The Green-Eyed Watchers

In the autumn of 1962, my sister Clara and I were kids in a cramped duplex in Spokane. We slept on a threadbare cot in the dining room, our older brother Joe crashed on the pull-out sofa. Our stepfather, a taciturn man with a drinking problem, had moved us there after our father shipped off to Vietnam. The house smelled of stale beer and old wood, and the windows rattled with the wind that came down from the mountains.

One night, a peculiar restlessness took hold of us. I was eight, Clara twelve, and we both woke at the same moment, as if a silent bell had rung. The moon cast pale stripes through the blinds, but the hallway beyond was a black throat. We needed to pee, but the bathroom was through our mother’s bedroom, which sat at the end of the hall. We clutched hands, our small fingers interlocked, and shuffled toward the front door first, because something had drawn our gaze there.

At the door, a tall figure loomed, filling the frame. It was not human. Clara gasped and whispered, ‘It’s Jesus.’ I saw only a black silhouette, dense as smoke, with no discernible features—just a towering void that seemed to drink the light. My heart hammered. We pressed ourselves against each other, a shield of trembling flesh. I looked to the sofa where Joe lay sprawled, but his eyes were open, and he was staring at the same spot—except he saw something else. A black panther, sleek and massive, crouched on the floor beside him, its green eyes glowing like lanterns in the dim. It was not attacking, just watching us with an unnerving calm.

We had to pass by it to reach the bathroom. Every step was a small death. The panther’s eyes tracked our movement but it did not move. I could feel its gaze bore into our backs, but we dared not run. We entered our mother’s bedroom, where the bed was a mountain of shadows. And there, sprawled across the covers, was another panther—larger, its coat blacker than pitch, its eyes the same eerie green. Our mother was gone. The sheets were undisturbed, as if she had never been there. The panther’s stare was ancient, knowing, as if it had been waiting for us all along.

We froze. The bathroom door was just a few steps away, but the beast’s presence made the air thick. Clara’s grip was so tight I felt my bones grind. ‘Don’t look away,’ she whispered. We inched forward, our gazes locked on those emerald orbs. The panther blinked slowly, a gesture that felt almost reassuring, as if to say, ‘Pass, but remember.’ We reached the bathroom and shut the door behind us, our backs against it, gasping. When we finished and opened the door, the bedroom was empty. No panther. No mother. The hallway was clear. Joe was asleep on the couch, the door was closed.

We never spoke of it again, but I never forgot those eyes. Fifty years later, Clara and I are old women, and she still swears she saw Jesus at the door, all white robes and gentle smile. I saw something else, but I’ve never been able to name it. Joe, now a retired cop, once told me in a rare moment of honesty that he saw a panther too, but he reasoned it away as a dream. The house in Spokane is gone, torn down in the 80s, but sometimes I wake in the middle of the night and see green glow at the foot of my bed, and I am six years old again, huddled against my sister, trying to make it to the bathroom without being devoured by the watchers that only we could see.