In the middle of the night on Sunday, I was jolted awake by some strange sounds. My husband remained asleep—it was just me. The noises came from the nursery. With our new baby girl recently home, my maternal worries were strong, but this seemed real. Fear crept in as I rushed to her side, but everything appeared fine. The sound ceased as suddenly as it started. My husband brushed it off as just the vent or pipes.
The next night, it all happened again, the peculiar and grating sound. It sounded like metal sliding on metal. I checked and found nothing amiss once more. My nerves were falling apart. I began skipping sleep and meals.
Unable to endure the uncertainty, I got a baby video monitor. Lying in bed, I watched my sleeping daughter through the monitor. I placed it on the nightstand, shut my eyes, and tried to relax.
About fifteen minutes later, there was a scream—sharp and abrupt—followed by cries. I sprang up. The monitor glitched, image shaking and blurring, strange shadows passing across it. Then the image cleared for a split second.
Behind the crib, a SHAPE stood! It was tall, dark, and looming directly over my baby.
I screamed and dashed to her room! I didn’t wait for my husband. I slammed the nursery door open and flicked the light switch, prepared to fight a ghost, a demon, or whatever was haunting us.
But it wasn’t a ghost.
A man dressed in dirty, black clothing was standing there, freezing like a deer in headlights. He had one hand on the crib railing and the other reaching inside toward my daughter.
He didn’t disappear into thin air. He scrambled. He dove toward the closet, pulled himself up onto the shelving, and tried to squeeze through the small attic access panel in the ceiling—the “grating sound” I had been hearing for days.
My husband arrived seconds later with a baseball bat and pulled him down by his ankles before he could escape into the crawlspace.
The police found a sleeping bag, empty food wrappers, and pee bottles in the attic directly above the nursery. He had been living up there for weeks, watching us, and coming down at night to “visit” the baby.
We moved out the next morning and never looked back.
