Source: When My Husband’s Ex-Hookup Sent Us Disturbing Hate Mail Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: January 9, 2026 | Archived: March 21, 2026

A while ago, in some article (I forget which) I casually mentioned that before we started dating, my husband used to hook up with this girl who later sent us literal hate mail (as in, stamped and delivered by a Richard Scarry ass mailman) after our wedding. Many of you were like, what? How can you just bury that lede? so thanks to you, I will be telling you the full story.

My husband Nick and I met in college when we were twenty-one and nineteen, respectively. About a year into our relationship, a particular woman from his past returned to our campus from her year abroad—let’s just call her Kayla. She was a bit of a mythical figure among our mutual friends, in that multiple women had “warned” me about Kayla. Ooh, watch out for Kayla. Whatever. Apparently, she and Nick had only hooked up, never really dated, but they were really close and Kayla was “crazy.”

Knowing that many perfectly lovely women were subject to the “crazy” label over insignificant, normal things like throwing out a carton of pre-cut mango because they thought it was poisoned by ISIS (oh? just me?) I did what any young woman in 2009 would do—checked out Facebook.

This was back when Facebook served to facilitate real-world interactions instead of being a repository for AI-generated images of single middle-aged women crying into their birthday cakes and a series of Reels notifying me that “In your 30s, your child will run a low-grade fever for two hours. It’s incredibly important that you rush him to the ER.” No, in 2009, you could actually get useful information about your social circle from Facebook—parties that were happening, friendships between particular people, updated relationships, etc. And what I saw was a series of comments, one letter each, left on a photo of me and Nick in our Halloween costumes, from Kayla:

• P

• R

• O

• P

• E

• R

• T

• Y

Okaaay, so she had commented “PROPERTY” in a very weird way, on a photo of me and Nick together. Maybe she was just high-fiving us, coming up with a more friendly way of saying “Your pussy is his now, diva!” Or, obviously, she was indicating that he was her property. I asked him about it, and he said it was “jibberish” because he has dyslexia and couldn’t actually read it. When I told him it spelled “property,” he said “That’s just her sense of humor! She and I have zero sexual chemistry, we hooked up a couple times at freshman orientation and never again. We’re like Jerry and Elaine.”

This Seinfeld metaphor was deployed every time I worried about Kayla’s return to campus. Oh don’t worry, she’s just harmless little Elaine in her big clunky boots and urban sombrero. But even if they were truly platonic friends, I still worried she would be a massive pain in the ass. After all, how many times had I been forced to contend with an extremely possessive, annoying male friend of a guy I was dating? Many times! A friend did not need to have sexual chemistry with a man to completely torpedo his relationship. I had already seen a relationship’s demise at the hands of a guy named Zach who played Ultimate Frisbee. Besides, Nick once told me that during his brief situationship with Kayla, she had broken into his dorm room through the window because he failed to respond to a text. At the very least, Kayla had done me one massive favor: made me look less insane in comparison. Either way, I kept my guard up.

Finally, I met Kayla. She was effusive. Warm. Kind, even. Not what everyone had told me she would be. She hugged me and told me how pretty I was, even invited me to a few gatherings. For all intents and purposes, she seemed perfectly fine.

You are probably wondering what she looked like, and for the sake of her anonymity I won’t go into detail, but I will say that we were basically polar opposite “types.” She was very pretty, but we looked nothing alike and had different best physical attributes, if you will. Also, whether she was truly crazy or not, we were apparently crazy in different ways too. I never once saw her Google symptoms of a rare prion disease, for instance.

Given that she was nice at first, I gave her the benefit of the doubt. But I became suspicious of Kayla’s motives when she started dropping little sparrow shits on our relationship in very subtle ways that Nick didn’t even notice. For example, one time we all got lunch together but I had to leave early to get to class. As soon as I left, she told Nick, “CHH looks better like this when she doesn’t wear too much makeup. Normally she wears way more than she needs.” (I don’t know why he told me about that, I think he thought I would take it as a compliment.) Another time, I was putting butter on a piece of toast and she joked that “I know someone else who likes butter—Cindy!” Cindy was a girl Nick hooked up with during our long distance “break,” and although I already knew about her (and I hadn’t been innocent during this time either) I was under the impression that Cindy was a meaningless hookup, not someone serious enough to warrant the reporting to friends about the fact that she liked butter. This one got me so mad that I actually stormed out of the cafeteria. Kayla texted me later and said, “Fuck Nick. I don’t care about men. I only care about women. I’m so sorry he kept that from you.” There was also a third incident—this one I’m pretty sure was alcohol-fueled so I don’t have great memory of it—where she invited me to a party in her dorm room and then locked the door when I went to the bathroom so I couldn’t get back in.

Realizing she clearly had some kind of devious plan to get between us, whether it was driven by sexual attraction to Nick, mental illness, or a general desire to claim “P.R.O.P.E.R.T.Y,” (or as Nick might read it, PORTERPY) I told Nick I was done with her. He was graduating anyway (as was she) and they were moving to opposite sides of the country. I told him I didn’t want to be her friend, I didn’t want him to be her friend, and I didn’t want her to be part of our lives at all. At this point, he agreed to keep her at a distance, mostly because they were already going to be living very far apart anyway.

Years went by when I didn’t think about Kayla at all. I graduated the year after and moved out to San Francisco to live with Nick. Every now and then I’d see some update from Kayla on Facebook, but we never saw her in person. She appeared to be in a new relationship with someone who at least appeared to be a good catch from what we could see on Facebook, so I figured she also wasn’t thinking much about us.

When Nick and I got engaged, Kayla reached out to congratulate him. This was obviously fine, and within the limits of what a distant college friend might do. What tripped me up was the fact that she “joked” that she had the “perfect speech planned” for our wedding. Nick told me about this as if it was some kind of hilarious bit she was doing, but I wasn’t so sure she was kidding. At the very least, I suspected she thought she was going to be invited.

Nick didn’t seem to have a strong interest in having her at our wedding, but he also thought there was no harm in inviting her, mostly because she so clearly wanted to go. I put my foot on that brake immediately for two reasons: first, we were having a small wedding so we couldn’t afford to invite people who weren’t very close to us, and second, told him I had a strict rule that we not have fucked any of the guests at our wedding (I would have invited any of my exes, but the Clown College was having their commencement ceremony that weekend…gotteeeeem.) Anyway, he agreed not to invite her and again I stopped thinking about Kayla and focused my efforts on my fear of dying from a pulmonary embolism before our wedding.

After our wedding, I noticed that my mother’s friend Carol, who has a penchant for taking lots of unflattering candid photos of people (including some at funerals) which reliably always make me look like a more haggard version of the donkey from Shrek, had posted a two-hundred-photo album of our wedding, where somehow everyone looked horrible. She also had basically zero privacy settings, so these pictures were visible to everyone. I was tagged in them too, so they weren’t only visible to her friends—they were visible to anyone who knew anyone in the photos. I didn’t think much of it, since my wedding wasn’t exactly a secret. So what? Bad photos of me are on Facebook. Big deal.

Carol even inspired a comic

But my attitude about Carol’s awful photos changed when Nick and I returned from our honeymoon. He went to work at his office the next Monday, and much to his shock and horror, there was a manila envelope at his office door addressed to him, and the return address was our college. He opened it up and found a series of haikus about my bad fashion sense and body shape, and then something that was somehow worse—printed-out photos of our wedding (the horrible ones my mom’s friend took) with all of the adults in the wedding party Photoshopped so their faces were covered with weasel heads.

At the time, I wasn’t thinking that Kayla did this. I had no idea who did it, which almost made it worse. I have a hard enough time distinguishing from angry Internet comments calling me a moron from an actual murderer showing up at my doorstep announcing his plan to kill me. So naturally, this sent me into a tailspin. I was absolutely sure what whoever did this was about to murder us and our entire families—anyone with the Mark of the Weasel. As soon as Nick got home from work, we called 911.

A police officer arrived—a young blonde man with the stocky physique of a former wrestler. He took a look at the photos and remarked, “This individual clearly knew what they were doing—they left their calling card as the return address. Your college. They don’t want you to know it was them for sure, but they want to give you a hint.” He turned over the photos in his hands. “Also, they knew that the most they could possibly do would be to put these hamster heads over—”

“They’re weasel heads.”

“Right, weasel heads. Well, they knew that this was about as far as they could go without it being a crime. I’ve also noticed they didn’t put weasels on the children.”

“What? How is this not a crime? This is a threat!”

“There actually isn’t a threat. Unless I see violent imagery—a knife, a gun, a verbal indication that this person is going to inflict physical harm…legally, this is classified as junk mail.”

I was irate. “Junk mail! They sent this to my husband’s office! We have weasels for heads!”

“There’s nothing we can really do. And besides, there’s no way to find them. They don’t have a return address.”

I took a deep breath in and out. “Imagine, for a moment,” I said, “That I was President Obama, and someone sent this to the White House with photos of me and Michelle Obama at our wedding with weasels on our heads. I’m sure they’d be able to figure out who did that in about a day.”

“Well, with all due respect, ma’am, you’re not President Obama.”

“Fine.”

“Look,” he said, turning to leave our apartment. “Do either of you have any vengeful exes? Anyone who might have a reason to be jealous about your wedding?”

When he said “exes” I was thinking of legitimate ex-boyfriends and ex-girlfriends. Nick and I weren’t in touch with anyone who fell into that category, and most of them had been from high school anyway.

“No, none of our exes care about our wedding,” I said.

“Well, this strikes me as someone who might have been romantically entangled with one of you at some point. And looking through these photos, it seems they’ve targeted you, ma’am, with the weasel head, more than your husband. That indicates to me that this was probably someone with a romantic connection to him, not you.”

Nick’s only real ex (in terms of people he had dated seriously) was an influencer married to a semi-famous actor, neither of us had seen her in many years. I couldn’t imagine her giving a shit about our wedding. Unless…unless, this person didn’t need to be a real ex-girlfriend to count.

“Whoever did this is probably going to send you a text in the next day or two, asking if you’ve gotten any interesting mail or if anything interesting has happened lately. They want to get a reaction from you. Just don’t give them that reaction.”

As the police officer left, I suspected that Kayla might have been behind this, but also thought that Kayla texting Nick after months of not speaking, solely to see if he received this weird hate mail, was a bit farfetched. Wouldn’t that arouse suspicion? As it turns out, the police officer was actually right. Nick got a “random” text from Kayla later that day, asking how everything was, and asking for “any updates about life.”

To this day, I can’t be 100% sure that Kayla was behind the weasel head mail. We’ve speculated a few other people it might be, including my old college friend with whom I had fallen out of touch, who may have also believed that she’d be invited to the wedding. We’ve also considered it might be a girl who had a crush on Nick in high school—a completely deranged woman who hooked up with Nick once in 2006 and referred to him as her “Mr. Big” as recently as…*checks notes* 2015. But that woman didn’t go to our college, and we suspected this person, on some level, wanted us to know who she was. Why put our college there instead of a random address?

All I can say is that even if this person was Kayla (and we are 99% sure it was) she showed tremendous personal growth by not breaking through the windows of our apartment.