Smiling man

I didn't engage in any further conversation with the girl. There was nothing behind me; even though I could feel an invisible force staring at me.

A police officer offered to drop me off, and I accepted. I got witnesses the worried faces of my parents after I entered; the officer told them about the incident. My father tried to talk but I simply locked my room; refusing to have dinner.

The paranormal always fascinated me. I always wanted to witness something like this, but never in my life have I thought about the horror inflicted on others by such incidents. I laid on my bed thinking about it, suddenly scratching noises entered my ears. I got up to find the source of the noise; it came from the closet.

I got up and opened it to see; claw marks on the wooden board. I shut my eyes tightly and then opened them. The claw marks were gone.

The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a term for 'frequency illusion', a type of cognitive bias your mind creates. To understand this, you need to know a little about cognitive bias as a whole. Sometimes it causes visual hallucinations. I am still sceptical about this whole Smiling Man thing.

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-Allison Pov-

I couldn't sleep after hearing about Mr Smith. I knew both sisters; Abbey and Lucy. I wiped my tears; dripping down my cheeks and decided to take a night walk to get my head clear.

I had maybe gotten five or six feet away from my house, I noticed the flickering of the streetlights. They're pretty old, so it wasn't out of the ordinary to see them flicker slightly.

I also noticed that only a few of them were behaving like that, particularly only the ones near me. I saw the ones closest to me flickering so alarmingly and uncommonly fast, while the ones further down the street in front of me were seemingly normal. Then, my earbuds started to malfunction. The audio quality took a steep dive, with the music becoming scratchy and cutting in and out. I unplugged the wire from the jack and chalked it all up to simply being an odd coincidence, but then the strange occurrences became harder to ignore.

I then suddenly became aware of an odd sensation. One that made the hairs on my arm and the back of my neck stand straight up. One that coursed throughout my body, almost feeling like tiny jolts of electricity running through my veins. I have experienced things like sudden chills, static shocks, and stuff like that, but this was different. Those kinds of things usually only last for a second, then go away. This wasn't. This feeling just made me tenser and tenser, I knew something odd was going on.

Then came the breathing.

I hadn't heard it at first because I had still been listening to my music before I took notice of the lights and the weird tingling feeling, but it was there. It sounded close, maybe a couple of feet behind me. "I must be losing it," I nervously thought to myself, "if somebody were that close to me, I surely would've known by now, right?".

It wasn't just how close it seemed to be that disturbed me, it was also how it sounded. It was ragged breathing, like that of someone who had just run a hundred-yard dash. It also didn't sound… exactly human. It was distorted and freakish, like someone blowing through spinning fan blades. It also sounded as if whatever was breathing was violently sucking in and exhaling air rather than normal breathing. It wasn't normal.

I had thought nobody was out there with me. I had thought it was okay to simply push away the fear of being watched. The fear came rushing back when I heard that awful breathing, I couldn't ignore it. The lights were still flickering, my body still felt as if it were full of pins and needles, and the breathing was still there. I took a deep breath, counting down in my head from three and whipped my body around to face whoever was behind me.

It was almost totally dark when I turned around. All the streetlights behind me had turned off, leaving the sidewalk and street nearly completely shrouded in shadow. I couldn't see very well, but my eyes were adjusted enough to at least see two feet ahead, which is how close the breathing sounded. Yet, I saw nothing there. The breathing suddenly stopped, as if whatever was there were trying to remain unnoticed.

As my eyes continued to adjust to the darkness, I decided to call out my pursuer. "Who's there?', I yelled aggressively into the night, not caring who I woke up by doing so. I waited a few seconds, got nothing in response. I could see a bit further now, and I peered into the blackness to see if I could catch a glimpse of whoever had been following me. I suddenly saw something, something that made my entire being seize up in fear.

It was a figure, standing ominously behind a tree. I couldn't see it all too well, but it was there. It looked to be around ten to fifteen feet behind me, which didn't make sense as the breathing had sounded much closer.

It was tall, abnormally so, probably around nine to ten feet in height. Its form was roughly humanoid, but... wrong. It had long, gangly arms, reaching down past what I assume were its knees. Its head was small compared to the rest of the body, and it was extremely misshapen. I couldn't see if it had eyes, but I could just feel that it was looking straight at me.

I couldn't tell if it was simply the lack of light and my terror playing tricks with my eyes, but its entire body seemed to be pitch black. Darker than I ever thought possible. Almost as if it were entirely composed of emptiness, a void that had taken shape. I thought I also saw small tendrils lash out at random from its form. Different parts of its figure appeared to warp and quiver; like it was barely holding its corporeal appearance together.

I didn't stick around long after that to get a better look. Nearly paralyzed out of sheer terror, I thought of ways I could get back inside my house safely. If I ran straight back down the sidewalk, that… the thing might have just run straight towards me and got me. I couldn't run around the back and get in through the garage because I didn't have my door opener. Left with really only one option, I broke out of my frozen state just long enough to take a sharp right into my neighbour's yard and jumped over the small hedges back into my yard.

I fumbled with my keys, not wanting to even look back to check if the being was getting closer. I managed to get the door open and I threw myself inside, slamming it shut behind me.

I locked the door and ran around the house making sure every possible point of entry was secure. I locked the windows, closed the vents, I even plugged up the sinks and drains. I didn't know what the fuck that thing was or what it could do, but I did know I didn't want it anywhere near me.

I went into my bedroom, barricaded the door, and turned on all the lights. Collapsing onto my bed, I had a moment to truly process what had just happened. I was just chased by some unknowable being, something I used to think was a situation exclusive to people in campfire tales and horror stories. But, it happened, I know it did. I wasn't going crazy, I wasn't having some stress-induced hallucination, that thing was as real as my skin and bones, I was sure of it.

I don't know how long I just sat on my bed, curled up in a ball. I didn't know what to do. I certainly didn't want to look outside to see if it was still there.