A month or two ago I set up a new video recorder system on my network, as I wanted to do some home automation stuff, like send a message to my phone when the cat is at the front door, or play a chime through my speakers when the pizza guy arrives. The set up was a breeze, and within the hour I had our front door camera hooked up, and object detection running. It even came with a cool little dashboard that would let me view snapshots of the things it detected, with the detected objects having a coloured border around it, and a confidence percentage.
At first it was kinda fun, logging in and seeing the neighbourhood cats wander through, or watch the postie deliver the mail. The object detection wasn’t perfect though, as it regularly detected my cat as a person, or myself as a cat, and with a roughly 70% score for everything, correctly detected or not. Not enough training data I guess.
One day I was sitting at work and I logged in to see if my parcel had arrived. I was browsing through the clips, when I came across a person that was detected at 3am the night before. The only thing was, there was nobody there. The software was sure it had picked up something though, as it was 100% sure that it was a person. I was confused, but wrote it off as a bug. After all, the software was 74% sure that I was a cat, despite having two arms, two legs, wearing jeans, and carrying a shopping bag..
That afternoon I got home and I told my wife because I thought she might find it amusing. When I mentioned what time it happened, gave me an odd look. She works from home and works nights, so she’s always up until about 6am or so.
“Now..”, she said, frowning slightly, “last night I was sitting in my room working, when I heard the screen door rattle as if the cat was pulling at it, wanting to come in”. She looked over at the door, paused for a moment, then continued: “but she was asleep in my room. I figured it was one of her little friends stopping by, seeing if she could go outside to play”
I thought about this for a moment. I was still convinced it was a bug, but I was now thinking that something had caused the camera to record, but the bug had meant it recorded too early or too late and just showed me an empty image. Given that we have several cats in the neighbourhood, and at least one of them has tried to follow me inside when I got home from work, that was probably it.
Or so I thought, until the next night, when I was dragged out of a deep sleep by my wife, who looked a bit concerned. It was about 2:30am.
“I just heard that sound again. The cat is definitely inside, as she’s sleeping on my chair in the loungeroom”
I grabbed my phone, opened up the dashboard and opened the live view. I watched it for a second, and..
..nothing. Well, at least for a moment, then I heard the door rattle, and saw on the camera, delayed by about a second, the screen door move back and forth. It was windy outside, but with the door being in an alcove, the screen door isn’t affected by the wind. I switched to the clips, and about 2 minutes prior, the camera had outlined a person again, with 100% confidence, but this time there was a shadow that looked vaguely human.
I was creeped out by this point. I got out of bed and grabbed my flashlight. It’s a sturdy metal one that is stupidly bright. If someone was running at you and you pointed it at them, they wouldn’t be able to see anything for a minute or two. It’s a seriously good flashlight.
I headed out into the loungeroom and towards the front door. I could still hear the screen door rattling behind the wooden door. It was absolutely not a cat, and absolutely not the wind. Our cat sat up and looked at me with a sleepy blink. Apparently she couldn’t hear, or didn’t care, about the rattling. She’s normally super interested in every noise, so this was odd for her.
My wife stood in the doorway between the hallway and the loungeroom while I flicked on the front door light and called out “WHO’S THERE?”. There was no answer. I then shouted “IF YOU DON’T GET OFF OUR FUCKING PROPERTY RIGHT NOW, IT WILL NOT END WELL FOR YOU. LEAVE NOW”, but the rattling still continued. Our cat was now partially sitting up, looking at me with concern. I inched closer to the door, waiting to see if my shout did anything, but it didn’t. My wife was visibly shaken by all this, so to end all of this, I turned my flashlight on full power, turned the deadlock knob and slowly opened the door. I’ll never forget what I experienced, for as long as I live..
I was met with the most terrifying sound I have ever, or will ever hear. It sounded like a man loudly saying “AAAAAAAAAAA”, but there was no trace of a soul in the voice. None. It was just a single flat noise. It didn’t have a start either. There was no exhaled breath, no increasing volume, no click in the throat to signify the start of the sound. There was silence, until the door was opened a fraction, then the “AAAAAAAAA” began.
You know how you look at an AI generated person and you can tell it’s not human, even though it absolutely looks human? That was the noise. My brain was shouting at me that there was something definitely not right with the sound I was hearing, and that fear actually trumped the fear one would normally feel when met with an unexpected, loud sound. And throughout all of this, there was absolutely nobody at the door. Nobody.
I stood there, rooted the spot for what felt like an eternity until my wife gave a terrified yell. I slammed the door shut with a frightened shout and backed away until I collided with the bookshelf on the opposite wall, sending items scattering. I looked over and my wife was crouched down, shaking violently and crying, trying to ask me what the fuck it was but being unable to because of the sobbing and shaking.
“Oh jesus fuck I don’t fucking know what the fuck that is” I said, starting to shake myself, unable to take my eyes off the door. The noise continued on outside, muffled by the door. The cat had leaped off the couch where she was sleeping and stood in the middle of the loungeroom, tail straight up and puffed out, a fuzzy exclamation point. “I’m not opening that door. I don’t know.. I don’t know what to do” I said, a secondary wave of panic starting to rise in me.
I sat down on the floor, my eyes still fixed on the door, listening to that awful droning noise continuing for about 15 minutes or so. Eventually the noise started to drift off. It was on the move. I heard it turn out of the alcove and head up the path towards the road. It eventually faded out of earshot, and after about 30 minutes, we had both calmed down.
Needless to say, neither of us slept that day, and I went to work tired and feeling rattled. I was dreading that night, as I knew I had to sleep at some point, but by the end of the day work had distracted me enough to where I was able to get into bed and sleep that night.
Fortunately, we haven’t heard that sound since, but I’ll never forget it, because what I heard was the least human sounding human I had ever experienced. Simultaneously more human and less human than a Google Assistant voice, or a throat back, or a heavily digitized voice.
I still don’t know what was at the door, and I hope I never find out because I don’t think my brain can take another fright like that.
It’s 4am, so it’s time for me to sleep, though writing down what happened will probably ensure that I won’t get any kind of sleep.
