A Queensland, Australia woman relates her many sightings and encounters, since she was a child, with what she believes to be a crawler humanoid. Is it following her?

I recently came across the following account:

"I don’t sleep with curtains open because of Crawlers. I’m a grown woman and I still can’t sleep at night with the curtains open. In fact, when I moved into my current house, I installed dual curtain rods so that even if my light blocking curtains are open, there’s a layer of privacy sheers behind them to block any sight.

I have seen the Crawler 4 times. I now live in Brisbane, Queensland. I don’t truly know if it’s the same one, they were all seen at different locations. It’s been years since I last saw one, but I still feel like they were the same creature, or at least, they knew me.

The first time, I was a very small child. Perhaps 4...maybe 5. My house was an old style flood house, so it was technically two stories tall but under the house was where we kept the car and our laundry room. Upstairs was where the living areas were. We were one of the only houses there, it was in the early days of the town and there were only a few other houses on the cul de sac. The back of our property was maybe 500 meters from the ocean, but you couldn’t see or hear the coastline from the house. There were some light rainforests surrounding our fully fenced house. My bedroom faced the back of the property.

I woke up one night, which wasn’t unusual for me because I was a very light sleeper. This particular night, my parents hadn’t closed my curtains. When I looked towards my window, I could see it. Keep in mind, I was on the second floor.

It was looking through my window. I couldn’t see much, the only light was coming from outside, but I could see the silhouette of its body. It was pale and thin but still the frame of the creature was huge, easily 2 metres tall. It was hanging off my roof, holding on to the frame of my window, and even though I couldn’t see it’s face I just KNEW it was looking at me. I was terrified. It’s been almost two decades since I saw it but I can still remember the intense fear I felt. It took me so much courage to get out of bed and walk to my parents room, where I finally fell back asleep. My parents told me it was just a dream.

The next time I remember seeing it, I was probably about 7 or so. I had moved houses probably a few months before, and my new house (about a 16 hour drive from my old place, still in Queensland) was a single story home, but still on the coast of the country. It was a lot further from the ocean, about 5kms, but very much the same kind of area. We were one of the only houses in the area and I had no neighbours.

I woke up one night because I heard something banging against the metal fence. In Australia we have a brand that makes fences and roofs out of corrugated metal that’s been painted. They’re quite common, 6ft high cream coloured metal fences. And they make an unmistakable noise when something hits them. I have no idea how anything could climb one of these fences. They’re completely smooth with nothing to grab onto. Even in my teens I tried sneaking out by jumping the fence and I just slid right down again.

At first when I woke up I thought some birds must have landed on the fence, but the noise continued for longer than it would take a bird to land. My next thought was that someone was trying to break into the house. I turned over in bed to face the window and saw it. Well, I actually didn’t see it at first. It was very dark out and I don’t remember much of a moon. As my eyes adjusted I could only just make out the figure hunched down in front of my window. Even in the hunched down pose it was still huge. This time I didn’t run to my parents. Their bedroom was no longer across the hall, it was all the way on the opposite side of the house, and I’d have to pass so many uncovered windows to get there. I don’t remember when I fell asleep, but I eventually woke up in the morning, and once again my parents told me I must have been dreaming. However from then on, they always came into my bedroom and closed my blinds before bed.

The next time I saw it, I was 9. I know I was 9 because I had just moved schools and made friends with a girl who we’ll call Casey. She invited me to stay at her house one night, and I was so excited. She was the first friend I’d made since moving schools and it had been ages since I’d gotten to have a sleepover. Everything went great, the night was perfectly normal, and I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of Casey crying. I sat up in bed and asked her what was wrong. She pointed towards the window, where I saw the thing again. Unfortunately for me, Casey had a night light, and I could see much more of the creature than I ever had before. It looked so crusty and dry. It was almost totally white, devoid of any real identifying features, except it stared at us with black eyes and mouth agape. Casey’s window was small and it had to hunch down to see us.

We both got up and ran crying to her mum. She turned on the outside light and brought us back inside the bedroom, and pointed out a large gumtree outside the window that she tried to explain just have been what we saw. We argued with her, the thing we saw was right against the window, not several meters away, and it wasn’t to the left, it was to the right. Casey’s mom eventually let us sleep on the couch.

A couple months later, Casey stayed over at my house. When I woke up in the morning Casey was gone. I asked my parents, and they told me that Casey had gotten up in the night and started crying, begging to go home. When I saw her again on Monday at school, she told me she got up at night to go to the bathroom, and when she walked past the loungeroom, she could see the “tall skin monster” crawling through the trees at the bottom of my backyard. She never came to my house again, and I lost touch when I moved schools a year later.

I don’t know what it was I saw. It can’t have been sleep paralysis, I was able to move and speak and everything. And it wasn’t a dream because someone else saw it.

I don’t know if this relates in any way, but when my partner moved in to my house a few months ago, he opened the curtains one night before bed. This time it was a full moon. I had already fallen asleep. I’m now living in a two story house with my bedroom on the second floor again.

I woke up in the middle of the night to my partner getting up and closing the curtains. When I asked him why, he told me he had a nightmare that there was a tall, skinny, white man clinging onto my roof, almost like a spider, and it was peering into my bedroom. He said it must have been a hallucination (he had been up all night playing video games) and when he got up from bed it jumped back onto the roof. I still haven’t told him, but his description of what he saw is exactly what I saw the first time I saw the crawler. Only, now I’m living in a busy neighbourhood with plenty of houses, unlike past experiences where I’ve been one of the only houses on the block and surrounded by forests.

I have heard “mimicking” many times, but have always drawn it up to imagination, sometimes I will hear my partner walk into the room and say hello at night but when I roll over I see the light coming down the hallway and I realise that he’s still in the loungeroom on the computer. I’ve heard my mother's voice a few times too. Throughout my childhood in all the homes I’ve lived in, we’ve had issues with dogs barking at nothing, and security motion detector lights randomly coming on at night when nobody is there. I don’t know if those two things are related or not but I’ve heard similar happenings in crawler related stories before and thought I’d mention it.

So those are my stories. I don’t know if I’ve seen a crawler, or something else, or if I’ve seen anything at all." PM

*****

Lon