About 2am this morning I was woken up to my little dog barking in the other room. I yelled out of my bedroom for him to stop barking and come back to bed. He is a snuggler and is usually curled up next to me while sleeping. He came back, jumped up onto the bed, and sat staring towards the bedroom door. He was clearly agitated and seem to be in guardian mode. He suddenly sprang from the bed as if he heard something only he could hear and ran back into the other room where he continued barking.
What I found odd was that I have a doggie door installed and he never went outside. If there was a cat or someone prowling about, he surely would have given chase. A lot of older homes in the Phoenix area have alley ways behind their yards. This had been used as a communal trash collecting area for the city, and from time to time some of the homeless will set up camp there. This still didn't explain why my dog was remaining in the house and not rushing into the yard.
After listening to him bark a bit longer, I decided to get up and investigate. To stay in stealth mode, I didn't turn on any lights. I made my way down to the other end of the house where my dog was barking in front of the sliding glass doors. I started to scan the yard from left to right. At first I didn't see anything but the outline of the bougainvillea growing against the back wall.
Then I saw it...
Standing off to the right side of my yard, close to where my bedroom is, was a tall dark silhouette of a man in a fedora-type hat. My heart started to race and the dog was barking his head off. It was standing completely still and appeared to be looking in my direction. All of the sudden it vanished. It didn't fade into nothing. It was simply there one second and gone the next. I thought, what the hell did I just see? I didn't get a good feeling from whatever this was. It felt foreboding.
Somehow I managed to get back to my room, get under the covers, and after some time, fall back to sleep. My dog followed me in and didn't make a peep the rest of the night. In the morning I looked back outside through the sliding glass doors to see if in a half asleep state I could've mistaken lawn furniture or something else in the yard for the shadow. I had not. Even so, why was my dog going ballistic?
Today I wondered if this could have been linked to a recent tragedy. Over Memorial Day weekend at the end of May, I lost the love of my life to an accidental shooting. My Dad is also terminally ill and I can't help but wonder if seeing this shadow man might be linked to either. Now I didn't write this looking for sympathy. Yes, it sucks but I'm really curious to what this shadow was and why it decided to hang out in my yard last night. If anyone has any idea, please let me know.
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My grief is starting to subside and I feel like I'm returning back to "the land of the living,' if that makes sense. It's still hard but I've had some pretty cool things happen as well that when I'm ready I will post about.
Again, thank you!
-DreamBird