Jack Wagner (6:09)
In the 90s, things were just different growing up. My parents weren't nervous like we are today. They both worked full time and we raised ourselves in the summer. We just had this inflated sense of confidence that we were fine and that real life couldn't happen to us. Had it happened now, I think we would have been far more vigilant and a lot more afraid. This takes place in about 1998-1999. I was living at home, attending Weber State University. I grew up in a home with 10 other siblings, so I'm the youngest of 11 kids. Four or five of my siblings were already moved out and married by the time I came along. Just me and my sisters are pretty much the only ones left at home. Everybody's moved on and gone away to graduate school or got married and moved out. There's only me and my two older sisters living at home. We're all attending Weber State University. All have separate schedules. My dad is actually a professor at Weber State, and my mom works in their education department. My parents always had the same schedule. They left early in the morning. Where we lived was at the end of a dead end street with a wall of pines dividing us from the rest of the neighbors. And then our property dropped down into the mouth of the canyon. I remember one morning everybody being gone to school. And we didn't have cell phones at the time. We did, but we didn't. We had landlines. And so when the phone would ring, all the phones would ring in the house. One particular morning, it started ringing and ringing, and I tried to ignore, kept calling back, calling back. So I picked it up and there was nobody there. So I hung up the phone. Well, it happened again. So I picked up the phone once again. Nobody's there. But I listened for a second. You could hear somebody there, but there was no, like, heavy breathing. It was just obviously in my mind, a prank call. I hung up the phone. It called back a few more times, and I just unplugged the phone, and I didn't really take note of it. This started happening almost every morning. I would just pick it up and hang it back up. Sometimes I would pick it up because I was irritated that I got woken up. And I might actually say, like, quit bugging me. I didn't appreciate getting woken up every morning. Then my sister Shannon reported having the same thing happen. When she would be home getting phone calls. She would sometimes be a little bit more upset. Like, yeah, you know, you could hear this creepy breathing. I don't know if whoever was calling was amping things up or if he just enjoyed talking to my sister more. But we talked my parents into getting caller id, which was relatively new at the time. I don't know why this would have stopped the phone calls, because I don't know how a caller would know we had caller, idiot. But it did. We didn't get calls anymore, and we all just kind of forgot about it. One morning, I went out to go to school. After everyone had left, I went out to my car and I noticed that there was glass on the ground. As I walked around my car to see where it was from, I saw that the back window had been broken out. The first thing I looked at was my car stereo to see if it had been stolen. And it Was still in place. So I went around to the driver's door, opened up the car, looked through it. As I sat there, I noticed that I wasn't missing anything. Things in my car had been moved. My wallet that was in the armrest had been taken out. My license was actually on the dash. There was a few dollars in my wallet. There was not anything worth stealing, but that was still there. My glove box was dirty. Not fingerprints, but dirt smudges. And so did my wallet, so did my driver's license. So I don't know if this person actually had dirt on their hands. And I think at that time I felt rather invaded because it felt very personal. My first thing was it's the same person that we've been dealing with on the phone. That just came to mind. That was my instincts, somebody knowing the family schedule to know when everybody leaves the house that that would be a good time to start harassing someone that was home alone. A college girl that was home alone. It all felt like it was related. Now. I complained to my parents about it and we just continued to do what we did. We weren't used to having locked doors and monitoring things. I didn't really have any recourse because I just didn't really feel like that was something I could call the police about. But it did start to escalate shortly after that. It was fall getting a little colder, but it was still pretty warm outside. We didn't have AC in our house at the time, so most of us slept with our windows open. This one particular night, I remember being pulled from my sleep, Just woke up for no reason. And I remember sitting there thinking, why am I awake? So I rolled over and went back to sleep. Happened again a moment later and I was kind of irritated. Rolled back over. Then the third time, I remember sitting up in my bed and actually saying out loud to myself, fine, I'm awake. So I got up, I went and used the bathroom, got a drink of water, came back into my room, flipped out the lights, climbed into bed. Right as I got comfortable, I heard a loud pounce. My bedroom window sits about seven feet off the ground. There's a basement window below it. And then there's kind of some like wainscoting that you could stand on. So someone had been right there at my window. And as I got into bed and turned the light out, he jumped down and I heard him walk. I rolled out of my bed onto the floor and actually crawled down the hall to my parents room and my dad, Next thing I know, he was Muggsy girl, what's going on? I told him what had happened. I was upset. He went outside, looked around. Whoever had been at my window was long gone. I was starting to get rattled for sure. I was starting to feel like this place of security was now being encroached upon. We're now upset enough about it that my dad says, okay, well, we're going to start making the house more safe. And his idea is we'll get some sensor lights put up around the house. And that seemed to help. That seemed to give us all a little bit more of a sense of security. We also started talking about we really need to start locking the doors, which we had never done. And we started just making measures so that we felt a little bit more secure, that if somebody is going to continue to snoop around the property, we felt like it would be less convenient for them. One evening, about nine o' clock, it was dark, and I decided I needed to run to the grocery store down the street. This night, I walked out of the breezeway, waved my arm, set the sensor light off, and I did my usual dart to the car. I darted down the driveway, hurried and unlocked my car, jumped in, locked the doors and went to the grocery store, came back home, got out of my car, locked it. As I walked up the driveway, waving my arms, the sensor lights weren't going off, and I kept waving and waving. And I started to feel this sense of dread. And as I got directly under the lights, I looked up to see that the light bulbs had been removed. Seeing those empty sockets, my heart sunk. It felt like somebody was there watching me. It felt like I was not alone standing there under that empty floodlight. The next day, we actually took inventory around the house. And we noticed that any lights that were on the deck or corners of the home, the sensor itself had actually been angled up towards the sky. And we saw an old broom on the back patio that was just dropped on the ground. It had appeared to us that this person had taken that broom and pushed the sensor lights with the handle of the broom up to the sky so that they wouldn't go off. And that was unnerving. So it made us feel like this person knew our property, knew our home every bit as well as we did, if not better, from watching it. After that had taken place, we had our first snowfall. We live in Ogden, Utah. We get quite a bit of snow, and we joked because activity had stopped the phone calls. None of us noticed anyone walking near our windows. We didn't have footprints in the snow. We named him, the fair, weathered stalker. And we all started to get sort of this sense of security, that maybe it had been over and he was done. We started going back to our usual activities. It was soon as that weather and the snow had melted that it started to pick right back up where it had left off. I remember the first time that we realized it was happening again. My sister came home from a date. She looked rather flustered and pale in the face. And we were like, what is going on? She just said somebody bashed out the sensor lights on the driveway. We were like bashed them out. So we went out there and someone had actually smash them like glass on the ground. This felt more aggressive, more frightening than before because it almost had like teeth behind it. I almost felt like whoever this was was angry. We were all thinking, the guy that harassed us all last summer is back. It came to a head this particular evening. It was a weekend, a Friday night. We had had friends over, hanging out, playing games. They had gone home. My parents had gone to bed. I imagine it was about 1am we were all packing for a river rafting trip that we were going on. The next morning we're getting our things together. I'm in my room packing and my sister is looking for a sleeping bag that happened to be in the trunk of my car. She goes out the back door. I'm folding things in my duffel bag and I hear this blood curdling scream. I freeze. I start yelling her name. I'm like, shannon, are you okay? Are you okay? But I'm still too terrified to move. I hear my sister Nancy screaming, shannon, Shannon. We're just yelling her name. And then it went quiet. Then we heard her say, who are you? Followed with? Don't move. And then she screamed into the house, call 911. As she started booking in the back door. She got back inside safe, locked the door. She's white as a ghost. And I'm calling, shaking, calling 911. And as I'm on the phone, she tells me there is a guy outside. He's on the side of the driveway. When I came out, he froze. She froze. They were all about 10ft away from each other. And he just stayed staring at her, kind of frozen in the light. The man she saw was actually a younger guy. Said he was probably in his later 20s, kind of a taller, gangly, athletic build, clean cut hair. He looked like a normal guy you'd see off the street following the phone call. They were there really promptly. I was looking out the window. I could see several Cops with big mag flashlights going through the bushes, going through the trees. Then dispatch said they're done looking. They haven't found anyone, but they would like to talk to you if you guys want to come to the door. And I remember I'll. Three of us and my parents were awake at this time. They actually said to us, you're not the first people who have called about somebody snooping around in this neighborhood. They told us of a woman just a couple blocks up from us, and she lived alone. But when she came to her home, the dishes had been used. Someone was actually in her kitchen cooking. Another woman complained that she had woken up in the middle of the night to a man standing above her bed. And she started coughing, kind of panicking. And at that point, he left the room and fled the house. You know, I don't feel like they were trying to tell us anything to make us nervous, but I think they really did want us to take this seriously. They said given the amount of activity that we had had, they felt like we were kind of a hotspot. They were concerned. Maybe a week or two after that, I woke up one morning. My parents were always out of the house. My sister Nancy was always out of the house by 7, 7:30. And then either Shannon or I were left home alone. I remember waking up just enough out of my sleep to hear my sister walk into my bedroom. And she was standing there in my room. I just felt like I shouldn't open my eyes. I just was tired enough, and my mind just told me that she was looking through my closet, wanting to get something, wanting to borrow something that wasn't unusual for us to try to borrow each other's things. I remember specifically saying, don't wear my white shirts. She didn't say anything. She just shifted. You know, I had old carpet in my room, and the matting under it made kind of a crunching noise. You could tell very specifically where someone was walking in your room. She shifted a little bit. I didn't know what she was looking at. I didn't really care. I didn't want to open my eyes. And then she walked to the doorway and stood there. And I remember thinking, like, what is she doing? But again, I didn't open my eyes. And the phone started ringing. And she leaves my bedroom, and the phone keeps ringing, and the phone keeps ringing. And I say, shannon, will you get the phone? No response. So I sit up in bed, and the hallway is dark. Then I walk out into the hall, and her room was dark. And the phone's just ringing off the hook. So I walk into the kitchen to get the phone, and I just felt this chill come over me. I felt like I wasn't alone. But there was definitely no sister in my house. I remember picking up the phone. It was a telemarketer. I set the phone back down. I really felt like there were eyes on me. And I just remember my heart, like, kind of racing. I looked out in the driveway, and there was no car. There was no one. And I looked back in the empty house, and that was when I knew I wasn't alone in the house. I knew that whoever had been in my room wasn't my sister Shannon. I knew it was someone who was standing there, staring at me and watching me sleep. The house was dead silent. All my senses were heightened. I beamlined it right to my room. I locked the bedroom door and called 911. And I sat there listening as I said, I'm home alone. I think there's somebody in my house. Dispatch said, stay on the phone with me. Are you in a room with the door locked? I said, yes. The lock was something you could open with your fingernail paper thin wood door. They were faux wooden doors. They were hollow. And she said, stay put. The cops are on their way. At that point, I was standing in my window with the window open and my foot against the screen because I knew that if somebody opened that door, that the best thing for me to do would be to jump out of my window and then run for it. Dispatch kept saying, you know, are you okay? And I just said, I don't want to talk. I didn't want to make any more noise. And as I sat there, I heard someone walking down the hall, and my doorknob twisted, and there was a little push on the door. And I sat there frozen, like, not breathing, listening to every sound. And I heard the person walk down the hall towards the front door. Went out the front door. At that time, dispatch said, hey, they're almost there. They're coming. I stayed right there in the window. I was trying to look out my window to see if I could see anyone coming from the front door. And then I just remember that I saw the cops come up the street. She said, you know, stay in your room. They're gonna surround the house. And she walked me through exactly what was happening. Finally, she said, kay, it's safe for you to come out. They went through your home. They're there for you to talk to. And I remember opening my bedroom door, and they said, do you remember this front door? Being open, it had been left wide open. Interestingly enough, after that incident, my brother Chris came home from law school and my nephew Adam moved to our house within probably that week. And when they moved back, everything stopped. And I don't think it was ever solved. I don't think anyone ever knew who it was. I remember the cops saying to us, oftentimes when you have a situation where somebody's stalking you to this degree, they know your schedule, they're calling your phone when people leave the house. They know when to come, when not to come. They said, oftentimes they're people that you've met somewhere. We just had a false sense of security.
