Motion Detector

It was Christmas Vacation in the eighth grade and I was taking advantage of my time off by doing absolutely nothing as often as possible. One Sunday night, I got back from youth group at church and went upstairs to my room to unwind. It was about 8:45, and completely dark outside. When I got upstairs I talked to one of my friends on the phone for about twenty minutes, and a little after 9:00 I laid down on my bed with some Chex Mix and put in a recently recovered VHS recording of my old favorite cartoon, X-Men: Evolution. I had all the lights off in my room except for a small lamp on my desk, so when the flood lights right by my window came on, it was very noticeable.

The flood lights on my house are kind of picky. At times they'll react to a fly landing on them, or the wind blowing a stick around in the driveway, but then other times someone can walk straight in front of them and nothing will happen. Contrarily, they will go through phases of working perfectly, at all the right times. I never know which is which. The lights coming on in the middle of the night could mean a burglar breaking into our house, or a squirrel playing in the carport. Anyways, I had been watching TV for only ten or so minutes (it was about 9:25) when the flood lights came on. I usually go look out the window when this happens just to check, but I didn't this time. They stayed on for about three minutes, turned off for thirty or so seconds, and then came right back on again. This happened three or four times, and after a while I just got up to check. I didn't see anything in my driveway. They stayed off for a while after that, but around 9:45 they came back on, and this time my dog started barking like crazy. They went off after three minutes, but my dog kept barking. I went to the window and looked out. To my surprise, I saw something dart into my nextdoor neighbors' backyard. It looked like a person. I watched some more, but I didn't see it again. I went back to my TV. My dog kept barking.

The lights came on again at about 1:00 that morning, right after I got in bed. I froze up, and after a few minutes I checked outside. There was nothing. A little freaked out, I turned on the TV and watched X-Men until I fell asleep around 2:00.

The next day I saw my best friends. Oddly enough, they are a brother and sister who live nextdoor, in the house with the backyard where I saw that figure. They told me they had an exciting story to tell me. They had been playing Clue on the floor of the den, off of which is their screened-in back porch, separated by some elegant glass double doors. They had left their two-year-old tabby cat, Hobbes, out on the back porch, her favorite spot. Around 9:30, they looked over, however, and Hobbes was scratching frantically on the glass doors. They ran over to let her in, hurrying so that she wouldn't scratch the glass, and immediately she ran off to the kitchen, where she backed up to the counter and faced the window, her back arched and her eyes alert. The sister got freaked out by the cat's behavior, and went back to the board game, but her brother was curious and stepped out onto the back porch. He heard a noise near the trampoline, and he saw it: a tall, thin, black figure outlined against the light from my floodlights. He told his sister to get his Polaroid camera, but as she asked where it was the thing disappeared. The sister turned on the TV and insisted that there was nothind out there, but her brother kept looking outside. He got his camera from upstairs and pulled it up everytime he heard my dog barking, but he never saw the thing. It's been three and a half years, and we've never had that experience again.