The Man in the Back Window - Reddit Horror Stories

The Man in the Back Window - Reddit Horror Stories

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The man in the back window. I live in a
small apartment on the fifth floor of an old building,
right in the center of a pretty noisy city. From
my living room, I have a direct view of an
even older apartment block, one of those with corroded iron
balconies and curtains that always stay shut. At first, I
didn't pay much attention to it, but a few months

(00:22):
ago I started noticing something strange. I worked from home,
so I spent a lot of time in front of
my computer, and every now and then I look up
to rest my eyes. One of those times I noticed
a window in the building across from me. It didn't
have curtains, just some crooked blinds, and behind them I

(00:45):
could see a dark room. What was odd was that
in the middle of the dimness I could make out
the silhouette of a man standing still, facing outward, directly
at my window. I figured he was just a distracted now,
so I didn't think much of it. But that same night,
when I went to the kitchen for a glass of water,

(01:07):
I passed by the living room and saw him again,
exactly in the same position as if he hadn't moved
in hours. It gave me chills. But I tried to
convince myself he was just someone with insomnia, or maybe
some strange decoration, perhaps even a Mannikin days went by,
and I started paying closer attention. Every time I looked

(01:30):
toward that window, he was there, always motionless, always standing,
always staring at me. The most disturbing part was that
I never saw him move, not a shift in posture, nothing,
He was just there. I tried to ignore it, but

(01:50):
eventually I became obsessed. One Saturday morning, I decided to
take a picture with my phone zoom so I could
get a better look. The image came out a little blurry,
but the face was distinguishable, and what I saw made
my skin crawl. He had no expression, as if his
features were frozen. The most unsettling thing was that he

(02:15):
seemed closer to the glass than before. That night, I
could barely sleep. I stayed in the living room with
the lights off, watching his window. At around three in
the morning, something changed. The hallway lights of the building
across the street flicked on for a second, and in

(02:36):
that brief glow, I saw that the man's room was empty,
no furniture, nothing. I froze. If the room was empty,
who had I been seeing all that time. The next day,
I went down to the corner store and took the
chance to ask Don Ernesto, the caretaker of the building

(02:57):
across the street, if he knew who lived in them
that apartment. He paused for a moment, then said, young man,
that apartment's been locked up for over fifteen years. Nobody
lives there. I didn't press him any further, but since then,
I keep my curtains drawn almost all day. Still, some nights,

(03:20):
when I get up for water and the living room
is dark, I can't shake the feeling that behind the fabric,
some one is standing there, waiting for me to look again.