Real Live Horror

It's getting close to Halloween, my favorite holiday. For most this is a time of cuddling up on couches and watching scary movies, or gathering around the flicking lights of a campfire for spooky ghost stories. I love a good horror movie, won't pass up a change for ghost stories, but what really gets me is true accounts of horror and mystery.

Earlier this week I stumbled across a Youtube channel called Mr. Nightmare. I am loving this channel. One video really stood out, because it brought back memories from my childhood that I would rather forget, but I know I never will. These are the memories that make me check the doors and windows multiple times before I go to bed. Memories that make look over my shoulder while walking my dog in our backyard at dusk. After all these years I still have the urge to reach for a gun when I hear a sound outside.

The video was 10 Real Creepy True Stories. This is my creepy true story. During the summer of 1988 we moved, not to far, just across the county to a house on a small private street, the area was pretty rural but a road in front of the houses acted as a short cut between two well traveled roads. Behind the houses was a hill densely covered with trees. Most of the husbands on the road worked nights, so most evenings it was just women and children home alone.

Not long after we moved in one of our neighbors mentioned that occasionally they would experience a "prowler" or peeping tom. The lay out of their house was nearly identically to ours, yet they had replaced their huge kitchen window with a much smaller window. The wife had reported that she had seen someone looking in the window at her several times while home alone.

I don't remember what our first encounter with him was. I remember a few times when my sister and I was home alone we would hear someone knock on the door or window, and when we checked no one would be there. He liked to sit just inside the tree line, we could see the glow at the end of his cigerette as he watching our houses. It wasn't constant, he would go months, sometimes a couple years without bothering us. He knew our names, sometimes he would call out to us late at night, just to startle us. One 2 occassions he poisoned our dogs, one dog was able to be saved, one sadly passed away. Another neighbor had a puppy disappear. Us kids found it, dead, tied to a tree on the hill. This was as violent as he ever got, thankfully.

One New Years eve, a friend from the neighborhood and I were home alone. My parents and sister were at New Years parties. The friend and I were old enough to be home alone, so that wasn't an issue. She was trying to lock my front door, the lock was finicky. I was down the hall. Suddenly I heard 3 loud bangs, she started screaming. I ran down the hall and found her with a shocked look on her face. She said she had been standing, straddling the open door trying to figure out how to get it to lock. It was being very stubborn. A man appeared out of no where and slapped the window 3 times before taking off running. We locked the door, grabbed a gun from the gun case and waited for an adult to come home.

A few times we would find hammers, screw drivers, or other tools on the front porch. When I was in high school I was reading a book by John Douglas, former profiler for the FBI. I hadn't had the book long, when it disappeared. I tore the house apart looking for this book. One night I devised a plan. I thought I knew who took the book, so I left our mysterious prowler a note. I told him if he returned the book so I could finish it, he could have it when I was done. I left the note on the TV. A couple days later I woke up and found the book sitting on the coffee table. Tell me, what would a prowler want with a book about killers, rapists and stalkers?

I believe the prowler had to be a career criminal, that would be a logical reason for him sometimes taking a year or two off before coming back to terrorize the neighborhood. Many of you may be asking yourself why we didn't call the cops. We did, our neighbors did, we would occasionally have cops laying in our bushes waiting to try to catch this guy. This was before Kentucky passed our Castle Doctrine law, but the Sheriff's office advised us that if we ever got a shot at the guy to take it.

We have sense moved away, but one of the girls we grew up took over her parents home, she has installed cameras around her house. She posted on facebook not long ago that she couldn't sleep, it was super early in the morning and she was sitting at her kitchen table, drinking coffee because she had gave up on going back to bed. Movement on one of the monitors caught her attention, a man was standing in her long driveway, just staring at her house. She watched him for several minutes, trying to decide if it was worth calling 911 over, she knew he would be gone when they got there. Then he just turned and walked away.