Ghosts Are Better Than This
“I was about seven years old. My brother was about 10. It was well past our bedtime when our mom woke up off the couch to put us to hbed. Our dad worked construction out of town back then, so it was often just us three at the house for weeks at a time. Up the stairs and to the immediate right was our parents’ bedroom. Going left put you in the middle of a hallway.
Taking another left down that hallway led to my brother’s room. The opposite end was my room, which was also across the hall from our upstairs bathroom. At either end of the hallway are windowed doors that we always kept locked and rarely used. The door on my end led to a balcony overlooking our front yard, and the door on my brother’s end opened to our back porch.
My brother and mom both had a habit of waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. I only knew this because I was always a light sleeper and they just couldn’t help flushing with the door wide open. This night, however, my brother stopped on his way to his room and came back towards the bathroom. That’s when he made a comment that chilled me to the bone.
He told me: “I’m gonna try to pee before I go to bed tonight. The past few nights, I’ve been too afraid to walk to the bathroom. I keep seeing a man wearing stripes at the end of the hallway.” I don’t know if my mom wrote it off as my brother telling ghost stories to try to scare me, or if she was already half asleep and didn’t catch it, but she didn’t react at all to my brother’s confession.
I, on the other hand, was terrified by it. The fear of seeing a ghost-like that at the end of the hallway or through the windows is the reason I started running from the stairs to my bedroom at night. Years later, when I was about 18, my mom and I were having a conversation in her car about a dog named Max that we’d had for a very short time when I was little.
We were sharing stories about Max’s tendency towards destroying my shoes and other unruly behaviors, when my mom blurted out, “Do you remember that time I opened the front door for the cops and Max ran inside to the kitchen and started tearing open that big bag of dog food we had?” This really caught me by surprise.
In all the years I lived in that house, we never once called law enforcement as far as I was aware. I asked her what she was talking about and she looked equally surprised, as if she had just revealed something by accident. Then, she said: “Oh, that’s right! I never told you about this because you were too young at the time…”
She continued: “One night, I woke up hearing noises outside my window and, when I looked outside, I saw a man staring into my bedroom.” She went on to describe how turning on the lights caused him to take off running, and how she had grabbed my dad’s pistol before calling the authorities. I started to ask some more questions about the experience until something clicked in my head.
My mom said she couldn’t remember all the details she gave them when they showed up, but she remembered describing the man as a tall white male, wearing a striped shirt and jeans, with short dark hair, or something like that. They said it matched the description of a man they were looking for in the area. It turns out he had just escaped from behind bars, where he’d been charged with murder.
Now, I know it sounds so obvious hearing those two stories back to back, but it wasn’t until a few years ago, in my mid-20s, that I pieced together that my brother had unknowingly warned us about a murderer who had spent multiple nights staking out our home. Who knows what he had been planning to do…”
