Image by Martin_Heigan via Flickr
Occasionally, my stat counter puts up crazy one or two-day page view surges that indicate someone new – usually widowed – has stumbled across my blog and is reading nearly everything I ever wrote. Fine. The blog is hardly a “how to” on the subject of coping and certainly heretical in terms of my opinions on all topics death, but I am confident that these readers will figure that out and move on or not as their needs dictate.
But this week, someone is trolling my archives for all the posts I have written about my experiences and observations about the area where I live.
And the creepy thing is that this someone lives in a nearby town.
I know this because Rob installed a program that allows me to track IP addresses and general locations of the people who land here.
This individual is quite specifically reading only posts about things that are happening or have happened locally and deliberately working back from the homepage to try to disguise his/her intentions. The tracker lets me know how long they spend on each post though, so I know which ones are being read and which are being skipped over. I can’t help but wonder if something sinister is up because honestly, people who spend time and energy trying to figure out who and where you are probably are up to no good.
If I had a big readership, I wouldn’t notice at all. But my dear readers, you are a wonderful, though not particularly numerous, bunch. The person behind the IP gives off a malicious vibe, and the fact that he/she is back for a second day – jiggles my spidey senses.
A little detective work of my own is in order.
anniegirl1138 
uh oh! It might be me, both my home and my work sometimes track me from a Canadian IP! Why, I have no idea. I guess as Comcast takes over the world, stranger things will happen. They supply our internets too.
But I’ve been normally stalking you, not obsessively stalking, so I guess we are good.
Well, Comcast is evil, so that would explain much.
That is troubling, the trying to disguise it.
I was sort of stalked two days ago. I posted a comment on Anne Rice’s Facebook page, a response to an article about the Catholic abuse crisis, expressing my disappointment that most people in the church are pretty apathetic about it. A woman sent me a message on Facebook saying “go to confession and back to church,” essentially. I responded with an MYOB, we went back and forth a couple times, and I blocked her.
Then she e-mailed me! I was more irritated than anything. My view is, people can easily find out anybody’s basic information (hopefully not bank account number!), so why worry. But if your spidey sense is telling you something’s up, you’re wise to listen.
Someone tried hard to disguise what he/she was looking at by starting with the homepage and scrolling back. If I didn’t have a stats on WP and another site that allows me to track people by IP’s and location and page views – I wouldn’t have known. Whoever it is hasn’t contacted me, so I will stick with the assumption that his/her intentions are hostile – though motive escapes me.
I’ve had to block commenters here before but there isn’t a way for me to do that with IP’s. I have enough info that if weird things started happening, I could give it to the RCMP and they could track the person via their telecommunications provider – which I also know.
Aside from Edie and Silver and a handful of writers from my old library group, I don’t really know anyone in that area. I have noticed that whoever is also scrolling my 50 Something posts too. The question of why though escapes me.
He sort of laughed at me when I told him about it today.
“You want to be a well-known writer, but you get creeped out when someone actually shows an interest in your writing,” he said. “Maybe it’s a newspaper?”
“There are only two papers there, ” I said. “Both are free and they both suck.”
“Well, the one sucks more than the other,” he pointed out.
Which is true. The better one is a freebie that is more ads and local events than real news and the other is a vanity thing put out by a guy I know from writing group. He ran for office a while ago and got trounced, so the newspaper is his “vengeance”. Mom and Pop thing. Worst editing ever though the other one could stand to spring for a proofreader too.
Kudos to Rob for installing the tracker! I stalk you, when I have time, but Iowa is quite the distance…. good luck in your detective work!