A few days ago, I shared a creepy experience from when I was just a little kid. Here’s another one that’s weird. Nothing supernatural, but at the time, it was creepy as hell. This is what happened.

The year is 2016 and it’s the last day of school. After school, which ended at around 12am, my mother, brother, stepdad and I left for the south of France. My stepdad had a vacation home there. So, we left at around 2pm and braced ourselves for a long drive. I was cheery, and so was everyone in the car. We listened to music and played some road trip games, like those where you need to come up with the name of an animal, which should start with the last letter of the animal used by the previous person. You get what I mean.

Either way, we’re five hours into the drive, about halfway in, and we’re having dinner in a busy parking lot, when suddenly my mother receives a phone call. My mother asks who’s on the phone, since the number calling her was one she didn’t recognise. A French speaking woman on the other side of the phone told my mother that she had a present for her, and that she wanted to know our then current address. The woman claimed to have tried dropping it off at our old address, since she thought that my mother still lived there. But the new owners told her that my mother had moved and that they couldn’t help the woman. It wasn’t even our former address, but our former former one, since we moved two times on a short span of time. My mother, who wasn’t very attentive because she was relaxed and enjoying the trip, unknowingly gave away our then current address.

After ending the call, she explained to my stepdad, my brother and I what the call was about. We instantly start asking questions. Why would the person have a present for her? How did she get my mother’s number? Why would she ask our address? And why did the woman speak French even though they don’t speak French where we live?

My mother’s face turned pale. So did mine. We were all really creeped out and nervous. My mother had given this woman our address. We were hundreds of kilometres away from our house, we couldn’t do anything.

After dinner, my mother went to recharge her phone inside the building that stood next to the parking lot. It wasn’t even a parking lot, more like a stop for tourists. The building had shops and restaurants in it. It was there that my mother reached out to the people who bought our former former house. They confirmed that a few hours before my mother called them, a woman did indeed come by and asked them about my mother. This wasn’t someone that worked for a delivery service. According to the people my mother had called, the woman didn’t have a specialised vehicle with a logo on it, nor did she wear any kind of uniform. The woman was also older. Not that old, but they estimated her to be in her late 40’s. My mother also asked them if they had given this woman her phone number, which they didn’t.

My mother ended the call, and we had even more questions now. At this point, all of us were severely creeped out.

We got back into the car and continued our drive. This part, however, wasn’t as cheerful and carefree as the first one. All four of us had a discussion on what we should do next, and why my mother went as far as actually giving our address to this person. My stepdad called our neighbour, and asked him to keep an eye on our property. But our house was on the top of a hill, and it was rather isolated. Our neighbour had to go over to our house and circle around the property. At this point, it was also getting dark.

My mother called one of her close friends to go and take a look at our home. I could hear the stress in her voice as she called him. That friend did. After he received the call, he drove to our home. He said that when he arrived, the porch looked normal, and that all lights in our house appeared to be out. My mother’s friend and our neighbour ran into one another and both scared the crap out of each other, but once they both came to the conclusion that it was safe, they both went back home.

After a while, our neighbour texted my stepdad that he mentioned what happened to his son, who happened to be a policeman. He informed his colleagues, who were doing a nighttime patrol in our neighbourhood, and they said they’d check every few hours. The police never saw anyone break in that night. However, they did say that, around eleven thirty that night, they saw a car drive onto the road that lead to our house. No one ever drove in there, besides the handful amount of people who lived there. According to the people who patrolled around our neighbourhood that night, though, the car didn’t stay long, and they never saw anyone get out of it.

I’m glad we didn’t think about what happened all vacation long.

We never heard anything from this woman again. Neither did we receive any “presents”. I’m also very glad that we moved out later that year.