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On Friday, we asked you to share your real-life ghost stories, and I semi-regret it. Some of your stories are legitimately freaky! Brace yourself for readers’ scariest real-life ghost stories.
Ghost hunters are not just for reality TV. FartInTheWind:
The only “ghost” story I have is this:
My bro is an actual Ghost-Hunter (paranormal investigator, whatever) and I went on a run with him to a graveyard once.
I was just standing around doing nothing while they took recordings and pictures and whatnot, when I got REALLY cold. He snapped a picture when I said something and when the pic developed (late 90s...) there was a very large “ORB” on camera around me.
Take from that what you will, I don’t know if I believe or not, but thats what happened.
A few of you told stories involving kids seeing ghosts. From HitBullWinSteak:
The other night I’m playing with my 2 year old son. It’s just us home since Mom is out to dinner with some friends. Then when it’s time for him to go to bed. I pick him up, carry him up the stairs, and as we’re walking into his bedroom he points behind us, back towards the other completely empty and dark bedroom, and his eyes lock-in as if he sees something (one) and says “Who’s that guy?”
I turn around and see absolutely nothing. Freaked me the fuck out. I ask him “who?” thinking I misheard him. He points again and says “that guy.”
Nothing again. Needless to say we slept with a nightlight that night.
Another from jimfix:
I don’t believe in ghosts. I like ghost stories but I’m a generally “there’s a logical answer to this” kind of guy. So, with that...
We recently moved into an almost 100 year old home in a part of town that is known for its historic homes, and inevitably with that kind of area, it’s “Haunted Houses”. I know at least the patriarch of the family died in the house (of old age, nothing weird). Probably some other stuff has happened in there over the last century, it’s an old house! It has a creepy basement. The attic, I presume, is spooky. I’ve never been in it. Anyway, when we went a looked at the house we took our 3 year old son with us to check it out. We let him run and explore “his” room while we looked around the rest of the top floor. As we were pulling away in the driveway he pointed to the dormer windows in the attic above his room “that’s where the ghost lives!” We all kind of laughed. After that every time we mentioned the “new” house he’d say “the GHOST house”. Ok, that’s a little weird but he knew it got a reaction, whatever.
Fast forward a couple months. We’ve been in the house for a couple of weeks. I go to wake him up. “Hey bud, did you sleep ok?” “No.” “No? What was the matter?” “The boy kept me up.” Uh... “What boy?” (points to the closet where the attic access is)“The boy in my room at night.”
I convinced him it was a dream. He didn’t seem too scared or anything. Pretty matter of fact about it. It freaked me the hell out though. He has brought it up a few other times and now that it is Halloween he insists we are in a haunted house.
Do I think our house is haunted? I haven’t seen anything that is outside of the “creepy old house” explanation but... I guess we’ll keep an eye on the kid and see if he starts climbing up walls or his head starts spinning in circles?
Here is some exorcist shit from BrianD:
Between 2006 and 2008 I was a Mormon missionary. My mission was in Utah (yeah). One night in December of 2006, I was serving in Springville, Utah with my companion. We got dinner at a local mexican place. While we were there we met a mother and her 16 year old daughter from Oaxaca (my companion and I were both spanish speaking missionaries).
They began telling us problems that they had been having with the younger 12 year old daughter who wasn’t present. A lot of creepy stuff had been happening and the young girl had been acting out. They told us how the younger girl would be breaking stuff and screaming nonsense at them. The 16 year old was terrified and told us about one incident when she was using the mirror in her sisters room to take a picture on her camera. The girl had a sad clown poster in her bedroom and when she took the picture of herself in the mirror, she looked at it and saw that the clown was smiling. She freaked out and deleted the photo and from then on would avoid her sisters room at all cost. The younger sister seemed to have no problem with her room though and laughed at her mother and sister when they showed obvious fear.
The mother and daughter asked us to come over to their apartment and ‘bless it’ to get rid of whatever ‘spirit’ they thought was there. ( I should point out that at this point I was extremely skeptical. As a missionary, you don’t really get called to perform exorcisms like you would see in movies and I was pretty sure they were just being superstitious). None the less we obliged and came over.
The younger girl was staying at her friends house, so it was just my companion, the mother and daughter, and another guy who lived next door to them (it’s utah so like all her neighbors are mormon and missionary rules stipulate that two missionaries cant be alone in a home with the opposite sex without another male non-missionary being there).
When we got there, I felt this immediate sinking feeling inside of their home. The younger daughter’s room was visible from the living room, the door was open and it was completely dark inside. I knew the clown poster was in there and I was curious to see it, but as I stepped toward the room, the hair on my arms stood up and I could feel this huge sense of fear come over me.
My companion and I spoke with them a little bit more while they told us more about the daughter. The entire time I could feel this sense of dread emanating from the bedroom behind me.
We eventually knelt down to pray. My missionary companion was just going to say a simple prayer, asking that the holy ghost (holy spirit, god, etc) be in their house so they could feel better. About 10 seconds into the prayer my companion stops talking, I open my eyes and he is sitting there, eyes closed, but he can’t speak. His tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth and I could see he was struggling to form any words. At this moment the daughter screamed and I looked over and saw the mother crawling on all fours, moving erratically forward like she couldn’t control her body.
At this second all 3 of us men jumped up and raised our right hands to the square and simultaneously repeated a prayer that you learn in mormon temples to cast out demons. The mother stops and we all sit there shaken up for a few minutes. I’m terrified by this time though and my companion and I promptly got the fuck out and never spoke of this incident again.
*note I’m not mormon anymore. I don’t know if I believe in god or not, but I do know this incident happened.
This sounds like the beginning of a teen movie. ElisADDMeds:
When I was about 13 I slept over a friend’s house. His parents went out for the evening, leaving us alone with his older sister (think she was 15). Well she whips out this book about devil worship, witchcraft, etc. We read this chapter that said if you light 5 candles, drip the wax from the candles into a pentagram and place one candle at each of the 5 tips of the star, then sit in the middle and chant some verses (that I cannot remember), you will conjure any spirits in the area. We promptly did so, laughing the whole time about what B.S. it was, when all of a sudden their 15 year old dog (the calmest dog on earth, nearly dead if I remember), starts going ape shit. Barking violently, growling, and biting at the air all around us. Then we felt a strong wind blow through the room and the lights began to flicker.
We all freaked the fuck out, blew out the candles, and ran into his sister’s room where we hid under the covers for what seemed like an eternity. When we finally went back down, his dog was cowering under the table and the sink was running in the kitchen. WE definitely did not leave it running.
I promise this all happened. I’m now a 35 year old attorney with 2 kids, and I to this day have no idea what to make of what happened. I’d be an atheist but for this experience, which rendered me agnostic.
TommyNJ:
When I was 23 I was staying overnight for the first time at a girl’s place who I had just started dating. We fell asleep and at some point during the night I rolled over to throw my arm around her and she wasn’t there.
I wasn’t overly concerned, thinking she had probably gone to the bathroom or to get a glass of water. Then I got a feeling like I was being watched. I had my back towards the door and I looked over my shoulder to see her standing in the middle of the room, mostly still but trembling slightly.
I asked her if she was OK. She didn’t answer initially. I asked again and she responded, her voice shaky and tearful, “he’s in the living room. He says he’s going to kill you.”
I’m gripped by panic immediately. Her apartment is a one-bedroom in an older building and it kind of snakes. I have to walk from the bedroom through the bathroom and through the galley kitchen to the living room. I pull a kitchen knife slowly from the block as I sneak past. I hear her say, “I begged him not to” as I tip-toe towards the living room. I pause briefly and steel myself up for whatever is in that living room, then burst through the door way.
Nothing. Nobody there.
I let out a relieved sigh then go back to the bedroom. She’s still standing there, exactly how I left her. I face her, put my hands on her upper arms and say, “are you asleep?” and she starts convulsing violently and collapses into a heap on the floor.
There would be many more sleepwalking and night terror adventures in the short-lived relationship but this one really stuck with me. Not exactly a ghost story but what the hell do you want? It was scary.
Here’s a banger of a story via Mr. Lahey:
My ghost story(ies) revolves around two houses I have owned. Back in 2003 I got married, my wife and I decided to move our huge family (that I married into 3 adults and two kids - none of which were mine) of now 5 plus 2 cats and a great dane into a bigger house than the 1200sqft we all shared at the time (a rental). We went and looked at the place, it was on leased land (look it up if you don’t know - it’s damn near a ponzi scheme IMHO) and 3500sqft. It was designed and built by the family we bought it from and the first husband died from complications of smoking for 50 years, even smoked inside (YUK!). So we tell them to leave anything they don’t want, we will deal with it (books and pictures, etc) cos the parents were in a nursing home so we dealt with the kids.
Day one of going in pre-move in:
I am in what will end up being my computer room (I am a professional computer nerd by trade - network admin) going through the tools and bullshit that was left behind. This room was the original husbands hobby room, there was 30amp 220 outlets for small welders and shit like that. This is middle of the afternoon mind you, I’m reading some papers I found and I see a man walk across the room... I look up and watch him dissipate into the family room that my door opened to. I FREEZE like a deer in the headlights. I go fetch my wife and her sister and tell them what I saw. They are all stoked on living in a haunted house and I am like - well this is an adventure I didn’t plan on.
Day two pre-move in:
I find a Ouija board - old school kind. I didn’t believe in them at the time. More on that later.
We move in, get settled and then shit starts ramping up!
We start hearing our names called from across the house in voices of OTHER PEOPLE LIVING THERE. Happened to my wife a few times, one time I was playing counter strike in my room and she came down and opened my door all agro. I was like “What’s uP?” and she proceeds to tell me that she was answering my call for the the last 15 minutes. I tell her I have been playing counterstrike for the last 3 hours and if she wants i can get everyone on here to back me up.
Kids heard their names called and many of times and come running saying “WHAT! WHAT DO YOU WANT!?!” and we have to tell them the house is playing a joke on them.
My dad even heard them while he was holding me up on a ladder, he proceeds to let go of said ladder to go wander though the lower part of the house looking for “someone he heard”
More often then not, while i was playing CS late at night, the man I saw on day one would appear IN FRONT OF MY DESK, then WALK AROUND SAID DESK, and STAND BEHIND ME to watch. My arms would go ice cold the whole time.
I saw things come out of the FUCKING WALL twice!
I saw THE BED DEPRESS down next to me as if someone SAT THERE
felt as if someone was in the house following me when everyone was gone, to the point that while in the shower I wanted to scream cos I could FEEL someone standing right next to me, but could see nothing.
The house was cool, but these things appearing could leave you on edge.
Fast forward to this year:
Bought another house, would hear people walking in the hall outside the bathroom after getting out of the shower - check - no one is awake and I am thinking I am looney.
After moving into said house I have heard multiple times the sound of shit crashing to the hardwood floor (like the distinct sound of the vinyl used for office chair mats we got that were rolled up and stood on end falling against the hard wood floor at 11pm, but didn’t wake my kid up) - found nothing has fallen.
Woman smells weird/odd/out of place smells - normally centering around kitchen area which is ball the hallway where I hear footsteps.
The odd thing is that when i bought the house I noticed in the attic that someone hung a spanish looking cross in there, so I suspect we are not the first to hear this stuff.
Find a new realtor, JimHarbrawler:
After the Northridge Earthquake in ‘94, my mom told my dad “Find us somewhere else to live, because we’re not living in Southern California anymore.” He talked to his job, and ended up finding a house outside of Atlanta, where we lived for five years. My sister and I were young, so my dad took care of everything with regards to finding the house and being there for the closing, so my mom had no idea what we were moving into. As we unloaded the moving truck, the drunken neighbor stumbled across the street and said something to the effect of “Didn’t you hear about that lady whose husband died in this house?” My parents brushed it off as the rambling of the drunken neighbor who had just stumbled across the street. While we lived there, nothing spooky really happened beyond my dad saying he woke up one night saying he saw what looked like a little girl sitting on the trunk at the foot of the bed.
After we moved to Florida, my mom saw a Dateline episode about Lynn Turner. She killed her husband, a police officer, by slipping anti-freeze into his jello knowing it was mostly undetectable and would look like he just got sick with some freak symptoms. There were empty anti-freeze containers in our basement when we lived there, but we didn’t think anything of it. She then started dating a firefighter and when he died under the same mysterious circumstances, his mom reached out to the mother of her now dead husband and the investigation started. Dateline drove by and filmed the house for the episode by driving by it, and they did it while we lived there—we painted the house after moving in and our trashcans were at the bottom of the driveway—which made it feel a little creepier. There was an episode of that Oxygen show Snapped about her as well, and they also used shots of the house either while we lived there or after we had moved out. He died in what would eventually become my bedroom!
Anyway, she was convicted for the murder of the police officer and she killed herself in prison.
KareemCheese:
My Pop-Pop and Nana died back in the 90’s (several years apart). Pop-Pop was a three sport athlete in college and played semi-pro baseball during the depression. Him and his brother built the house that they lived in (duplex) back in the late 1920’s. Anyway, when they passed my mom was the executor of the estate. My cousin was newly married and lived in the same town so they decided to sell the house to my cousin and his wife.
At the time they had 2 kids, boy and girl. One day my cuz’s wife goes out onto the front porch and the boy is playing with baseball cards and staring out into the yard. She asks, “What are you looking at?” The boy replies, “Oh I’m just watching that man play catch with that little boy.”
She asks, “What man?” He says, “The old man that lives in the attic.” (Where Pop-Pop slept). Needless to say that freaked her out and then came this exchange.
A few weeks later they were getting ready for church. The little girl is in my Nana’s old room playing and wife comes in and says, “C’mon let’s go to church.” Little girl turns to the rocking chair my Nana used to knit in and says, “Gotta go to church, bye old lady!”
Cuz’s wife couldn’t handle it so they ended up moving out after the next kid, but I think it’s actually kinda cool.
This sounds like it could have been a movie, and I can’t verify it, but mtdrift has a spooky story:
About a dozen years ago when I was a grad student in anthropology, I was on a field expedition in the high mountains in the western US (for obvious reasons I can’t specify where).
This field work took us deep into the backcountry at elevations above 8,000 feet, and we had to make do with very basic survey and excavation techniques and equipment because we had to haul everything on our backs. After a few days of digging and cataloging artifacts at several sites on a high ridge, we were preparing to close up shop and head back to basecamp.
A few hours earlier, a small group of my fellow students had been sent out to look for potential new sites in a nearby creek drainage, but they had failed to return to the rendezvous point at the agreed upon time. Our expedition leader was less than happy - he took a few students down the valley to look for the party, and sent me up the trail on my own to basecamp to wait if they showed up there.
It was about four miles back to basecamp, and when I arrived the missing party was already there, drinking beer and having a great old time. Fuck. We had radios, but the boss was way out of range, so I dropped my pack and hoofed back up the trail to try and get some reception.
It was getting toward twilight, and I was completely knackered from 5 days of traipsing up and down steep ravines, lugging 70lbs worth of pack over 25 miles of trail, eating freeze-dried food, and digging in the dirt. Now I’m running back up the mountain, and I’m feeling a little, let’s say, unhinged. Blood sugar dropping, stressed out, plain tired. And when I topped a small hill, that’s when I saw him.
A tall Native American man - buckskins and bow, long braid down his back. A fucking cliche, but real as hell. Real enough that I called out to him, said hello, and asked him if he saw anybody else on the trail recently. He turned slowly my way, looked me in the eye, and disappeared into the forest.
And by “disappeared” I mean vanished into the underbrush and deadfall. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, I felt my stomach fall into my shoes, and suddenly was very, very cold. Again, with the cliches.
I called out to him again, still convinced he was real, and I spun around to look behind me in the fading daylight, and there he was again. Back turned to me, he was walking slowly and silently down the trail back toward camp. He faded into the sunset and I pretty much freaked out. I was yelling at him over and over but he was gone, vanished into the nothingness again. My boss came over the radio right at that moment.
Me: “Hello? Yeah, everyone’s accounted for - they’re back in camp.”
Boss: “Great, thanks, we’ll be there in a little while.”
Me: “Hey, um, did you see anybody else while you were out there? Anybody on the trail, maybe an Indian guy?”
Boss: “Nope.”
Me: “Ok.”
And then this happened. I got myself to move forward and return to camp, and there was a perfect arrowhead lying dead center in the middle of the trail. A huge, notched, chert thing, just sitting there.
Now if you know anything about North American archaeology, you know that trails are actually a pretty decent place to find stuff like this. The natural erosion that occurs on trails often reveals artifacts, and the people who lived on this continent for thousands of years often utilized the same travel corridors that we do in the present, and they left a lot of things behind.
But now? Right now? On a trail that a dozen anthropologists and anthropology students had traversed multiple times in the last week? That I had just hiked over an hour earlier? Nobody had seen it, including me.
At this point I’m taking really deep breathes and trying to make sense of all this, I mean, I’m a scientist, right? There are a lot of explanations - fatigue, hallucination, the effects of high altitude, etc. But I cannot shake the idea that this guy was REAL. I mean, he looked me right in the eye. He moved through the world. He dropped a damned arrowhead. I picked it up, turned it over, and left it in the ferns by the side of the trail. I had handled too many objects once owned by dead people over the last week to even consider documenting or thinking about it. It probably wasn’t real anyway.
I’m a born skeptic, but I’m absolutely convinced that I saw a ghost that afternoon. My colleagues back at camp, when I related my story, just handed me a beer.
ShamrockFury:
Back in high school, I shared a bedroom with my younger brother, which was difficult because he was a frequent sleepwalker. The hardwood floors would creak when he would get up and walk out of the room. I would have to follow him and bring him back to bed at least 2-3 times a week.
My brother was a hard headed kid and was usually pretty difficult to scare, so it came as a surprise to me when one day he asked me if I had been noticing anything weird in the house. He tells me that when he’s home alone, things have been moving on him. He’d put down a glass of juice and if he left the glass for a moment, it would move, and one time he came back and it was empty. He started to get very uncomfortable if anyone left him home alone for more than 10 minutes or so.
Came home from school one day and he was already home and looked pretty shaken. Tells me that he started to feel sick, so he went down to the cooler basement, and on our couch he sees an old man sitting there, staring at him. He sprinted up the stairs and locked the door. The sleepwalking became more frequent and was almost a nightly thing. One night, I hear the creaks of the hardwood, the usual sign that he was on the move, and I wake up in time to see him standing there, the streetlight outside the window lit up the room just enough where I was able to make out his figure, staring down at his bed. I remember sitting up and saying, “Jimmy, Jimmy, Hey, lay back down, man”. I kept repeating his name until he looked up at me, turned around, and walked out the door and down the hallway, the floors creaking under him. Frustrated, I turn on the lamp and am about to follow him when I look down and see he is laying in his bed, asleep. No one else was awake, no one else saw a thing. Never told him. A year or two later, we moved into a new house. Never sleep walked again.
Be wary of houses where people have died. ViewOfTheSouthSide:
We bought an small Cape Cod built in the 1930s. There was only one owner and she died in this house a year or two before we bought the house. We fixed it up (restored the wood floors through out the house), lived there awhile but decided to move to the suburbs when our first child approached school age.
The last night in the house, all our possessions were gone. It was a sad moment because we poured our heart and soul into this house. My wife and I were doing the final cleaning and making sure nothing was left behind. I was at the base of the stairs and heard someone walking across the wood floors in our bedroom. The lights were on the in the bedroom. I called up “ Hey, Karen let’s call it a night”. No response and the sounds of someone walking across the wood floors continued. . Again I called up “Karen”. Again no response.
This was a small house so there was no way she didn’t hear me but I thought she might be in all out cleaning mode. I turned and walked through the dining room, then through the swinging door which led into the kitchen. As I entered the kitchen, Karen and our daughter came up from the basement. I looked at her and freaked a bit.
I told her what happened. We walked to the base of the stairs, there were no more footsteps coming from upstairs. We figured if it was a ghost, it either the lady who built this house or my wife’s deceased mother (which there is a whole other ghost story). We decided then to leave for the night but before we left I stated , “If the person upstairs was Mrs. XXXX , thank you for letting us live in your house. If it Karen’s mom, we are moving to.....’
BTW, no ghosts yet at the new house.
LordRae:
I’ve told this one before but it’s the only real ghost story I have... and it’s not even mine though I am in it.
My parents were living in Ocean Springs, Mississippi at the time with my older brother. My parents had been trying to have a baby (me) and all was going well until one night my mom was woken up by something. Their bed was set up so that as you lay in bed you could look down the hallway to the living room and Entrance hallway. Anyway when mom woke up she realized there was a shadow figure standing at the end of the hallway in the living room. She freaked out and woke my dad up but as he woke up the shadow vanished. She apologized and figured she had dreamt it. Until the next night when again she woke up and saw the figure at the end of the hallway. She laid in bed watching it and made sure she was awake until it just creeped her out too much. She woke up my dad and again it vanished. This happened each night until my mom realized that she was now pregnant with me. The dark shadow had shown up only after she had gotten pregnant. Dad was very patient and kept waking up each night to make the “shadow go away” but as each night went on mom realized that the Shadow got closer each night. The further along in the pregnancy she got the closer to their bedroom the shadow would appear. Mom became absolutely convinced it was there to hurt the baby and demanded they move before I was born.
When she saw it the shadow never moved while she was looking but just continued appearing incrementally closer each night, radiating menace and terror and definitely person shaped. Dad resisted but eventually as the shadow got closer and closer and mom got more and more freaked out he finally either got tired of waking up each and every night or just wanted to appease her and they ended the lease and moved a few months before I was born. By the time they moved the shadow was in the doorway of the bedroom and mom was thrilled to move. She has never had any other experience and that’s the only “Ghost” she has ever seen. She insists to this day that it was going to hurt me if it had made it to the bed. It happened every night for months. Once they moved no more shadow and no more ghosts or shadows in the 30+ years since or anything else supernatural. My parents lived in a lot of houses over the years but that was the only one that ever bothered mom.
The house? One of the few on that section of Beach in Mississippi that survived Katrina intact.
This one gives me the heebie jeebies. Pierogi Power:
I worked as a Teach for America teacher in Baton Rouge, LA, for 2 years after I graduated from college. While there, four of my friends and I lived an awesome and spooky old house. The house was on the site of an old plantation in the Goodwood part of the city, and a 250 year old oak tree with a beautiful balcony stood in the backyard. The house was so cool that when we first moved in, we were too excited to be cognizant of any problems with the house, but over time we began to feel more and more uneasy at night. Simple midnight trips to the bathroom on the first floor became terrifying experiences, and we all had a feeling of being watched.
Then, one night in the middle of 2011, I had the most vivid dream that I have ever had. In it, an older woman with a bizarrely menacing face and grey hair came out of the wall, and held me down in my bed. She screamed at me, “GET OUT!” while pressing down on my chest. I woke and swear on my life that something was in the room with me. I somehow fell back asleep, but knew that I had to tell someone the story in the morning. I ran into one of my buddies in the kitchen the next morning, and told him about the ghost in my dream. When I finished telling the story, he stopped and looked at me sideways for a second, then told me to slowly repeat my story. His face absolutely lit up with horror after that second telling; he told me that he had the same dream a few nights before in his own bed, which is especially creepy given that his room is right next to mine.
We were both freaked out, but teaching and being 22 made us forget about our encounters for a time. Fast forward to 2012, when we switched rooms within the house. A third friend, who had never lived with us before, moved into my old room, and within a month came into the kitchen one morning to tell us about a creepy dream involving an old woman. My second friend and I looked at each other, and knew that he was going to repeat the exact same dream that we had the year previous. Unsurprisingly, he did, and we were all absolutely petrified. The strangest part? We had NEVER told the third friend about our own dreams, and his experience was removed from ours by at least a year.
A month or so after that, I was in my new room, which was, coincidentally, right across the hallway from my old one. I was fast asleep with a lady friend, but woke to an ominous presence in the room at around 3 in the morning. I rolled over to find that my companion was wide awake as well, and was literally whimpering. I asked her what was wrong, and she told me that there was an old lady at the side of my bed glaring at her and telling her to go. She refused to stay at the home after that, and I began to spend more time away from the residence as well.
A final, creepy turn took place on our move out day, before all of us left Baton Rouge, and our second friend was the last to leave the house. As he locked the front door one last time, he swears that a woman’s voice whispered, “Get... Out...” as he closed the door. None of us ever shook the feeling that something... else... was in that house with us.
All of my friends from that time are successful school administrators, businessmen, or lawyers, and will swear to you that this story was entirely true.
“Look at me.” Via DonCherryDonLemon:
Fine, I’ll do it (not my story):
This happened in my junior year of high school.
One evening, my mother and stepfather had gone out to some event, maybe it was an extended dinner or a concert, it’s hard to remember. I had stayed at home to work on a paper that was due the next day (I was one of those kids who procrastinated until the last minute) and spent the whole night working at the desk in my room. To give you a picture of the room, my desk faces a wall and sits next to a small window that’s on the same wall, and from where I sit, my back faces my doorway. While I was working, I was wearing these great headphones that I had gotten for my birthday — the kind that are noise canceling.
My parents left the house around 6:00 PM, and the whole time they were gone, I sat at my desk, blasting music through my headphones and writing my essay. Occasionally, I would take breaks and watch the rain and lightning outside my window (we lived in Houston at the time and there was a big storm that night). I never left my desk.
My parents returned around 11:00 PM. At some point late late in the evening, I had removed my headphones, so when my parents came home (coincidentally just a few minutes after I had taken off my headphones), I clearly heard the garage door open and my parents open the door to the house. Seconds after I hear them enter, I hear my mother shout my name. “Adrian!” she screams, “what on earth happened in here!?” Confused, I get out of my chair and start walking through the house to them. There’s only a small hallway that separates my room from the living room. Due to my rush to figure out why my mother was yelling, I paid little attention to the hall and the house. After a few moments, I get to my parents. My mom looks livid. She’s pointing at the carpet floor yelling, “Was this you!? Did you have friends over!?” I look down. The carpet is ruined. It’s covered in muddy footprints.
I frantically explain to her that I have no idea how those got there, that I spent the whole night at my desk working on my paper. I watch as her face goes from anger, to confusion, to fear. We realize that someone else must have entered the house. Quickly we scan the footprints, trying to make sense of the situation. It only takes us a few moments to figure out where they start: our back door, which we usually left unlocked. Then we noticed something else. The footprints started at the backdoor, but there were no footprints exiting the back door.
We hear something pounding through our house. We hear the front door get torn open, then slammed shut with a sharp WHAM!
We all run into the garage and lock the door. My mom starts shouting at the police through the phone, “Please come quickly! Someone’s broken into our house!”After what seems like hours, the police arrive. An officer stays with us in the garage as his partner goes through the house room by room. His partner tells us that it’s safe to go back in, that there’s no one in the house. Then she asks us a question. She asks us whose room is down the hall to the left. My parents look at me and I tell the officer that it’s mine. She asks us to follow her down the hall.
As we go, it’s easy to see that the footprints weave through my house from the back door. They go through the living room, through the small hallway, into my parents room (which is down the hall to the right) and then turn around towards my room. They stop in my doorway.
Then the officer points at my door, which I had left open the whole night. On it, in black sharpie, was written the following:
My Log
8:47: I see you
8:53: You forgot to lock the back door
8:59: You seem focused
9:24: Turn around
9:47: Look at me
10:15: Look at me
10:37: Look at me
10:49: Look at me
For nearly two hours, someone stood in my doorway watching me. To this day, I shutter to think about what would have happened if I had ever turned around and looked at them.
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