When people think about Roddy Piper, they think of one of the greatest heels in wrestling history. Teal Piper remembers something very different. She remembers stalkers, death threats showing up outside the family’s home and the day her father’s car exploded just seconds after he got out of it.
Speaking with Monte & The Pharaoh, Teal said her father always tried to keep his wrestling life separate from his family. As kids, they weren’t supposed to see the ugly side of fame. But there were some things even Roddy Piper couldn’t hide.
One of those moments came when a man allegedly became obsessed with her father. Teal said she was still in school when she started hearing the same name over and over again, until one day her dad finally sat the family down and warned them what to do if they ever saw him.
“I’ll tell you a story. Uh so the one thing my dad always said was try to protect us from the horrors of the real world in general. So at the time I wasn’t understanding what was going on, but I have this distinct memory of him having a stalker when I was in I want to say maybe middle schoolish. And this guy’s name kept coming up and then I remember he was like, ‘Hey, if you hear this person’s name or see this person, you know, don’t, you know, take us, you know, go get help or whatever.'”
Then one night, everything changed. Teal said she woke up to find a house full of men with her father. Nobody expected her to be awake. Everyone looked tense. Before she really had time to understand what was happening, her mother packed up the kids and took them to their grandparents’ house, where they stayed for a week. Nobody ever explained what had happened.
“One day I woke up in the middle of the night and there was a bunch of men in my house with my dad, clearly not expecting me to wake up and they all looked very amped up for something. And my mom came and she got all of us and we went and we stayed at my grandparents for a week and then when we came back I never heard anything again. So something escalated in that moment.”
Even after that, Teal says the scares kept coming. One morning, as her mom was taking her to the bus stop, they found death threats hanging on the family’s front gate. What made it even more unsettling, she said, was where they lived. Their house wasn’t somewhere you could accidentally stumble across.
“I remember a time when I came out in the morning, my mom was dropping me off at the bus stop and there’s this sign on the gate with like these weird death threats that somebody had put inside our private property and we lived in the middle of nowhere. So, it’s not, you know what I mean? Like, you have to find ours back then and it like that’s how close they were getting.”
But the story that has stayed with her the longest happened not long after. According to Teal, Roddy had just pulled into the driveway, parked the car and walked only a few feet away when it suddenly exploded.
“There was this around the same time there was this bomb that went off in my dad’s car that we never really knew what happened. He… drove his car. We live in the middle of nowhere. He gets home, he parks and got maybe 10 feet out of his car and the whole car exploded.”
“When they investigated it, the only information we got is that there was a tracker on it that had to be tracked within like 5 miles of the car and that something under the driver’s seat exploded and ignited the car. They weren’t sure what it was associated. That’s all we knew.”
What was the most shocking part of Teal Piper’s story? Let us know in the comments below.
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