Real Encounters

*The Smiling Man's brother*

For this story to make sense you have to understand a few things... Our house is shaped like a rectangle. It is placed neatly on a block with a bunch of other rectangle houses. We all have tall privacy fences made out of wood and two gates on either side that let people into the backyard from outside. Mine and my sister's bedroom windows face to the back yard. There are also windows facing the street and the back yard on each side of the house respectively.

My parents went to bed very early per usual around 9pm and my sister and I were sitting on the couch watching TV. We live in an extremely safe neighborhood and have never had to worry about anything. We don't have a dead bolt on our front door and the door itself is rarely even locked. My dad keeps his garage door opener in his truck in the street. Really if someone wanted in, it wouldn't really be a problem.

My sister looks out the living room window and says there's a guy outside walking around the house across the street. The house across the street is generally empty as the man who owns it is a single man who travels to different cities as a robotic engineer. He has two cars both of which are home but sometimes he has rental cars.

We start watching this strange man walk around the house. We know it's not our neighbor because our neighbor is black and this man is very, very white. It's insanely obvious how white this man is even from across the street in the dark. He's walking really strangely too, almost in a silly manor. The way I would walk if I were trying to make friends laugh. He's semi crouched down but taking really big steps with his arms straight out at the side and his wrists limp letting his hands kind of dangle. Almost like Shaggy from Scooby Doo if that makes sense. The more we watch him the stranger and creepy this becomes. We decide maybe we should wake up our parents and tell them.

At the time I was 20 and regardless of being a semi adult, strange men are not something I like dealing with. My sister stands up to go wake up my parents and walks down the hallway going towards all of our bedrooms. At that moment the man stops for a second and snaps his head around and we make eye contact. I instantly felt my whole body turn cold. I get up and run to my parent's room near my sister talking loudly, "he saw me what the fuck he's so creepy!!" My parents are annoyed we woke them up but decide to come investigate.

As they're taking their time coming to see, I walk back into the living room and from the side peer out the living room window. It's a picture window so its very large and hard to really go anywhere in the living room without being seen outside if the blinds are semi drawn. When I make it to the window everything in me stops working. The man is now standing directly across the street from my house. He is extremely tall and lanky and he has this insane smile on his face. It was as if he is smiling as big as humanly possible, in the most manic crazed grin I've ever seen. But at the same time, his chin is touching his chest and his eyes are narrowed. I try to scream but all I can do is gasp.

I hear my parents walking down the hallway and they see the man too. He's just smiling there with my dad and me looking back at him while my sister and mom are standing away from the window a bit by the hallway. My dad makes a shooing motion and almost like a cartoon the guy pretends that my dad's hand has knocked him over and he's lying on the ground. My dad gets mad and opens the front door and yells at the dude to go away. The dude just lays on the ground. My dad slams the front door shut and sits on the couch just watching the guy. He lays there for another 5 minutes and then starting rolling his body across the street. The way you would do if you were told to stop, drop, and roll.

My dog is suddenly interested in what is going on and sees the guy and begins growling. All the hair stands up on his back and he begins shaking from the tension. My mom thinks this is a good time to dial 911. While my mom is on the phone with the police, the guy rolls all the way to our front lawn and begins to crawl towards our window. My dad tells my sister and I to go stand in the hallway as my dad grabs a pistol from his bedroom drawer. The guy crawls straight up to our picture window is staring eye to eye with our dog who is barking so intensely spit is flying everywhere. The man is just smiling at him.

Up close I can see that the guy is older, probably the same age as my parents, he has smaller eyes and a wide grin this entire time showing the tiniest little nub teeth I've ever seen. He is wearing a black hoodie and is still so incredibly pale. The man is not looking around at anything in our house so I don't know if he knew my dad was now holding a gun. My dad screams at the man from in the house to go away and when they make eye contact the guy pretends to get comically sad. Like a cartoon once again, he slumps his shoulders and takes this huge steps away from our window back to the sidewalk. He turns his back towards our window, waits a second then starts sprinting towards the space in between our house and our next door neighbors house where there is a the gate for our backyard. My dad starts screaming and opens up the back door expecting to see the guy but he never enters the yard and is waiting on the side of the house.

My dog is furiously trying to get outside to get to this man. We have two small windows on the side but my mom refuses to open the blinds covering them too afraid of what she'll see. About one minute later the police arrive with about 3 cars.

They search our property and the neighbors and find no trace of the man except a huge pile of shit. The guy literally took a shit next to our house. They continue to search the block and we are given the okay its all clear. The police continue to scan the area and we all try to get some sleep. The next day we buy a dead bolt and my dad secures the area, and picks up the poo. A few weeks later we hear that they caught the crazy man. He snuck into the home of a family a few miles away and got caught trying to play with their little girls doll house at 2 in the morning. After calling the police and running some information the man was identified as a 57 year old man with severe bi-polar disorder who had stopped taking his medication. He lived with his younger sister who began staying with her new boyfriend and this upset the man so much that he rebelled by skipping his meds and 'running' around at night. He never did any harm but our peace of mind was definitely shaken up that night.