I was laying on the couch around 11:30pm one night last week. I was watching a DVR’d baseball game I’d missed earlier that evening due to a dinner at my in-laws house. My wife and daughter were in bed, but I had taken a week off work and when I do that, I use up every possible second of time awake I can get. Everything was going as planned for a while, in that I wasn’t doing a damn thing. I wasn’t worried about work the next day, I wasn’t stressing about work from that day itself, I was perfectly content. Now, before I go to bed every night, I go around the house and close all the blinds and make sure all the doors are locked. Since I was still up, I hadn’t done so yet. The way my house is set up, when you’re on the far end of the couch, you can see down the hallway and into the kitchen, where there is a window on the far wall. The way I was laying, I had a direct line of sight.

When I was starting to get tired and had decided to go to bed, I looked up from the tv, and I saw the silhouette of someone peeking in the window in the kitchen. For a moment, I was frozen in fear. I didn’t know what to do, I’d never been in this sort of a situation before. The man made a movement, and I sprung up. In the split second it took me to get to my feet, the figure was no longer there. I slowly walked to the window to make sure no one was in fact there. I got to the window and peered out, and what I saw is something I won’t soon forget. A man, probably six feet tall, wearing a tattered tuxedo, was tiptoeing in my backyard. When I say tiptoeing, I don’t mean he was intentionally walking quietly; he was walking like a cartoon walks quietly. He had his arms curled up to his chest, and with every step, he brought his knee as high as he could, and arched his back backwards, before leaning much too far forward, stepping down, and repeating the process with the other leg. He had a huge smile on his face, and a strange glistening to his eyes, like something that wasn’t there was shining off of them. It was a horrifying visage.

The man slowly tiptoed his way across my backyard, and I ran across the kitchen to the window over the sink to get a better view. When I got to the other window, he was gone. I spent about 20 minutes in the kitchen making sure he wasn’t anywhere in the backyard, and when I was confident he wasn’t there anymore, I went back to the couch. Now wide awake and alert, I decided I’d stay up and watch the rest of the game. Everything was fine for about 10 minutes, when I saw the figure tiptoeing past a window in the dining room connected to the living room I was laying in at the time. I immediately picked up the phone and called 9-1-1. I knew my wife and daughter were sleeping in the same room (my daughter has been having nightmares lately, it’s a phase), so I wasn’t too worried for them at the moment, and if I could spare them the horror until the morning, so be it.

The man tiptoed slowly along the side of my house, and when he passed the window, this time I waited for him to pass the next one. But he never did. I waited and waited. He never backtracked across the window he’d just passed either, so he had to be waiting between the two. I figured I’d just wait for the police to show up. I let my adrenaline get the best of me, and I went to the second window to see if I could get a glimpse of him. I wish I hadn’t.

I peeked my head around the far end of the window, and the man was there, staring at me with his wide, shining eyes. They were a shade of green I’d never seen in an iris before. I was mesmerized. I stood there frozen for a moment before the man finally made a movement. He brought a long, slim finger up to his grossly wide smile, pursed his lips, and (presumably) whispered, ”shhhh”, let out a slight giggle, and continued tiptoeing.

Here is a rough version of what this man looked like

I was let out of my apparent trance as the man continued around my house. He just tiptoed around it, through my front yard, like it was totally normal. He stopped at every other window and peered in, staring directly at me, each time stopping me dead in my tracks. He would eventually leave his post at whatever window he was at, and I was free to move about and follow him again. It seemed like the police were taking an eternity to get to us. The man finally once again reached the window I’d first spotted him at. He stopped for a brief moment, looked through the window but this time not at me, but into my kitchen. He then continued on his tiptoeing way, and this time, I heard him walk up the single wooden step to get onto my back deck. I looked out the window but at that angle I could barely make him out.

Then I heard the doorknob rattle. In my fear, I hadn’t even thought to lock the doors; I was lucky in this case. The doorknob rattled and rattled and rattled, for what seemed like forever, before it stopped. I heard the wood of the deck creak as the man continued across it. I went to the other window and looked out, and he was tiptoeing down the opposite step of the deck. He again looked right at me, freezing me in place, even though I made a point of not looking him in the eyes. It seemed as long as he looked in mine, he could do whatever he was doing to me. He shrugged his shoulders in a comical way, and then attempted to open my kitchen window from the outside. When he had no luck, he took a few steps back into the grass that covered my backyard, then, in the quickest motion he’d made throughout the entire ordeal, did a little dance in which he spun around three times.

The man then tiptoed away from my house, out of my backyard, and into the darkness. I stayed up the rest of the night and for several subsequent nights on extremely high alert. I have no idea who the man was, what the man was, what the man wanted, or where the man went. I also don’t know why the police never came. I looked in my call log on my phone, and I had in fact called 9-1-1. Nothing strange has happened since, but it was the single most terrifying night of my entire life, and I don’t know if I will ever quite fully understand it.