Everyone has that feeling some time in their life. Some able to explain the phenomenon, and others simply cannot. That unknown feeling of someone, or something, watching you. That experience where either dread or curiosity can get the best of you.
You could be quietly sitting at home, earbuds in, immersed in your technology when it hits you. You look up from your phone to see your parents sitting, watching television and paying you no mind, and your siblings sitting on the floor; drowned in a video game. But you find no source of the feeling you just had. Some people brush it off, others get paranoid, but some, they find the source. I was one of those people.
It was a warm day in August, and I was quietly sitting at the window seat inside a Starbucks near my college campus. I had my music blaring in my ears to help drown out the busy customers while I vigorously worked on a research paper. After about an hour of staring at my laptop, I suddenly had the feeling of eyes on me.
Being in a pretty busy place, I didn’t give it much thought. I looked up, and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary; a few men sitting at a table chatting, other college kids like me, full attention to their studies, and a woman at the register getting her order taken. No eyes on me, until I looked closer at the woman. There was a little girl tightly wrapped around her leg, probably around three or four, that I didn’t initially notice. She was looking at me from behind her mother’s leg with a confusing look on her face. It was hard to explain; like a blank but fearful stare right at me. She didn’t look very well to be a kid that was being taken out to a restaurant. She had dirty brown hair that was matted down in random places, bare feet, and a (used to be) white dress that was stained; as if she had just finished playing in a flowerbed. I silently smiled at the young girl and waved. After getting no response, not even a change of facial expression, I shrugged and looked back down at my laptop.
About a minute went by with the feeling of the little girl’s eyes on me, I decided to look back up out of instinct. She was gone. The mother was paying for her food as I quickly scanned the room for any sign of her daughter, as it appeared she didn’t realise the girl was missing. After I noticed no signs of anyone younger than me in the restaurant, I quickly walked over to the woman and tried to explain that her daughter was missing. What she said next disturbed me:
“I’m sorry, I came here alone.”
In shock, I apologised and slowly walked back to my seat. I noticed the girl in too much detail, how could she have never been there? After being certain the girl was not in the building, I started to rationalise it as just being a daydream I had that slipped into reality. I mean, I had been staying up late worried about this paper. I regained my composure and decided to just forget about it.
Thirty minutes went by before the feeling came back. I tried for as long as I could to ignore it, as I thought the feeling was just nerves, but the longer I waited, the worse it got. Eventually, I couldn’t take it. I snapped my head up and basically fell out of my chair when the brown headed girl appeared in the seat directly across from me with that fearful stare in her eyes. I let out a scream as I tumbled to the ground. But, when I looked back up from catching myself, the girl was gone once again. The eyes now on me were that of everyone else’s in the café, but the girl was nowhere in sight. Being just as embarrassed as I was frightened, I grabbed my stuff and quickly walked out and back towards my dorm.
I was still trying to wrap my head around what happened when I suddenly saw her once again. Across the road behind a light post, in the back seat of a passing car, even through a window in the back of a shop, that girl was standing, constantly staring at me. The feeling of dread stayed over me until I was safely back in my dorm room with the door locked behind me. Finally, I passed out from exhaustion onto my bed.
The next day, I woke up to the news blaring on my television. Apparently a man had been arrested right outside the Starbucks I was just in. Reporters stated that a group of kids were walking down the sidewalk when they noticed a man sitting in his parked car and fully focused on the restaurant with a large camera. The kids slowly walked by and peered inside his car. Behind the passenger’s seat of the car they could plainly see some nylon rope, a large roll of saran wrap, and the glistening of a large butcher’s knife. They quickly walked off and called the police as soon as they could to investigate.
When police arrived, they found the objects, took the man’s camera, and shortly after, took him in for questioning. The man had apparently been taking pictures all day of girls walking down the street and in the restaurant. They quickly showed some of the photos and my heart sank as I saw a picture of myself sitting on my laptop, getting up to talk to the woman at the register, falling out of my chair, and leaving the restaurant. Those were the last photos he had taken before he was caught.
In no time, they found out that the man had just recently been released from prison after serving a 25-year sentence for the kidnapping and murder of a three year old girl named Annette Smith. They showed a picture of her and the same feeling came back as before. The picture was taken before her death and she was standing barefoot in a field with long brown hair and a beautiful white dress.