Mountain House

A few years ago, my boss let me and my family stay in his mountain house. This is not a secluded home; it’s pretty close to the other houses. Nice community. But still, it feels secluded when you’re in the house. It was built in the 70s, and it has a spiral staircase. It’s two floors - the top floor is level with the upper slope and the bottom floor is an exact mirror of the top that is level with the bottom of the slope.

We always board our dog up, but because this was a last minute trip and a big travel weekend, we had to bring the dog.

The second night started off perfectly. It was cold and raining, we had the fireplace going and were watching The Office. The kids were asleep, and shortly after, my wife and I turned everything off, checked the doors, and went to bed.

I don’t know how much time passed - maybe 15-20 minutes. I heard some slight thuds, but it was raining, kinda windy, and the branches from this one tree would hit the back wall. Then I heard what sounded like someone coming up the spiral stairs. Literally as soon as my mind processed the noise; my dog, sleeping, in the living room raised absolute hell. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her do this. I had my pistol, went down the stairs, and saw muddy shoe prints leading in/out the door from the bottom floor. I’m perplexed because I KNOW we locked the door, but there were no signs of forced entry.

While I’m looking around, my wife calls the police. But they actually pull up to the neighbors house as she’s on the call! So my wife and kids load up in the car, we pull into the neighbors driveway (I wanted them out of the house) and come to find out they just experienced the same thing. Someone coming in from the bottom, dog raised hell, etc. It was strange because they also said they had locked everything up but there were no signs of forced entry. We left a statement with the police, and I hated to do this because it was 11pm at this point, but I called my boss and told him we were going to stay in a hotel and head home the next day. It really freaked all of us out.

I do not know what came from this. However about a week after this, I was just Googling the area again, and one of those pages that list the arrests popped up with a headline like “man arrested after alleged break in and assault”. I don’t recall the exact headline. Then about a week after that another article came out that had the victims name. After a quick Google and property search; the victim lives about two roads over! My gut says it’s him, but I don’t know. I’d hope not because he was 6’2 and about 275.

We love the mountains and have been back, but we have stayed in hotels. We tried a nice little private cabin thing but nobody slept.