Let's Not Meet Again

City Night Stalker

This story happened when I about 7 or 8, so around 1995 or 1996. It's the first time I have ever told this story.

Some background: I live in a big city with my family in a three story apartment building. It was myself, my Dad and Mom, my older sister, and my older brother in the middle apartment with other family members living in the bottom and top apartments. My family lived in the same neighborhood since before I was born so I saw the changes that it experienced through the years: at an even younger age it was common for me to find used heroin needles on our sidewalk and to spot the prostitutes waiting on the corner. Another time I saw a man get shot at a laundry mat from my bedroom window.

The reason to explain this is to say that during the time this story happened, the neighborhood was slightly improving due to the improved economy and subsequent increase in police presence. Regardless of these improvements, the story is slightly spotty as it happened in a way where things were just not noticeable because of all the other more extreme stuff I was used to seeing.

Our living room windows were tall rectangles (went as high as 6ft), on the left side of the room was one window that faced towards the end of the street where you could see down the rest of the block. There were garages going down the rest of the block (8 individual garages in total) that we owned and rented out so we knew all the cars. The other two windows faced the front of the house and looked out onto the street as well as the lot across the street (it was an empty lot with overgrown weeds, tress, and boulders that was contained by a chain link fence). My parents had a tendency to leave the blinds up and our TV was located about a foot from the left side of the window with a rocking chair and another chair placed in front of the TV.

This setup essentially made it really easy for a person walking up the block to see us watching TV when the blinds were open. One night me and my sister were watching TV when I noticed a white two door sedan parked about 10 yards from our house. At first I did not pay much mind to it but it was weird because the car was blocking one of our garages. Odd but people are stupid, so I went back to blindly watching TV. Two hours pass and I decided to look out the window again, it was still there.

At this point I told my sister that this car was parked in front of our garages and they sure as hell didn't belong there. She looks over and says, "Yeaaah. I've been noticing that car parking there at night a couple of times now." I did not ask how many times she saw this car but I decided it was better to close the blinds. It was obvious we were talking about this car because we were staring right at it, pointing with the blinds opened. We wanted them to know we saw. After about 10 minutes the car was gone.

The white sedan didn't show up every night but it started to show up on more nights, usually late (9 p.m., sometimes midnight), and always parked in the same spot. My sister at the time was a teenager so many times she was out with her friends at night while I was stuck at home. I started to get that feeling of someone watching me and notice the car showing up on multiple occasions...or maybe the person in the car started to look for me. I'm not sure but more and more I found myself up late, alone in the living room only to look up and seeing that white sedan parked.

Even though this happened on a consistent basis I still questioned myself, "Maybe I'm just being paranoid?", "Maybe the person sleeps in their car." Because of these questions I did not tell my Mom (Dad worked nights so there wasn't much point telling him) but I demanded that she close the blinds even but she usually kept them open anyways. The weather started to get warmer as it entered into summer so keeping the blinds fully closed would make the room really hot. I thought that maybe if the blinds were opened about 5 inches it would be enough to let air in but not open enough to allow this person to see inside. The white sedan started to park closer, probably in an attempt to see through the 5 inches that the blinds allowed. But then it stopped coming for a few nights and I thought that the closed blinds worked.