My boyfriend and I recently moved into our first apartment in the city together. We’re both from rural areas, so we tried to find a place that we thought would be quiet. We didn’t want loud people or cars or sirens keeping us up at night. We ended up renting the second-floor rear apartment in a small building. The apartments on the front side of the building face a busy street, but the apartments at the back of the building—like ours—face an alley, a small parking lot, and some other apartment buildings. We thought we would hear less noise.
And we do hear less noise. At night in our bedroom, it gets so quiet that we can pretend we still live in the middle of nowhere. The only issue with the apartment is the view. All our windows face the apartment building next to us or the apartment building behind us. It has made opening the blinds feel awkward, like a bunch of strangers could peer into our apartment, so we usually keep the blinds down.
It took months for us to notice it. The first time we saw it, we had arrived home late from a concert. We took showers and talked about how beautiful the moon had looked on the drive home. My boyfriend wondered if we could see the moon from one of our windows, so we turned off the lights and pulled the blinds open. It was a little past three in the morning.
We froze as soon as we looked out the window. The moon no longer interested us. A person stood in the center of almost all the other apartments’ windows. Over twenty people, standing at their windows with the lights on inside their apartments. Maybe they all wanted to see the moon too, my boyfriend suggested. But it didn’t make any sense: with their lights on behind them, they wouldn’t be able to see out of their windows well at all. I made my boyfriend shut the blinds.
Ten minutes later, my boyfriend peered through the blinds again.
“Everyone is gone,” he said. I looked outside. Every light was turned off. No signs of life anywhere.
It was hard to fall asleep that night. The silence in our bedroom was disturbing, not peaceful. We had to turn on a white noise machine. We agreed that tomorrow, we would set an alarm for three in the morning and wait to see if it happened again.
The next night, we sat by our bedroom window with the lights off and the blinds pulled open. At three, all the lights were off. I counted, and we could see 46 windows from our vantage point.
At 3:10, all the lights turned on at the same time. Then people appeared in the windows. It was as if they had been squatting beneath their window sills, and then, at the same moment, they all stood up. Everyone was backlit, so it was difficult to make out their faces, but it looked like a mix of men, women, and children.
At 3:13, they all sank down again, as if returning to their squatting positions beneath the window sills. The lights abruptly turned off. My boyfriend and I looked at each other, unsure of what to do. It wasn’t the sort of thing you could call the police about.
For three nights, we set an alarm for three so we could look out the window. The same thing happened every time.
My boyfriend wanted to investigate more. He wanted to ask the neighbors about it, but we’re both shy and don’t know anyone in the city very well.
I begged him not to, but on the fourth night, he wanted to go outside while it happened. I told him I would watch from inside our bedroom and call for help if something happened to him.
At three, my boyfriend stood in the apartment parking lot. At 3:10, no lights came on. By 3:13, nothing had happened. He came back inside, and I thought it might be over. But he wanted to try again the next day, this time waiting to step outside until after the people were standing in their windows.
That night, the lights came on at the same time as usual. The people rose to stand in their windows. I watched the back door of our apartment building and saw my boyfriend come outside. He only made it a few steps from the door before he was frozen completely still, pausing in the middle of taking a step. The people disappeared at 3:13. A minute later, my boyfriend started to walk again. He looked up, scanning the dark windows of the apartment buildings, then came back inside.
“Guess it’s not happening anymore,” he said to me once he was back in our bedroom.
“You think it didn’t happen?”
“Yeah, I didn’t see anything out there. Did you see something?”
I told him what happened. It scared him enough that he decided we should stop investigating. It didn’t affect us, he said. At first, I was happy to stop looking into it. But lately, I’ve started to wonder. We’ve met some people in the apartment building behind us, and they seem so nice, so normal. I’ve started to wonder if it’s even them standing in the windows. Each time my boyfriend and I watched the people standing in their windows, I got a dark feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I’ve started to wonder if I need to warn someone.