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Late one night I got a call rom a friend I knew was out of town for a conference. My wife and I were in bed, just about ready to turn out the light. My friend was speaking gibberish, but absolutely panicked. She said she was bleeding, she had no idea where she was, then more gibberish. She asked me and my wife to pick her up from the airport. Her flight was cut short or something and she was on her way back. Never got details on why. Bad phone reception along with all the other confusion. So we hopped into the car to go pick her up. This was about 11 pm.

Halfway to the airport, she calls again. More absolute panic. She's sobbing over and over "I'm sorry! I'm sorry!!" and I... there was nothing to be sorry about. I had no idea why she was so panicked. I told her it's ok, but she was phasing between sobbing and just gibberish. Also, she wasn't flying back. She was in a hotel. We drove next to a mountain and lost the cell signal. But she sounded sure wasn't flying back tonight. The airport wouldn't let her fly. They thought she was drunk.

So we turned around and tried calling her for an hour or so. She finally called us. She was in a dark hotel room two time zones away, not where her flight was headed, but the layover location. She didn't know if someone was with her in the room. Or maybe they had left the room and were coming back. She had no idea why she was there or what hotel it was. Normally, she's a very sharp woman. I had to walk her through the steps of looking on hotel stationary to get the name of the hotel. Maybe the address. I had to tell her to look on the phone for the phone number. She's still sobbing and speaking gibberish. She said she was bleeding from her head and her glasses were broken. It was absolutely shocking and grim and so, so creepy to hear it coming from her, and not be able to take any kind of command of the situation.

I called the police in the city where the hotel was located to get the cops to do a wellness check on her. They took her to the hospital. She had been roofied on the airplane and couldn't tell us anything else about what had happened to her. We picked her up from the airport the next day. She remembered very, very little of it and seemed to be in complete denial, despite wearing the same clothes she left in and having blood smeared on her forehead and busted glasses. But I remembered the panicked calls and the helplessness. It bothered me for weeks, maybe months. It's still one of the creepiest things I've experienced.