The man who would not die - or leave

This is a story from my childhood that looks different in retrospect. When I was growing up, my (divorced) mother and I lived in a trailer in a trailer park in north Georgia, and we had a lot of trouble with trespassers, even though there were several other families living there too. I was a very small child at the time, so my memory consists mainly of impressions rather than coherent scenes or conversations. I think my mother was in her 30s and I was around 4.<br><br>The trailer park was surrounded by dense woods, which offered plenty of cover for people slipping in over the railroad tracks that hid our little neighborhood from the road. The trailer park itself was cut through by a gully, so there was a wide strip of woods in the middle that further fragmented the neighborhood. We lived near the front, just behind the trailer park owner's house. My mother would tell you that this was a very bad neighborhood, but I don't remember it that way at all. We had a little creek that ran into the gully and lots of woods to explore even as a little kid, and I spent most of my time outdoors with a boy from across the road whose mother was a friend of my mother's. I don't think it even occurred to me at the time that there was such a thing as "safe" and "not safe," although I do remember that if we wanted to play in the woods past dark, our mothers preferred that we be together, and we had a strict curfew of 9 o'clock.<br><br>That said, I do remember being afraid at night sometimes because I would hear men walking around the trailer. I didn't have my own bedroom; I slept on a convertible couch in the living room. I don't know how my mother slept through it, because it seemed like the creaking and groaning was incredibly loud. Once, I woke up and saw a man standing in the living room watching me, but that was it - I just went back to sleep, I'm not sure why. When my mother woke me up the next morning, I asked her if she had company over while I was sleeping, and that's how I found out there had been a man in the house.<br><br>My mother was a high school dropout who had been on her own since early adolescence, so she didn't have a lot of resources. By the time I came along, she had already been through a lot of bad things, so she wasn't easy to rattle. I remember her being very calm and telling me that she had shouted at the man and he had left. I wasn't very worried about it, and I don't think my mother was either. I had a hard time being afraid of things that hadn't happened yet.<br><br>The next night, I woke up to the sound of footsteps again. I sat up and there was a man standing in the living room. This time, he jumped when I sat up and he ran out the front door. I called out to my mother, but she didn't answer me. When I went into her room, I found her gone and the back door standing wide open. I don't remember how long I waited for her; I couldn't have kept track of time very well at 4, but it felt like forever. Finally, I heard her at the front door. She looked awful, even to me. She asked me if I saw someone in the living room, and I said yes, I had. Then she told me that she had chased a man out the back when she heard him, and he had run out into the street, where a car hit him. She said she had gone back inside to call the police, and when she came back out, the man was gone.<br><br>The next night, I was awfully scared. It was storming horribly that night, but that didn't stop whoever was outside from creaking and groaning around the trailer. I went into my mother's room and asked her if I could sleep in there with her. She said I could, but I don't think I slept very much. I was listening for footsteps.<br><br>Around 2 or 3 in the morning, I heard the trailer creaking again. Suddenly, my mother sat up straight and shouted. I followed her gaze: there was a man standing in her window. I remember that he had no eyes - I don't know if it was the rain or the dark or my fear, but I could see a silhouette and a pale face with no eyes, and it is the most terrifying thing I have ever seen in my life. My mother threw the covers off and ran out of the bedroom, and I ran after her, out the front door and into the storm, wearing nothing but pajamas. We ended up back at our friend's trailer, pounding on her front door and screaming until she let us in. When we finally calmed down enough to call the police, they searched our trailer and the neighborhood but found no one. I don't know how that man survived being hit by a car, but it seemed like he did.<br><br>After that, I was afraid to sleep alone at night, so my mom took to locking me in my room when she went to sleep. I don't really know why, but this seemed to work for a while, until one night when I woke up to the sound of voices. My room had a window, but it was too high for me to climb out of, and my door was locked, so all I could do was sit there and listen. It sounded like there were two men in the trailer, and they were having a conversation. One of them had a deep voice and the other had a high voice, and the man with the high voice kept talking about how he was hungry. I don't know what the man with the deep voice said because I couldn't understand him.<br><br>The next morning, my mother was gone again, and I had no food. I don't know how long she was gone that time, but I think it was a couple of days. I don't remember being hungry; I think I was too afraid to be hungry, and I didn't want to leave my room anyway. Finally, I heard someone at the front door, and it was our friend from across the road. One of her kids had been missing for two days, and she had been looking for him everywhere. I told her I had heard men talking in the trailer, and we decided they might have something to do with her missing boy. So while I waited at her trailer, she went back to my trailer to look for him.<br><br>Later that day, she came back to her trailer and told me that my mother's car was missing, but there was a little boy's body in her car, in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant in the next town over. The police told her that the boy had died from stab wounds, but that he was dead when he was stabbed. I don't know what that means or how they knew that, but I'm just repeating what she said. I don't think they ever caught anyone specifically for the boy's murder, but they did find my mother's car and it was all bloody inside.<br><br>I lived with our friend across the road for a while after that, since my mother was gone and I had no way to take care of myself. But months later, out of the blue one day my mother just showed up at the trailer park again. She acted like nothing at all was wrong. She said we were going to forget the whole thing had happened, and that we were going to move and never talk about it again. And we didn't - we moved to a new neighborhood, and she never mentioned any of it. I don't even think she mentioned it when I was an adult. We didn't live together for very long after that, and by the time I was grown and on my own, my mother and I were strangers. I tried to ask her about it a couple of times, when I was older, but she always told me she didn't know what I was talking about. I never saw her after I moved out, and she died suddenly when I was in my early 20s.<br><br>For a long time, I didn't think about those events except as my "crazy childhood." I had a lot of other bad experiences growing up, so it's not like it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. But now that I have a child of my own, I look back on that in a different way. I don't know what really happened, or how my mother was involved. I don't want to know. What I do know is that there was a very bad man - or two - in that trailer, and no one stopped them. No one helped us. And my mother, who was supposed to keep me safe, didn't.<br><br>So whoever you are, I don't want to meet you, and I hope you died a long time ago.