PEEPING TOMS AND OTHER CREEPS

ONE NIGHT, WHEN I WAS 4 YEARS OLD, I WATCHED MY MOTHER WALK ACROSS THE LIVING ROOM TO THE WINDOWS. I remember she walked quickly, with purpose in her stride, and went right to the windows, where she pulled the shades all the way down to the sill.

"Why did you do that, Mommy?"

"There was a man out there looking in the window."

Of course I had questions. Mommy told me No, she didn't know who the man was. And she told me some men do that, so we have to keep the shades pulled all the way down at night. They're called Peeping Toms, Mommy said.

It didn't seem like a big deal to my 4 year old mind, but I remembered it.

Then, about ten years later when I was fourteen, I was in the kitchen one night, washing my hair at the kitchen sink. And just about the time I was wrapping my head in a towel, a commotion started outside.

I heard shouts, and then there was a knock at the back door.

Our neighbor was there, and he told me he'd looked out his bedroom window and saw a teenage boy standing outside my kitchen window, looking in, watching me.

The neighbor had gone outside and called to the kid, "Hey, You", and the kid took off running. He ran around the back of my house, jumped over the bushes lining our yard, and he must have been going fast because he ended up bumping against the house next door. That brought those neighbors outside.

My parents and the neighbors stood in our driveway talking about it, and then a kid from down the street joined them. He'd seen the Peeping Tom running through his yard and knew who it was. An orphan boy who lived with his aunt and uncle and cousins.

Ours was a small town and we didn't have any police. My parents and the neighbors discussed the situation and decided not to call the State Police. It was only a Peeping Tom. No big deal. They felt sorry for the orphan boy, saying he must be lonely, and so curious about seeing family life he'd watch through the window.

In those naive times, the 1960's, that's the way we thought.

It was creepy, but not a big deal.

My next experience was about 5 years later. I came home from a date and was sitting in my boyfriend's car, in our driveway. It was a Saturday night, a little after midnight. The street was dark and quiet.

Across the street lived a nice old lady. Her house had been there long before our new ones had been built across from hers.

She had a son who came and went, sometimes staying with her for months, then leaving again for many more months. He was probably in his fifties. Nobody knew anything about him.

That night, while sitting with my boyfriend in his car, we saw that man come across the street to his mother's mailbox, which was at the bottom of my driveway.

What an odd thing to do well after midnight.

A little while later my boyfriend watched me go in my house and then he drove away.

We had a little enclosed back porch, with a door, and from there we had the kitchen door.

When I went in, I didn't lock the porch door, we never did, but I locked the kitchen door. Though we lived in the country, my Dad was a city boy and he wanted the doors locked after the last person was in at night. I was the last one in.

The kitchen light wasn't on, and I didn't turn it on. Enough moonlight was coming through the windows for me to find my way to the cabinet for a glass. And by the light from the refrigerator, I poured myself a glass of milk.

I stood by the kitchen sink drinking the milk.

Then, in the dark and the quiet, I heard the porch door scrape across the cement floor as it was opened. A curtain covered the window in the door, so I couldn't see who it was, but I knew someone was there. I wondered if my boyfriend had come back for some reason. I waited for a knock.

Instead, I saw the doorhandle being jiggled. Someone was trying to get in. But the lock held.

A moment later the porch door was pulled shut. I heard the scrape.

Then I ran into the living room to make sure that door was locked. Dad always locked it, but I knew I had to be sure.

It was locked. Whew!

I went to the front window and pulled the curtain just enough to peek out.

I wouldn't have known who it was trying to get in, except I'd seen him just a little while ago. It was the man from across the street. The neighbor's son. He walked down our driveway and across the street to his mother's house.

Did I tell my parents? No. It was so strange. What did the man think he'd do if he got in? My parents were home, asleep in their bed. I couldn't figure out his intentions. And what could my parents do about it?

Also, my parents liked to get along with the neighbors. If they went to the nice old lady, I knew it would cause bad feelings. So I just made up my mind to be very careful.

All of these incidents scared me enough to make me remember them, and caused me to be careful.

Years passed, I got married and raised my family, and then I was alone. So when I saw an ad in the newspaper for a job as a sorority mother, I applied. I got the job. And I was asked to move into the house the day before the girls came back from their Thanksgiving break. That was fine with me.

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving I moved my clothes and brick-a-brack into the house mother's furnished apartment on the ground floor of the sorority house. Then I left to work my last night at my old job.

I worked from 3 to 11 and then set out for the college town, arriving about an hour later, around midnight.

I parked in my spot in the parking lot behind the house and headed for the back steps into the dining room. But I stopped before climbing the steps. I heard music. It was coming from somewhere inside the house, from one of the basement rooms, but there wasn't supposed to be anyone in the house. And the code on the locks had been changed, so they wouldn't be able to get in, anyway.

There weren't any other cars in the parking lot.

The town was quiet with the college kids away, nobody on the street, no lights on in the other houses.

There shouldn't have been music playing in the house. There hadn't been music playing when I was there moving in that afternoon.

I got back in my car. What should I do? I knew I didn't want to go in that house. But I had nowhere else to go. This sorority house was my home now.

I didn't know my way around the town, didn't know where the police station was, and cell phones weren't in use then, not quite.

I pulled out of the driveway and just began driving, looking for a police patrol car. And I found two, pulled in next to eachother the way cops do, visiting to pass the time.

I parked my car near them, went over to them, and told them about the music coming from the sorority house. They said they'd follow me back, and we headed out.

I keyed in the new code for the cops so they could search the house. The music was still on.

While they did a search, from the top floor to the basement, I waited in the big dining room.

After a long while, the two officers reported to me that the music had been from a radio in one of the basement bedrooms. They said it must have been set to come on, an alarm clock radio.

That didn't make sense to me. The girls had been away since Wednesday, and now it was late Saturday night, early Sunday morning. It would have been on for days. I would have heard it in the afternoon.

In the end, the police didn't seem to take my reservations seriously, they said they'd searched the whole house, and it was safe for me to stay there.

They left, and I went to my apartment and locked myself in.

After that, all went well until the girls left for their Christmas break.

The sorority house was big, with bedrooms and the laundry room, a storeroom, and two maintenance rooms in the basement.

On the ground floor I had my apartment, reached from the formal living room. Then there was a front hall with stairs leading to the upper floors, another living room, the dining room, and a big restaurant-style kitchen.

On the second floor were many bedrooms, some of them filled with bunk beds, about sixteen sets in one room, maybe ten sets in another, and then the preferred rooms the girls shared and furnished with couches as well as their beds and desks. And there were two large rest rooms with showers.

In the attic were more of the bed-sitting rooms.

So I was the only one who slept on the ground floor.

When it came time for the Christmas break, I spent the day seeing the girls off as they packed their cars and headed home. After the last one left, I sat down in the formal living room to watch TV for a while. My TV wasn't working.

Later that night I turned off the TV and went to my apartment, locking myself in.

I hadn't been asleep for long when a sound woke me up. Somehow I quickly figured out what it was. Someone was trying to push up the rusted screen from my bedroom window.

My first thought was to yell, to scare the person off. But I couldn't think of anything to yell! So I shouted, "Hey, hey, hey!" as I hurried to the phone in my living room.

I called 911, told the operator someone was trying to break in and where I was, and within a few minutes two cops were at the front door.

They searched the whole inside of the house and went all around the outside. Then they came to report to me that they hadn't found anyone, but they'd gotten a call while they were searching. The housemother next door had called the police to report that a man was at her back door, trying to get in, but she'd already changed the code, as was the custom.

After the police left, I went back to my apartment, locked the door, and pulled a bookcase in front of it. I didn't sleep well.

The next morning, in the daylight, I did my own search around the outside of the house, and what I found was frightening.

My apartment had been added onto the original house, with a crawl space beneath it. And there was a window into that crawl space. But there was no glass in the window, just a frame.

Then I went into the basement, and discovered that in the room where the oil tank was, there was an opening in the wall, about four feet off the floor, and it was covered with a tarp.

That opening led to the crawl space.

I figured I'd found the way somebody got into the house during the Thanksgiving break. But what didn't make sense to me was why that guy trid to get in my window. Was he trying to scare me off? Or had he tried to get into my apartment and found the door locked?

I'll never know. But months later the police arrested a man from a neighboring town, charging him with attempted rape after he'd entered a college girl's room through her window.

THERE ARE CREEPS OUT THERE. I FEEL MY LIFE WAS PRETTY MUCH A SHELTERED LIFE, I WAS LIVING QUIETLY AT HOME, BUT THESE PERVERTS WERE WATCHING. LUCKILY, NONE OF THESE INCIDENTS GOT WORSE, BUT THEY COULD HAVE. BE CAREFUL.

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