It wasn’t long until a black SUV rolled up alongside him and a man who looked like Max Headroom asked if he wanted a ride. Desperate and freezing, Blackbird accepted. After Blackbird turned down the man’s request to “party,” the night took a disturbing turn.

Andrew Blackbird had just finished a bartending shift and his wife, who was meant to drive him home but had presumably fallen asleep, wasn’t answering his calls. Then his phone died. With all the cabs taken up, he started the 25-kilometre walk home.

Blackbird had no idea how often this strange request has been made to stranded Halifax men after a long night. He just thought it was one of those “weird random freak things.” In fact, it wasn’t until Blackbird saw an incredibly popular Reddit post (which eventually got turned into a podcast and a CBC story ) describing an eerily similar experience that he learned the truth: there was an urban legend of a man who scouted the streets of Halifax looking for desperate men to try on his gloves.

Two images from a YouTube channel connected to the Glove Guy. The video is entitled "Leather Glove Fetish" and shows a man making fists while wearing leather gloves and then sniffing them.

Blackbird acquiesced to Glove Guy’s requests and got behind the wheel. The two of them drove up and down the same patch of road while Blackbird tried on a selection of tight-fitting gloves—gloves he admitted were “really well-made.” Like the Reddit poster, Glove Guy had Blackbird make a “fist a few times to work them in.”

While many of his alleged actions are in dispute, one thing is clear: Glove Guy is real.

According to several comments (the post has 683 of them), Glove Guy cruises the streets in a black SUV after the bars close, picking up young, often drunk, men, and offering them rides home. Along the way, he gives them a business card and has them try on pairs of excruciatingly tight gloves, assuring them it's for his glove-sales business, “Love the Gloves.”

“He gives me a pair of leather gloves which are extremely tight to fit on my hands… He then prompts me to pull the glove right on and thread my fingers together to stretch it on properly, and shows me how to stretch the glove by pulling on it and making a fist,” says the 2017 post, the all-time most popular on the Halifax subreddit. “I turn back to the guy and he has a ‘better fitting’ pair of gloves for me to try on. This time it becomes extremely obvious that he has a fetish for young men wearing leather gloves and this is how he gets off.”

"The whole time I was doing that he's, like, looking at me and, like, fucking rubbing his leg and shit. He's like, 'How do they feel? How do they feel?' and breathing really hard," Blackbird told VICE.

"In my head I was like, 'Jesus Christ,' but I just told him, 'They feel good.'"

There have been enough glove-foisting incidents for the authorities to get involved: Halifax police have received reports and information regarding “a man offering rides to male pedestrians and asking them to try on gloves,” Cst. John MacLeod said in an email to VICE.

One case even resulted in a police charge. Shawn DeWolfe told VICE he was picked up by Glove Guy in 2016. He says that while he was made to try on several pairs of gloves, Glove Guy started to masturbate in the driver's seat. DeWolfe says he fled the vehicle as quickly as possible.

Most people “just think it’s funny,” DeWolfe previously told the CBC. "[But] for other men who had more serious encounters, I just believe that they're too embarrassed or too afraid to maybe even come out and talk because they're afraid that what other people might think of them."