The men outside my window
I need to add some context before starting this story. In 2023, when I was 17, I got with my ex boyfriend. We’ll call him J. J and I started renting a room in a 3 bed 2 bathroom house about an hour outside Seattle, WA. We had 3 roommates, K and S, in the master bedroom, and W in the adjoined bedroom. We lived in the city, but in a part of town that was heavily wooded, secluded and on a dead end road with little to no traffic.
This story takes place about 2 months after we moved in. But the events leading up makes it that much scarier.
In November 2023, the day after we moved, J got a text from a man called D. D claimed that him and I had been hooking up outside the mall a few miles from the house for the past few weeks. I knew this wasn’t true, as I had never hooked up with anyone through our relationship, and up until the day before we lived 3 hours north. But J believed him. J told D to come to the house, so he could talk in person . J gave D the address and he came to the house in a black pickup truck. They talked outside for about 15 minutes before D left. That was the end of that for a few weeks.
About a month later, my roommate K started noticing a black pickup truck sitting on the side of the road at night. Whoever was in the car would park, turn their lights off, then sit for about 30 minutes-an hour depending on the day, and then they would leave. This would happen about 2-3 days a week, but over the course of the next month, it started happening almost every night. Being 17 and nieve, I didn’t think anything of it.
This all changed the night J and I broke up.
J was not technically on the lease, so when we broke up he moved back north to his sister’s apartment. We had an abusive and unhealthy relationship, and I was honestly just happy to be alone again. However, that night around 2am, the black pickup truck came again. This time, the person in the car got out. I didn’t notice because I was asleep, but a man none of us knew walked around the side of our house, to my bedroom window. The man watched me sleep for about 30 minutes. My roommate, K, had woken up to take the dog out, and when he did he noticed there was a movement alert from the cameras we had in the front yard. K noticed the man and sent me a text, “you need to tell J to leave.”
I didn’t see the text until I woke up for work the next morning, and when I did, I was confused. I had J on life360 and we had been texting up until I went to bed the night before. I checked his location history, and he had been at his sister’s house 3 hours north all night. I was confused, so I asked K what he was talking about. K sent me a screen recording of the man walking over to my bedroom window. I was terrified, I had no idea who this man was, and it definitely wasn’t J.
I called my mom before I went into work that day and told her what happened. Though I was scared, I didn’t feel unsafe. I’d survived my fair share of traumatic shit throughout my life and honestly this was more or less entertaining. I told her I was fine, and that I didn’t want to do anything about it. I promised her to be more alert and sleep with my windows locked. She ended up picking me up from work that night, she told me, “You’re going to come back up with us for a week or so. If everything calms down, you can go back, but this feels unsafe.” I rolled my eyes at her but looking back on it, I am so grateful that she did this.
That night, I slept in the living room of my parents house, I stayed up late because I didn’t have work the next day, and I wanted to binge watch law and order SVU. Around 3am, I got a text from K again, “Can you and J quiet down please.” “Please stop banging on the wall.” “You need to quiet down.” I was extremely confused because I wasn’t home, and I know W had left for the weekend to visit family. I called K immediately, to which I got no reply. I was terrified now for them, because as far as I knew, they were supposed to be the only ones home. I called their Fiancé S, and she answered. I told her that J and I weren’t home, and that W was out of town. S checked the surveillance footage, and saw three men walking the same route to my window on the side of the house. S handed the phone to K, and got my permission to go into my bedroom to check if they got in/were trying to get in. K had a gun, so I gave him permission to protect themselves. When K got into my room, there were 3 men trying to get into my bedroom window. 3 men, all with ski masks. When they saw K, they got into the car and drove away.
To this day, I have no idea who that was trying to get into my window. I don’t know what their intentions were. All I know, is that when I moved out the following weekend that black pickup truck never came back after I moved.
I’ve came up with a few theories, but none can be proven. The first of which, is that this is a friend of my exes, and he set something up. This makes sense because he was extremely abusive, but J had no friends, especially no friends with a car. My second theory, is that I was being watched. I walked 30 minutes to and from work every day, and it isn’t impossible that I was followed once or twice. But truly, I have no idea.
So to the three men outside my window, let’s not meet again.