They thought it was nightmares. Then they actually caught a man outside his window.

His parents didn’t believe him when he said there was a scary man outside his window every night. Then they caught the man on camera.

A three-year-old boy in Wellington was terrified to go to bed for three nights straight. He kept telling his parents there was a ‘man with a light’ scaring him outside his window. Putting it down to bad dreams, they thought nothing of it.

Then they heard him scream.

“At 5.30 in the morning he let out an absolutely gut-wrenching scream from his room,” his mother, Melissa Rodrigues told Stuff.co.nz. “I knew something wasn’t right.”

Melissa and her husband then checked outside their son’s bedroom window, where they saw footprints, and realised that the front gate was ‘wide open’. They immediately called the police, and Melissa downloaded a motion sensor app to her phone that would hopefully capture images of the man if he returned.

He did.

image via

The app, called Salient Eye, automatically causes the phone’s camera to take pictures when it senses motion. And at 4:45am the next morning, it started taking pictures and sending them to Melissa’s email account.

“It gave me the shock of a lifetime because, even though I was waiting for it, I wasn’t expecting to see him,” she said.

Quickly calling police, officers were able to track down the intruder, who hadn’t managed to get far from the house. Apparently it was a youth known to police, who had been stealing tools and other items from people’s gardens.

Hopefully the little boy has been sleeping soundly since.

via