Spooky happening

[Thistledew]

My mother lives in a very rural location on the edge of the marshes.

One summer I was visiting her and because it was very warm I slept with a window open. In the middle of the night I was awoken by the sound of something scrabbling about on the roof. I’m well
used to the sounds of various birds that live under the tiles and scrabble about, but this was quite different. It sounded much heavier than any of the birds I had ever heard- I wondered for a moment if it could be an owl, but it sounded bigger and heavier than that.

What was particularly odd was that the sound invoked an immediate sense of terror in my such that I kept out of bed and slammed the window shut. The sound of the window shutting was enough to cause the thing on the roof to fly away and I managed to go back to sleep, telling myself that the sinister feeling was most likely a remnant of a dream.

The next morning my mum seemed tired. I asked her if she was ok. She told me that she had also been woken by the sound of something on the roof and had been unable to get back to sleep because it had sounded so sinister.

I mean, it probably was an owl, right? But why in that case did we both get an overwhelming feeling of it being sinister? What was it on the roof?

I could well have just been a large bird. We have seagulls and they are huge. Usually around 3-4am they wake me with what sounds like a seagull in hobnail boots dancing about up there.

Sounds terrifying tbh! Once I was awake downstairs at my parents house around midnight. I was in the living room facing a door which led out to a single storey porch. Something ginormous sounding clattered down onto the porch roof and I was completely frozen with fear, it sounded ‘sinister’ as you’ve described. I can only assume it was an owl or other large bird, it sounded more like a person jumping around though 😨and the cat went crazy, he was running to each window downstairs trying to see what it was. I remember my dad came down and had a look outside but it had gone.

🦇 bats....for a tiny wee beasty they make the most amazing amount of noise, the first time I heard them going in and out under the eaves I was freaked right out, it sound like scraping metal chains! However I'm used to it now, and tend to sleep through their racket, but sometimes the squirrel wakes me up at some ungodly hour tap dancing in clogs on our roof.

Pheasants stomp on the roof quite often here, they are very heavy-footed.
Noisiest roof-stompers I've had were a peacock and a coiuple of peahens. I was sure humans were on my roof, but no, just large birds.