Father Arrives Home Early, Orders Pizza, Vanishes; Real Father Still at Work

THE INTERNET — A Reddit user posting to r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix has described an afternoon from his boyhood that, by his own account, he still cannot explain. The author was 13 and lived alone with his father, the post states.

According to the account, the routine was fixed. The boy came home from school around three, played Xbox or watched television, and expected his father back at five or six. On the day in question he was partway through a match of Halo 3 when the front door burst open and a man who appeared to be his father walked in. The boy was not alarmed, the author writes, as his father sometimes liked to startle him. What troubled him was that he had not heard the car, a loud BMW whose arrival was normally audible.

The man was reportedly in unusually good spirits, though the author says his father generally came home exhausted. He announced that he was hungry, asked the boy to order pizzas, and went to change in his bedroom, which the author describes as part of the usual routine. The boy switched to cable television and waited.

One hour passed, then two. Past seven o'clock, the author says, he knocked twice at the bedroom door without answer, then opened it and found the room empty. The bathroom was empty too, as was the rest of the house. His phone then rang. It was his father, calling to say he was still at work and would be home in an hour or two.

The author reports that when he later told his father, the older man suggested he had been dreaming. The author rejects this. He says he does not have vivid dreams, was on no medication, and had not been napping, and he points out that he was in the middle of an online match when the door opened. The post offers no further explanation, and the author concludes only that he knows what he saw.