Mason

I'm 24 now, but this happened when I was 22, and I still have a hard time talking about it without feeling stupid.

Not because I think I imagined it.

That would honestly make this easier.

I feel stupid because every time I say it out loud, it sounds like some campfire story somebody made up after drinking too much.

and I know exactly how I would react if someone told me the same thing.

I would probably nod along and think they saw an animal, got scared, and filled in the rest later.

I get that.

I used to be that person.

I didn't believe in skinwalkers or curses or anything like that, and I still don't know what I believe.

I just know that for one night, while I was house-sitting at a property outside Farmington, New Mexico, something stood on the back porch and knocked on the door.

and when I looked through the peephole, I saw a deer standing there like a person.

The house belonged to my mom's friend, a woman named Carla, who had known my family since I was in middle school.

She and her husband owned a few acres about 40 minutes outside town, not exactly in the middle of nowhere, but close enough that you couldn't see another house from their place once the sun went down.

They had two dogs, a handful of chickens, a dusty old barn, a corral they didn't really use anymore, and a double-wide trailer on a permanent foundation that had been added onto over the years until it looked more like a long, low ranch house.

Carla called it her desert money pit because something was always breaking.

The pump would quit, the AC would freeze, the fence would sag, the dogs would dig under it, and some kind of animal was always getting into the feed.

She and her husband were going to Albuquerque for four days because her sister was having surgery, and she asked if I could stay at the house instead of just stopping by.

I was between jobs at the time, taking online classes, and I needed money badly enough that I said yes before she even told me what she was paying.

It was easy work, feed the dogs in the morning and evening, check the chicken water, make sure the back gate stayed latched, and sleep there so the place didn't sit empty.

She told me coyotes had been bad that spring.