Darkness Rising- Horror Stories

This story took place my sophomore year of Highschool. I was 15 girl, young for my grade; it was a Wednesday in the winter. I joined the honor society at my school, besides meeting and talking about how to help my community we also had to meet at 7:20am, which was 25 minutes before school, since I wasn't a morning person, missing more time to sleep was always frustrating, that's why I was always late, which on this day I was running late.

Being 15 I couldn't drive myself to school, so I had to have my grandma, who lives with my mother and I, take me to school since at this time my mother would be in the bathroom, putting on makeup before work.

My grandma opened the garage with a button on the garage wall; both my grandma and I got into her car which was parked in the garage of course. Once closing the door she would pull out into the drive way. Now, she looked back towards the front windshield to pull out to the right towards the street to our coldisac.. and I screamed to stop and she quickly slammed on the brakes.

There was a man, tall about 6ft., dirty blonde looking hair, wearing all black. He was only illuminated by the headlights since on winter mornings it was pitch dark and today it was raining. I noticed something in his hand. Being the observant person I was, I thought I saw a black handle..

The man didn't look at us, explain, himself, or wave a hand to say sorry.. he just stopped in front of the lights for about 3 seconds before continuing to walk through our yard towards our neighbors house, we watched him disappear in the dark.

I live in a neighborhood where we all know each other and watch out for each other. We all own about one acre of yard. Recently my neighbors have been having work done around their houses with taking down some trees and fixing up there house.

So my grandma with her heart of gold continued driving as we discussed what just happened. She assumed that he was just a worker. I knew he wasn't. I told her I thought he had a knife and she brushed it off, saying "maybe it was a worker holding dust pan or a shovel, he could have just been using out yard as a shortcut." But no. Something told me I had to warn my mother.

So I began trying to text my mother, but no texts were sending, nothing was going through. I texted "lock the door." But when it went through, she didn't understand, she questioned me saying "what why?" At his point I called her, quickly explaining the situation and yelling at her to bolt lock the door.

She did; and not a second later he opened out screen door and tried to open our doors handle, when it didn't work he tried to kick the door down.. my mother then called the police, I don't know how quickly the police arrived.. but we live in a small town so I assume the response time was fast.

When the police arrived she told them what happened and they write up a report, later that morning, the man was found a couple roads down, he tried to get into some other houses too when he ended up getting into a house and a man had chased him out with a shot gun. He was caught and arrested.. found with a large butcher knife.

Although this isn't an extreme story, it always holds a lot of what ifs.. what if I hadn't been late, what if I hadn't gotten ahold of my mom.. and the biggest one of all.. What if I wasn't late and my grandma would have asked him if he needed help.

I'm now a junior in Highschool and it's been about a year, but the affects of this encounter still haunting me. I'm afraid to be alone, I will double check or even triple check locks, and listen intently to the sounds of my house when trying to go to sleep, if I hear something I'll try to go check it out.

He's made me paranoid, but I guess my fears are rational, who expects their own home to be the sight of a creep encounter.