In 2006, a 14-year-old boy named Evan lived on a farm in North Carolina. This was not a typical farm with animals and crops, it was a pine tree harvest. Pine tree needles are a big landscaping commodity, so Evan and his family made their living bailing pine straw every year. As such, their main living house farm was situated right in the middle of 550 acres of perfectly lined pine trees.
They did not have any neighbors nearby and there was only one road that led into the property from the main house they could look out and see through the rows of trees to the beginning of this road, which meant any visitors were really easy to spot. The main house was built on a very slight hill which meant one side of the house was effectively built on stilts to compensate for the angle. On that side of the house on the first floor was the living room so anyone who was in the living room looking out the window would need to look at a downward angle to see the ground.
It would seem like you were on the second floor, but really, you're on the first floor. The window in the living room was very unique. It stretched almost the entire length of the room, so almost 50 feet across. At night you could see animals darting between the trees because you could see down the rows. That was pretty creepy and then just the fact that this window is so big, if you're in the living room at night, you just felt exposed. Between the creepy animals running around and the level of exposure and vulnerability, people avoided the living room any time they were in the house at night.
That winter, Evan's cousin came to stay with him on his farm and because the main house did not have any extra bedrooms, Evan and his cousin would have to sleep in the living room. There were two couches inside the living room, one that was right underneath the 50-foot-long window and then another that was on the other side of the room against a wall that did not have a window. Evan would be sleeping on the couch right under the window and his cousin would be sleeping on the other couch.
The first night Evan's cousin was there, they put this big sheet up over the window, but it only blocked 75% of the window. The two flanks of the window were still exposed, but where the couches were lined up, they were kind of blocked by this sheet, so it gave them a little bit of privacy. After goofing around for a while, the boys finally fell asleep around midnight, and they woke up a couple of hours later because they heard Evan's dogs barking way off in the pine trees. Evan was used to his dogs running around the property and barking at other smaller animals, so just them barking was not necessarily a red flag.
The barking persisted to the point where Evan's cousin got up off the couch, and moved across the room to the opening of the window that was not covered by the sheet at the foot of where Evan was sleeping. Evan was still lying on the couch, he was not going to get up and look out the window. He's looking down at his cousin kind of looking at his face to get some sort of a read on what he's seeing, and he notices his cousin had this perplexed look on his face. He's squinting his eyes and trying to make sense of what he's looking at.
Even looks at him and says, "Hey, what's going on? What do you see?" and his cousin's like, "I don't know if my mind's playing tricks on me or not but I'm- I'm pretty sure I see people out there." At this point, Evan jumps off the couch and runs over, and butts up right next to his cousin so he can look out the window too. He's scanning out amongst the rows of trees because there's just a mile of pine trees. The first thing he notices is the moon is very bright that night so really adds to the illumination.
He's looking out maybe 300 feet when he sees someone's leg extend from behind one of the pine trees as if they're stepping into the space between a pine tree column and he's staring at it and he can't believe he's seeing even anyone walking around this area because he didn't see anybody come in on the road and they have no neighbors. He's looking and then a body follows the leg. A person walks from one row to the next. This tall, dark figure walks as calmly as can be between the two pine trees and Evan just grabs his cousin and he's like, "Yeah, I saw that."
So, they continue to look in the direction of where this person crossed the path and after a couple of minutes, they see another leg now emerging, going the other way back towards where that first person had come from. The leg kind of extends into this gap and this tall figure walks across into the next row, except now, instead of going just directly across, it looks like they're moving at an angle closer to the main house property. The boys look at each other and they don't know what to do so they just keep watching in stunned silence.
As they're looking, they see this person emerge again, except now they're not 300 feet away, they're more like 60 feet away. They don't know how they were able to move that quickly without being seen, and this time when the leg comes out from behind the pine tree instead of walking across the gap, it stops right in the middle, and it turns and looks directly at the boys in the window. And begins running towards them.
The boys practically fall over, trying to get away from the window, Evan's yelling for his father upstairs, and the boys instinctively just start running around the house locking every door, and shutting every window. As they're going from door to door, they're anxiety is growing and growing because they think if they don't get there fast enough, this person who is running towards the house is going to come barging through that door. At every door, their anxiety is through the roof, but they manage to shut everything. Everything is locked right as Evan's father comes charging down the stairs.
He's got his gun in hand and he's like, "What's going on?" and they say, "Someone's out on our property." Their dad charges out the front door. The front door is not on the same wall as the living room. It's on the side of the house so once he's going needs to turn to the right to look out in the direction they were describing. He bombs outside and he stays on the porch, and he starts yelling at whoever's out there that if you come over here, I'm gonna shoot you. Get the fuck away from here.
And then there's silence and the boys are waiting, they're looking around, and they don't see anything. The dad comes back inside, shuts and locks the door, and tells Evan to keep an eye out if you see him again you let me know. Evan would reflect on this experience later on and say, "You know we really should have called 9-1-1 at that point, but as a kid, I just understood that that's the way my family did business. We kind of took care of ourselves. And so even though there was a threat of some stranger who was running at our property, we were not going to call the cops and so his dad was telling him to be a lookout.
And so Evan and his cousin go back into the living room, and they kind of go up to the window. They're a little bit apprehensive and they're looking out and after five, ten-ish minutes of looking out the window and not seeing anything, they're thinking to themselves, "You know, Evan's dad's a pretty intimidating guy, and he was just out there screaming and yelling with a gun threatening to shoot them. So, they've probably got the message and they're probably gone."
And so, the boys got back into their couches, and it took them a while, but they did ultimately fall asleep. The next morning when the boys got up, the first thing they wanted to do was go out there and see if they could find any footprints from this person to kind of confirm it was a person because part of them thought, "You know, maybe we didn't see that. Maybe that was our imaginations." They don't know and so they start by going out the front door, they walk down into the trees and they're looking around and they find some footprints.
So, they're confirming to themselves, "Okay, there was someone out here, it wasn't us, these are not our footprints, we've found them." They start following the footprints back towards the property and they realize at some point there are two distinct sets of footprints, there were two people out here, and even worse they followed them up to the house and there are two different circles of footprints that stopped right underneath the living room window along the two flanks of the window where the sheets were not covering.
This means, throughout the night, when Evan and his cousin were up one or two strangers were tucked up against the side of the house and they would not have seen them because of the angle out of the living room window. It was steep because of the stilts it was on and so anybody who was tucked up along the side, they'd be a blind spot. And then for sure after Evan and his cousin got back into bed and were sleeping, two strangers were right up against those windows probably pulling themselves up to look inside.
When Evan's father found these footprints, he immediately grabbed his gun and tried to follow them back into the woods to see where they came from but unfortunately, the snow cover wasn't complete and at some point, they lost the tracks. They never figured out who those two people were. Even would say following this event his cousin refused to ever come back over to his house for a sleepover.
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