Something horrifying happened to my kid and me one night. Something that’s never made me feel comfortable in my home since. It was a school day, and I awoke in the morning, groggy and disoriented; something felt wrong—I hadn’t woken to an alarm. When that realization set in, I checked the clock and it was twenty minutes after my alarm should have sounded. I looked to my side, and my son lay sleeping beside me. In a panic, I shook him awake — he was going to be late and miss the bus. I jumped out of bed, pulling him with me, and rushed to get him ready and fed. Luckily, the bus arrived as soon as we stepped outside. My son, still half asleep, walked onto the bus and waved at me through the window as the bus drove off.

I went back inside, sat down on the couch to collect myself after the chaotic morning, and reached for my phone. Two alerts waited on the screen — my house cameras had detected a person moving that night. I opened the first one, and it showed clips of my son getting up from his bed, sneaking quietly in the hallway as he made his way to my room before he gently slid into my sheets without my noticing at all. I shook my head knowing I would need to have another talk with him about not sleeping in his own room. Then that thought dissipated as I wondered what the second notification was about.

I thought about my son getting up again to use the bathroom, which wasn’t unusual either. I clicked the recording, but the footage wasn’t from the bedroom. In fact, it didn’t show the upstairs at all—it was the feed from the foyer. I pulled my phone closer to my face as my concerns grew. I was scanning the screen to see any activity, but it was motionless. My skin prickled. Some part of me expected a ghost to drift past the lens. Then I reasoned with myself that the camera’s detection could be faulty. But suddenly, I noticed movement: our window slowly opened and a man crawled carefully through it and into my house. I let out a gasp and covered my mouth, my eyes as wide as they had ever been.

Grasping for breath, I watched the man walk around my house. He was dressed in all black and was wearing a face mask. I thought he must be a burglar. I kept my eyes on him as I wanted to know what he would take from us. But his pacing was unsettling as he walked slowly and nonchalantly through the house, as if he wasn’t in a hurry or aware he was invading someone else’s home. A burglar would be rushing to grab everything he could and run, but that clearly wasn’t his plan. He paced the main floor, studying the pictures and paintings I had hung in the living room and kitchen. He touched and admired my furniture too, and stopped to smell some of my flowers. He passed my phone, the expensive bracelet I had left on a table, and my son’s laptop without a second glance. My stomach dropped. Whatever he wanted, it wasn’t our things. He wasn’t there to steal our stuff—he wanted something else.

That was when I watched him make his way up the stairs. He took every step tenderly all the way up and then walked to my son’s room. On the camera, the man poked his head into my son’s room — but my son had already crawled into bed with me. That’s when I noticed something odd about the man: he was covered in something glossy, something wet. It was unsettling as it hadn’t rained that night. However, those thoughts got cut off as the man retreated to the hallway and into my room.

My heart pounded painfully as tears leaked down my cheeks with a lump caught in my throat as I watched the man enter my room where my son and I were sleeping. He walked to the front of the bed and watched us. I felt so violated that I started trembling so hard I could barely make out what was on the screen of my phone. I fast-forwarded as the man didn’t do anything but just stand and watch. I set the video back to normal speed as the man crossed to the far side of the bed, opposite from where we slept. Then, unexpectedly and disturbingly, he lay in bed and became motionless — he fell asleep.

I fast-forwarded again and watched the timestamp climb: three hours of the man lying still while my son and I turned in our sleep. This stranger didn’t move a muscle. As I watched, I was so scared of the man waking up, scared to see what he would do once he awoke. I also felt so filthy as I slept with my son beside this stranger, both of us unaware. I felt like I let my son down as his protector. However, those thoughts were interrupted as the man began to move again. He looked over to us, briefly, and got out of bed. This time he walked around the bed to our side, and his eyes were on us again. But this time, it felt like he was contemplating, as he was fidgeting with his hands. My eyes filled with tears as I prayed for the man to just leave. Then the man reached down—not towards us, thankfully, but towards my alarm clock — it seemed like he turned it off.

Then the man walked back downstairs, opened the window once again and left. The recordings showed no more movement until my son and I woke up. I sat on the couch for God knows how long, thoughts teeming with such impossibilities. Then doubt flooded in. None of it could be real; it had to be a mistake of some kind. So I ran upstairs into my room for proof. As I examined the other side of the bed, reality set back in — there were red stains all over the sheets and the spare pillow. And then it came to me: the man was covered in blood.

I called the police immediately and when they arrived, I told them the entire story and showed them the recordings and the blood on my bed. They confiscated the videos and sheets as evidence. They told me to lock the house up and stay with family for a while. I took their advice and my son and I stayed with my parents. The hardest part was staying strong and composed for my son, acting as if everything would be all right. After a week, the police didn’t have any more information, and there were no alerts from my cameras. I started to calm down and felt like it might be time to go back home. I didn’t know who this man was, what he wanted, or why he was covered in blood. But I felt it was a deranged man who simply found a window unlocked and needed to rest a bit. However, the day I felt it was safe to go back, I received an anonymous message on my phone saying: “Thank you for letting me rest. Your bed was comfortable. Sorry for the mess. Sometimes it gets messy.”