Stranger in the House

Today's story comes to us from my my best friend in high school, Calvin.

One weekend, Calvin had our mutual friend, Charles over to his house for a sleep over. Since Calvin's sister, Donna was sleeping over at someone else's house (sleep overs were big in small town 80's America), Charles could sleep in her room.

Unlike myself, Calvin lived "in town," in a pretty dense neighborhood. Everyone's backyards separated by an alley that ran the length of the street, where people would leave their trash to be collected by the garbage men. Calvin's house had a big sliding glass door that opened into both the dining room and the kitchen. There was a phone on the wall in the kitchen and a phone in Calvin's room. Actually, the phone jack was in Donna's room, but the cord stretched into Calvin's room across the hall.

Late that night, around 3AM or so, Calvin and Charles called our friend, Jean. Charles on the phone in the kitchen, Calvin on the phone in his room. Charles laid down the phone on the floor when he got up to go to the bathroom. Having the attention span of the typical teenager, Charles neglected to hang up the phone when he went into Calvin's room so that he and Calvin could both talk to Jean at the same time. As the conversation went on, Jean eventually went to take a bathroom break of her own, while Calvin and Charles waited.

While they were waiting for her to return, they heard (via the phone in the kitchen that Charles neglected to hang up) the sliding glass door in the dining room sliiiiiide open and the clatter of someone picking up the phone. They sat there petrified, listening to whoever listening in...breathing.

In what seemed like an eternity, they eventually got up the nerve to bolt from calvin's bedroom to Calvin's parent's room located just across the hall, to alert them about what was going on.

By the time they got to the kitchen, the phone was hung up, the curtains caught in the closed sliding glass door and nothing but the sound of the wooden gate leading to the alleyway, swinging on it's hinges. They never did find out who it was.