A woman has shared her chilling experience of finding out who her childhood penpal really was 10 years later.
Lyndsay Joanne, now a mother-of-two, recounted her story on TikTok through a series of videos. She said she had corresponded with the penpal for years when she was a teenager, and was startled to find out he was actually a 55-year-old man who would later be convicted by the police.
Brighton-based Lyndsay said in her video: “I’m lucky it was only ever letters, but it does still haunt me how close I came to such a dangerous situation.”
She described herself as a “really quiet” teenager with “very few friends” who enjoyed writing letters. After her friend’s swimming magazine featured a penfriend section, she applied and her address was published in a subsequent issue.
“They actually published my address, which is crazy and I had hundreds of letters – more than I could ever have kept up with,” she said.
The man, whom she referred to as ‘Ben’, first contacted her when she was 13, claiming to be a year older and living an hour away. “He was just a regular teenager – there was nothing weird about his letters at all,” Lyndsay stated.
They exchanged lengthy letters every couple of weeks for years, which eventually became like diary entries. “So me and him wrote to each other for absolutely years – every couple of weeks we’d send letters that were pages long,” she said. “Those letters turned into what I would call diary entries – I told him everything and we were like best friends.”
The situation took a disturbing turn when Lindsay was 14, as Ben began sending her “secret envelopes” unexpectedly. “He said you don’t have to open it if you don’t want to, but of course I’m going to” Lindsay remembered.
“Inside it had things about his ‘experiences’ on his own and with his girlfriend – I felt like he trusted me with this stuff and I should be supportive.
“I guess he wanted me to tell him about my experiences, but I was just a 14-year old girl watching Friends in my bedroom. I continued replying to those letters though, as it felt like an insight into the boys’ world and it gave me great material for sleepovers.”
As Lindsay Joanne started college, which was only 30 minutes from Ben’s home, the situation became “even weirder”. “I asked him if he’d like to meet up but he said he’d be too nervous,” she added.”Now I understand it’s because he would have turned up and been an old man.”
“How freaky is that though?” she questioned. “He knew where I lived and where I went to college and where I went shopping – I just feel like he probably saw me in person, he must have done.”
By the age of 16, Lindsay began to realise how “weird” things had become. After her sister tragically died following heart and lung transplant surgery, Lindsay poured her heart out in a letter to Ben, but his response shocked her and marked the beginning of the end of their correspondence.
“I wrote a really long letter about my sister, and he wrote back and simply said, ‘Oh sorry about your sister, I want to talk to you about the other thing’ – that kind of content.”
Lyndsay hit out: “I honest couldn’t believe my eyes – that my friend had dismissed the biggest thing that had happened in my life.”
She closed: “I wrote back telling him he’s a disgusting human and I didn’t want to hear from him anymore. I didn’t want to hear from him again if that was all he cared about – and I didn’t. We never spoke again. However, when I was 27 and working in an office, my mum called me and said the police had been and they needed to speak to me about my penfriend.”
Lyndsay added in a separate video that he’d been convicted of being a paedophile and she had to read out all their letters to the police. “God how awful!” one TikTok user wrote in response. “We think this is a modern issue but actually no!”
A second added: “How creepy. I wrote to a lot of people and had my address in magazines also, it was normal then but would be very odd these days.”
While a third said: “This is awful – but the worst bit was reading that you had to read out all your letters to the police. I’d DIE if I had to go and do this with the letters I wrote to my penpal.”