7. Crazed man tries to enter my house
I grew up in a very small town in Massachusetts. My family’s first home was a tiny two bedroom house but it was idyllic and really nice; it was on a corner lot next to a busy street but there was a huge yard and a big natural pond in the back yard that my mom admiringly recalls in stories she used to tell us about families of deer walking across it frozen over in the winter time to feed on tree boughs hanging over the water. Next to the pond was a totally expansive wooded area.
I still remember what happened because especially for my small mind to process at the time this was really terrifying to me then and according to my mother I had recurring nightmares about this, but even today it’s still kind of disturbing. My father would leave for work every day early in the morning and a lot of times I would wake up with him, and subsequently my mother who would stay at home to take care of me would follow suit, so our days usually started very early. On one of these mornings my mom decided to take a shower before she did her other things typical of any day of the week. While she did that I played in the kitchen by myself on the floor. Our old kitchen was like a galley style and sort of narrow and at the end of the room directly ahead of me was our back door and a porch that my dad had built (which in retrospect was pretty high off of the ground because our house was built on a hill).On this day I was playing and all of a sudden a man ran – ran as in dashed – onto the back porch and started banging at the door to be let in. We hadn’t invited anyone over, not especially some man, and guests were pretty infrequent anyway but this was no ordinary man. He was literally pounding on the door, and through the window in the door I could see him staring at me on the floor and then he started begging me to let him in.
I just sat on the floor probably in mild shock and stared back at him. This man didn’t even look away once to see if he could flag down help elsewhere like passing motorists on the busy street around the corner if he so desperately needed it. He was raising his voice and he was asking me to come to the door and let him inside. Asking a child, a very young child, to let a stranger inside. That’s rule no. 1 that you don’t break and every child in America is told to obey and luckily I had enough sense apparently to know this.
He might have realized this because I wasn’t moving and then all of a sudden he started demanding that I open the door. He was yelling things like “c’mon kid just let me in”, and at this point in my memory I believe I noticed he was wearing like a wig, a white electric looking wig because his hair was wild. And now he was absolutely pounding the door even harder and yelling and I distinctly remember him say something like “don’t get mommy” or something like that because I had gotten off the floor and now I was banging on the bathroom door to get my mother. I told her that there was someone outside, and only dressed in just a towel she came out to see, and this is what gets me.
He jumps off of the back porch, like maybe a descent of like five feet because again my house sat on a hill and the porch was elevated off of that slope, and he runs – according to my mother – into the woods behind our house. Gone. My mother called the police I think but I do not remember if they ever found him; I guess that because I don’t know that’s probably indicative that they didn’t because we never heard about it.
I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I had let him inside the house if he sincerely needed help. Like maybe he was being chased and he wasn’t actually the threat; crime never happens in our town, ever, so it’s hard to believe that that’s the case. We were not friendly with our neighbors in any way and never knew if this man had also approached them asking for the same, but I will never forget this.
