis police department were too stupid to realize this 20 years ago.

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Hannah was obsessed with this girl's boyfriend Dan. She had been obsessed with him for years. She had developed a detailed and deranged fantasy that the two of them were in a secret relationship together because she has a peculiar and somewhat rare psychiatric condition called erotomania or De Clermabault's syndrome. She believed that this young woman was standing in the way of their romance and so she ingratiated herself to her and pretended to be her friend so that she could find a way to get close enough to her to get her out of the way.

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She successfully managed to spread rumors and interfere in their relationship enough that the two of them broke up and then Hannah invited this young woman to Minneapolis to isolate her from her other friends and control what information she had access to.This was the year 2000, we didn't have text message or Facebook back then for keeping in touch with people She lulled her into a false sense of friendship and security so she could manipulate her and get close enough to her to hurt her. When she realized she was still in love with Dan and wanted to talk to him Hannah realized that she would eventually find out that the rumors she had been told were not true and that Hannah was the source. She purchased a cell phone in Indiana and made a recording of Dan's answering machine message so that she could impersonate him on the phone and so the young woman would believe she was in contact with him. She never knew that Dan never received the messages. Hannah was using that to spy on her. When she said she was going to go back home and show up and see if Dan would talk to her in person Hannah knew that meant she would find out she had given her a fake phone number and that she had gone to extreme lengths to prevent her from speaking to him and it would have been obvious why.

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She tried to talk her into trying heroin because she planned on killing her and her other roommate because that would be a good way to make it appear to be an accident. Hannah was about to have her obsessions with Dan, her delusional beliefs about him, and her bizarre mental disorder exposed and she knew that. She knew for at least a day or more **before** the incident which is why it is clear that her actions were premeditated, because her motive was. All of this would have been remarkably easy to figure out if the police had contacted Dan, and if they had taken a look at Hannah's phone records. Phone harassment has always been her favorite hobby.

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Instead they treated it just like the other 999 overdoses they have to respond to every month and gave Hannah the old rehab or prison option. Since her family could afford a lawyer and a 3 month rehab stay that was the option she took. The police never investigated her for anything. Never contacted the man "Dan" at the center of this, and never took any serious look into her background. It wasn't an accident. It was an attempted murder and a pretty easy one to prove at that. Instead, the police totally dropped the ball and because of their incompetence she was allowed to completely get away with it. By the way, just in case any idiots who work for the Minneapolis Police Department ever read this; there is no statute of limitations on first degree attempted murder.

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At the time, I didn't know any of this. I was trying to act as a support system for a former friend who was suicidal on the cusp of a heroin relapse. I was suspicious, but any time I asked Hannah questions, she just said it was too painful to talk about or would guilt trip me about not respecting her boundaries. She had sworn to me that this young woman had never been in any relationship with the Dan from our hometown that she had known years earlier.

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I returned to Indiana and Hannah returned to her parents in Atlanta and I didn't talk to her for a while. She called later and wanted to visit her old hometown again. Once again I let her stay with me.

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We ran into Dan. He had moved to Chicago, but just happened to be back in town that weekend. I hadn't seen him in years. Hannah had contacted him to get together. She spent the whole afternoon trying to pull him aside to talk to him, but instead he made it clear that he had only shown up because he wanted to see me. He had broken up with Kelley years earlier but I thought he had a long term girlfriend since then. Dan said she had left him a year ago and just disappeared. He had called her repeatedly but she had completely cut him off. He was nice to me, he was handsome, he was a lot of fun to be around and he asked me out.

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We made plans to meet up the next day. I saw him at a bar and he turned around and walked out the door and wouldn't even look at me. I was upset and confused. Hannah was super sympathetic. She apologized for not telling me what he was like and said he had this weird thing with lying to girls and playing with their emotions by pretending to like them. It wasn't like I had never been lied to by a boy before but this felt strange.

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A week later my student loan came through and I decided to go back to college and finish my degree. I moved a couple hours away. The first person that called me was Hannah. Once again, she wanted to come visit me. She insisted that she had gone out and got me a "surprise" and she needed to give it to me in person. She said she had something really important to talk to me about and she said that it would sound weird but she asked me to promise her that I wouldn't tell anyone she was coming to see me. I humored her.

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She showed up at my apartment and when she walked in the first thing she asked me was if I had told anyone she would be there. At first I said no. She said that she had something for me and reached into her purse. She paused and said that she just wanted to make sure that no one knew she was there. I was frustrated and I kind of off-hand said that no one besides my mom and best friend. Hannah got furious. She was angry that I had told anyone she would be there and refused to show me what she had brought as a surprise for me. She went and locked it in her glove compartment because she said she didn't want me to snoop in her stuff and find it. She kept saying she wanted to talk about something but the time wasn't right. She decided to go home a day early.

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Then, one day a couple of weeks later, out of the blue, she just showed up on my doorstep one evening. I was on the phone with my best friend, who by the way, went to the same Catholic high school as Hannah and while not close friends with her, knew who she was. I was talking to her when I saw Hannah walk up to my front door. It was an 8 hour drive from Atlanta to Indiana. I got up and opened the door and I still had the phone up to my ear. When I opened it, Hannah had her head down and she had one hand inside her purse. I said her name and she looked up at me and pulled something purple from her purse.

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She saw I was on the phone and swiveled around and put whatever she had been holding in her hand back in her bag. She was acting very strange and she was shaking and I was worried. I asked her to come inside. At that point I was convinced that she was back on heroin and that had been the secret she had been trying to talk to me about for months.

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She said that she was upset about a boy and needed to talk to me. She said she had something that she wanted to show me and she reached into her purse and pulled out a handgun. It was a purple and black revolver and I realized from the color that it was what she had pulled from her purse when I had first answered the door. She said that she had been checking to make sure the safety was on and I was lucky that she hadn't accidentally shot me because I had startled her. She said the gun was because she was back on heroin and scared of the part of town she had to go to in order to buy it.

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I didn't know it back then, but revolvers don't have safeties.

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She told me about a musician in Atlanta that she had met and she was frustrated because he had a girlfriend and she hadn't been able to find a way to get him to pay attention to her. She wanted me to tell her what I had done to Dan so she could use it on this guy. She told me he was still talking about me months later and she wanted to know why he was still interested even though we hadn't talked since the previous summer. From my point of view, he wasn't. He had ghosted me months earlier. Hannah kept insisting that I must have done something to him. It was like she was implying that I had hypnotized him or something ludicrous and she wanted me to tell her. I clearly explained that I hadn't done anything and he had ignored me and then never returned my phone calls after I tried calling him. She cried and drank for a couple of hours and then turned around and drove 8 hours back to Atlanta in the middle of the night. Just for the record, Hannah was the one who gave me Dan's phone number.

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After this, something very strange seemed to get set into motion. I got a phone call from an anonymous number and when I answered it was Hannah who said someone wanted to talk to me and she flipped me over to a three way call with someone else. It was Dan's roommate and best friend in Chicago and he started screaming at me asking me why I was playing games with Dan and messing with him. He said he was going out of his mind and I needed to call him back and stop whatever it was that I had been doing to him. I told him I didn't know what he was talking about, Dan had never called me and I had tried to call him and…....Then we were disconnected. Then another anonymous call that was really Hannah with another three way call and another group of boys who started yelling at me and telling me they would kill me for what I had done to Dan. Then another disconnected line before I could ask them what they were talking about.

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Then I called Hannah to find out what the hell was going. It was the craziest and most disturbing conversation I have ever had with another person. At first, she just kept saying that I had hurt Dan and I could not ever talk to him again or have any contact with him. None of it made any sense since this was about a guy that had refused to return my phone calls and had ignored me for months. Hannah started getting very upset and kept saying that I knew what I had done, I just wouldn't admit it. She said that Dan hated me and had never wanted anything to do with me but that I was doing things to him to make him say that and pretend that he liked me instead of her. I had no idea what the hell was going on.

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She said that Dan was her secret boyfriend and that he was in love with her and had been in love with her for years. She said that the two of them had been together since they were teenagers and that I knew it but was pretending not to. I asked her how she could have been his girlfriend when I knew of others girls he had dated. She started screeching that those weren't real relationships. He was only pretending to like them, when he talked about them he was really talking about her but other people kept doing things to him so that he couldn't tell her directly how he felt, but she knew. She insisted that he found ways to let her know that he was really thinking about her. She said that all of his friends respected their privacy which was why they would play along when he pretended he was dating other people. She kept insisting he was in love with her and no one else.

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She said she was sick of people pretending to be her friend and then stabbing her in the back by going after her boyfriend and she said she would not put up with anyone coming between them and she would not let anyone hurt him. She said I was forcing him to forget how he really felt and that it had hurt him not to be with her and she wouldn't let me hurt him. I realized that she wasn't making any sense and that she was totally psychotic. I told her to NEVER contact me again and I hung up.

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All I could think about was how she had pulled a gun out of her purse the last time she had shown up at my apartment by surprise. She had given a fatal overdose of heroin to another woman, and had been accused by another of luring them to a ledge and trying to push her off. The one thing we all had in common was Dan. I called the number I had for Dan. It was disconnected. I thought about that weird situation with the cell phone she had purchased a couple of years earlier. I found that old number in my address book and called it except this time it wasn't Dan's voice on the answering machine it was mine. The psycho bitch had made a recording of my voicemail and had put it on a cell phone that she owned and once I discovered that pretty much everything fell very clearly into place. That was what had happened to that girl in Minneapolis, and that was why Dan had spent the last several months thinking he was contacting me. There was no relationship with Dan, it was all in Hannah's head and she was frantically trying to keep other women away from him to protect her fantasy from imploding.

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Hannah is psychotic. It is a mental disorder called erotomania and it is the fixed delusional belief that another person is secretly in love with you. Not everyone who has it will be violent, but some people are. In some cases other people are used in strange psychotic dramas and vicious smear campaigns that are aimed at trying to rearrange reality so that it conforms with the delusions inside of their head. The people that are perceived as standing in their way can be the victims of extreme violence.

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Hannah showed up the next day at my apartment screaming at me to let her in. I would not and I was getting ready to call the police when she started crying and saying that Dan had killed himself and then she walked away and that was the last time I ever saw her. I spoke to my parents who told me that I had received several phone calls to their house from people letting me know the same thing.

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I changed my phone number to keep her from contacting me. I contacted the police in Indiana who said if she showed up again that they could arrest her for felony intimidation but not for anything she had done months earlier. I contacted the police in Minneapolis but I knew very little information, only Hannah's name, not where or when it had happened. I asked repeatedly to please be allowed to speak to someone but the woman on the phone said they weren't interested in talking to me. I moved so she wouldn't know where I lived. I cut myself off from anyone from my hometown who I thought might know her so nothing could ever get back to her about where I lived. The last I heard from her she was stalking some new guy down in Atlanta.

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I would have been more than happy to meet the bitch in a courtroom but unfortunately the law is nothing like you see on TV. So unless I ever have the privilege of sitting in on her sentencing hearing, Hannah from Indiana, let's not meet again.

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Tldr; former friend turned out to be a psychotic stalker with a strange mental disorder who spent years engaged in bizarre and secretive behavior to attack or kill any woman who went near her imaginary boyfriend.