Halloween eve haunting

By: Robert

It was about 11:45 on October 30th 2004 when I decided to go to bed for the evening. Everything was normal, the wife, suffering from a cold, had gone to bed several hours before and was fast asleep. Our two dogs, Australian Shepard, faithfully followed me to our upstairs master bedroom as they have done since they were pups. Both dogs are extremely protective of my wife and me and respond to knocks on the door and uninvited guests with angry barks. The aggression is only for show as they have never bit anyone, but they will run towards someone and stop short to send a warning. This particular evening the dogs were uneasy for several hours before I retired to bed. Several times they had ran to the foot of the stairs and barked as if they had seen someone. Anyone who owns a dog knows that they will bark very differently for different reasons, fun bark, happy bark, stay away bark, etc. This was stay away barking, loud and mean. Each time I investigated all I found was an annoyed wife that had been awakened by the barking. The dogs had behaved this way a few other times over the four years since we moved into our new home, so I did not think too much of it. This evening was also different in that once I was in bed I could not get the dogs to sleep on the floor. I would order them down only to have them jump right back onto the bed within a few minutes. When one of the dogs jumped up causing my wife to kick at her from under the blanket I sat up to scold her and make her get down. What I saw next scared the hell out of me. Standing at the foot of our bed was a grey haired man wearing a dark shirt just looking at us. Because of the dog jumping on the bed my wife had also sat up and saw the man at the same time. She started yelling, “oh my god, oh my god, who is that?”. I turned to my nightstand to switch on the light only to find he was gone when I looked back. My wife at this point was scrambling for the phone to call 911 and I was reaching for my gun. All I was thinking was that we had an intruder and I was going to shoot his ass. I asked my nearly hysterical wife where he went and she responded that he just turned and vanished. I assumed her answer meant he had run out of the room in response to the commotion so I followed with gun in hand. I called our dogs several times to help with the search only to find they were cowering back on our bed with my wife. I scanned the house by myself, gun in one hand flashlight in the other. After searching every room, under every bed and in every closet I concluded that the intruder had somehow gotten away. I wondered how this was possible as all the doors to the outside were securely locked and dead bolted. I searched the house one more time and then made a walk around the front and back yards with the same results, no one was there.