Flower woman

To set the scene, my friends (a married couple) had just bought a house in Central Oregon. The house is a little ways outside of town, set back in the woods and bordering on National Forest. It sits on almost 3 acres of fairly wooded land, and there is a small second dwelling in the back that is essentially a 1 bedroom house. They were letting me rent it from them, as we had all lived together for the last year in a rental house downtown.

It's early July and I had already moved in, a few weeks ahead of them because the husband was finishing an accelerated summer class. I was working from home, and was the only one on the property. This was a bit before I adopted my dog, so I was really alone. All our neighbors are a ways off, since all the plots there are several acres minimum, so the little house is fairly isolated.

It's about 9:30am and my work is in full swing. I would start early in the morning and the phones were generally extremely busy at this time. Suddenly I hear a knock on my door. This freaks me out, because I was supposed to be alone on the property, but I quickly push the anxiety out of my mind and figure one of my friends probably came to work on the house and needed something from me. With the way my front door is positioned in relation to my windows, I have no way of seeing who is at the door without opening it.

I open the door to see this little old lady standing there. She introduces herself as the previous owner of the house and asks if I am the homeowner. I tell her no, that I am renting the small unit from the homeowners but that they would be moving in a few weeks from now. She then asks if she could take some flowers from the garden, claiming she planted them for her dead mother. I tell her to go for it because I didn't really care and needed to get back to work. So I close the door and go back to work.

Later that day, when I clocked out for lunch, I called my friends to tell them what happened. They seemed oddly unsettled by the whole thing. They explained to me that the house had been owned by one couple since it was built and their daughter, who was not the woman at my door, was selling it because they had both passed away. This left me feeling a bit odd, but I shrugged it off and tried not to overthink it.

About a week later, my friends are doing work in the main house, but had parked in the garage so it didn't look like anyone was there. I was working again, as usual, when I heard what sounded like someone walking through the brush outside. I texted my friend to ask what he was doing outside my house, but he said he wasn't at my house and that they were both still in the main house. So I got up and looked through my blinds into my back yard, and there's the woman, rummaging through the brush. I couldn't tell what she was doing exactly, as the brush is fairly high back there, but when I went out later, it seemed like she had been digging?

Of course, this freaked me out a bit. My car was the only one visible so it would seem like I was alone. I immediately called my friends in the main house, who came out with their dog to figure out what she was doing. The dog started barking as soon as they walked into the yard, because he barks at everything, but he was still out in front of my house, she was behind it. As soon as she heard the dog, I heard her start moving hurriedly away from the house. At this point, she had moved to one of the blind spots on the side of my house, by the garage, so I could no longer watch her through the window. I heard my friend call after her, but she took off into the woods.

There had been no other cars parked on the property, so she hadn't driven up. We never managed to catch up to her, as she had a pretty good head start, so I still don't know what she was doing around my house. I adopted a dog a few days later (I'd been in the process since before the initial encounter) who is easily frightened by anything unexpected, so she barks and growls any time a pine cone falls on the roof. Sometimes she will bark at what seems like nothing, especially in the beginning. I don't know if it was my friend or my dog who ultimately scared her off, but we haven't seen her since.

To the flower lady, let's not meet again.