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.
I am aware of the back alleys you speak of, they exist in Tucson as well, so it provides a good mental image.
I don't believe you have anything to worry about. Your gut feeling about the entity/being you saw was correct, the behavior of your little protector (dog) verifies that. Animals can read energy and intention very clearly even from a non corporeal form.
Often when a person is experiencing negative emotions to an extreme, such as in your case, it can attract other entities/spirits that function at a similar vibration, like attracts like and they feed off it. In many cases they can exacerbate the emotions, make them worse to keep the cycle going. I think this was something passing through that sensed the strong emotions you were experiencing and stopped to check it out. It obviously kept its distance from the house and did not want to be detected by you, thus its sudden disappearance when you spotted it.
You need time and space to process the grief/sadness/loss and other emotions you're going through, it's a lot for a person to go through. My hope is that you're not doing it alone and that you have some sort of support from family and friends? It would be prudent to protect yourself and call upon a spiritual support as well, according to your beliefs, whether its prayers, sage burning (there's a wonderful place in Sedona that sells a sage spray) or a myriad of other ways to keep these types of entities from attaching or prowling around as you definitely don't need them hanging around your space.
This could continue to happen in other ways as you're going through all this, and you have a bunch of tools you can use to ensure you don't keep receiving unwanted guests and visitors. Hopefully this helps and good luck!