"I was 8 years old when we first moved into the house on the edge of the forest. My parents had their doubts about buying a house with a backyard bordered by forest, they had concerns about wild animals getting into our bins or hurting our dogs, and were worried one of us might go too far into the trees and get lost. But it was cheap, my dad liked the seclusion, my mom loved the house itself, and my siblings and I were excited about playing in the backyard and exploring the forest.

Our first sign that something wasn't right was that our dogs were absolutely terrified of the forest. They never went into the forest for any reason. If a toy they'd been playing with found its way past the treeline, they would refuse to retrieve it, and when one of us went in they would pace anxiously until we returned. On occasion we'd notice the dogs staring at a spot in the forest in obvious distress, sometimes growling or barking, but we could never see anything there. My brother once carried one of the dogs into the trees to show her there was nothing scary about it, but she wriggled out of his grip and sprinted into the house in a panic.

If we were in the backyard when it was getting dark, we sometimes heard noises like someone was walking through the forest, sticks crunching underfoot, branches being pushed aside. If we called out there was no response, but if we shined a flashlight around we would occasionally catch a glimpse for just a split second of something that we could swear looked like a person walking around in the dark. My parents quickly banned us from entering the forest at all after dark, and even during the day we weren't allowed to go out of sight of the house.

My sister's bedroom window looked out at the backyard and the forest beyond, and she remembers looking out her window one night and seeing a shadowy figure standing right at the edge of the backyard. She says there was something wrong with it. Like it wasn't quite standing on the ground, and it was a little too tall to be a person, and it was sort of distorted. And she was convinced it was staring at her. She called for our dad, saying there was a man in the yard staring through her window, and when he ran outside to chase off whoever it was, she continued to watch the figure. It didn't move away, but when the light from our dad's flashlight passed over it, it suddenly just wasn't there anymore.

We regularly heard knocking at the back door at night, with no one there. Our parents thought it was teenagers playing pranks, and stopped bothering even opening the door, until one rainy night when the knocking was persistent and agitated. My mom pointed out there might be someone needing shelter from the heavy rain outside, but when she opened the door, not only was there no one there, but there were no wet footprints on the porch. The knocking continued the whole time we lived there, it would happen several times in the span of a few weeks, then stop for months, then start up again. My parents eventually installed a security camera, and there was never anyone at the door.

The camera wasn't all useless though. About three years into living there, my brother started having night terrors and sleepwalking. When he went sleepwalking, he would always go out the back door and start walking towards the forest. My mom, being a light sleeper, would hear the door open, and would run out to get him before he made it into the forest. After the third or fourth time it happened, my brother asked to see the camera footage, because he wanted to see how he looked when sleepwalking, I guess thinking it'd look funny. The footage showed him walking out onto the porch, then pausing as if listening to something, and shaking his head, then reluctantly walking forward as if being pulled or forcefully guided by something.

One evening my dad was in the backyard, and he heard my sister calling him from the forest, seemingly in distress. Thinking she'd gone exploring in the forest and fallen over and hurt herself, he ran in and started calling to her, but quickly realized it was too dark to see her, and he couldn't pinpoint where her voice was coming from. He told her to wait where she was while he grabbed a flashlight. When he ran back into the house for the flashlight, he saw my sister inside, safe and completely unconcerned.

At the time my dad hadn't told us about hearing my sister's voice in the forest, so when I heard my mom's voice coming from the forest months later while I was outside with the dogs one evening, I didn't question it despite the fact I'd seen my mom inside recently and hadn't noticed her walk past me. My mom was calling to me, saying she'd gotten her sweater caught in some branches and needed me to come in and help her. As I walked in, the dogs started barking, alerting my dad, who saw me through the window wandering into the forest. He came outside and called to me, and I said I was just helping mom. He yelled back that mom was inside and I needed to run back to the house as fast as I could, which I did.

After this, my parents had a fence built around the backyard, and started looking for a new place. In the time between the fence being built and us moving out, it got way worse. We'd hear knocking at the door more regularly, as well as tapping on the windows, as if someone was walking the perimeter of the house and trying every window. We would often hear scratching and scraping sounds on the fence, and voices beyond it. My brother's night terrors got more frequent, and one night my mom didn't hear the door open when he went sleepwalking, and he woke up standing at the fence, staring into the forest, with the dogs barking at him. The last morning we spent there, less than four years after we moved in, we woke up to find the back door fully open, and the security camera footage showed it slowly swing open on its own.

Since moving out, my brother's sleepwalking has stopped, though he still gets night terrors and he suffers from pretty severe anxiety. A few nights ago, he called me out of the blue, and after a bit of small talk he asked me if I think the door being opened that final night means whatever was out there finally got in. He was trying to make light of it, saying he was getting into the spirit of Halloween, joking about how maybe we should all get exorcised just in case something latched onto us all those years ago. But I think he's deeply bothered by everything that happened. I know I still am a little, I still get nervous around dark wooded areas. I don't know what I think was out there, in the forest behind our house at night. But I get the feeling that, given the chance, it would have swallowed us whole."