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Scary Stories and Rain
Scary Stories For A Rainy Night - Ep. 323 - She Changed Into Something
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Hey, welcome back to the podcast. I really hope you enjoy this episode and if you'd like to hear more stories like these with a different background sound, please check the description to check out my other two podcasts. And if you want to get rid of all of the ads, you can subscribe for just 2.99amonth. Last thing, I really appreciate you being here and I'd really love if you would follow the podcast and come back again soon. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy. Back in 2003 I was a struggling college student who had grown up in a very expensive California beach town. Rent was even back then ridiculous. I have no idea how anybody can actually go to college in this town anymore, but in order to survive with both college loans and full time jobs, my girlfriend and I ended up living in quite a few interesting situations. One time we rented half of a restroom in a trailer park for example, because it was only $600 a month 20 years ago. So when this apparent gem of a situation came up on our radar, we were more than excited. It was a small trailer that had been converted to a house at the back of one of the only farms within walking distance of the downtown area as well as our school. It's hard to describe this place, but I'll try. There was a gorgeous porch that looked over a yard that contained the only functional bath on the property, a huge aloe vera plant, and beyond a grove of trees was an entire organic garden. Again within walking distance of the downtown area and school, but it was still very secluded. There was no phone in the house for example, and back then we could not get cell reception while in the house. We would have to walk about five minutes down the long driveway. But that wasn't the main reason it was so affordable. The main reason was the unfortunate fact that this property was not just very isolated, but at the base of a well known forest area that was frequented by the homeless and drug addicted community of the area with no neighbors anywhere nearby. But it was affordable and gorgeous. So me and my 19 year old girlfriend moved in. Did I mention her nickname in high school was Pamela because of her resemblance to the Baywatch star Pamela Anderson? She would argue that she is actually way prettier because she has Reese Witherspoon's face. I would argue neither because this girlfriend eventually became my ex wife, but that is a different story. So we moved in. We were extremely excited to live in such a unique location that was both remote yet extremely close to everything and somehow affordable. Who cared if it was a bit funky we were very used to living in funky houses in this area. Anything not funky would require us selling our internal organs or something. Another bad joke. But rent in this house was, and still is, extremely ridiculous. We had only spent a handful of days at this rental before two of her friends came over to visit and to go for a walk in the nearby forest area. I should add, they both also looked and dressed very similar to my girlfriend. Looking back, the four of us wandering through an area well known to be the home to a large population of the county's homeless and addicted population was probably a terrible idea. But it was a gorgeous area and we had no way of knowing what would happen later that night. After dinner, her friends left and we probably watched a movie and then headed back to the back of the house to the bedroom area. Now, I should describe that the way this house was set up was that you walk into the house via two double doors that opened into the living room. The bedroom area was just a half sized wall that separated the bed from the living room, and the kitchen and bathroom was off to the side of this main area. Sometime in the middle of the night, I awoke to the two double doors opening. In a flash of an instant, I knew there was somebody in our house. I was in extremely good physical shape, and within an instant I knew that the only weapon I had access to was my skateboard. It was at the foot of my bed. Something I can only describe as teenage mutant ninja skills took over me and I knew that I could roll, grab the board and strike the metal trucks over whoever was coming at us. And so I jumped for my board and started screaming at the top of my lungs, who is this? Who are you? What do you want? He probably thought I had some actual weapon. I looked straight at this guy in my living room. He was a very large male dressed in all black with a black wool cap. He said, there's been a terrible accident. I needed to use your phone. He's dying outside. Then the guy ran out of the same doors he came in. My girlfriend was obviously in shock at this point. We sat there for what seemed like a very long time, but probably only a couple minutes. Then we went outside with our cell phones to begin the long walk down the dark driveway in order to get into cell reception and call the police. I guess we didn't realize that we could have probably dialed 911 and got reception via the emergency service network, though I don't know if that was even a thing. Back in 2003, as we walked down the long driveway and the only road in the area. We saw no accident. There were no signs of anyone having been there at all at the end of the driveway. Once we got cell reception, we called the police and we waited there for them to arrive. When they arrived, they took a look around the property and gave us the sad truth. There really wasn't anything they could do. He probably ran off into the woods. They apologized but said the only thing they could do would to be come back if he returned. Yeah, it's not the most comforting message. So we drove to my parents house, told them the whole story and slept in my childhood bedroom that night. The following day we returned because all our stuff was there, including the two cats. My girlfriend refused to stay the night, but I decided to stay. I ended up sitting in the living room chair with a baseball bat in my hand the entire night. It was the last night that we even attempted to stay there. I am not exactly sure how many days later I saw the following story on the COVID of our local paper, but it was within the following week or two. Apparently there was a serial predator in our town. He frequented the exact area of our rental and this sketch was exactly how I would have described the individual that I saw in my living room that night. It started the first time I caught the bus to work. I had been having some major car trouble and it looked like my car was going to be in the shop for up to two whole weeks. That meant for 10 whole days I'd have to take the bus to and from work. It was an inconvenience, sure, but I am not so stuck up or sheltered that I was dreading taking public transport or anything. My main concern was getting caught in a rainstorm or something, but investing in a sturdy umbrella pretty much put those fears to bed. If I had only known that the trouble with taking the bus wasn't the time spent or the exposure to the crazy weather we get here in the Pacific Northwest. It was the people I'd be riding with, or more specifically, one person in particular. So another thing that sucked about having to take the bus was how much earlier I had to wake up. Okay, 30 minutes earlier isn't all that bad, but it still sucked seeing 6:30 instead of 7:00am I would have to be at the bus stop by 7:15 in order to be at work by 8am sharp. And given the area I was living in at the time, this usually meant I had to stop to myself. But then, either the third or fourth day I arrived at the stop, I discovered I wasn't Alone. At first, the guy just looked like a construction worker as he was wearing heavy boots, jeans, and one of those big warm looking highlighter pen jackets with the reflective strips on it. I didn't pay him any mind. It was way too early to interact with anyone, so I just stood there under the shelter, just listening to my podcasts. The next thing I know, I feel someone tapping on my shoulder. There was literally no one else around, so of course it was the guy in the construction jacket. So then I take out my earbud, turn to him and ask him if I can help him. To which the guy repeats Good morning in this passive aggressive way I assumed he thought I was just ignoring him. So I apologized and made it clear. Clear that I just couldn't hear him. Only right in that moment, I swear I smelled one of the single grossest smells ever. It was a mix of the guy's breath and his general odor, which I guess I hadn't picked up on at first because it was so cold outside. If I had to guess, I would say the guy probably hadn't brushed his teeth in a decade, and this was sharply evidenced by the state of his mouth. Honestly, it looked like his mouth had died and was just waiting for the rest of him to catch up. It was truly awful and I found myself severely pitying the people who had to work with him, not to mention myself, who had to share a bus with the guy. I tried sitting as far away as possible from him, but I swear he literally followed me right to the back of the bus to sit in the opposite seat. And yes, you guessed it, he tried talking to me the entire time. I know what some of you might be thinking at this point. Just take an Uber or stagger your schedule to avoid the guy. Well, I had already spent $45 on a month's orca pass, and I wasn't exactly in the best of financial situations at the time, so that was definitely guiding my poor decision making. That and the guy wasn't at the stop every morning. Not at first anyway. So I figured I would just suck it up and keep using my orca card. But then he was there. Another morning, then another, always trying to talk to me until it was on the verge of being harassment. Then one day I get the call saying my car would be ready the following afternoon, meaning I would only have to take the bus one more time. I was elated, but naturally my not so secret admirer was waiting for me that final morning. I had already asked the guy to leave me alone by that point, but he just wasn't taking the hint. So to try and get back at him, I decided to give his employer a call to see if they knew what he was up to while in uniform. And when I saw in uniform, he had a company pass hanging around his neck and his jacket had the company name on it, too. So I looked them up, gave them a call, and told them one of their employees wouldn't leave me alone. I know that these days that probably seems like a super Karen thing to do, but to me it was preferable to getting the cops involved. And all I wanted to do was just scare the guy. Not like actually get him fired or anything. But none of that mattered anyway, because when I called the company and described the guy the secretary hit me with, oh, we fired him months ago. He didn't return his uniform, so we took it out of his paycheck. That's when it hit me that after that first chance meeting, the first week I was riding the bus, he had only been there to harass me. He sure wasn't catching the bus to work. At least not to work for the company whose pass he had. So the idea that I was totally oblivious to the fact I was being so stalked legitimately, one of the worst feelings of my life. The only thing is, as bad as things seemed right then, they were about to get so much worse. So I was back to using my car. About two weeks had gone by and I was halfway to forgetting about this guy and the whole thing. Then this one evening, I finish up late at work and get home at like 6:45. It's dark, it's cold, I'm starving, and all I want to do is just curl up on the couch and go to sleep. My apartment at the time had two locks, each requiring a different type of key. You unlocked the first one so you could use the second to actually open the door. But when I go to unlock the first lock, it seems like my key is jammed. It wasn't. It's just that the lock hadn't been locked at all. It wasn't out of the question that I had just forgotten to lock it that morning, but it was like a built in part of my routine. It seemed really odd that I had just neglected to do it. Anyway, I shrug it off too, focused on my planned pre dinner of coffee and molten hot pop tarts, then walk into my apartment. That's when I smell. Smell was that same rotten mouth smell that had clung to this bus guy like a dark cloud. It's weird how your brain just files those Kinds of smells away and the moment you smell them again, certain memories just come flooding back. Well, it was exactly like that. As I stood in the dark hallway of my apartment, hand on my heart, I think that's the most terrified I have ever been in my life. Knowing that he was close without being able to see him, I just bolted back out of my apartment, back down into the parking lot of my building, jumped into my car and called the cops. The whole time I am locking up the second floor windows of my apartment, just waiting to see him moving around my apartment or something, but there was nothing. It got to the point where I thought I might be going crazy, that maybe it was backed up sewage or something. And I just had the dumbest panic attack in the history of panic attacks. But still the cops show up and I let them into the building and then direct them up to where my apartment was, telling them that the door should still be open. By that point, I figured they would go in, find a dead rat in my toilet bowl or whatever it was, and then just leave. What happened next will stay with me for the rest of my life. So if you remember, I am watching my own apartment windows from my car while the cops are on their way to search my place. I think that the next thing I'm going to see is the cops walking around my apartment, probably complaining about this crazy person downstairs who is scared of bad smells. Only the next person person I see is him. The man from the bus. He's not wearing his jacket or anything, but his greasy gray hair gave him away from a mile off. He literally ducks behind my apartment curtains, probably after the cops had announced themselves. And he tries to stand as thin and still as possible. I couldn't believe he had done something so dumb. They were pretty thin curtains too, so it wasn't like he was fooling anyone. But the moment one of the cops appeared in my window, I watched the guy pull something out of his jacket. I don't know if it was a knife or something else, but the cop was basically wise to the whole thing and tasered him before he could make a move. But the whole time I am watching the whole thing unfold, feeling completely and utterly helpless, all while screaming, look out. He's got something. With no one around to hear me, I stayed in my car for everything that followed. And I actually watched the cops leading the guy out of my apartment building in handcuffs. It was like an actual nightmare knowing that he had been waiting in my apartment for me all after. I thought I was totally rid of the guy. The only good news was that he had violated probation and was headed back to prison to finish the latter half of an eight year sentence for the exact same crime only committed years before. It was a relief knowing there was no chance of running into him for another four years. But it was still haunting to know how close I had come to whatever it was he was planning for me. In a way, I should be weirdly thankful that he didn't take care of himself. Because if I hadn't been able to smell him as soon as I walked in, I might not be telling this story right now. In late 2008, I came one night to find my mom sitting in the kitchen all alone in floods of tears. When I asked her what was wrong, her answer made my jaw drop. My dad had left her. There was absolutely no indication that anything was wrong with their marriage or that he was remotely unhappy. But that afternoon while I was out, he had apparently packed a few things into his suitcase, told her he was leaving, and just disappeared. I only mention this because it explains why my mom and little sister just didn't want to be in the house over Christmas and New Year's. That kind of family oriented time of year would have just been way too hard on them, so they basically buggered off to Mexico for a month to just decompress or whatever. The point being I was all alone for Christmas and New Year. Christmas Day sucked and I realized they were right about not wanting to be alone in the house at that time of year. So for New Year's Eve I decided to throw a little get together for me and a load of my friends, hoping that a little party might take away some of the sadness I felt as a result of my dad leaving. So on the night itself it ends up being about 20 to 30 of us getting together in my parents place, getting drunk, listening to music, playing Xbox. Just a big hangout among some of the people I was closest to. It was a really good night to start off with and it really did help take my mind off things for a little while. We did the whole New Year's countdown thing, set off fireworks, generally having a brilliant little night together. But the drunker we all got, the messier things became until it was just a medley of people throwing up or arguing among themselves. Two of the people who ended up fighting were my friend Chris and his girlfriend at the time, a girl named Katie. From what I could gather, Katie thought Chris had been flirting with a mutual friend of ours and had taken issue with it. Chris was insisting that they were Just being friendly and it was nothing to worry about. But Katie was adamant that something was going on, that he was cheating on her, blah blah, blah. You know how it is. Teenage drama. Now I know Chris really did love her, so it wasn't like a stand up argument. It was more like him begging for her to see reason and to not get too mad and dump him over some perceived bit of flirting. He swore he would never do anything like that, that she was the only girl for him, how much he loved her, all this romantic theatrical stuff that you might expect from two young lovers. It wasn't really any of my business though, so me and the other party guests just sort of left them to it while we got on with trying to have fun. Then a little while later I find Chris sitting in the back garden swigging off a bottle of raw vodka on his own. I go up to him and ask if he's okay, only to find that he's crying, completely drunk, saying that Katie dumped him and left. I tried to be a good friend and console him as best I could, saying that she was probably just drunk and over emotional and saying there was a good chance they'd get back together over the next couple of days when she realized this was a mistake. But he was insistent that she was gone for good and that they wouldn't be getting back together. All I could do was get him on his feet and hug it out with him. The poor guy really was in one bad state. I managed to convince him to hand over the vodka, drink some water and then get some sleep in my bed so he could maybe sober up a little bit before heading home. He agrees and I tuck him in and then leave him to get some rest. About an hour or so later, the party is winding down and the remainder of us are just chilling in the TV room when someone goes off to use the toilet. They return like seconds later saying someone's in the bathroom throwing up and then asking if they can go pee in the back garden. Of course I tell them no, I didn't want them peeing all over my mom's flower beds and that I will run upstairs to see if I can get whoever it is out of the bathroom. So I get to the bathroom upstairs and I can hear someone gagging and retching on the other side of the locked door. My friend Julia joins me, a little concerned and starts trying to help me talk to the person who's locked themselves in the bathroom. It's something sometime then that I noticed that two doors are open. The first Being my bedroom, the second being a little cupboard on the first floor landing. I check my bedroom and see that the bed is empty. So it's obviously Chris that's in the bathroom puking his guts out because of all the vodka he drank. I shut the door to the bedroom, then go to close the door to the other room, which happens to be a little cupboard that my mom kept cleaning supplies in. My first thought was that Chris had opened up that door, thinking it was the bathroom in his drunken haze, then ran to the right bathroom in his desperation to puke. But I noticed something that at first I didn't really understand the significance of. The cleaning supplies that my mom usually kept all neat in a little plastic box were spilled all over the floor. Not like open fluid spilling out, they were just all out of the box, like someone had been rooting through them. As I'm wondering why someone would do something like that, Julia calls out that the person who had locked themselves in the bathroom, presumably Chris, had gone quiet all of a sudden and that they weren't responding. That's when I put two and two together. Violent vomiting, cleaning supplies missing, deep drunken depression. Chris was trying to end it all. I flew to the bathroom door and started to kick the doors off the hinges. Julia screams in shock at what I'm doing and the people from the living room start piling out towards the bottom of the stairs in utter confusion. I had been really protective of the house all night, not wanting people to smoke inside, not wanting people peeing anywhere they shouldn't, trying to stop spillages and all that. Then there I was, booting down my own bathroom door. It was way too heavy to actually kick off the hinges, but I did manage to kick a hole in the wood paneling. And that's when I got a look inside. Chris was laying there, a bottle of bleach next to him, and there was a pink fluid all over the floor and his clothes. It was pink because he had drank the bleach and it had corroded or burned the inside of him so much that he had vomited up blood. We were distraught, terrified, almost sure he was gone, but we were extremely quick to call an ambulance. Chris had his stomach pumped and he survived, but it took a long time for him to be back to normal because he puked. The fumes had damaged his lungs or something, so he had trouble eating, drinking and breathing for at least a month after that. 12 years. And I have never forgotten that, and I am sure neither has he, because as far as I know, Chris never drank Vodka again. Because if the smell of it makes me think of that night, who knows what horrible memories it brings back for him. You might be able to describe 17 year old David Faraday as the all American boy. David was clean cut, a good student and a member of the Boy Scouts of America. He was also apparently something of a moral arbiter, having once confronted a dealer outside of his high school when the man had apparently been attempting to pedal to members of the student body after threatening to inform the police. The dealer was said never to have hung around the high school again. And although by today's standards we might consider this to be so called snitch behavior, David was clearly simply trying to protect his fellow students from something he was concerned would affect their academic performance. He was a good person with a good heart and almost all of what he did came from a place of love. But like many boys his age, David found himself increasingly interested in the fairer sex. And there was one particular young lady that caught his attention over all others. Betty Lou Jensen was 16, a year younger than David. But she was incredibly popular and her reputation as a charming, well mannered young lady preceded her. She was also a very talented artist who took a great deal of interest in all things creative. It was at a local youth function that David got the chance to talk to Betty Lou. And his affection for her seemed to be entirely reciprocated. Betty Lou shared a great deal with him and even invited him to visit her after school so that he could walk her home. After a few weeks of wholesome teenage dating, something of a relationship began to blossom between the two bright eyed young people. But all was not entirely well as there was another boy who had his eye on Betty Lou, One who was not about to let David have her all to himself. He squared up to David when the young man was waiting outside of Betty Lou's high school. And although the confrontation didn't become physical, some pretty harsh insults were exchanged and David was warned to stay away from Betty Lou. Other boys might have been deterred by such a display of possessiveness and aggression, but not David. He was determined to secure his place as the only boy in Betty Lou's life. And so one afternoon on their way home from school, David asked Betty if she would like to go on a date with them. Their first date. And to his absolute elation, Betty Lou said yes. David racked his brains for a solid first aid idea and given that it was late December, decided that a great way to capture that festive romantic spirit would be to take Betty Lou to a local Christmas event. And being the gentleman that he was, he made a promise to her parents to have her back home by 11pm at the very latest. Rumor has it that David and Betty were planning on attending the Christmas themed party with a few other local high school students. But perhaps this was simply a cover to reassure the young girl's parents. Because what we know for certain is that they ended up driving over to Lake Herman Road in David's Rambler station wagon, parking it up in quite a well known spot that was known to many as Lovers Lane. The whole appeal of the spot near Lake Herman is that it was quiet and unfrequented by members of the public. Hence why young couples might use it to gain some privacy for certain unsavory activities. Activities. But it wasn't just infatuated lovebirds who noted the location's seclusion because someone else wished to take advantage of the isolation for something that was considerably more malicious. At some point during their stay up on Lovers Lane, David and Betty Lou noticed another car pull into this spot, one that parked up alongside them before turning its lights off. At first, David and Betty were worried it was the cops come to arrest them for committing lewd acts in public. But as they peered through the darkness to study the vehicle next to them, it became increasingly obvious that it was not, in fact, the police. All the young couple could do was watch, growing increasingly scared as the shadowy silhouette in the front seat stayed staid, still staring at them through the passenger window. Betty Lou told David she was spooked and asked him to see if he could get the person to leave. But unlike previous encounters where David's bravery had shown through, when confronted with a source of maliciousness, he too was far too frightened to do anything. But as he prepared to start up the Rambler's engine so he could drive Betty Lou out of there, the driver of the other vehicle got out and approached, approached David's side of the Rambler. David was transfixed, frozen in fear like a deer in a car's headlights. But when he saw the mysterious stranger pull out a weapon and aim it at his window, his flight response kicked into gear. Betty threw open the passenger side door, throwing herself from the Rambler before David following suit. But neither of them was fast enough to outrun a bullet. The stranger fired once through the roof of the Rambler, then sprinted around the back to fire another shot at David through the vehicle's rear window. Both shots hit the young man, and he crawled along the ground near the station wagon's back wheel on the passenger side, trying and failing to escape. Betty Lou, however, began to sprint away through the darkness as the first shots were fired. But the stranger was fast. He took aim and fired five shots at the right side of her back, each bullet striking her torso before she fell and she lay dying in the darkness. The killer turned his attentions back to David, pointing the pistol towards his head and pulling the trigger one last time, sending a bullet crashing into his skull just behind his left ear. Apparently, the killer then simply got back into his car car and drove away into the night. Sometime later, someone who drove past the spot on Lovers Lane must have seen the bodies lying in the dirt and then rushed to call the police. David was still breathing when they arrived on scene, but was completely unresponsive and was dead on arrival when he was finally taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. The double homicide scene stunned and horrified the local community, and rumors abounded that there was a crazed madman on the loose, with it only being a matter of time before they struck again. One of the first people contacted by the police as a potential suspect in the murders was the young man who had confronted David as a result of his own jealousies over his and Betty Lou's blossoming relationship. But it was discovered that this young man had a strong alibi for his whereabouts, meaning there was no way he could have been the mysterious, bloodthirsty stranger who pulled into Lovers Lane that night. As the summer of 1969 drew to a close, journalists and law enforcement alike wondered if the teenage lover's killer would ever be found. But little did they know that the nightmare had just begun. And what would follow would continue to baffle all those involved for decades to come. Because the man who took David and Betty Lou's lives that evening, the man who relentlessly fired into the Rambler station wagon, would come to be known by a name that would echo through the annals of true crime all over the world. The Zodiac. Zodiac's identity remains a complete mystery even to this day. The killer's nickname originated from a series of taunting letters and cards such as Sent to the San Francisco Bay Area Press. These letters included four cryptograms based around a number of ciphers, one of which was recently solved by the FBI. After over 50 years of research and study, we know for certain that Zodiac murdered five people in Benicia, Vallejo, Napa county and San Francisco in the 11 months spanning December of 1968 and October of 1969. It seems he preferred to target young couples, which is how he seemed to have come across David and Betty Lou while the pair were on their first date. Yet despite only five confirmed victims being attributed to the Zodiac, he once claimed to have murdered 32 other people, bringing his total body count to 37 victims. A killing spree that started with two young lovers so excited to finally have some time alone together on their first date, never being able to imagine that it would end in such a brutal moment of painful finality. So the next time you're on a first date, don't be so quick to go somewhere secluded as you never know who might be watching or following. Just ready to turn a perfect romantic moment into a living nightmare. Almost 10 years ago now, I am in college down in Florida when I get a call from my ex girlfriend who I had only broken up with like 6 months previously. I didn't recognize the number at first as I had switched cell phone carriers not long prior. I have never been one to answer calls from unknown numbers, but since I was in college, I used to get calls from professors, people over at Financial, people inviting me to D and D games and dorms, stuff like that. So I kinda nervously answered, just sort of hoping it was going to be about something good. I recognized the voice immediately, and as soon as I do, my heart just sinks. There was a reason I hadn't given her my new number, and I wondered just how she had gotten a hold of it. She said, we need to talk. To which I reply that I'm not sure we really do. It had been like six months and I thought we were out of each other's lives. She responds with no, we really, really need to talk. Are you sitting down? Because I have something to tell you. She's pregnant. That was my initial thought, and I won't lie, I did feel myself get weak in the knees. So I sit down on my bed, feeling my heart racing in my chest and my hands getting clammy, getting ready to hear the bad news. We got a patient in the ER from a car accident and she didn't make it. I'm so sorry, but it was your mom now. My ex worked as an emergency room nurse and getting the news like that absolutely destroyed me. I was just in shock for some reason. I tried calling my mom's cell, but she didn't pick up. Of course she didn't pick up, so I hung up to call my little brother and give him the news. We cried like babies as I told him everything. How my ex had given me the news ahead of time and how our mom wasn't answering her phone. All of that stuff. He confirmed that she had driven over to Walmart like an hour or so ago and lamented not making the most of this last goodbye with her. Then, in the middle of us having some real heart to heart, I hear him shout mom. Out of nowhere. She wasn't dead, she just walked through the front door super confused as to what was going on. Long story short, my ex had lied and she did so because she wanted to hurt me just like I had hurt her. This is about the point that I need to tell you that I did cheat on her with a girl in college, but was at least man enough to admit it and have her break up with me. I'm not saying I didn't deserve some kind of revenge, but man, not that bad. Brutal. Ex boyfriends can be jerks, sure, but ex girlfriends can be psychos. During college Christmas break of 2016, I had traveled all the way back to Pennsylvania from California to spend the holidays with my parents. It was kind of weird going to mostly independent college kid in a place that hardly ever gets called cold, to going back to living in my childhood bedroom in a state that becomes a legit winter wonderland around December and January. But I love my mom and dad and I don't care how much the flights cost, there was no way I was going to spend the holidays alone in California. So anyway, my old room is on the second floor of the house, directly above the sliding door that heads out into the decking in our backyard. It's a really heavy door, so anytime someone opens or closes it, it rumbles right up into my bedroom. This is in a house that was built back in the 50s too, so as you can imagine, the whole place has a lot of creaks and groans to it, but it is otherwise pretty sturdy. I should also add at this point that the part of town that my parents live at is pretty safe with a relatively low crime rate, especially to that of nearby Philly. The most intrusive calls they ever got tended to be from magazine salespeople and the odd Jehovah's Witness, and after my dad refused to speak with them, they stopped calling altogether. Point being, they never had anything remotely close to any kind of break in or home invasion for the entire time they were living in that property. Next thing is a brief confession for myself. I picked up a pretty horrible smoking habit during my freshman year of college, so whenever my parents went to bed I tended to stay up playing Siv on my laptop, sitting next to my open bedroom window while I smoked and drank tumblers of scotch that I had pilfered from my dad's liquor cabinet. After midnight, I would have my window open for anything from 30 minutes to two hours. I mean, it would purely depend on how cold it was outside or how tired I was, but I would generally let the room air out before spraying some air freshener so that tobacco smell didn't cling to anything. Too bad. I also had to use headphones to watch TV or listen to music so it wouldn't wake my mom and dad up. But I would tend to only ever use one earphone so I could keep an ear out for anyone coming down the hallway since they really wouldn't be happy if they found out I was smoking in the house. So one night I was in my usual routine of conquering the known world in an online multiplayer game of Civ when our house alarm suddenly starts blaring. I don't think I had heard that thing since I was about six or seven years old and I had completely forgotten how loud it was. So hearing it had me practically filling my underwear from being frightened out of my skin. The point being, everyone in the house is now incredibly awake and ready to head off whatever is about to go down. Now, my priorities might sound way, way off here, but initially my big worry wasn't so much that something bad might be happening, like a home invasion or something like that. It was more like me being terrified that my parents were about to realize I had been smoking and stealing booze from them. I was 20 years old at the time, technically underage, and my parents were old fashioned types, real sticklers for the rules. If they found out what I had been doing, there would be drama and lots of it. But somehow, when my dad stuck his head around my door all bleary eyed to make sure he knew where I was, he didn't seem to smell anything. I don't know whether this was because he was too tired and freaked out about about the alarm to notice or that he had noticed and actually just didn't care. But either way, he told me to go into their bedroom and stay with my mom until he could give us the all clear. So my dad goes downstairs, I'm assuming with a weapon in hand, and gets to work clearing the house as well as checking out the front and backyards to make sure there's no one hiding in the darker areas out there. He comes back up, tells me and my mom that he couldn't find anything and that it was probably just a false alarm. And then we all head back to bed. Or rather, they went back to bed, I went back to being a diplomatic genius on Civ 6. About an hour goes by and I start getting pretty tired, so I get up to close my bedroom window before heading to bed when the alarm goes off again. Once again, my dad goes downstairs, does a sweep of the ground floors and the yards, then comes back up to tell me not to worry and that he figured it was just the wind or something. I mean, it had been a pretty windy night, which honestly suited me because it meant the breeze aired my bedroom out. Like I said, it was an old house, so it wasn't out of the question that the wind could have rattled the doors or windows and set the alarm off. My point being, both me and my dad were chill about the alarm going off. Neither of us thought there was anything to worry about. So the next morning at breakfast, my dad is going through the alarm systems app in his iPhone, checking out some of the data readouts from the night before. All of a sudden he says, okay, that's weird. Apparently the backsliding doors were opened 14 times last night. 1. I was impressed the alarm system was so sophisticated that it could feed him that kind of info. I guess he shelled out big boy cash for that thing. 2. How could it have been opened that many times? Then? I am not kidding. Like five, 10 minutes later, there's a knock at our front door and it's the neighbor guy from the house down the street. He asked us if we had had any intruders over the previous night and we tell him no, or that at least we didn't think so. It's then that he tells us that he had actually caught someone on his security camera trying to break into his house, that the guy had tried to jimmy a lock or something before looking right up into his camera before getting spooked and bailing. We assumed that's about the time he had moved to our house, then kept at it when he realized it was the weaker target. That seriously freaked me out. The whole time I had been sitting there innocently playing sieve and sipping stolen scotch, there had been a guy trying to get into our house, maybe only six or seven feet below me. If I had bothered to look out the window at any point and directly downward, I would have locked eyes with this guy. He must have smelled my cigarette smoke, known someone was in the house, and it just didn't bother him in the least bit. He was more than prepared to face off with someone, although apparently not when he had seen my dad with a weapon sweeping the house and the yards in the Dark. I have always liked a scary story or a good horror film. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, they're my jam. I have never found like serial killers or whatever to be scary though. Like, I didn't think that human element to the horror was particularly potent. After that night, though, that all changed. It struck me how evil and predatory human beings can really be. How that guy had been creeping around our backyard for basically hours, right under my nose, and I had absolutely no clue that he was there. It was how he had managed to just disappear when the alarm went off too. And how he had the balls to come back once we had all gone back to bed. I mean, he was like a ghost or something, just vanishing into the darkness. I mean, think about it. My dad had checked out the backyard, tried to make sure there was no one hanging around, hiding out in the dark spots underneath the trees. And there was. There had been someone there. Just watching my dad walk around in his slippers or whatever he had on, just waiting for him to call off the search before creeping back up towards the house. Just thinking about it now gives me shivers. And now that I am back in California telling this story, I always make sure that all the windows and doors of my dorm are. Are locked. And that I double or triple check whenever I think something bad is about to go down. Because sometimes it seems you'll never know if someone is just lurking in the shadows until it's way, way too.