I’d almost forgotten that this happened, but here we go…
About ten, fifteen years ago, my mother, brother and I lived in a tiny apartment complex. There were all of six units. The apartments were laid out in a U shape, so that four of them faced inwards towards the driveway and the two at the end of the U faced… the street, more or less. We lived in the middle one on one side, so that we faced the driveway.
This is where it gets tricky to describe… When you entered our apartment, from the door you could see into the dining area (just a vague ‘arch’ there, no real door) and then the sliding glass door into the backyard. The majority of the living room/dining room was to the left of the front door as you entered. The living room was small, so you had to take a detour around the television and turn right to get to the hallway. There was a bathroom to the right, and a bedroom to the left, almost at the end of this 10-15 foot long hallway. At the end of the hallway was the second bedroom. This bedroom had a large window that faced into the ‘backyard’, about four and a half to five feet off the ground. I was somewhere between 4th and 6th grade when we lived there and I couldn’t see out without standing on something.
As for the ‘backyard’, it was little more than a back porch. Every apartment had its own carport (the ones facing each other shared with the apartment next door). So there were wooden gates that led from the carport into the backyard. One side of the gate connected to the apartment wall, the other to a storage area that was outside. So you go through the gate, you’re standing on the back porch, right next to the sliding glass door. It’s not more than 3 feet from the door to the end of the concrete slab. Then another foot or so and then the six foot tall wooden fence that surrounded the backyard. The horizontal slats for the fence were all on the other side, so that there were none on the ‘inside’ where we were.
If you stepped past the sliding glass door (on the other side of the door from the entrance gate), just beside it were the washer and dryer side by side. They barely fit on the ‘porch’. Stepping beyond the dryer, you were now on dirt with a few stepping stones placed (got horribly muddy when it rained) ending at the square clothesline. This thing sat right beneath the second bedroom window and spun so that you could stand in one spot and get all the clothes on the line; or hang them up. The bedroom window was even higher from the outside than the inside.
Now that all those boring details are out of the way…
One evening, we’re watching TV in the living room (from which there’s a clear view of the porch, remember?) and my younger brother wandered off for some reason. Suddenly, he comes back from down the hall and reports that he just saw ‘an alien’ in the back bedroom window! My mom scoffs and sends me to investigate. As my brother seemed genuinely scared, I’m not exactly thrilled with this task. But I eventually go look and see… nothing.
Now there was a neighbor kid who lived across the street and didn’t like us. He did various things, including stealing something from us at one point; I think it was one of our bikes. So my mother said it was probably him, playing a joke on us, wearing a Halloween mask. With the two of us being somewhere between 7 and 13 (I don’t remember the exact date…) this explanation satisfied us.
But, thinking over it now, there are a few things that don’t add up.
- If it was the neighbor kid, he had to get in the backyard somehow. The gate was not at all quiet. It creaked and banged whenever anyone used it. It creaked and banged whenever there was a storm, too, even if it was fastened shut.
- Assuming that someone went in that way, they’d have to go past the large sliding glass door. The curtains were sheer, as nobody could see into the backyard in the first place and nobody was supposed to be there besides us, so we should’ve seen… something.
- There was absolutely nothing to stand on back there that wouldn’t have made a loud racket from being dragged about. The neighbor kid was a year or so younger and slightly shorter than I was. If I couldn’t see into the window, neither could he. Nor could he have hung from the clothesline. Not only did my brother only see ‘a face’, but the clothesline spun and was generally unstable. True, he could’ve held a mask up to the window, but then he wouldn’t have been able to tell when my brother saw it and left.
- A burglar, “casing” the place? My brother was adamant that it was ‘an alien’ with big eyes. What would a six foot tall man be doing wearing an alien Halloween mask? And, again, how did he get into and out of the backyard without anyone seeing or hearing? The fence surrounding the backyard area was certainly not new and not in the best of shape, had anyone tried to climb it.
My brother couldn’t have gotten the idea of ‘aliens’ from TV, since my mother absolutely forbid any ‘scary’ shows. Shows about aliens, ghosts and magic were all out. She let us watch the original Star Trek, but that was about it. And the ‘monsters’ on there don’t resemble what my brother claimed to see. I don’t even remember seeing any alien Halloween masks at that period of time. We lived there for several years, through several Halloweens, and I don’t remember seeing any of the numerous trick or treaters wearing an alien costume. Nor do I remember seeing any in the store before Halloween, though I’ve seen alien masks for sale in the past two or three years.
Whatever it was; prank, burglar, alien or simply an overactive imagination… My brother never saw it again. I never saw it.
And my mother? She never said anything about seeing anyone leave the backyard when my brother and I went to ‘investigate’. Even though the sliding glass door curtains were sheer and the back porch light was on.
Now that I’m writing it out, over a decade later, it gives me the creeps again. I severely doubt it was a kid and, if it was a grown-up, were we about to get robbed when my brother scared him off by spotting him?
Or was it… something else?
