lurkette

A friend of mine (we'll call her L) recently left her marriage and went into hiding because her husband was, shall we say, crazy. She makes the following claims:

- he was a normal guy during the day, but at night...
- repeatedly drugged her and "made" her have sex with other people, tied her up, beat her, and drank her blood
- she had only vague memories of this and thought it was dreams
- he confessed obliquely to some of it - the blood drinking.
- he said, casually and not like a threat, that he would kill her. Like "I have a feeling you're going to die young and I'm going to be the one who does it."
- he tracked down ex-girlfriends and killed them; she saw this in a dream.
- she has dreams that come true, and so does her mother
- her mother had a dream that she told the ex where she is
- a friend of a friend recently saw the ex and he told the FOAF that he knows where L is, and that L told him.

She is now paranoid that he's going to come after her and kill her. She's been having dreams lately that she interprets (after the fact) to mean that this is going to happen. I'm frankly at a loss about what to believe. I didn't know her when she was married to him - I only met her after she went into hiding, and told me all this. I really don't know what to do. She's a real drama queen and has a victim streak a mile wide; she really gets off on the drama of all of this. But just because that is true doesn't mean her fears aren't founded. He could really be a sick fuck who would kill her. It does happen. But it seems that her story about what happened always changes, and a lot of her fears are based on dreams or on what seem like paranoid interpretations of random events (a waitress at a restaurant she's never knowingly been to saying she thought she seemed familiar; ergo, the ex must have drugged her and taken her there on one of their kinky sex outings) - putting 2+2 together and getting 715.

I have no idea how to deal with this. She is obsessed about this and talks only about this, and she's really hard to be around. I don't want to abandon her but this is challenging MY sanity. I don't know what to do short of advising her to tell the police about it, to do everything she can to keep herself safe, but not to let this fear control her life.

Gack, any advice? Is she nuts, or am I cynical and callous?

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"If ten million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

- Anatole France