I’ll keep this short and sweet. A few years back, we were having a brutally cold winter. The snow had frozen into ice and covered everything. It was pitch black in the backyard when I went to let my dog outside one last time before bed that evening. As we exited the house from the sliding door of the walkout basement and onto the lower deck, I felt that something was off. Our house backs up to some woods, so I was accustomed to hearing noises from wildlife in the night. This night was different. Nothing made a sound except the arctic cold wind, but I had the feeling I was being watched. The entire time my dog was in the backyard, I looked around nervously, expecting a coyote or other predator to pop out of the tree line. My dog did his business, but afterward stopped and stared at a corner of the woods until I got creeped out and called him back inside. I quickly locked the sliding door and shut the curtains, unable to shake the uneasy feeling I had outside. After double and triple checking all the locks in the house, I went to bed.
Around 3:00 in the morning, I hear the muffled sound of my dog barking from the basement two floors below. I got up, stumbled down three flights of stairs and found him standing at the basement sliding door. He was peeking his head through the closed curtains, barking his head off with the hairs standing up all along his back. I tried calling him away from the door, but he wouldn’t let up. I dreaded peeking out the curtain to see what he was barking at after the uneasy feeling I had earlier in the night. Finally, I held my breath and swiped the curtain aside. I peered into the inky blackness, but saw nothing to cause any alarm. A wave of relief washed over me.
I figured it must’ve been a deer or raccoon in the yard that set him off. He whined at the door for a few more minutes until I bribed him upstairs with a dog cookie. I went back to bed and wasn’t disturbed again. That is, until the morning when I went to the basement to let out the dog. I opened the sliding door and walked out onto the deck as he bounded into the snow. My blood ran as cold as the subzero morning temperatures when I looked down. There, frozen into the ice on the deck, was a set of bare human footprints. They were very clear; I could make out each toe on the person’s foot. The prints were large and appeared to be from an adult male. Looking around, I noticed they started at the base of the deck, went to the sliding door and the window of the basement living room, then seemed to disappear off the side of the deck. I had my snow boots on, so I walked around the yard but I could find no trace of the footprints in the snow once they left the deck.
Keep in mind the daily temperatures that winter barely made it above 0 F, and the wind chill made it feel close to 20 below. Frostbite would set in within a matter of minutes for anyone walking around barefoot, especially in the dead of night. I never experienced anything like that again, but I did adopt a second dog shortly thereafter.