The Stranger Everyone Was Afraid Of Was Standing Right in Front of Me

At 10:18 p.m., Sanni received a message from a number she did not know.

Are you at Kamppi? The man in the red jacket is everywhere.

She was standing on the tram platform near Kamppi Shopping Centre in Helsinki, holding a paper bag with two cinnamon rolls going cold inside it. The message made no sense, so she looked around.

There were people everywhere.

A teenager was filming himself on TikTok near the entrance. Two tourists were arguing quietly over Google Maps. A woman in a long black coat was trying to keep a small child from stepping onto the tram tracks.

Then Sanni noticed the man in the red jacket.

He was standing across the street.

He was not doing anything strange. That was almost the strange part.

He was simply standing there, looking at his phone.

Sanni typed back.

Who are you?

Three dots appeared immediately.

Doesn’t matter. Just look at X.

She opened the app.

The first post on her screen showed a photograph of the same man.

The caption said he had been seen in three different parts of Helsinki that evening.

People were already arguing about him.

Somebody said he was following women.

Someone else said he was a thief.

Another person claimed he had been seen outside Helsinki Central Library Oodi earlier that afternoon.

The post had been shared hundreds of times.

Sanni looked across the street again.

The man in red was gone.

She suddenly felt ridiculous.

She was thirty-one years old. She worked in customer support. She paid too much for a one-bedroom apartment in Kallio and complained about grocery prices like everyone else she knew.

She was not the kind of person who believed every thing she saw online.

At least that was what she told herself.

Her friend Mika called.

Where are you?

Kamppi.

Leave.

She laughed.

Why?

Because people are saying he is there.

He is there. I just saw him.

Silence.

Then Mika said something that made her stop smiling.

How do you know he is the same man?

She looked at the photograph again.

The photo was blurry.

Red jacket. Dark trousers. Grey backpack.

There were thousands of men in Helsinki who could have looked like that.

I don’t, she said.

Exactly.

The tram arrived.

Sanni got on anyway.

She sat by the window and watched the city slide past. Helsinki looked normal, almost offensively normal. People stood under streetlights waiting for buses. Someone carried a takeaway pizza. A cyclist cursed at a car that had stopped too close to the crossing.

Her phone kept buzzing.

The story was spreading.

By the time she reached Hakaniemi, someone had posted a video claiming the man had been seen near Hakaniemi Market.

The video showed a red jacket disappearing behind a kiosk.

The comments were wild.

That is him.

Definitely him.

I saw him too.

Police need to do something.

Why is nobody talking about this?

Then someone wrote:

My sister saw him outside her building in Töölö.

Another person replied:

He was in Pasila ten minutes ago.

Sanni stared at the screen.

Ten minutes.

Töölö and Pasila were not exactly next door.

She opened Google Maps.

The locations made no sense.

She sent the screenshots to Mika.

This cannot be one person.

His reply came almost at once.

Maybe it isn’t.

That was when the story changed for Sanni.

Until then, the internet had been telling her what to believe.

Now she was looking for reasons not to believe it.

She got off the tram at Hakaniemi and walked toward the metro station. The evening air had turned cold enough that her fingers hurt when she took them out of her pockets.

She bought a bottle of water from an Alepa.

The cashier, Joonas, glanced at her phone.

The red jacket thing?

Sanni looked up.

You have seen it?

He smiled.

My girlfriend sent it to me. She thinks I should not walk home alone.

Sanni laughed.

Do you believe it?

I believe my girlfriend.

That answer followed her into the street.

Outside, a man in a red jacket walked past.

Sanni froze.

He had a grey backpack.

Same colour.

Same height.

Same jacket.

For one second, she considered following him.

Instead, she took out her phone and opened the camera.

She zoomed in.

The man turned.

He was older than the man in the original photograph.

Different face.

Different shoes.

She almost laughed at herself.

Then she noticed something else.

The original photograph had been taken from behind.

You could not actually see the man’s face.

She went back to the first post.

The account belonged to someone called Lauri K. The profile had been created only two weeks earlier.

No photograph.

No real name.

Very few followers.

Sanni felt that small cold feeling people get when something online stops being entertaining.

She sent the account to Mika.

He replied:

Do not engage.

She did not.

She reported the post instead.

Then she walked home.

By midnight, the story had become enormous.

Someone had made a map showing all the supposed sightings.

Red dots covered Helsinki.

Kamppi.

Töölö.

Pasila.

Kallio.

Hakaniemi.

Ruoholahti.

It looked almost convincing.

That was the frightening thing.

Not because it was true.

Because it looked true.

The next morning, Sanni woke to thirty-seven messages.

Her mother had sent one.

Are you safe?

Her coworker Emilia had sent three.

Please tell me you saw this.

Everyone at work is talking about it.

Apparently there are police cars everywhere.

There were no police cars outside Sanni’s building.

She made coffee and stood by the window.

A man in a red jacket was walking his dog.

She watched him for nearly a minute before realizing what she was doing.

At work, nobody talked about anything else.

The office in Ruoholahti was usually noisy on Fridays, but that morning people spoke in small groups.

Emilia pulled up a chair beside Sanni.

My cousin says someone was attacked.

Who?

She does not know. She saw it on Facebook.

Sanni looked at her.

What was the name?

There was no name.

Where did it happen?

Somewhere near the station.

Which station?

Emilia paused.

She did not say.

They both laughed.

It was not really funny.

At lunch, someone showed them a new video.

This one had thousands of views.

A man in a red jacket was walking through a shopping centre.

The person filming whispered that he had found the man.

People in the comments were already demanding that someone stop him.

Then Sanni noticed the sign behind him.

The video had been filmed in Tampere.

Not Helsinki.

She said nothing for a moment.

Then she pointed.

That is Tampere.

The room went quiet.

Someone checked.

She was right.

The man was not in Helsinki.

He was not even supposed to be in the same city.

The original account deleted its first post twenty minutes later.

By evening, another account claimed the whole thing had been a misunderstanding.

A harmless misunderstanding, apparently.

No crime.

No missing person.

No dangerous man.

Just different people wearing similar jackets, strangers seeing posts about one another, and thousands of people connecting dots that were never meant to connect.

Still, the story did not disappear.

That was the part Sanni found hardest to understand.

People did not want to let it go.

They had already chosen their version.

Some insisted the police were hiding something.

Others said the whole thing had been created for attention.

Someone posted that it was a social experiment.

Someone else claimed it was political.

By Saturday morning, nobody seemed to remember how it had started.

Sanni did.

She remembered the first message.

Are you at Kamppi? The man in the red jacket is everywhere.

She still had it on her phone.

She had not deleted it.

Weeks later, she was walking through central Helsinki when she saw another man in a red jacket standing outside a café.

For a second, she stopped.

The man noticed.

He smiled politely.

She smiled back.

Then she kept walking.

Her phone buzzed.

A new notification.

She looked down.

Another story was spreading.

This time it was about a woman seen taking photographs outside apartment buildings.

Someone had posted a blurry picture.

People were already guessing who she was.

Sanni stared at the screen.

Then she locked her phone and put it in her pocket.

She never found out who started the red jacket story, and sometimes she wondered whether that was the point.

The internet did not need a real stranger to become frightening, only enough people willing to imagine one.