DeathBefore Thread

When I was a child, before I could remember, my parents had an encounter with a man in our backyard one night.

My dad had gotten up to go to the bathroom at about 1 or 2 in the morning. It was storming that night, wind howling and rain pouring. He uses the bathroom and gets back into bed, my mom still fast asleep. He said he tossed and turned for a little bit due to the storm being so loud. He had gotten used to the wind dragging the tree branches on the side of the house and was about to fall asleep, but then he heard a loud crash. Knowing it was probably due to the storm and not an intruder, he got up just to make sure it wasn't anything that needed to be picked up immediately (BBQ, lawn fixture, etc).

He pulled the curtains open, and his heart stopped. He said he was frozen there for what felt like ages, but snapped out of it and woke my mother up.

"Honey...honey...there's a man on the back patio," he whispered. "There's a man with a hat on the back patio, he's standing there."

My mother got out of bed as fast as she could without making a sound so as not to alert the man to them acknowledging his presence. They kept all the lights off, and my mother rushed to the telephone in the kitchen to call 911. My dad kept peering out the curtains at the ominous "man with a hat" - he still had yet to move a muscle.

Mom got ahold of a 911 operator, and started for the bedroom where my dad stood peering out of the window.

"911 what's your emergency?"

"Yes, there's a man in our backyard..he...he's just standing there on our patio staring at the house."

"Are the doors and windows locked?"

"Yes, all of them."

By this time, my mother had made it back to the bedroom, and walked up behind my dad and looked over his shoulder to get a good look at what my dad had seen (up until this point, she hadn't seen the man).

"Okay, very good. Can you make out any features on him? Ethnicity? Age?"

"No, it's hard to tell...it's just a silhouette."

My dad said my mother sounded skeptical for some reason after answering that question. To my father's surprise, my mom opens the door leading to the patio (directly next to the window) and walks up to the figure. My dad was yelling, trying to get her back in the house. She pushes over the man and he falls to the ground, making a huge splash in the puddle that formed from the storm.

"THE FUCKING BASKETBALL HOOP, STEVE. IT'S THE KID'S FUCKING BASKETBALL HOOP."

TL;DR Man with a hat = Little Tikes basketball hoop

Edit: formatting