The Man in the Window
When I was about 14 years old, my mother and stepfather had a house way out in the country, surrounded by woods. On the property next to ours was an abandoned house. One day, my little sister, four of my cousins, and I decided to explore it.
As we walked up to the house, we noticed a small headstone in the front yard. It was too faded to read. We looked at the window and could swear there was a man standing there looking out. There was no glass in any of the windows, just sheer curtains over them.
I boldly walked up to the window to check it out; nothing there. We went in and there were all kinds of dishes, broken furniture, and mail all over the floor. We read some of the mail, and the letters appeared to be love letters.
We decided to make the house a clubhouse for us kids. We began to make trips to our house across the field with dishes and all of the things we thought were salvageable. We then started cleaning up the house. We spent the rest of the day talking, playing, and sweeping the dirt into a big giant pile of garbage under a big wooden square of floor that you could pick up with an iron ring. Under the square was a dirt cellar. The entire time we all had feelings of being watched or that someone was going to touch us. We never talked about it until we got back home that evening.
My cousins went home and the next weekend only my sister and I went to the house to play. We were there maybe 20 minutes when this noise from far away started. At first I did not pay attention because we were talking. It steadily got louder and louder, this booming noise, like someone was using their fist or a hammer with all their might against a metal door! We just froze; I looked at my sister and shouted her name, because you had to shout over the noise! She just stood there frozen, staring at something. As I turned to see what she was looking at, I finally realized that the wooden square in the floor was moving!
With every BOOM the door was coming off the floor higher and higher. I finally just grabbed my sister and literally pulled her through the front window. Finally, we felt we were far enough away, so we turned back, and there in the picture window was the silhouette of a man!
We ran back and told our mother what had just happened and what she said was almost as bad as what we had just been through. She said, "Don't you kids ever go back to that house, you promise!" At first she wouldn't tell us why, then she said, "I didn't say, because I didn't want you to be scared. After you and your cousins were there and carried all that stuff over here and all. that night I was sound asleep and this banging noise started on the bedroom wall and got louder and louder. I laid there with my head covered! Finally, I said, ‘In the name of God, make it go away." She said it faded off and was gone. None of our dogs even woke up.
We never went back to that place or found out anything else. We just went on and grew up. Yet at different times in my life, myself, friends, and acquaintances have seen what can only be described as a "shadow" of a man at different houses I've lived in. For example, my daughter told me there was a man in her room a few years back, and he would sit on her bed and say, "Help me find it.” I know this is the man from the window in the woods!