The Boarded Window Watcher

I’ve never been one to fear the dark or the things that might lurk in it. Maybe it’s because I grew up with a peculiar companion, one that visited me every night before I even started school. This is the story of the first time I met it.

My family lived in a small, isolated house on the edge of a vast pine forest in the Pacific Northwest. Our nearest neighbor was a mile down a gravel road, and the only light at night came from the moon and the stars. My room was at the back of the house, with a large window that faced the woods. At the foot of my bed, I could see the window perfectly.

It started a few months before my fifth birthday. I remember lying in my bed, waiting for sleep to come, when a shape began to form outside the window. It was tall, about the height of a man, but its proportions were wrong—long limbs, a hunched back, and a head that seemed to tilt too far to one side. Its fur was a dull, grey-brown, like the bark of the old pines, and it moved with a strange, fluid grace. But what struck me most was its eyes—they were not animal eyes, but something almost human, gleaming in the darkness.

The creature didn’t climb or knock. Instead, it began to cover the window. It placed wooden planks across the glass, one by one, as if boarding up the house against a storm. Each plank was rough-hewn, with splinters and moss clinging to them, and it handled them with an eerie precision. I watched, frozen, as the window slowly disappeared behind a barrier of wood. When the last plank was in place, the creature would turn its head and stare directly at me, its eyes piercing through the gaps. Then, it would vanish, and I would finally feel a wave of exhaustion wash over me, and I would sleep.

Night after night, this happened. I never told my parents—I was too young to articulate what I saw, and I assumed it was a dream. But sometimes, during the day, I would look out that window and see faint scratches on the glass, deep grooves that couldn’t be explained by tree branches or weather. My parents dismissed them as the work of a curious raccoon.

As I grew older, the visits became less frequent, and by the time I was in first grade, they stopped altogether. I convinced myself it was a childhood fantasy, a product of an overactive imagination. But a part of me always wondered.

Years later, when I was in my late teens, I came across an old photograph album in the attic. Among the faded pictures, I found one of the house being built—the frame of my room, with the window set in place. In the background, barely visible, was a figure standing at the edge of the woods. It was tall, with long limbs and grey-brown fur. My blood ran cold. I stared at the photo, and then I noticed something else: the window in the photo had fresh claw marks on its frame, as if someone—or something—had already tried to get in.

I’ve never been afraid of ghosts, because they’re just echoes of the past. But this was different. This was a presence, a guardian or a stalker, that had been there long before I was born. And now, as I write this from my the same room, I can hear a faint scratching at the glass. I look outside, and the forest is dark—but there, at the edge of the trees, I see a familiar shape. It’s waiting. And this time, I don’t think it’s going to just board up the window. It’s going to come in.