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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/feverhead_coldhands on 2024-10-21 02:46:53+00:00.

Since even before I can remember, I’ve seen a man’s face whenever I look through a window. My mom loves to tell a story of when I was 3 or 4 at my grandma’s house. I called them into the room and asked “why is there an ugly face in the window?” My mom went and looked and assumed that I was seeing my own reflection. “That’s you!” she said, and then apparently I got mad and started crying.

I don’t remember this, but my mom thinks it’s hilarious and loved to tell it as a cute, embarrassing story. I always felt a cold dread when she would tell it because I know that I wasn’t seeing my reflection that day. I was seeing the man in the window.

When I was a little girl, I thought he was old. But once I started getting a little older myself, I decided he looked to be in his late thirties to mid-forties. He has dark blonde hair with a little touch of grey in it. Usually his hair is down to his shoulders or pulled back in a ponytail, but sometimes it’s cropped to his ears and once or twice I’ve seen him with a buzz cut. He’s almost always wearing glasses. He usually has a patchy beard, kept cropped short, though I’ve seen him clean-shaven before. But even though little cosmetic changes happen from time to time, it’s always the same man, and he always has a gaping, bloody hole in his face.

It’s above his left eye, just near the hairline. The hole is black with clotted blood and red is smeared down his face. His left eye doesn’t always open all the way due to the blood and deformation around the eye socket. Spatters of red fleck his glasses. His face is pale. Any real person with this injury would either already be dead or mere minutes from death. But he lives behind the windows, looking like a reflection superimposed on my own reflection. Sometimes he’s very close to the glass, and sometimes he’s further away, but he’s always watching me.

I don’t remember my mother’s story, but I can remember seeing him from about age 5. By that time, I already understood that this wasn’t normal and had also decided that this was a secret I could tell no one. My parents raised me in a pretty extremist version of Christianity, and anything with even a hint of the supernatural (besides church) was considered demonic. As such, I had come to the obvious conclusion that the man in the window was a demon, attached to my soul due to some heinous sin that lurked in my heart. I had decided that this was a test and a judgment from God: I must pray and have faith that He would deliver me. I must repent of whatever sin had caused this demon to attach to me. And I would do it alone, both out of conviction that this was my burden to bear, and out of shame at my apparent lack of purity.

You might think that these are pretty weird thoughts for a five year old to have but, uh… you don’t know my family. Let’s just say these weren’t even the most fucked up religious ideas I had placed in my head. But that would be another story.

From around age 5 to 8, I remember being terrified of the man in the window. I would insist on having the curtains drawn in my room, especially at night. Like a reflection, he was easier to see when the outside of the window was dark. I tried to avoid looking at windows. I prayed. I begged God to protect me. But nothing changed. He was always still there.

Sometime around my tweens, the intensity of the fear began to wear off. He had never done anything to harm me. I was more afraid of what his presence said about me, than his presence itself. I became more comfortable with windows, though I still kept the bedroom curtains closed at night and would cry when my sister would open them.

At age 11, I was baptized in our church and “received the gift of the Spirit” which means speaking in tongues, for those unfamiliar. This is, for Pentecostals, the moment that you are saved. I remember feeling elated, thinking “surely now I have been made clean and God will release me from the demon in the windows.” When we came home that night, I only pretended to go to bed. Once everyone was asleep, I got up and spent the whole night praying. I praised God, I rededicated myself to him over and over, and I reveled in my new-found salvation. I said “God is with me now. I rebuke the demon in these windows in the name of Jesus Christ.” Then, finally, I pulled the curtain aside.

He turned his head to look at me. A spurt of fresh blood washed down his face, plastering a streak of his hair to his cheek. He was very close to the window, looking intently at me. Before my eyes blurred with tears of disappointment and confusion, I thought that he also looked sad.

The next day, I was really sick. I must have caught something at the crowded church, and it developed into pneumonia. My fever sored, and I hallucinated that my bed was sloshing back and forth underneath me.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t pray.

After I recovered, I began to think differently about the man in the window. Maybe he wasn’t a demon. Maybe he was something else.

Instead of avoiding his gaze, I started to study him. Sometimes I talked to him when I was bored doing my home schooling alone at the kitchen table. He still frightened me a little, but I suppose I just didn’t have the energy to fight against him anymore. And if I was going to have to accept that he’d always be there, I might as well try to make peace with it.

Around age 13 or 14 I think, I saw him with both short hair and no beard for the first time and was struck by how similar he looked to my dad. A new theory bubbled up in my mind: was he the ghost of some relative of mine that had attached himself to me?

He wasn’t any of the uncles or cousins I knew. But my dad had a fairly large extended family, some of which I had only met when I was too young to remember. I went to our family photo albums and flipped through. There I was, a chubby toddler in white and green dress, scowling at the camera with my thumb in my mouth. Behind me was a veritable horde of family members lined up and grinning. I scanned all of the faces. Only one of them besides my dad had blonde hair, and she was a woman. No one matched the man in the windows.

I asked my dad if he had any long-lost brothers or cousins that weren’t in the pictures. He didn’t know of anyone, though I wasn’t sure he was trying that hard to remember. He asked why. “I was thinking about trying to do a family tree,” I said.

So that was a dead end. I still felt pretty sure that I must be close to the truth, but I didn’t know how else to pursue this. We didn’t live close to any of Dad’s family anymore, and even if we did, I wasn’t sure what I would even ask. “Are there any blonde men in the family who died of gunshot wounds to the head?” I didn’t really believe myself to be demon possessed anymore, but everyone else would think I was if I showed up with a question like that.

Besides, around this time, something else was beginning to take up space in my mind. Another secret, another sin, something so shameful and disgusting that I was not able to fully acknowledge it even to myself. But refusing to give it words didn’t make it go away, and it gradually began to eat away at my mind and my heart. I spent hours in the bathroom with the lights off, crying into the sink. I pinched my arms and banged my shins against the toilet to raise bruises. I lay in the dark with my pillow over my face and wondered if I could somehow suffocate myself and never wake up. And sometimes I’d look at the man in the windows with the gaping hole in his skill and I’d think “I wish I was you.”

When I was 19, I was alone in the house. I knew where my father kept his fire-arms. He had bought several because he was paranoid that “Obama is going to make guns illegal” and he wanted all of us to know where they were hidden. I got his hand-gun and carried it to my bedroom window. I looked at the man. He was watching me, as always. I raised the gun and pointed it to my head, right above my left eye, like him. It seemed right.

But then I saw him lunge for the window. His glasses slipped off of his blood-slick face as he pressed a hand against the glass. I could see him, eyes wide, mouthing words, pleading with me. “No,” he was saying silently through the invisible wall between us. “No. Please.”

Slowly, I lowered the gun. Tears came in a flood, adrenaline and exhaustion shaking my body violently. I pressed my head against the cold glass, wishing I could hear his voice, but glad he was there all the same. I ugly sobbed. There was snot dripping from my nose and my face was red and I smudged the window with tears for I don’t know how long. But whenever I opened my eyes, I could blearily see him there, still with me. And that was just enough to keep me from picking up the gun again.

Soon after, with nothing but a couple of suitcases of clothes and a few cooking tools, I moved far away from my home town and family and away from that hand gun. Mentally, I was still not well, and the bruises on my legs showed it. But at least I had the distraction of a new job, new community, new friends to make, and a new way of life to help keep me moving forward. And also a good bit more alcohol to numb me up than was healthy, but I somehow managed to barely skate above the surface of a life-threatening addiction to it.

The man in the windows was still with me, though he drew much further back from the glass after that day. For years and years, I could barely see him unless the night was very dark and the l…

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