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I don’t know how I got added to the “gangstalking” digest on Quora, but however it happened, it occasionally sends me emails full of posts by “victims.” And those posts send me down rabbit holes of pain that rival anything I’ve ever read related to QAnon.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, consider yourself lucky. It gets pretty complicated, but gang stalking is essentially the idea that certain unlucky people have been targeted for large-scale harassment, surveillance, following, medical experimentation, defamation, or even physical torture – always by a massive group of anonymous “stalkers” whose goal is to inflict as much punishment as possible before the subject takes their own life. The “targeted individuals” subjected to gang stalking see their harassers everywhere they go and in every facet of their life – a New York Times story on the phenomenon, written almost a decade ago, has one TI describe seeing stalkers at church, her doctor, and the grocery store. The stalkers inflict their “touchless torture” with everything from late night door knocks and phone calls to sonic weapons and poison. And for the people experiencing the stalking, it’s the closest you can get to hell without actually dying. It causes physical wounds, leaves you with voices in your head screaming at you to kill yourself, takes away your sleep and sense of self, and often leads to isolation and extreme paranoia. Or even death.

For centuries, those believing they were the victims of organized persecution were isolated, left to rot, shunned, or simply committed to asylums. But in recent years, people who believe they are being gang stalked have come together to form associations, self-publish books, hold seminars, and increasingly to back up each others’ stories on social media. Hence the thriving gang stalking thread on Quora that I somehow got subscribed to.

The stories are horrifying, written by people desperate to share their journeys of being stalked, find relief, and get someone on the outside to listen to them. Because, as we’ll see, gangstalking is a little-studied phenomenon that, while real to its victims, does not actually have any evidence to support that it exists. And despite the vivid and harrowing stories of “targeted individuals,” gangstalking is considered by mental health professionals and the legal system to be a persecutory mental illness, on par with schizophrenia or delusional disorder.

Not that those who believe they are being stalked would agree.

“It is absolutely demonic,” one victim wrote on Quora. “[Stalkers] are always vile hateful beings void of empathy, boundaries! and respect. They come into your life when you are weak like a pack of vultures and swarm you constantly. “

“Gang stalking is the constant stalking, harassing, torturing, terrorizing a person by large groups of people, via all forms of methods. The intent is to destroy the person mentally, emotionally, financially, spiritually and physically. It’s a very insidious and nefarious crime. It is very violent and difficult to detect,” wrote another.

Another victim on Quora described a constant hellscape that consists of, among a long list, “cars parked outside or at the end of the street, strangers brushing up against you at the store and asking how the children (using specific names) are doing on their science fair project (which they just started last night), every time you go outside or walk out of a store or church you hear the same double honk from a vehicle, your phone is hacked, computer is hacked, mail stops being delivered, bank account issues, slashed tires or any type of vehicle sabotage, neighbors and friends start to change, mobbing begins at work, etc. They will tell lies or slander you to your friends and neighbors.”

Quora has thousands of such posts stretching back years. Reddit does as well, as do Twitter and other social media sites. The stalking transcends political affiliation, race, class, career, or personal opinion. It happens under Democratic and Republican presidents alike. Obama didn’t stop it, nor did Trump. Some even theorize the stalkers are so powerful that they are essentially above the law and can’t be stopped by law enforcement or any governmental body.

There is very little research on the psychological causes of the gangstalking, and no compelling evidence that any such organized large-scale “above the law” stalking exists. That’s not to say stalking itself isn’t real, because it obviously is. But the majority of these cases are individuals stalking other individuals, usually for romantic purposes, or to indulge in a personal vendetta. The only real psychological study of the phenomenon, published in 2015, examined 128 accounts of organized gangstalking and found every one to show signs of some kind of mental illness.

Most purported gangstalking victims struggle to articulate why they’d be chosen for as complex and expensive an endeavor as constant surveillance and harassment by dozens or hundreds of people. While they reject the notion that they’re making it up or “crazy,” they also rarely can identify any of their stalkers, explain what the stalkers would gain through their efforts, or what makes them so special and important so as to be “targeted” for stalking at all. They will deluge journalists or researchers with graphic depictions and even photos of their torture, often by what they claim are electronic or sonic weapons. But none of these claims can be verified, and what they describe can easily be attributed to late-developing mental illness, extreme stress, psychiatric disturbance, narcotic addiction, or something else that has nothing to do with large-scale gangs.

And yet, the insistence these people have that they are being targeted for systematic torture is real. And the pain and fear and helplessness they feel is also real. They truly believe these things are happening, any attempting to write it off to mental illness only reinforces the belief. This often takes the form of desperation. Many TI’s talk of spending thousands of dollars on useless anti-electromagnetic products, supplements, removal from non-existent “TI lists,” and anti-surveillance sweeps – only for the torture to continue. Inevitably, a few supposed targeted individuals have turned to violence to make the stalking end – including multiple mass shootings in a short stretch in 2013 and 2014.

As a society, we continue to struggle with how to treat and help those suffering from severe mental illness. And the internet hasn’t done anyone any favors there. Technology itself is seen by many as the enemy of sanity, with fear of radio waves transitioning to fear of wi-fi, 5G internet, smart meters, cell phones, and sophisticated new tech used to create fearsome weapons – see the endless debate over whether Havana Syndrome is a mass delusion caused by a mix of localized and psychiatric factors, or evidence of the large-scale use of sonic weapons cooking the brains of our diplomats. Both are bad, they’re just bad in different ways.

Invariably, my mind turns to the people accused by TIs of doing the gangstalking. Much of my work in conspiracy theories focuses on the loved ones left behind by those who have been sucked into the black hole of paranoia, and gangstalking is no different. While many purported victims believe their stalkers to be strangers or paid agents of a dark force, many others speak of their families and friends inflicting the worst of the horror on them. Or as one post on Quora put it, “What do I do about gang stalking when my family started it and then they lie to me about it?”

What do I do, indeed.

It’s a question I find myself asking a lot, because I’ve been loudly and constantly accused by several people on social media of being part of stalking gangs numbering in the dozens or hundreds, paid by anti-democratic forces to harass left-leaning researchers and journalists, cripple democracy on behalf of Russia, prop up and recruit for QAnon, and cause chaos and death. Several even accuse me of personally isolating them and attempting to drive them to take their own lives.

I won’t use their names here and give them attention, but their posts – all of which are false – about me are endless, done on social media and blogs since early 2021.

They have made similar posts and accusations about many other journalists, researchers, and even just people I’ve interacted with on Twitter. It takes little effort to find them, and I can speak more about it privately if anyone still has doubts. Multiple people have spent years obsessed with me, my work, the lives and work of other journalists in this field, and how we are all in criminal stalking gangs against them.

They have written hundreds of blog posts and thousands of tweets about my various crimes and misdeeds – which include treason, murder, and criminal computer hacking. Several have claimed I’m responsible for suicides and violence, have perjured myself to Congress, and have faked every aspect of my writing and research. They have physically threatened me, threatened to sue me, and claimed they would ruin my career.

I know none of what they accuse me of is true, just as the family members of “gangstalking” victims know the accusations made against them aren’t true. They attempt to intimately connect me to people I’ve never met, embroil me in schemes that don’t exist, and accuse me of crimes that I clearly had nothing to do with. I don’t know if the people doing it are mentally ill, but I suspect at least some are. Some of their vendetta is personal grievance, and some of it is bewilderment that I won’t engage with them. And nobody in any position of authority or whose work I respect has ever believed it. It hasn’t hurt me at all, at least as far as I can tell.

Of course, it’s extremely difficult to prove false allegations wrong, as opposed to them proving their allegations right, which they can’t do. So I mostly ignore it. I’ve pushed back before, when I feel it’s necessary and depending on the platform of the person making the accusations. But it does nothing to convince the people with the delusions. And most of the time, their posts and tweets get so little attention that talking about them publicly might actually encourage them. While “don’t feed the trolls” generally doesn’t work when dealing with large scale issues like QAnon, it feels right for smaller-scale problems like the guy who won’t stop tweeting about me, even though nobody who matters believes it.

Certainly it’s hard to feel any sympathy for the people making these accusations, and I deeply wish they’d stop. But I also know they believe them to be true – even if they aren’t. If I thought I’d pinpointed the person or group making their life a living hell while writing books and going on TV to monetize their fake expertise, I’d probably be mad too. Conspiracism often stems from personal failure, societal rejection, career setbacks, and a profound lack of understanding about the way the world works – and I suspect that’s what drives a large part of both my own harassment and the wider ethos of most TI’s.

Like TI’s, my sympathy is just as much for the people who have to deal with these folks in real life as it is for those enduring the delusions – many of whom refuse to get help or consider any alternative theory for their “stalking” beyond massive hoards of criminals paid by someone to eliminate someone who is not a threat to them.

Ultimately, harassing individual journalists is a choice, while suffering from profound mental illness is not. Gangstalking “victims” need support, treatment, and for psychology to catch up with the predicament they’re going through. Likewise, their victims need our sympathy and support. Their friends and loved ones didn’t choose this, nor are they responsible for it.

I can handle a few people trolling me on the internet. But as for living with someone who believed I was torturing them with a sonic weapon from the depths of hell? That would be a lot harder.

Ultimately, I could unsubscribe from the Quora gangstalking emails if I wanted to. And maybe I will if it ever gets to be too much. But for now, it’s important to me to recognize that no matter how much pain TI’s inflict on others, they too are in pain. Maybe they won’t get my undivided sympathy, but at least for now, they’ll keep my attention.

My serial harassers don’t even deserve that.