We have an October tradition in this space. 

Near Halloween, I tell you an eerie story. You get scared. We call it a day. 

These stories have always been ghostly, possibly demonic.  

This year, we’ll switch horror genres to the slasher, the home invasion. 

Home invasion is the most disturbing genre. As much as I’d like to pretend, there’s no ghost over your shoulder. They’re not real. 

Even though you just turned around. 

But home invasions? I’ll bet you’re thinking of at least one you saw on the news. 

Let’s give you another to think about. 

In the summer of 1997, my family — me, my teenage sister and cousin, Willie, Indy, my aunt, and my uncle — drove down I-95 to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. 

Andrew Cunanan was making his way up I-95 after killing Gianni Versace. 

Or so everyone thought. 

We arrived at our shared, beachfront condo. 

That is, my family and I arrived at our shared beachfront condo. Andrew Cunanan and I were not sharing a beachfront condo. 

After a quick jump in the ocean and a leisurely dinner, my sister, cousin, and I retreated to our bedroom. We hashed out who got what bed, managed to get the FX network on the TV — a real find, since Comcast didn’t carry it at the time — and settled into our pajamas with the 21 Jump Street I forced everyone to watch because, hi, we had FX for an entire week.

Suddenly, Willie, Indy, my aunt, and my uncle burst into our room. En masse, they hustled to the door at the back of our bedroom, the one leading to the beach. 

“We, uh, just wanted to make sure it was locked!” Willie said with composure so forced, it had its own gravity. 

“Yes, locked!” the others said, in Stepford Wife unison. 

Then, as one, they shuffled out of the bedroom, like The Blob. 

“Be right back,” I said, ducking from the room. 

In the hallway, I cornered the adults. What gives? I wanted to know. Why were they acting so weird? 

The story spilled from Willie’s mouth. My aunt heard a knock at the door. Thinking it was one of us girls locked out, she answered it. 

It wasn’t one of us girls. 

It was a flasher.  

My aunt screamed and slammed the door. The police had been called. A search was underway. 

But the adults — Willie, Indy, my aunt, and my uncle — had a suspect. In fact, they were certain of the flasher’s identity. 

Andrew Cunanan.  

In his desperate flight from the law, Cunanan took a three-hour detour from I-95 to drive to an obscure Outer Banks island and flash my aunt. 

I mean, obviously. 

The adults were terrified Andrew Cunanan would use our bedroom’s door to the beach to access our bedroom and, well, be Andrew Cunanan all over our beachfront condo. 

But within a day or so, Andrew Cunanan’s body was discovered. He’d never left Florida. 

“Or he came here and went back,” Willie said. 

Again, obviously. 

With the specter of Cunanan gone, the flasher took a humorous hue. We cracked jokes. We were not kind about the flasher’s, um, attributes. 

One night, my family decided to go to dinner.  

I begged off. There was a 21 Jump Street marathon, and 21 Jump Street marathons do not grow on trees. 

I was curled up with cookies and Richard Grieco when I heard the knock at the door. 

“This guy,” I thought.  

I ignored the flasher clearly returning to the scene of his crime.  

But he was persistent. Soon, the knocking turned into an all-out pummeling of the door. 

Now, I know you won’t believe me when I tell you I was calm. Calm and I are about as well acquainted as Andrew Cunanan and my aunt’s flasher. 

But I was calm. Even as I slid past the door with the angry flasher battering the other side. 

I stole down the hallway, light on my stockinged feet. I slipped up the stairs to a front bedroom, to scope out the parking lot. 

While the building’s architecture blocked my view of the front door, I could easily see the parking lot. My family’s car wasn’t there. 

Stupid flasher, I thought. I have you now, buddy. 

I crept into the kitchen. In this pre-smartphone era, I needed its wall-mounted phone. I called 911. I explained the situation to the operator. 

“Oh, honey, you just hang on!” the operator said in her honeyed southern drawl. The police, she explained, had set up camp in our condo’s parking lot since my aunt was flashed. She put me on hold so she could alert them. 

A knife block sat in front of me. I grabbed one. The longest one. Looking up at the floor-to-ceiling glass doors fronting the beach across from my perch on the phone, I could see how pale I’d become, the shake in my hands. 

My ears strained for the operator’s voice. I longed for her to return. The insistent knocking had stopped, but the silence was worse. For a brief moment, I felt like the only people in the world were me and that flasher. 

Did I stand a chance with my kitchen knife as my only defense? 

That was when I heard the first rock hit the glass doors. The glass doors directly across from me. The one showing my worsening pallor, my intensifying tremor. 

Another rock, bigger this time. Then another. He was going to break the glass. He was going to break the glass and kill me. I would die here, this night, with a kitchen knife in my hand and Richard Grieco on the TV downstairs. 

The operator returned. “He’s trying to break down the door!” I screamed. 

“Hold on, baby,” she said. Then, “Honey, they’ve got him. Open the door. The police are there. They’ve got him!” 

Tears streaming down my face, knife clenched in my hand, I broke for the door in an all-out run. 

I flung the door open. Two of North Carolina’s finest stood before me. 

“This man,” they said, tugging a bedraggled man before me, “claims he’s your uncle.” 

And, um, he was. 

It was my uncle.  

After dinner, the family decided to shop. My uncle, disinterested, asked to be dropped off at our condo, certain I would let him in. 

As my family pulled away, they joked I’d think he was the flasher. 

Uh, yep. I sure did. 

That night was the one time in my entire life my uncle hugged me. 

Thanks for the memory, Pops.