The Man Outside My Window Every Night

2 min read

The man outside my window first appeared on a night I couldn’t sleep. It was around 2 a.m. I got up for a glass of water, and as I passed my second-floor bedroom window, something made me glance out.

There he was. A man standing across the street, directly under the dead streetlight, looking up at my window. Not walking. Not smoking. Just standing, perfectly still, his face tilted up toward me.

I froze. He didn’t move. After a full minute of staring at each other across the dark street, I backed away from the glass and told myself he was just a neighbor, a man waiting for a ride, anyone with an ordinary reason to be standing there.

The next night, I checked at 2 a.m. He was there. The night after that. There. Same spot, same posture, same upward stare, as if he had never left at all.

The Cameras That Never Caught Him

For two full weeks, every single night, at exactly 2 a.m., the man stood under the broken streetlight and looked up at my window. I called the police twice. Both times, by the time a patrol car arrived, he was gone — as if he somehow knew they were coming before they did.

They suggested I install security cameras, so I did. Two of them, one covering the street and one covering my front door. But the cameras never caught him. He always stood just outside their range, in the one narrow blind spot between the two lenses, as if he knew exactly where the edges of the frame fell.

I stopped sleeping properly. I’d lie awake until 2 a.m., then creep to the window to confirm he was there, then lie awake again until dawn, listening to every creak in the building.

The Night the Street Was Empty

Then, one night, I looked out at 2 a.m., and the street was empty. No man. No shape under the streetlight. Just an ordinary, quiet, empty street.

I was so relieved I almost cried. The next night — empty again. He was gone. After three weeks of terror, it was finally over, and I let myself believe I could sleep like a normal person again.

On the third empty night, I slept better than I had in a month. I woke at dawn to my phone buzzing on the nightstand. A text from an unknown number. It was a photo. It was a picture of me, asleep in my own bed, taken from the foot of it. From inside my room. The message underneath read: “I got tired of waiting outside.”

I don’t live there anymore. I broke the lease, lost my deposit, and moved to a building with a doorman and cameras in every hallway. But I still can’t sleep with the curtains open, and every night around 2 a.m. some instinct wakes me and pulls me toward the window — just to check the street below. If you ever catch someone watching your window, don’t wait like I did. Call the police the first night. The worst mistake I made was telling myself it was nothing.