In the spring of 2008 my family moved into a townhouse in a quiet cul-de-sac in Centralia, Washington near Centralia High School and less than 100 yards from the banks of the Chehalis River.
My daughters, age 16 and 12 at the time, shared bunk beds in a bedroom that overlooked several neighbors' backyards, the training yard of a dog training facility, and several acres of horse pasture with a distant view of the back end of Borst Park. My youngest daughter had taken the top bunk and was next to the window which, at the time, had not been given window treatments.
As soon as the mornings began to get lighter, around 5:00-ish a.m., she complained of seeing four small, dark creatures passing from the garage side of our house, hopping our back fence and traveling along the neighbor's fence before disappearing around edge of the fence. She was insistent that we get window treatments right away as she felt incapable of not looking at the creatures when she was awakened by their presence.
She described them as approximately 2-3 feet tall, with long arms, traveling at a jog, hunched over. That they frightened her was obvious. I asked her if they jumped over our fence or went through it. She said they physically jumped over the fence; sort of a vaulting motion.
I was a bow hunter for a number of years and I know how to track animals. I checked the lawn for footprints - there were none. I checked the path she described them as taking each day. It is a path that would not have been traveled by anything else and there should have been obvious signs of the passage of creatures such as she described, but there was nothing. Nothing on the fence, nothing in the grass, and the neighbors thought I was crazy for asking if they saw anything.
After several more times of seeing these creatures, at the same time each morning, the last creature in line, just before disappearing around the neighbor's fence would pause and slowly look back and up into our daughter's window - looking right at her. After the second time of this happening, she put a large piece of poster board that had been a science project across the window until we put blinds and curtains up.
I asked why she didn't come get us or her sister when this would happen. She claimed to be unable to move when she saw them; not "scared stiff", but physically unable to move - that was much of what was scaring her about the encounters. She was also insistent that the creatures did not have a "friendly" feel to them - she described them as feeling dark.
My wife and I and her sister are the only people she has ever told about these encounters. It was easy for us to believe she was telling the truth because she has no history of crazy stories with us or her friends. Her fright and her insistence on covering the windows were genuine and she has never changed her story.
While she has been happy to forget the whole experience and doesn't like to talk about it, I've been all over the web looking for any explanation of what she could have seen.
I have already considered and discounted all the indigenous animals in our area, or kids, or prankster midgets, or aliens. Whatever these things are, they were too large for the closest animal they could be - raccoons. They followed the same route each time, they walked on two legs, could hurdle a 3 foot fence, and became aware they were being observed from a window 12 feet up and over 60 yards from where they would disappear from sight.
Nor do any of the alternate explanations adequately explain why my daughter would be wakened by their presence, be "forced" to observe them and be unable to move or call out until after they were gone from sight.
If they had left any signs of their passing I could say that, however farfetched it might sound, they must be cryptids, but since they left so signs, I am forced to conclude that they must be supernatural, despite the necessity of jumping the fence to get to the neighbor's yard.
Does anyone have any similar experiences or any clue as to what my daughter saw and the effect it had on her, i.e., the wakefulness at their presence, the inability to refrain from viewing and the "paralysis"?
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