I know how it sounds. Believe me, I do. When I tell you that there is someone else living inside my home, who only I am able to see, your first conclusion is probably that I'm suffering from hallucinations. That's what I initially believed as well.

I think the first sign of my unwanted guest was a couple weeks ago. I was putting in a load of laundry, only to notice that the back door was slightly ajar. Seeing the darkness outside contrasting with the light of the laundry room filled me with an odd sort of dread. My husband and I lived in a fairly safe neighborhood, so I shouldn't have been too worried about the possibility of someone sneaking in, but it still felt like someone had trodden on my grave nonetheless.

Pulling myself together, I closed the door, locked it, and got back to work with the laundry, trying to put what I thought was simple paranoia out of my mind. As I clicked the lock shut, I swore I heard something like a faint breath right behind me, but when I turned my head there was nothing there. Feeling a bit spooked, I headed back to the living room, gently reminding my husband not to leave the back door unlocked.

I didn't actually see anything for a while, but I frequently felt like I was being observed. I'd be at home alone, watching TV, cleaning, or doing some other mundane task, when I would suddenly feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I'd turn around and there wouldn't be anyone there.

I would sometimes hear faint breathing too, under the bed, from the closet, on the other side of the shower curtains while I was brushing my teeth. Whenever I'd check though, I would be greeted with nothing. Just empty space, though occasionally I could detect a faint, musty odor.

This continued for about week, and I was beginning to get quite jumpy. I started regularly checking the house from top to bottom, every day, just making sure there wasn't any possibility of someone being there. I'd even look in the crawlspace under the house with a flashlight. I never saw anything that even suggested there might have been an intruder. But the tension, the paranoia, it didn't go away.

Then, finally, I saw him. It was late at night, and I was up getting a glass of water. I was about to take a sip, when I saw something reflected in the shiny black surface of the fridge.

It was a pale face, grinning at me from the shadows.

Instantly I wheeled around, dropping my glass in the process, causing it to shatter into a hundred pieces upon the tile floor. I hardly noticed though, because the face was still there. It hadn't just been a trick of the light, or a brief moment of pareidolia, there was actually a man peering at me from the shadows of the dining room.

He was tall, but not unusually so, perhaps slightly shy of 6 feet at the most. His face was stretched into a smug, close-lipped grin, with half-open eyes giving an impression of sleepy contentment. He was nude, and entirely hairless, including on the top of his head.

I screamed in horror and grabbed a cleaver from the knife rack, in case I needed to defend myself. Moments later, I heard my husband come rushing down the hallway, asking what was wrong. As I watched, the naked intruder put a finger to his lips and shook his head.

At this point my husband burst into the room, clutching a baseball bat. "What happened? What's wrong?" he asked, audibly panicked.

Unable to speak, I pointed towards the strange man, hand shaking. My husband looked into the dark, visibly straining his eyes. He moved closer to the intruder, who was still standing there, smiling smugly and staring at me with those half lidded eyes. My husband turned on the light switch, fully illuminating the stranger, but still didn't seem to notice him.

"What's wrong honey,?I don't see anything" my husband asked, standing less than a foot away from the intruder.

I swallowed, trying as hard as I could not to look at the naked man in my dining room, his smile widening ever so slightly. It didn't help, I couldn't stop staring at him. I've never suffered from delusions, hallucinations, anxiety, or any other symptoms of mental illness, but at that moment I thought I was going crazy.

"Oh i-it's nothing dear. I t-thought I saw someone at the window, but", I paused for a moment, staring at the nude man, who was subtly nodding his head, "it was just a trick of the light. I'm sorry for waking you up honey."

My husband set down the baseball bat and moved in for a hug, offering words of comfort as he wrapped his arms around me. I didn't hear any of them though, I was still focused on the intruder. No matter how hard I tried to will him to disappear, he refused to cease existing. As I watched, the man winked at me, and took a seat at the table.

My husband led me back to bed, but even as I followed him, our hands intertwined, I couldn't help but look back at the naked man in my dining room, waving farewell at me slowly. His half-closed eyes reflected the faint light of the moon through the uncovered window with sickening malice.

I didn't sleep at all that night. How could I? At that time, I was convinced something inside of me had snapped, but for the life of me I couldn't think of anything that would have caused it. I'm a stay-at-home spouse, so it wasn't work that could be causing it, and I'd had ample opportunities for social interaction, so clearly I wasn't losing my mind due to isolation. As far as I knew my family never had any especial predilection towards mental illness.

My thoughts raced through my mind like rats in a maze until the sun's rays poured through the bedroom window. I waited until my husband awoke before I felt comfortable leaving bed, I didn't much relish the thought of being the only one awake, in case our unwanted guest was still here.

When my husband finally got up, late in the morning, I accompanied him out to have breakfast. To my horror, the intruder was still there, still sitting at the table. I processed for the first time that he was sitting at my usual spot.

After my husband and I prepared a breakfast of scrambled eggs and sausages, we made our way to the table. The intruder sat there, unmoving, his half-closed eyes fixed on me. His smug smile seemed to dare me to try and sit down on his lap.

I sat on the opposite side of the table as normal, next to my husband. I noticed him raise an eyebrow, but he didn't say anything, so I didn't explain myself. Throughout breakfast my husband tried to make conversation, but I only answered with monosyllabic responses and grunts. It was hard to focus with the naked man staring at me. I finished breakfast quickly, and then got up to go take a shower. I pretended not to notice as the intruder licked my plate clean.

I triple checked that the bathroom door was locked, and then took my time trying my best to relax in the hot water. I knew that I'd regret taking such a long shower when my water bill would come in, but I tried not to focus on that. Instead I just tried to calm myself down. It almost worked, until I heard the dreadful squeaking of skin on glass.

I pulled aside the curtain and screamed. Standing in front of the sink, head turned to look back at me, stood the intruder, smirking. On the mirror, drawn with a finger on the fogged up surface, was a smiley face.

Once again, my husband ran into the room at the sound of my cry, the door seemingly unlocked.

"Are you okay?" he asked, concern on his face. He still didn't seem to notice the nude man.

"I'm fine", I lied, "I j-just slipped, I'm alright. Um, honey, d-did you draw that on the mirror?" I pointed to the smiley face on the glass. I knew sometimes that things drawn in the condensation on mirrors could reappear once exposed to more steam, and I hoped to God that my husband had just idly doodled it.

"What, the smiley face? No, I don't think so. Why? Are you sure you're okay?" he asked, visibly confused. The grin of the intruder who only I could see grew slightly wider.

I mumbled out that I was fine and stepped out of the shower, putting on a bathrobe and trying as hard as I could not to accidentally brush against the stranger. I felt his stare bore into the back of my skull as I left the bathroom to go get dressed.

The next couple days passed fairly similarly. No matter how hard I tried to will the intruder to vanish, he still remained. If I was watching TV with my husband, he would lie curled up under the coffee table, smirking at me. At dinner he would sit down in my regular chair, never breaking eye contact. He even started standing at the foot of my bed at night.

I almost got used to it, that's the worst part. I just began to accept that I had gone crazy, that this hallucinatory nudist was going to follow me around for the rest of my life. Then he started escalating things.

I once woke up earlier than my husband and went out into the kitchen. I paused in front of the refrigerator and gasped in horror and disgust as I saw what was attached to it.

Affixed to the fridge door with a cheap magnet was a sheet of printer paper covered in the most vile obscenities I had ever read. Slurs directed against my husband, crude drawings of swastikas and racist caricatures, allegations that I was cheating on him with his best friend, etc. I glanced over to the dining room and saw my guest grinning, half-closed eyes full of sadistic glee.

I tore the sheet of paper into little pieces and tossed them in the recycling bin, refusing to acknowledge the intruder's presence. The rest of the day passed fairly normally, though every time I looked over at the nude stranger I felt my stomach lurch.

Things escalated quickly after the note on the fridge. I found rusted nails left outside the bedroom door. A condom (opened, but thankfully unused) was left on my husband's desk. One day when I went to go make some oatmeal raisin cookies, I opened up the jar of raisins only to find hundreds of dead flies, their wings meticulously plucked off. Every time, I would look over at the intruder, and he would make eye contact with me, as if daring me to speak out. And every time, I would say nothing and just clean up the mess.

You have to understand, I was convinced that I was just doing these things on my own, as if I was in some sort of trance. I considered putting up security cameras to catch myself in the act, but I was horrified by the possibility that I might see something else.

There was one thing that put doubt in my mind, however, something that made me feel that the intruder might be something real. Our cat, Horace, could see him too.

Whenever the stranger was near him, Horace would hiss and his tail would puff up. On one occasion, he even swiped at him, drawing blood. The intruder leapt backwards, and for the first time I saw his half-closed eyes open fully, his smug grin turning into an open-toothed grimace of rage and pain.

As the cat ran off to hide in the bedroom, my husband laughed and remarked "Silly critter isn't he? I wonder what's gotten him so worked up."

Two days ago came the final blow which both proved the intruder's reality and destroyed my marriage.

I had gone out for a walk, to try and clear my head a bit, while my husband was at work. I decided to go on a fairly long hike through the nearby forest, and as a result, when I got back it was nearly 5:30. When I stepped through my front door the first thing I noticed was the smell, a metallic tang like rust or ozone. It was so alien to my home that it took me a few moments before my brain processed the scent of blood.

Grabbing my walking stick like a club and fearing the worst, I crept towards the smell, which seemed to be emanating from the kitchen. As I rounded the corner, I tried my best not to vomit.

The tile floor, cabinets, and fridge were splattered with blood. Nailed to one of the higher cabinets, viscera dangling out like party streamers, was the mangled, flayed corpse of Horace. Scraps of fur and skin were strewn about the floor in disgusting heaps. In the corner, covered in blood and scratches, sat the cross-legged form of the intruder, grinning with infinite, repulsive smugness. Written on the wall in still-wet cat blood were the words "More than one way" with a smiley face underneath.

I readied myself to attack the stranger, to bash his brains in with my improvised club, but it was at that instant that my husband came home.

I don't want to relive that moment. The things that he said to me. My sobbing insistence that I didn't do this. The disbelief on my husband's face as I finally told him about the intruder. The disgusting, perverse delight in the stranger's smile as I pointed towards him. Finally, I once again gripped the walking stick and moved to kill the intruder, confident that maybe in death he would become visible.

It didn't work. Whenever I moved to attack the intruder, he would simply leap out of the way, causing my strike to hit the floor, or the counter. I only stopped when the walking stick finally broke, and I fell down sobbing on to the bloodstained floor.

My husband left in a hurry, yelling something about divorce. I half-hoped that he would just call 911, that I'd be dragged off to a psychiatric institution and pumped full of drugs until I couldn't feel anything anymore. But no, he just ran off, slamming the door on the way out.

I've been alone in the house with the intruder for over a day now. With my husband gone, he's only gotten worse. He's smashed all the easily breakable objects in the house, torn up all the pillows and blankets, and broke the TV with one of my husband's golf clubs. I tried to stop him at first, but no matter what I did, he always managed to evade my grasp. Eventually I just gave up.

I don't know what the intruder is, or why he has done any of this. I know I didn't kill Horace, I know that I physically couldn't have, given that I was out hiking at the time. I don't understand why only I can see him.

I'm so tired. I haven't slept in over 24 hours. Whenever I try to leave the house, the stranger blocks my way, and I am far too afraid to test the limits of his strength. I can't sleep, I am horrified of what he might do now that there are no witnesses.

I don't know what to do. Please help me.