I don't know why I did it. You know how you get, sometimes, late at night, when you've had a couple glasses of wine and the mood is nostalgic and your thoughts go sideways into the past without a specific direction? I was thinking about the house where I grew up. I don't know why I opened Google Maps. I just did.
I typed in the address. The street appeared. The satellite view first — just roof and yard, the maple tree my dad planted when I was seven that's now enormous, the addition my parents built when my brother was born. I switched to Street View.
The house looked the same. Clapboard siding, same color we painted it when I was twelve. The porch railing that was always slightly crooked. The garden bed along the front walk that my mother kept but which, in the Street View image, had gone to weeds — which made sense, because my parents had sold the house four years ago and moved to Florida, and from what my mother said, the new owners didn't garden.
I looked at the image for a while, just doing what you do when you look at your childhood home from far away: remembering things. The summer the porch rail broke and my brother and I jumped off the edge of it. The window with the broken latch on the second floor that always swelled shut in summer.
I looked at that window.
There was someone standing there.
Not a reflection — the light was wrong for a reflection. Not a curtain. The image was clear enough, in the way Google Maps images often are, with that particular flat bright quality of images captured by a camera on a moving car. Whoever was standing at the upstairs window was visible from the chest up. They were facing outward.
They were looking at the car that had taken the photograph. They were, therefore, looking directly at me.
I checked the date on the Street View image. You can usually find it in the bottom corner. This one was from two years ago, which meant two years before I was sitting at my desk looking at it, two years after my parents had moved out and a full year before the new owners had moved in.
The house was empty. No one was living there. It had been vacant for a year when this image was taken.
I zoomed in as far as the image would allow. The face didn't resolve. I could tell it was a face — the shape was right, the positioning — but the detail wasn't there. What I could tell was that they were not moving. They were standing very still at a window in an empty house, looking at a camera mounted on a car driving past, looking at me.
I called my mother. I know how it sounds. But I needed to know if the house was being used for anything, if there had been someone watching it between sales, a maintenance person or a realtor or someone. My mother said no. She said the key had been with the realtor and the realtor had said no one had accessed the property.
I went back to the Street View image. It was still there. I refreshed the page. Still there. I cleared my browser cache and reopened it.
The person was gone.
I don't mean a different image had loaded. The same image — same lighting, same angle, same date — but the window was empty. The house was empty the way a house should be empty when no one is home.
I don't know what to do with this. I saved a screenshot before I refreshed, because some instinct told me to, and the figure is in the screenshot. I've shown it to two friends. One says it's a curtain. One says she can see it too, and we shouldn't talk about it.
My parents still live in Florida. The new owners of my childhood home are a family with two kids, from what I can tell from the neighborhood Facebook group I found. They seem happy there. They have not mentioned anything strange.
But the image on my computer shows someone standing in that window.
The window with the broken latch. The one that was always hard to open from the outside.
The one that you had to know was broken to be able to get through.