He Was Watching Through the Blinds

G'day mates, it's B-Buster here, and before the episode begins, I would just like to let you know that Be Scared, which is produced along with Studio 71, features scary stories from around the globe on a weekly basis that aim to fuel your nightmares with a smile. And if you enjoy the podcast, it would be great if you could hit that subscribe button and drop a review. But thanks for listening guys, and without further ado, let's begin. This happened when I was in high school in the early 90s, in a small town in Iowa. This was way before everyone had cell phones, cameras everywhere, or doorbell cams. Which meant that if something weird did happen around your house, half the time nobody believed you unless they actually saw it themselves. Our house sat right by the edge of a long bike trail that used to be an old railway line. During the day, people walked dogs or rode bikes through there, but at night it was basically empty. The back of our yard faced the trail too, with nothing but a short chain link fence separating it. The first time that I noticed anything strange, I honestly thought that I was just being paranoid too. So I woke up one night at around 1 or 2 in the morning with that feeling like something was standing nearby. You know that feeling when you're suddenly wide awake for no obvious reason? My bedroom window faced the backyard and the blinds were closed but not perfectly. There were small gaps where you could see outside. At first I didn't see anything. But after a minute I noticed movement in the yard, like someone shifting their weight or something. It looked like a person standing near the fence line. I couldn't see details, just a dark silhouette or an outline. I assumed it was someone walking the trail and looking into the yards for whatever reason, but it creeped me out a bit, but I convinced myself that it wasn't a big deal. But then it started happening more often. Every few nights I'd wake up with that same feeling. Sometimes I'd hear a faint sound nearby near the window, like someone brushing their hand against the screen or lightly tapping the frame or something. Once I heard what sounded like someone breathing outside too. Not loud but close enough that it made my skin crawl for sure. I told my parents after the third or fourth time about this and my dad checked outside with a flashlight one night, but of course there was never anyone there when he looked. After a while too they started assuming that it was just animals or maybe branches hitting the house or something. But one night, during the summer, I heard something that was different from the usual noises. It sounded like someone slowly dragging their fingers across the metal screen of my window, not scratching aggressively but just sort of lightly running it along the mesh. It lasted maybe five seconds, and then it stopped. That was the first time too that I ran straight into my parents' room. My dad grabbed a baseball bat and went outside, but again there was nothing. No one in the yard, nothing on the trail, no footprints or anything. But after that they started locking the backyard gate at night, but the weird stuff kept happening. Eventually too I sort of just got used to it in a strange way. I still hated it, but I stopped reacting every time. Months went by like this too. Then winter hit and everything changed. One morning my dad was outside shoveling snow and he noticed footprints behind the house. They came from the bike trail, walked straight up to my bedroom window and then went back that same way, just one set of prints but whoever it was had clearly been standing right outside of my room. After that though, my parents finally took me seriously. My dad installed a motion light facing the yard and for a while, thankfully nothing happened. But then one night, it all kind of came together. My parents were out at a friend's house and I had two friends over. We were getting ready to go to a movie and one of my friends went to my room to grab something and immediately yelled for us. We walked in and the motion light outside was on. When I looked at the window there was a man as well, standing about a foot away from the glass staring directly inside and he wasn't trying to hide it at all. He looked rough too, like somebody who hadn't slept in days. Messy hair, dirty jacket, just standing there watching us like we were something interesting on a TV screen. All three of us started yelling at the same time. The guy didn't move right away either, which made it worse. He just kept staring for a couple of seconds before slowly walking off toward the trail. We locked ourselves in the bathroom and we called the police instantly from the kitchen phone. They showed up about 15 minutes later, but obviously the guy was long gone by then. The officers walked around the yard in the trail but they didn't find anyone and they were polite but you could tell that they thought that we might have exaggerated things. A couple of weeks later, something weird happened that made my stomach drop. My mother had the local paper on the table and there was a story about a man who had been arrested a few towns over for breaking into houses and watching people through windows. Apparently he had been caught after someone saw him trying to get into the back door late at night and that mug shot photo, I will never forget it. It looked exactly like the guy that I saw outside of my window, down to the clothes and everything. I don't know how long he had been coming around our house for before I noticed him, but it could have been weeks, could have been months, maybe even a year. The police never contacted us about it and we never followed up either, but after he got arrested, I can say that the noises outside of my window, they stopped completely. To this day, I still sleep with my blinds fully closed, that whole experience kind of burned the habit into me I think. And yeah, whoever that guy was, I'm really glad he eventually got caught because looking back on it now, the fact that he stood outside of my window that many times without anyone noticing it, is honestly the scariest part of the whole thing. So this has been going on for a while now and I figured that I should put it out there at least somewhere. Not sure if anyone will relate to it, but here it is. So I live with my grandma in a small trailer, in a rural area. The place is right near some old mining tunnels that were shut down decades ago and from what I've read, a few people died in collapses and accidents there. I didn't dig too much about it when we moved in, but now I kind of do. The trailer is one level, no attic, no basement, four locks on each door and windows are always shut. We had an alarm system for years as well, so there's no way anyone could have just got inside. The layout is pretty simple. Kitchen and living room are open, the door to my grandma's room is in the living area and the only hallway leads to my room. The first weird thing that I noticed was in the living room, around 5.30 in the morning. It was still dark and my cat's smokey was sitting on my lap while I was reading. When out of the corner of my eye, I saw something black sort of peeking from behind the armchair, just watching me. The second that I made eye contact with it, it ducked behind the chair though. I stayed there for a bit, unsure if I had actually seen what I had seen, but then I realized that my cat was staring at the same spot too. This repeated itself for over an hour as well. I didn't go back to my room at the time too because it seemed like it moved in that direction. There were the footsteps, heavy, like boots walking up to my door, stopping and just staying there. I never heard them leave, motion sensors didn't trigger, my grandma doesn't wear boots inside obviously and she wasn't awake. Another night at around 2 in the morning I was in her room as well, 5 feet away from her and heard footsteps circling the living room. I started noticing shadows more often than as well. One night in my room I saw a dark shape in the corner and when I looked directly at it, it ducked like it didn't want to be seen again, but then it reappeared at the foot of my bed, doing the same thing. Another time on the ceiling corner, I saw what looked like a head with a six horn-like projection to it. My first thought was, I must be going mad but my cat was staring straight at her too again, hair standing on end and she was hissing. The scariest moment was in late October though. I was in the kitchen reading at the table, my grandma was outside talking to someone, my foot was resting on a chair completely still when, out of nowhere the chair got yanked back like somebody grabbed it and pulled hard. I nearly jumped out of my skin. I've had this being watched feeling for years now and I remember vague things from when I was like four or five, like hearing voices under my bed. Hard to say if it was anything actually, but there's also been tapping on walls, a single knock on my door that didn't trigger the motion sensor and loud slams outside the trailer that nobody else seemed to notice but me. But then again, even my grandma occasionally hears weird noises that she cannot explain. Pets notice it too, every cat and dog that we've had stares at corners, sometimes barking or growling, but there's nothing there and it's always pretty consistent as well. Honestly, I don't feel physically threatened by anything but it's like there's a presence that just observes and test limits here. It's been happening more frequently over the last six months and now I'm not the only one noticing too. My grandma caught a shadow move in the living room while she was inside. One night my dog went into full alert mode, growling and backing up at a corner that I was staring at, but again there was nothing there that was visible. At this point, I don't know what it is. It's not violent thankfully, but it is certainly very unnerving. It follows me around the trailer, moves objects subtly and leaves that feeling in my chest and I'm being watched constantly as well. I'm thinking of setting up some cameras, but even if I do catch something, I don't know what I would do next. If anyone has dealt with something like this, especially attached to a person or a small living space, I would really appreciate any advice you can give me. I'm not sure if it's like residual energy from the minds or if whatever this has latched onto me or us, but either way, it's exhausting just being home sometimes and I'm really getting sick of it. So I've been thinking about this memory for years and honestly I still don't know what to make of it. I'm sharing this because, well, maybe someone else out there has experienced something similar or maybe there's a legit psychological explanation for it that I just haven't thought of. This happened way back in 1985 and I was living with my grandparents in a small town near Marysville, Washington. I was around two or three years old at the time and even though I was tiny, this memory has stuck with me perfectly all these years. My crib was in their living room right next to a big floor to ceiling window that looked out into the thick patch of woods there. The house was tucked back from the road with no neighbors in sight. One afternoon I was put down for a nap and when I woke up, it was quiet except for this soft sort of tapping against the window. I got up in my crib and that's when I saw it, a figure standing outside. I can't describe it as human exactly but it was humanoid in shape but whatever it was, it was massive, almost filling the height of the window and completely dark. Not a shadow and not fog but just thick black and a shape. It didn't move like a person, it almost shimmied in fact, like it wasn't completely solid. At first, being how young I was I suspect, I didn't feel scared. It leaned toward the glass though just sort of watching me but then it did something weird. It cupped its hands around its face and made this gesture like it was trying to see me better and then waved. I remember laughing and waving back and it honestly felt kind of silly like someone playing peekaboo but then it changed. The hands went upside down, palms facing the face now, fingers pointing down and it sort of leaned closer to the glass. I don't know why but the second that it did that, terror hit me like a wall as well. I remember my chest tightening and my stomach sort of being full of butterflies and I just screamed. Not a quiet toddler scream as well but full on hysterical. My grandmother came running and I could barely breathe, I was crying so hard. When she looked out the window, the window was empty. My grandfather checked the yard and around the house but nobody was there. The woods were silent and it just didn't make any sense. But I knew that I had seen something and I was trying to communicate this with them, being so young at the time it was hard but there was no trace left. Even now though when I think about it, I get that same heavy pit in my stomach. I know that childhood memories can be unreliable or reconstructed over time but I've never remembered it differently. The shift from playful to horrifying was so real and it's always so vivid in my memory too. I've wondered a lot about what could explain it. Could it have been just my imagination at the time? Could a two year old brain interpret natural shadows or light in such a distorted and tense way like that? Or was it something else? Has anyone else here had a memory from super early childhood that involved a humanoid figure like this that started playful and then instantly became terrifying? Also don't be afraid to question this because I'd like to hear if there's a neurological or psychological explanation for it or if maybe someone has seen something like this themselves. Even after all these years I sometimes get flashes of that figure in the corner of my mind and it's one of the earliest things that I can remember and it's stayed with me for over 40 years now. This is something that happened when I was really young and it's one of those memories that has just never faded or changed over time. I don't automatically assume it was anything paranormal but I still don't have a clean or clear explanation for it. So when I was about 5 my family moved into an old two story house in a rural area. The place was built sometime in the early 1900s and had clearly been renovated in pieces over the years. Because the upstairs bedrooms were unusually large my parents decided to put all three of us kids in the same room. I had just gotten my own bed, my older brother had his across the room and my baby brother slept in a crib near the wall. One night I woke up randomly for some reason, there wasn't any noise that woke me, it was just one of those sudden wake ups where you instantly are alert. The room was dim because of some street light coming through the curtains and when I looked down at the side of my bed I noticed something that immediately made my stomach drop. It looked like long black shapes rising slowly from the floor on both sides of me. The easiest way to describe it is that they sort of look like arms but they weren't attached to anything. They didn't look solid either, more like darkness that was thicker than the rest of the room and they weren't moving fast, they were just slowly lifting upward toward the mattress. I remember freezing at first like I couldn't even move, then I looked across the room and saw my older brother sitting up in his bed staring down at the same thing happening next to him. That part is what stuck with me the most too over the years, it wasn't just me seeing something weird, he clearly saw it too. We both started yelling for our dad at the same time, he slept downstairs because he worked early mornings but he never came up. The shapes didn't react to the noise at all as well, they just kept rising a little higher until they were level with the top of the mattress. At some point I got angry instead of scared as well and I don't know why but probably just a kid reaction, I remember sort of yelling something like go away or stop it and the moment that I did that, the shapes slowly lowered back down until they disappeared completely. At the time I hoped that that would be the end of it too, I remember thinking but it wasn't. After that I noticed movement around my bed, there were multiple figures standing nearby, they weren't detailed enough to see faces clearly but they had to find outlines enough and looked human sized in posture. The best way that I could describe them as a kid was that they looked like people wearing long robes or cloaks maybe, that wasn't based on any sort of religion or anything, it was just the closest comparison that my brain had at the time. Now they didn't speak but they acted like they were sort of interacting with each other, they would move from my bed to my brother's bed and then toward the crib, it looked almost like they were sort of checking on each of us one by one, none of this lasted very long but eventually they moved towards the window and then were just, well gone, not like they walked away but like they faded out once they reached that area. The next morning my brother and I both brought it up without prompting each other, we described basically the same thing and we were kids and so we called them space people, mostly because that was the only idea that we had that fit something that didn't make any sense at the time. Now dad, well he laughed it off and told us that we were dreaming, after that though my brother refused to talk about it for years, when we were teenagers though it finally came back up again during a family conversation at one point and that's when he admitted that he had definitely seen something that night, he tried to rationalize it by saying that maybe we were half asleep and interpreting shadows from the outside or something, but I can tell you that there weren't any trees near that house and the way that the shapes moved didn't match anything like that. There were also other strange things in that house too, though none were ever as intense as that night, like if I went upstairs alone I would sometimes hear quick scraping sounds in my parents room, like something dragging lightly across the floor sometimes, it only ever happened when I was there by myself and if somebody else was nearby it stopped completely. The weird part though is that everything stopped around the same time that I hit my early teens, no more sounds, no more visual stuff, in fact there was nothing anymore. Going back now as an adult, I really don't know what to make of it, but the fact that my brother and I both describe the same details independently like that, well that part still bothers me a lot. I don't jump straight to like haunted house or anything, but I also can't fully explain why that one night was so vivid and consistent for both of us. One of those memories I guess that just sort of sits there without any clear answer. So this happened a few years ago when my wife and I went on a trip after getting married. Not exactly a big honeymoon or anything, more like a quick getaway because we both had to go back to work soon. This was in 2021 as well and we booked a small hotel in Vietnam because the reviews online were pretty solid and the photos looked decent too. First thing that I'll admit is that I am a bit paranoid about hidden cameras. I've seen way too many posts online about people finding them in hotel rooms and so when we checked in and got to our room, before we even unpacked, I did a quick sweep around the place. I checked smoke detectors, vents, behind the TV, inside the bathroom, mirror cabinet, all that stuff. Nothing looked weird. The room itself was pretty small though, bed, small couch, TV mounted on the wall, mini-fridge and a table near the window with a decorative metal box sitting on it. It looked like one of those gift boxes hotels leave with like snacks for guests or whatever. It had some wrapped dried fruit inside and also a little note welcoming us. At first I didn't think too much of it. Later that evening though I was standing near the window looking out at the street and I noticed that the box felt heavier than it should have when I moved it to grab something underneath. It was one of those small details where your brain kind of pauses for a second. So I picked it up again and turned it over. On the bottom there was a sort of thin rectangular panel that didn't quite match the rest of the metal. It looked almost like a battery cover that you'd see in a TV remote or something. That immediately set off alarm bells in my head. I tried to open it with my fingers but it wouldn't move. Then I grabbed a butter knife from the little dining area, tray and carefully pushed it into the seam. After a bit of pressure as well, the panel popped open. The side was a small circuit board in a micro SD card and in the center of it was a tiny camera lens pointed outward through a pinhole in the metal design. For a few seconds I honestly just stood there holding it trying to process what I was looking at. I could hardly believe my eyes. I mean, I know about these things but I mean you never really think that it's going to be you that is subject to it right? My wife thought that I was joking at first too until I showed her inside of the box and it was around 11.30 at night and the front desk phone in the room kept ringing to an automated message saying the line was busy. We tried calling the main hotel number from our phones but nobody picked up. At that point we were both very uncomfortable but also exhausted from travel, so we ended up unplugging the camera board and putting everything back inside of the box. I figured that we would deal with it in the morning with the manager. But then something else started happening that night. Around 1am we heard the door handle move. Not a loud bang or someone trying to kick the door in or anything but just a slow turning of the handle like somebody was checking if it was unlocked. We both froze upon hearing it. I got up and looked through the peephole but the hallway was empty as far as I could see. I assumed maybe someone had the wrong room number or something. Hotels can be weird like that sometimes. The next morning we were downstairs and asked about the manager. The guy at the front desk told us that he wouldn't be in until the afternoon. We showed him the box and asked why there was a camera inside of it. He looked genuinely confused but also not shocked. He said that the hotel buys these boxes from a supplier and that he'd never seen one open before like that. He told us that he would report it to the management and he apologized. It was a really weird response to be honest but we didn't really know what to do at that point. We decided to just keep the camera parts with us and see what the manager said later. That night too was when things started getting a whole lot worse. At about midnight the same thing happened again with the door handle except this time whoever was on the other side tried it several times, slowly turning it left and right like they were hoping the latch might give way. I opened the peephole again and this time I caught a glimpse of someone walking away down the hallway. I didn't get to see their face though. The next morning we asked the front desk again about the manager and again we were told that he wasn't available yet. That was starting to feel suspicious too. We decided to stay one more night because our flights weren't until later that week anyway but we pushed a chair against the door just in case this time. And night three was definitely the absolute worst. Around 2.30 in the morning the handle started moving again but this time whoever it was put actual force into it. Not kicking the door down but clearly trying to open it. The chair that we had wedged against the door rattled when the handle turned. My wife grabbed my arm and whispered that someone was definitely trying to get inside. I went to the door and shouted that I was calling the police. The handle stopped immediately and I looked through the peephole again and saw someone standing at the far end of the hallway near the stairs. They quickly turned the corner and disappeared before I could get a good look. After that though neither of us slept. The next morning we packed everything and we checked out two days earlier than we had planned. When we told the front desk what had been happening they acted surprised again and said that they'd reviewed the hallway cameras. We never did hear anything back from them and to this day we still don't know who put that camera in that box or why someone kept trying to get into our room at night. But the whole hotel was really suspicious in the end. Maybe it was just one person working at the hotel. Maybe it was someone who thought the room was empty and wanted to steal stuff or something. I have no idea but that trip was supposed to be our honeymoon and instead we spent the last three nights sleeping with a chair jammed under the door taking turns staying awake. I grew up in a small town in eastern Kentucky, maybe 3,000 people if you count the surrounding farms there. Everyone knew everyone's business around this place which honestly made this whole thing so much worse. So the person involved is my mum's mother, I'll just call her Carol here. I could all contact with her when I was around 8 or 9 and I haven't spoken to her since. That was more than a decade ago as well. Unfortunately though she never really accepted that. Carol has always had serious mental health problems you see. I'm not saying that as an insult too, I mean actual documented issues. My mum grew up dealing with a lot of manipulation and some pretty rough abuse in that house. My grandfather wasn't exactly stable either. My mum told me later that she used to kick holes in the walls and once cracked one of her ribs during an argument, stuff like that. By the time that I was born, my mum had already moved out and tried to put distance between them but Carol never really stopped trying to stay involved in our lives. At first it was just constant phone calls and showing up randomly but then it escalated into something way more obsessive. When I was about 7, Carol actually tried to go through the courts to get visitation rights with me. In Kentucky that kind of thing is technically possible in some cases but the judge shut it down pretty quickly because of the harassment complaints my parents had already filed. And so instead of getting access to me, she ended up with a temporary restraining order. That didn't slow her down much though. The first time that I remember being genuinely scared of her too was during a 4th of July festival that our town used to do every year. This was a sort of parade that went down the main road past the courthouse and ended near the river park. I was walking with a youth baseball group at the time and at some point I heard someone shouting my name from the sidewalk. I turned and saw Carol pushing through the crowd trying to get to me. She was yelling stuff about how my parents were keeping me from her and I froze because I didn't know what to do. My dad was driving one of the trucks in the parade a little ahead of us and he noticed the commotion. He pulled over, grabbed me and put me in the truck cab. Someone called the police and they ended up escorting her away. I remember then being more embarrassed than anything because half the town saw it happen. But a couple of years later she tried something even worse. So one morning she actually showed up at my elementary school. My parents had already warned the school about her and given them photos just in case but somehow she still made it inside of the building. The office called my classroom and told my teacher someone was there to pick me up early. I said no immediately and started freaking out. I remember crying and refusing to go anywhere near the hallway. My teacher figured that something was wrong and locked the classroom door while she called the office back. As I was out, Carol was down there insisting that she had permission to take me home. The school ended up going into a partial lockdown while they waited for the police and my mother to arrive. After that incident, the restraining order got upgraded and the school was told not to let her anywhere near the property ever again. For a while after that, things went quiet too. Then when I was nine, my little brother was born. Long after that, my parents decided that we were done dealing with the situation and moved us out of state to southern Indiana and I didn't fully understand why at the time but it made sense later. Even after the move, Carol kept trying to track us down. In fact, over the years she'd made dozens of fake social media profiles, sent emails to random addresses that she thought might belong to me and tried messaging my friends pretending to be somebody else. Most of her got blocked pretty quickly but every once in a while something would slip through and the weirdest thing that I learned about her came much later. When I was twenty, I went back to my hometown for the first time since we had moved away, mostly just to see what the place looked like now. While I was there, I knocked on the door of the guy who used to live next to us and we talked for a while and eventually he brought up my grandmother. He said that after we moved out she kept showing up around our old house at night and apparently she would walk around the yard shining a flashlight into the windows even though nobody lived there anymore. A couple of times he saw her sitting on the curb across the street just staring at the place. He also told me that apparently she used to wander onto his porch late at night bouncing a basketball for no reason and one time she even started yelling at his security camera like she thought somebody inside was watching her. He ended up calling the police on her more than once and hearing that honestly made my skin crawl a little bit because it confirmed that none of it was just childhood exaggeration, she really was that obsessive. As far as I know she still lives somewhere in that county and every once in a while a new fake account pops up trying to message me but I blocked them as soon as I realized who it is. At this point I don't feel angry about it anymore, just very very cautious. If she ever did try to approach me again I probably would just go straight to the police but after everything that happened growing up there's one thing that I'm completely sure about. I have zero interest in ever seeing her again. Today mates it's B Buster here.