When I was in my early twenties, my mom unfortunately passed away suddenly. Shortly thereafter, I was a young, new homeowner having inherited a modest home located smack dab in the middle of sparse field lands. It was my first time living alone, so my cats and I were anxious at first. And that’s all it was in the beginning, just a little normal anxiety.
At night, the tall dead grass swaying in the vast fields around us with the gentle winds began to blend with the familiar sounds of our surrounding life. Some nights, the cats and I would hear the occasional wild animal breaking through the crunchy, loud wall of the dead field weeds. They were pretty much the norm as far as wild invaders go, you know like raccoons, skunks, coyotes, cats, Etc. But I felt it when those casual sounds began to slowly shift into indicators of his presence.
Maybe it was the way my cats started to act nervous some nights. Or it could’ve been the way that I started to notice the sounds becoming different and more defined. The way all those feelings translated to me though, it felt like the burning sensation of eyes concentrating on me. I started keeping my blinds closed at night so every window was covered. Even then though, I’d wake up at all hours of the night, with maybe a faint memory of a dreamed sound.
Still new to living alone, I really did miss the strange sounds and the feeling of being watched as I dismissed it all until one day when I was watering plants outside, I noticed something. I noticed what appeared to be footprints outside of my living room and bedroom windows. The mysterious footprints were Indented in the tan bark.
That prompted me to do a perimeter walk around my field and I found some recyclables that had been gathered from throughout my field. The recyclables were all piled up on one edge of my field, right by the neighborhood road everyone used. Near that pile were some sleeves cut off from a sweatshirt and some other miscellaneous garbage, including water bottles and other metal items.
Okay, I figured, I’m just hearing some idiots scavenging or something. In an effort to ease my fears, I decided to take a walk on some of the other properties that bordered along mine. I knew the owners, so I checked with them and it was all fine. On the hill across from my main living rooms large windows though, I found something peculiar. It was a thick black piece of plastic cut into about a 12-in circle. The thing that was so strange about that piece of plastic though, was that the mud underneath it was pressed in in such a way that you could definitely tell someone had been sitting there and didn’t want to get wet. Around that site, I also found some spread out beer cans of the same brand and a couple of gas station pain pill packets.
It was after that when I decided to start studying tracking for myself. I learned how to spot and measure for actual human footprints and how to measure the gait, which I honestly never applied to any of my findings. Through following up on the footprints, I found a few spots where the barbed wire had been tied together in such a way that made it easier for someone to crawl under. I also found a few other places where it looked as though someone had bedded down for a short time with some more beer cans and snack wrappers.
My grandma, who lived across the street from me at the time, would call me at least once every 6 weeks or so to tell me that she could see what looked like a spotlight beam coming down our road in front of our driveways on her infrared cameras at night. When I would go outside and look though, I couldn’t see any sort of light at all. She even had me go up to her house across the road once to look and see the light on her monitor for her cameras and I did see the light that she was talking about, but when we’d walk outside to look, we couldn’t see it. I did do some research on that and found out that there are infrared spotlights for hunting that you can use in order to not freak out the wild game. You have to be using a device like a digital camera or cell phone camera to see it because infrared light is invisible to the naked human eye.
I then decided to buy a cheaper night vision camera that I could watch live on a monitor, since I couldn’t afford a DVR for recording footage. One night, while in my bedroom with the camera monitor on, I caught a glimpse of someone walking by my camera! It was a very quick glimpse like I said, but my heart pounded in my ears as I listened to his foot falls outside of my bedroom window! A couple of minutes after that, I could start to hear the neighborhood dogs all barking.
After that night, I started to notice that I was hearing the neighborhood dogs more and more. On some of those nights, I noticed that my cats would act strange and jumpy. One of those spooky nights, I went out on my front porch to smoke at around 11:00 p.m. I got outside and lit up, standing under my porch light. Then, right there in the silvery moonlight outside my porch light, I caught the glimmer movement next to my garage which was to my right. I looked over and watched a tall, slim figure walk from next to my garage to my neighbor’s property under a tree, right across the road! I watched this person as they reached the Texas Umbrella tree on my neighbor’s property, then they stood there for a moment and appeared to use a lighter to light something of their own.
So began the days of me just basically wading through everyday life, not knowing which neighbor or stranger that smiled at me at the gas station to suspect. I knew I had a night crawler, but I had not a clue as to who it could possibly be. That is until one day a clue finally came along…..