Chapter 69: The Watchers
The summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school a friend of mine and his family moved in with his grandma. They were buying a house that ended up having to have some work done on it so his grandma invited them to live with her while they waited for the house to get finished. She had a beautiful, big house and it was just her and my friend's cousin that lived there so there was plenty of room. My friend's cousin was two years older than me and was going into her senior year of high school.
The house's living room had a vaulted ceiling with floor to ceiling windows on all sides. It looked amazing, but gave you no real privacy. It wasn't a big deal though because the house sat about 500 feet off the road and had woods surrounding it on all sides.
Shortly after my buddy and his family move in I went over on a Saturday to spend the night. My buddy's room was small so we decide to sleep on the two couches in the living room. Just as we are getting ready to go to sleep about 1am we see someone walk past the window outside. We freak out. We get his dad who shuts off the lights in the house. About 100 feet away in a tree line you can see a small red light as two people pass a cigarette back and forth. They are just standing there watching the house. His dad calls the police then opens the front door and yells and the two guys take off. The police find nothing over there. The woods are full of little game trails so there is no telling where the guys went.
The interesting thing is that there are only three houses within about a mile of this house and none of them have older kids. One has very small children and the other two have no kids. So we have no idea where the people came from.
A few weeks later another friend and I both spent the night there. The three of us walk into the living room at about 10pm to watch a movie and there is a guy standing looking in the window. We freak out and he runs off. Again, we can see the lights of the cigarettes in the distance.
Over the course of that summer there were multiple encounters with "The Watchers" there were three places they would come and stand and we never could forecast if they would come or where they would go. They would knock on the windows, once they shook the front door so hard it set off the burglar alarm. At times we would just see them in the tree line watching the house. Once they took lipstick and wrote "Hello" on the window.
During the day we combed the woods trying to find them, but never could. We thought it was likely guys from our school trying to catch a glimpse of my buddy's cousin in her bikini or in her underwear because she was hot, but it would have been a hell of an effort just to maybe catch a glimpse.
We never found out who it was. Eventually the house my buddy's family was buying was fixed and they moved. Who "The Watchers" were and what they wanted is still one of the great mysteries of my life.
