The ghost my brother used to see

I was about 7 years old; my brother about 10. It was well past our bedtime when our mom woke up off the couch to put us to bed. Our dad worked construction out of town back then, so it was often just us three at the house for weeks at a time. Up the stairs and to the immediate right was our parents' bedroom. Going left put you in the middle of a hallway. Taking another left down that hallway led to my brother's room. The opposite end was my room which was also across the hall from our upstairs bathroom. At either end of the hallway are windowed doors we always kept locked and rarely used. The door on my end led to a balcony overlooking our front yard, and the door on my brother's end opened to our back porch (the house kinda leans into a small hill).

My brother and mom both had a habit of waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. I only knew this because I was always a light sleeper and they just couldn't help flushing with the door wide open. This night, however, my brother stopped on his way to his room and came back towards the bathroom, "I'm gonna try to pee before I go to bed. The past few nights I've been too afraid to walk to the bathroom. I keep seeing a man wearing stripes at the end of the hallway.". I don't know if my mom wrote it off as my brother telling ghost stories to try to scare me or if she was already half asleep and didn't catch it, but she didn't react at all to my brother's confession. I, on the other hand, was terrified by it. The fear of seeing a ghost like that at the end of the hallway or through the windows is the reason I started running from the stairs to my bedroom at night.

Years later, when I was about 18, my mom and I were having a conversation in her car about a dog we had for a very short time when I was little. We were sharing stories about Max's tendency towards destroying my shoes and other unruly behaviors when my mom blurted out, "Do you remember that time I opened the front door for the cops and Max ran inside to the kitchen and started tearing open that big bag of dog food we had?". This really caught me by surprise, because in all the years I lived in that house we never once called the cops (gun owner family in a quiet, rural WV neighborhood, etc.).

I asked her what she was talking about and she looked equally surprised as if she had just revealed something by accident. "Oh, that's right! I never told you because you were too young at the time. One night, I woke up hearing noises outside my window and when I looked I saw a man staring into my bedroom.". She went on to describe how turning on the lights caused him to take off running and how she grabbed my dad's pistol before calling the cops. "I can't remember all the details I gave them when they showed up... tall white male, wearing a striped shirt and jeans, short dark hair... something like that. They said it matched the description of a man they were looking for in the area. It turns out he had escaped from jail on a murder charge."

Now, I know it sounds so obvious hearing those two stories back to back, but it wasn't until a few years ago, in my mid-twenties, that I pieced together that my brother had unknowingly warned us about a murderer who spent multiple nights casing our home.