Barking. Barking. Barking. The dogs had been barking all night, it seemed. I had already chased my neighbors’ dogs back into their yard numerous times that evening, so I thought that was the cause for the ruckus. My daughter was not feeling well that night, and she was asleep in my bed while her dad slept in the living room. I felt very irritated as I went to investigate the yard again around 10:45 pm, hoping the commotion would not wake her or my husband, who had to be at work early the next morning. I started to record on my phone as I approached the gate to the backyard, just in case there was someone or something out there.
It was odd, because as I got closer to the dog kennel, I could see that my dogs were actually not barking. The noise was coming from what sounded like directly behind the privacy fence. I stood there for a moment, panning the camera around and listening. For some reason, I could not approach the fence. Something told me to stand back, to not get any closer to it. Maybe it was because it was so dark, or maybe because not knowing what might possibly pop up over the four foot tall fence was more than my nerves could handle that night. After about a minute, I turned and went back inside.
I was restless all night. Another oddity, around 1:00 am, a car with a loud exhaust woke me up from what felt like a dead sleep, driving very slowly by the house. We live on a dead end road, so there is not generally much traffic, and this was not a vehicle that my ears recognized. It drove past my house, then back out toward the main road, having turned around somewhere closer to the dead end. Then, it came back toward our house again, and I got out of bed and went to the living room to look out of the window as it approached. It stopped directly under our street light, and reversed back toward my neighbor’s yard. All I can remember of the vehicle was that it had headlights on. The engine shut off. I went back to bed, thinking they were visiting the neighbor. Then within what felt like mere minutes, its engine started again, and I heard it make its way out to the main highway.
I did not think much else about this event until almost two weeks later, when I decided to go back and watch the video of that night. Indeed, it seems that there was something odd about when I was outside.
If you look at the picture of our dog in the first pen, his shadow was cast behind him and to the left, thanks to our streetlight in the front yard. When I slowed the video down to view each frame, there was a shadow that I just can not make myself believe was either mine or his. So, was someone actually behind me that night? Could the car that I heard and witnessed stopping in front of our house at 1:00 am have been coming back to pick up a prowler, etc? Jumping a four foot fence would not be impossible. But, why were my dogs not alerting me if there was someone in our yard?
This theory does not explain the orb or flash of light that seems to shoot through the kennel yard just as the shadow melts away.
Logical explanation or paranormal event on camera?
I will let you all decide.
Stranger Than Fiction 