u/OkYou9707

I haven’t always had a fear of the water. I believe the exact term for it is thalassophobia. It wasn’t until I was in my teens and my best friend told me about what happened to his kid sister when they were little and were vacationing at Lake Tahoe that this deep abiding fear manifested itself.

There are already a ton of myths and legends surrounding this lake. Everything from old Native American legends of burial ground hauntings to stories about the mob and how they’d dump the bodies of people they killed in the deeper parts of the lake.

There’s also a lot of mystique surrounding the lake itself because of how deep it is and because people who drown in the deeper parts of the lake rarely resurface.

IF they’re found, they are more or less perfectly preserved, even after years of being there, because of how cold the water gets the further down you go.

My family used to have a vacation home up there when I was young, and we’d do a lot of boating and swimming there each summer. At that point, I didn’t see anything the least bit unsettling about the lake or the surrounding area. On the contrary, I was always floored by how absolutely gorgeous it was. My favorite thing about it was how clear and blue the water was. When I’d go swimming, one of my favorite things was to wear goggles and peer down below me to see this vast, empty, blue void extending down and around me for as far as I could see.

I could see how this might bother some people, and maybe, if younger me had known more about some of the myths and legends I mentioned earlier (specifically about my friend’s experience), I’d have been scared then, too. If I had known, then perhaps watching how the shafts of light danced below the water and gradually faded into the empty blueish-purple void would have evoked a sense of dread and vulnerability. Or seeing the faint outline of aquatic plants waving further down would have reminded me more of hands blindly reaching out and grasping for anyone within their reach, but I digress.

Anyway, this friend and his family were vacationing, as I’d mentioned, near the lake. While they were there, they did a lot of swimming and exploring. On the second-to-last day there, his dad took him and his little sister out on a pontoon boat rental.

They had life jackets on, and he and his sister took turns jumping into the water, climbing back into the boat, and then jumping again into the water. They repeated this a few times, but on the 5th or 6th time, his little sister jumped, and somehow she slipped out of the life jacket and started sinking pretty rapidly.

It happened so fast that by the time their dad (who had been keeping a close eye on them) dove in after her, she was already disappearing beyond the clear, well-lit surface into the hazy, bluish-purple depths of the lake.

Their dad dove down as far as he could after her, but eventually, he couldn’t go any deeper and had to resurface. He frantically dove down again several times to see if he could spot her, but didn’t see any sign of her.

Climbing back in the boat, he grabbed his cell phone. Reception can be pretty spotty that far out, but he was able to contact the authorities, who eventually arrived with a dive team to search for the missing girl. Honestly, at that point, I don’t think they were expecting to find her alive. Their main goal was probably just to retrieve the body.

Their hours-long search extended into the evening by the time they had to call it off. They were back at it first thing in the morning, as soon as it was light enough to see, but were unsuccessful that day as well.

My friend and his parents extended their time out there as search and rescue crews tried in vain to recover the body of their little girl. There were even some people searching with dogs along the shoreline on the off chance she washed up there. It was a long shot, but it ended up paying off in a big way on the 4th day.

One of the dogs and its handler was searching on the opposite shore from the rest of their team. Suddenly, his dog started going ballistic. He’d apparently picked up on the girl’s scent.

Not only was she found, but she was found miraculously alive, which no one could explain. The thing that really startled the rescuer, though, was that her face had deep scratch marks all over it, and it was clear that the damage extended from her eyes to the rest of her face. It was so bad that she was left blind, but there were no other scratches on any other parts of her small body.

About a day or two later, when they finally got the chance to talk to her, the police asked her how she had survived and how she had gotten the scratches around her face and eyes.

She was 5 or 6 at the time, so her answers weren’t all that helpful. Based on what little she was able to articulate, she and her brother had been jumping off the boat to see who could make the biggest splash when she slipped out of her life jacket. All she’d say after that was that “the cold people from the bottom got her."

No one understood what that meant, but she added that what she saw scared her so badly that she had to “scratch her eyes so she wouldn't have to see them.” Because, in her words, "They wouldn't let me close my eyes."

She also seemed to be completely unaware that she had been missing for 4 straight days. The way she described it was that she was down there for maybe a few minutes before she escaped while simultaneously scratching her eyes and was almost immediately found by the “nice dog” and its shocked handler.

Now, I didn’t know this friend or his sister at that time. It wasn’t until years later, when we were all teens, that we met in high school, found out we used to vacation in the same spot, and eventually became good friends.

By that time, they were both pretty well emotionally adjusted. My friend’s sister was actually really outgoing and, despite her physical appearance (the scars around her eyes) and her being blind, she was well accepted by most of the other students and was pretty active.

When I got to know her and her brother better, they confided in me what had happened when they were little. I got curious and probed her further about it and asked what she saw that scared her enough to essentially gouge out her own eyes (I worded this more diplomatically, of course).

I’ve never seen someone’s demeanor change that quickly. Her normally upbeat and outgoing attitude changed in an instant, and all she would say was that “there are things at the bottom of that lake no one should ever have to know about…”

I remember that conversation vividly to this day. The story itself was enough to make me deathly afraid of swimming in large bodies of water, but seeing the way she shut down so quickly, her unseeing eyes staring blankly at me, and the tears streaming from the one tear duct that could still produce them, is what really cemented my phobia.

There are tons of legends surrounding Lake Tahoe. But this story made me realize some of those 'myths and legends' might not be as far from reality as I used to believe.

2

“There is motion at your front door.” I’ve been seeing a lot more of these alerts on my phone over the last two days from our Ring doorbell.

You can adjust how sensitive the camera is to movement, so you don’t get as many false positives, and this was the first step I took. My wife and I have some bushes right by our front porch that sometimes trigger these alerts. I’d given up checking the actual video feed for the most part because of how often this was happening.

,myInitially, adjusting the sensitivity settings for the doorbell seemed to solve the issue. I was relieved because all the false positives were draining the battery of the camera, and it was annoying having to bring it inside so frequently to recharge it. Recently, though, I started getting more alerts during the day at odd times. They’d stop around bedtime but picked up again in the early hours of the morning for some baffling reason.

The last two mornings, roughly around 3 a.m., I received a flurry of alerts on my phone. When I checked the Ring app, the thumbnail image for the video feed was completely dark, and I couldn’t make anything out. I checked the live feed, and it was the same. This is odd, because I always leave the porch light on at night, so I should have been able to see something.

I grabbed my nightstand gun and went to investigate. Opening the door slightly, I peeked outside and realized I had, indeed, forgotten to leave the porch light on. I like having our porch well-lit at night, as I feel that doing so is a deterrent to would-be thieves. I flicked it on and looked around, but didn’t see anyone around, so I closed the door, locked it and went back to bed.

This same thing happened again this morning. A flurry of motion alerts around 3 a.m. Even in my groggy state, I am self-aware enough to acknowledge how incredibly forgetful I am. I’m the guy who spends 10 minutes looking for the TV remote only to realize it has been in his hand the whole time. I rolled my eyes at myself, figuring I forgot to turn on the porch light again.

To be safe, though, I clicked one of the alerts on my phone and was immediately startled by the thumbnail image the app presented to me. Staring back at me was a dark, blurry closeup image of a man’s face. It filled the entire thumbnail, so his face must have been almost right up against the camera. As I processed what I was seeing, I noticed a couple of other details about the man’s face. Even with the poor lighting, I could see enough of his face to tell that his eyes were very far apart. So much so that it bordered on unnatural. He also had the widest grin I’ve ever seen a person have, with way more teeth than I would have thought humanly possible.

I was so unnerved by this that, even with my nightstand gun, I did not want to confront this guy. I clicked on the thumbnail to bring up the live feed, but the man appeared to be gone. I still couldn’t make out much more of the image, though, so I hesitated for a moment, trying to decide whether to phone the police to be on the safe side or check things out myself.

I like to err on the safe side, so I started to get up to step into the other room to phone the police so as not to wake my wife. She’s a light sleeper, so the slight commotion woke her anyway, and she groggily asked me what I was doing. Not wanting to worry her, I simply said that I couldn’t sleep, had remembered that I left the porch light off and that I just wanted to go turn it on.

There was a pause, and what she said next made the color drain from my face.

As she turned over to go back to sleep, she mumbled, “…while you’re at it, can you make sure to put the doorbell back up outside? I brought it in the other day to let it charge and forgot to put it back up…” I felt sick as her words sank in. The odd timing of the motion alerts during the day had been the camera picking up our own movements as the device sat charging on the kitchen counter. But the ones in the early hours of the morning, that face staring into the camera...those had also been recorded inside our home. Another alert startled me out of my shock, “There is motion at your front door...”