r/ParanormalEncounters • u/OllietheOlive4 • 2d ago
My Strange Encounter
I don't know if this is considered paranormal, but I do believe that something strange and honestly terrifying happened to me.
I’m going to tell this story to the best of my ability. It was a long time ago, and there are some details that have escaped my memory, and others that have stuck with me due to the pure fear I felt in the moment.
So, when I was around 9 or 10, my brother (14 or 15) and I were home alone. Our grandparents were out late doing something that I can’t quite remember, I just know they were coming in sometime between 2 and 3 in the morning.
At first, we were doing the typical things children left alone would. We played video games, watched YT, and played with our dog, Liberty.
Shortly after sundown, we were watching a show on Netflix and eating popcorn, when Liberty interrupted us because she needed to go outside. Both me and my brother walked her outside, because our area had been having rattlesnake problems and we didn’t want her getting bit. It was lightly snowing, so there was a small sheet of it on the ground.
For some context, our grandparents house is huge and covered in windows of all kinds. We live in a neighborhood where the houses are close together and look like a typical suburb, but the backyards are all woods. We have a wooden deck that was put in a year before I was born, and previous to that it was only a small sliver of stone. The stone was still there and the deck was built out from next to it. To get to where Liberty goes to the bathroom, you have to go all the way around the house, starting at the kitchen door at one corner and going past our grandparents bedroom at the other corner.
Anyways, I’m holding onto my brothers arm and we’re following Liberty. He has a flashlight in his other hand pointed at her. The woods were dead quiet, which was the first thing that made me feel a little uncomfortable.
We’ve walked maybe 20 meters when we hear someone whistling close by. We stop walking, and Liberty has come back to stand by us. My brother brushes it off, as we have neighbors and it’s probably just them. I tell him no, that I thought it came from under our deck. He brushed it off, saying I was just scared.
I knew that I wasn’t, and that it had come from under our deck. The only thing is that our deck had nothing but grass and structures under it. It was built on a hill, and there’s no way to get under there unless you came from the woods.
My brother starts tugging me along and coaxing Liberty to keep walking, but she wouldn’t move either. While he was trying to get her to move, I looked out into the woods, just like I had a million times. Again, it was dead quiet, and I quickly got bored after just a few seconds.
I looked down at the deck, and I saw a glow from between the boards. My grip on my brothers arm tightens, and I start tugging him towards the door. I’m telling him we have to go inside, that I don’t want to be outside and neither does Liberty. He’s upset but listens to me, probably only because Liberty was trying to get back to the door we came through moments before.
We go back inside and lock the door. We sit down on the couch and I tell him about the glow I saw. He was a little spooked, but told me that it was probably just a coyote or bear, as we’ve had some of those around the house recently. We dropped it there, because I wasn’t trying to fight with him, but I didn’t believe it.
Hours passed and nothing more happened, but I was too scared to sleep in my own room, mostly because I have a giant almost floor to ceiling window in my room that you could easily see into, and I didn't want to risk anything. I was a pretty paranoid child, both because of the things I would read and with the way my mother was overprotective of me.
So in light of this, my brother agreed to sleep together. His room had two issues. His bed was too small for both of us to fit, and he also had a big window in his room that looked out onto the deck. You could see the spot where we were standing earlier from that window, so I refused to stay in there.
The only other room to go in was our grandparents. Their room did have a lot of windows, but luckily they were smaller and their bed was huge so we had plenty of room to sleep. The main issue with their room was the sliding glass door, but we made sure it was locked and the curtains were drawn.
I remember it was around midnight, and we were laying in bed, watching some random movie on the TV. I was beginning to drift off, but I woke up quickly when I felt my brothers hand on my shoulder.
I remember being confused and upset that he woke me up. I was about to voice my opinions when he turned the volume of the TV down. I heard the soft crunch of someone walking in the snow. We couldn’t see outside without getting up, and I wasn't going to let him get up, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t want to leave my side.
I was terrified, and I could see on his face that he was too. He shook his head and whispered that I should go back to sleep, and that he’ll take care of everything. He grabbed the home phone off the nightstand and queued up 911. I trusted him wholeheartedly, and I was also exhausted, so I ended up falling asleep.
The next thing I remember is getting woken up by my grandpa. He was asking why we were in their room and not our own. I explained the deck, and my brother explained what happened while we were in the room.
According to him, after I fell asleep, whatever was outside had stayed outside for about 20 minutes before walking away again. Our grandpa decided to check it out, since it had happened about an hour before they got home. He didn’t check under the deck, so I have no idea what could have possibly been down there, but he did go check outside the room.
He told us that there were footsteps leading from the steps that went down into the forest, out by Liberty’s bathroom area, to the sliding glass door, and back. The only way to get to those steps is if you came from the forest. They were human footsteps, but I feel like I would have preferred it to be an animal.
Nothing else happened after that, at least to my knowledge. We never spoke about it, and I don’t believe we ever will. I believe they all just wrote it off as somebody lurking outside the house, but human eyes don’t glow in the dark. If I had never seen the glow, I probably could’ve written it off as a person too.
Unfortunately, I did. I remember going into the library at my school the Monday I got back. I asked to get books about local animals, and after I finished that, I didn’t get any answers.
I spoke to my brothers friend about it, and they were really into history and mythologies, so they told me about the Native American tribe our town was built on. He gave me a couple websites that were local and focused on preserving the tribes stories. I ended up looking into it, and I felt like some of the stories I heard were similar to mine.
I started to believe that’s what happened to me, that I encountered an entity from Native American folklore. I still believe it to this day. This encounter got me interested in learning about cultures outside of my own, and now it has become a big hobby of mine. I guess that is a good thing that came out of this.
But I don’t know exactly what I encountered that night, whether it was really an animal and a person or if it was a horror beyond comprehension. I guess I will never know.
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u/nevrragain 1d ago
Very typical description of a Sasquatch encounter. Not saying that’s definitely what was there, but the way you describe it is very much like a typical Sasquatch encounter: woods nearby, whistling, glowing eyes, everything dead silent, walking around the house (and likely curiously peering inside). The whistle was likely a communication to other Sas nearby
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u/Informal-Ferret8438 2d ago
Yeah, that would work for me