Hmmm, long stories, shortened... not!
Let's see. The "grinning man" was a tall thin man who would prowl our neighborhood at night. I lived in a place called the Mashpee United Church Homes, which was what I think people from the UK would call a council estate. It was poor, or lower class housing, that ironically was located at a site where they were building an eighteen hole golf course [to upgrade the already existing nine hole one], so I had the 'benefits' of a suburban to 'urbanesque' style of living, while living on the very edge of the vast woodlands that still remain to this day. The golf course [Quashnett Valley] bordered a major road [rt.151] so it was often used as a shortcut by people heading into town. Or, I guess I should say, people heading to the liquor store.
My house was the absolute last in a series of one family dwellings that ran like a giant horseshoe around the three story apartment flats. The front of my house was facing towards the open end of the horseshoe, but the back opened out to one of the most majestic views the course offered, the putting green for the third hole. It was a huge hill that had it's plateau for the putters, then ran down into a picturesque miniature cranberry bog [complete with stream] that then ran back uphill to start the fairway.
Because we had the "last house on the left" kind of thing going on, we had more than our fair share of break-ins and hooliganism. So it should be no surprise if a child molester or peeping-tom might make a sudden cameo appearance. Which is what my mother insists I saw at the window 'till this day!
This was the deal. It was late at night, about elevenish or so, and lightly raining. I was in bed trying to sleep, but having great difficulties as I had been to the doctors all day and was in a certain amount of pain from a proceedure performed there. The noises I started hearing at first as I lay there were innocent enough. I had thought I had heard a slight scratching sound, which I dismissed as the rain, then the noises went from scratching to tapping, and it was then that I noticed the shadow from the streetlights on the wall in front of me [I had my back to the window] moving about in a way shadows of inanimate objects have no right to move!
The tapping quickly turned into knocking, and that was when I rolled over and saw the face looking in at me. The face was uncommonly pale, with thin lips set in a viscious smile. Actually, the lips seemed painted to me, they weren't just red, but were RED! The eyes made me think that maybe it was some kind of a mask being worn, because the skin around them seemed extraordinarily wrinkled, and the eyes themselves didn't seem to have any whites.
When he saw that he had got my attention, the knocking went to pounding on the glass and screaming "Let me in!" Let me in! LET ME IN!" over and over again.
Of course I screamed like a little girl [no offense to any little girls out there!]. My Mom came rushing into the room, and took it all in in a single glance, snatched me up and carried me to her room [I was only eight years old and was having some form of palsy problems with my legs, and couldn't walk.] She called the cops and told them we had a prowler trying to break in. She sat there with me until the cops showed up. She told the police what had happened, although I had never told her my side of the story yet, and they looked around and found absolutely nothing. No footprints, no marks on the glass, nothing.
To this day my mother only remembers that some weirdo was at my window, and when pressed she will say she didn't see a thing, yet she told the coppers exactly what I had seen, without my telling her, so hmmmm...
I think I will start a new one later for the skunk ape!
