Cane Toad

Source
I was still living with my parents, up late I've night watching tv. Our dog was with me laying in my lap. There were no lights on in the house, just the glow of the TV. Around 3-3:30 AM, I saw someone walking down the stairs out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look and see who it was, expecting one of my parents to tell me to turn off the TV and go to bed. As I turned my head towards the stairs, I saw the shadow of a person coming down the stairs. Nobody was there.

I wanted to tell myself it was just a shadow from the light of the TV screen, but my dog had woken up and looked at the same exact spot. She looked up at me after we stared in the darkness at seemingly nothing, and the look of fear on my dogs face made my blood run cold.

It wasn't the only instance in that house. My older sister was a huge science nerd (she's a middle school science teacher now) and she had glued those glow in the dark stars and planets all over her ceiling. There was a period of time where she'd turn off the lights to go to bed and things would block out the flow in the dark stars above her bed as she looked up, as if something was standing over her and moving around the room. There were nights where she'd wake up the whole house screaming from it.

I'd hear noises in my room. Sometimes it was a long, drawn out hiss that sounded like it was coming from right over my shoulder, and other times I'd hear things moving in my closet. I tried to justify the hissing as the sound of cars driving by outside, but we lived in a quiet suburban neighborhood, and the sound would carry on much longer than a car simply passing by. One day I was going through my closet and there was a massive Cane Toad in my closet. My room was on the second floor of my house. There was no logical explanation as to how it got there.

Years after my siblings and I had moved out, my parents had decided to get a divorce. My dad had moved out and got an apartment across town. Late one night my mom was coming home from work. As she was rounding the corner to get to the front door, she saw a tall, dark silhouette standing in front of the patio door. She said it had no defined features, but it was close to 7 feet tall. She asked my dad to come over the next day and put in a bright motion sensor light right outside the patio door.

That house always gave me the creeps.