Man with a bag

I've talked about this before on Reddit, but not in great detail or anything.

This happened a few months ago. It was a few days after Christmas, and my mom had asked me and my girlfriend to house sit and watch the dogs for her while she went on vacation for a week with her boyfriend. We agreed, and the first few days were pretty uneventful.

My mom's house is on the edge of a rural upstate New York town, so really the only big thing that happens is roadwork.

It was probably the third night there. My girlfriend and I were on the couch, she was on her phone and I was playing Pokemon Shield on my Switch. It was probably around 12:30 AM when suddenly we hear footsteps from outside. Someone with really big and heavy boots had stepped up on the porch.

The way my mom's house is laid out is that there's a couch against the wall with windows on either side of the couch. On the other side of that wall is the front porch, so this guy was right behind us. He stomped around some, and got really close to the window on the left side of the couch and grunted "Shit, fuck!" in a deep, angry voice and then stomped off.

My girlfriend and I froze but after about five seconds of registering what just happened, we got up and turned off all the lights in the house and went to the laundry room where we knew no one could see us.

After a little bit, I decided to go out to a different room and look out the window to see if we could turn the lights back on. When I look out the window, though, I saw this big burly guy shuffling down the sidewalk opposite the house. In his hands is a plastic bag. Keep in mind this is 12:30 AM in a rural backwater town so none of the stores around are open for him to get one.

This guy continues doing this awkward shuffle while holding this bag, then suddenly he starts moving really nimbly in an almost cartoony manner across the street towards a parking lot near my house and disappears. I go back to the laundry room where my girlfriend is and tell her what I saw. I bring her back to the window I was looking out to see if we can find him again, but he's still gone.

We check other windows around the house to see if he's outside any of those. My girlfriend is looking out a window on the other side of the house when she says she sees him, but he's walking away. We try to collect and discuss whether or not we should call the cops when suddenly we hear knocks on the door on the other side of the house.

We race to the door, and we can hear the doorknob jiggling. Thankfully it was locked. One of my mom's dogs starts barking and going insane. He's a small dog, a rescue that growls at anything foreign. He has a loud, ear-piercing bark so I think that scared him away.

We called my mom and asked her what to do. We debated calling the cops, but cops in our area are notorious for not really doing their job, so we decided not to. My mom also encouraged us not to because she thought he was just someone drunk and/or high who didn't know what he was doing.

While this wouldn't be the first time someone showed up drunk at the door in the middle of the night (gotta love small towns, right?) I don't think he was.

I don't know what this guy's intentions were, but man I'm glad I didn't find out.