Estimated reading time — 17 minutes

This is a copy of something I’ve written and posted all over the internet. The websites, subreddits, and Discord servers relating to the hobby have long been found and shut down. There aren’t many of us anymore, let alone those both young, sane, and tech-savvy enough to navigate the internet, but I know for a fact that all of my old friends that may or may not still “gaze” still frequent these sites. For obvious reasons, I’d rather not go back into direct contact with them.

This is also a general warning for anyone in the state of Utah: Do NOT go gazing near Park City.

Two things, in case anyone gets curious enough to look it up and not take my warning seriously:
Gazing is watching people in their homes. Never interacting, never doing anything to affect a person or their property. It’s illegal, of course, but most of the people that gaze do so from outside of the property. They use this as a legal and moral excuse to justify their curiosity, though most of the hobbyists claim that as long as you’re on public property you aren’t breaking any sort of law just by watching someone’s house.

Park City is a place near Salt Lake City, in Utah. High up in the mountains, it’s a place prided as the home of the Sundance Film Festival (which isn’t the case anymore, but for a long time it was quite the claim to fame) and the winter Olympics back in the early 2000’s. The place has a lot of money invested in it, which leads to a lot of big, isolated houses among the mountains where owners don’t bother drawing the shades, or just as bad, ignoring that you can see their silhouettes as long as the lights are on unless you have some very thick curtains in front of your windows.

Gazing only has three rules that are actually quite outspoken: You only have a few hours to watch and wait for something exciting. You cannot leave any sort of evidence of your presence. You can never go back to the place you’ve already been. Gazing is a short-lived hobby, and it’s well understood that anyone who breaks these rules or goes homeless trying to find new places to watch winds up jumping down the rabbit hole and getting caught. I never did, not until last night.

My idea was genius. Usually I went up into the lower hills and outcrops around Salt Lake City itself, but it was a hard trip. Any time you gaze, it usually means an overnight trip to a specific neighborhood. That meant that you either needed a car with nothing discernible about it or rely on public transportation – which I often did.

But a trip to Park City? Hell, I could drive up there myself and make a nice “stay-cation” out of it, spending a week in a nice hotel with three of the seven days dedicated to a long trip gazing down the mountains around town. The best part was that I had a way to make it almost too easy of an effort: the alpine slides.

Basically, big long concrete slides that wind down the mountain. Renting the wheeled cart needed to use the slides was relatively expensive, but I didn’t need that. Just the ticket up the chairlift. After a day of enjoying a nice hotel and some pretty fun local bars, followed by a day of using the pool, hot tub, and an arcade down the road, I parked my car at the end of a certain neighborhood and took a bus back to the alpine slides.

I planned it so that I took the last ride up to the highest slide. What I thought would be the most dangerous gamble of the night was jumping off of the chairlift and dashing into the forest lugging my pack stuffed with slap-dash camping essentials.

My insides were in tight knots, but I managed to make the jump while the chairlift was near the ground. I got up and ran, not bothering to check if anyone had seen me.

I dove, sliding into the bushes near the trees, and stayed still. I hadn’t seen any cameras on the chairlifts, but I made a bet that if there were any, they weren’t being watched particularly closely.

I waited in the bushes for an entire hour, occasionally crawling east towards the neighborhood that I had spotted on Google Maps. It was a long, winding neighborhood marked with big houses and (this is how you know the people that owned them were loaded) massive driveways. Best of all, the mountain seemed to slope in just a way that I could comfortably and constantly walk downhill in the thick forest surrounding the houses, comfortably listening to music while I gazed.

The sound of an engine came up the hill. I looked back, making sure not to move my body too quickly. A group of security guards rode on ATVs up the hill towards the slide I’d just bailed from. I’d gotten high enough to see where the chairlift I’d abandoned ended up: a large, concrete platform with the slide stretching down towards the opposite side of the mountain.

A few employees, I think of the hotel the slides were owned by, stood waiting for the security guards. Still moving slowly, I pulled out my binoculars and watched them. My entire body clenched when the group turned toward the forest I was hiding in. Eventually one of the employees shook their heads and said something that made the rest laugh. The security guards went back down the mountain, and the hotel employees got to reap a pretty good benefit of their job: getting to slide down after every shift to clock out and go home.
Shivering slightly, I put my binoculars back into my pocket and risked standing up. I’d crawled far enough into the trees to not be noticed, or at least I hoped. This part of the journey, hiking a few miles towards the neighborhood, was the riskiest part. Getting caught by the hotel would be bad, but getting caught near a public road that I could claim I was in the middle of jogging got me out of felony territory and towards a petty misdemeanor.

But god damn, it was a beautiful walk. Squirrels and birds seemed to be everywhere, and the scent of the alpine (a unique blend of fir trees, pines, and sagebrush) was intoxicating. Even if I didn’t see anything exciting when I gazed, this renegade hike through the mountains was more than enough of a thrill to make the trip worth it.

A few hours later I rounded a certain hill, and I was finally at my destination. It was pretty much a huge pit that had large houses with even larger yards winding down through forests that were almost overtaken by civilization. Meticulously sculpted pavement snaked down towards the west side of what I’ll call “the pit”. Every quarter of a mile, a three- (occasionally four) story house split off from the roads. It would have been a nightmare to navigate if there wasn’t a consistent pattern on the left-most neighborhoods: a clear path of forest that would cover me while also being directly across from many of the houses that wound down the pit. At the very end, and I’d double-checked this just to be safe, was a gate that let back out into a public park near Park City proper. My car was parked at the edge of said park.

My binoculars came back out from my pocket. The sun was still setting, and there was a stretch of hill that I needed to walk down to start on my path down the pit. In the meantime, I thought I’d get some preliminary gazing out of the way.

There was only one house that had lights on that I could see from the top of the pit. I say house, but it was really a mansion, hosting a party that filled the entire yard, with a large pool, hot tub, a basketball court, and even two batting cages that took up a football field-sized section of land. People of all shapes, sizes, and colors mingled, ate food, and enjoyed the amenities. Nothing crazy or wild enough to warrant writing down at the time happened, but it was fun watching people have fun.

After the sun really started to set, the partiers began moving inside. I watched them go in, trying to see what was going on in the mansion, but I was much too far away and elevated to get a good look. I wondered if they were going to break out the crack, molly, and condoms after they went inside.

I caught sight of a little girl in my binoculars following her parents inside. Now I hoped to God the three things weren’t a part of the party. I chuckled a bit (although I really did hope the people up here weren’t that fucked,) drank some water, and took one last look at the mansion.

The little girl was standing just outside the wide mansion doors, looking towards me.
Not at me, but way too damn close for comfort.

There’s an excellent science-and-learning based channel on YouTube that I keep up with. One of their episodes had been about horror and paranoia. I bring it up because I remembered when I was looking through those binoculars that there was a popular theory that you knew when you were being looked at due to specific rays of light that can emit from someone’s eyes when they look at you. It was the only way I could explain my certainty that the girl was looking right at me.

She wasn’t, or at least, I really don’t think she was. Even after everything that happened I’m not sure, but I do know that an alarm went off in my head that something was looking at me, even if it wasn’t the little girl looking towards the hills where I was hiding.

The girl turned away, took a sip from the pouch of juice she was carrying, and walked into the mansion that now flooded with life and light. She closed the door behind her, and that “watched” feeling finally went away.

I felt cold and, for the first time since picking up the hobby, doubt. It didn’t take much to shrug off that doubt, but I wrote what I’d seen down. The other guys, and plenty of gals believe it or not, in the hobby would get a kick out of the creep factor.

By then the sun had finally finished setting, and true darkness was in the pit. All of the houses were lit up, and from where I was it looked like a huge diorama of rich tiny plastic neighborhoods and forests. I took in the sights one more time before I took my night vision goggles out of my backpack and started climbing toward the snaking path of forests that led to the opening in the pit that led out to my car.

It took half an hour of walking to reach the first house, or rather its backyard. People were much less likely to give their backyard surroundings any mind, even with drapes over the window like I’ve said, and that was even in a really populated area.

Walking through a thick forest with night vision goggles and a backpack full of food and wilderness survival equipment wasn’t hard. What was hard was making sure I moved quietly. There are a few tricks to that, but I’m not sharing them. Despite how I’ve typed up until this point, I’m also going to tell you, with my whole heart, to not go gazing. At all. Besides the obvious moral reasons, what Reddit posts and blogs won’t tell you is how often someone gets shot without even trespassing. Never mind being put on a registry depending on who’s living in the house when you eventually get caught.

But I won’t lie to you, I didn’t have that mindset until after I reached my car bloody, bruised, and exhausted the following morning.

When I approached the big wide backyard of the first home on my trail, I was excited to see what I could glimpse. The night vision goggles came off, I sat comfortably against the hill, and I gazed.

There was nothing overtly suspicious or noteworthy about this backyard, so I relaxed just enough to gaze at what looked like the wildest party I’d ever seen. The backyard wasn’t that large, but it was full of games, food, and drinks everywhere there was room. Pool tables, ping pong tables, and an inflatable sports area/bouncy house. People were drinking, chatting, and having an absolute blast.

The house was a huge, angular glass box marked with marble and granite, with a gigantic wooden patio where even more people were sipping drinks and having fun talking to each other. I don’t go to a lot of parties, but this would’ve been the exception. The only thing that really seemed odd was the second story of the house. Smoke and colored lights filled the air, and unclothed, sweaty people were flowing and undulating like the heavy wisps of smoke and incense that surrounded them.

The entire sight gave me an excited, longing feeling. People were walking in and out of the house, greeting people they hadn’t seen before constantly, and with drinks or food. I felt a genuine urge to sneak in and mingle, take advantage of the situation and have some fun. It was probably going to be my last gazing trip anyway, and there were a few people on the edge of the lawn nearest to me that were wearing the kinda clothes I had on. I probably could have done it.

Slowly, I slid my night vision goggles back on and turned away from the party. I had a few urges as I made my way around trees, leaves, and bushes to go back. Lord knew that I wanted a reason to cut loose. Honestly, I still couldn’t give you the exact reason why I ignored the party other than that I was just too scared to be even a little more risky than I already had been.

A quarter of a mile down the forest, I saw a small and cheap looking apartment building made with red brick. Four wide and obscured windows were evenly spaced out along its back side, though I couldn’t see a door coming out from the small concrete patio or from the sides of the building.

I settled down, sat against the hill, and gazed. After a few minutes of twiddling my thumbs and listening to music, a light came on from the top left window. A shape moved through the room, approached the window, then pulled it open.

It was a blonde woman, in jeans and a t-shirt. After she’d slid the window open, she frowned and leaned out towards the backyard.

“Hey! You!” She whispered, so loudly that she might as well have yelled.
I stopped breathing.

“Hey! Come on, I know you’re out there!”

My breathing came back, but only enough to keep me conscious. My heartbeat was a heavy pulse that I felt throughout my entire body. Panic was only held back by the fact that she wasn’t looking directly at me. Rather, she was looking all around the forest.

She didn’t know where I was, but she knew I was there.

“Come on, please!” She whisper-yelled, motioning towards the house. “We don’t get hikers up here very often, at least tell me which trail you’re heading towards!”

I didn’t say anything, didn’t even blink.

Had she tracked me on the mountain? Maybe I’d set off some sort of alarm, even though I’d been keeping an eye out?

“I’m gonna call the cops if you don’t show yourself!”

I almost broke. I wasn’t born with a silver tongue, but I figured that if I had to, I could’ve passed off as a hiker. Looking back, I probably would have, but even more than the alertness I felt at being spotted, there was an odd twist to my gut that I felt when I looked at the woman continuing to whisper and, at one point, even started a one-sided conversation trying to get me to reply.

At the time only one thing felt really off to me: her room. Her room, or the room she was standing in at least, was completely empty. The walls were cracked and yellow, both from the old paint and the dim, used bulb that hung naked from a simple plug in the ceiling. A string hung down from it. There was no lightswitch near the door.

Yet the light had come on before I saw any movement in the room.

Very, very slowly, I started to move my way down the forest. The light in the room wasn’t nearly strong enough to reach where I was but I played it as safe as I could. She continued to whisper until I was almost out of earshot. This is one of the few things from that night that I don’t vividly remember, but I would swear that after a certain distance, she stopped talking entirely. Just when she went quiet, the light went off.

Keeping my hands and legs from shaking was almost impossible. The only way I kept it together was a simple fact: If I was being tracked or had been spotted, I needed to keep an eye out for anything that would give that, or me, away. It felt like hours before I saw the next backyard, but it must have only taken me fifteen or twenty minutes.

Light suddenly shined in my eyes so brightly that I yanked my night vision goggles off and stared at the ground. All I could see was a pulsing white and red.

“Freeze!” I heard a man shout from where I’d seen the house. “Put your hands where I can see them!”

The red and white flashing in my vision became tinted with blue as my sight came back. Floodlights and police cruiser lights spinning on top of cars marked Park City Sheriff’s Department.

I don’t know what would’ve happened if I’d surrendered. My gut tells me that I’m only breathing as I type this because I happened to be behind a larger tree when the lights had come on, and two things I heard out of the cacophony of shouts I heard were “Get up from the ground” and “we will open fire!”

I’ve never been arrested and the only experience I have with cops was watching the titular show when I was younger and clips on the internet, but even in my panicked state of mind I knew that cops didn’t immediately threaten to shoot a trespasser just for trespassing. And get up from the ground? I was standing straight up behind a tree.

I ignored all of my instincts and waited. The cops continued to shout, warning me that they were going to open fire if I didn’t come out with my hands up. The longer I waited, the more scared I became. Not because the voices were getting louder or closer, rather that they stayed the same.

Being conservative, I must have stood behind that tree for at least half an hour. Yet no shots rang out, no noises of foliage being pushed aside as the cops approached me or fanned out to look for me. But the shouting continued, the floodlights and police lights blaring together and making an odd mixing of swirling colors into the trees.

What got me moving after another fifteen minutes was boredom, if I’m being honest. Not real boredom, I don’t think my heart rate or breathing got any slower while I was expecting to get shot, but I did realize that whatever was happening wasn’t going to stop.

So I tried sneaking forward, low to the ground, in the shadow of the tree I’d been hiding behind. I’d barely made it five feet when one of the floodlights swung directly towards me.
“There he is!”
“FIRE!”

I ran. Slow and cumbersome-like because of my backpack, but still as fast as I could.

Sharp, loud cracks came from the direction of the yard. The police kept yelling, telling me to duck, freeze, to get the fuck down, and come back. I kept running. The light was doing one thing in my favor: letting me see what was ahead of me. I had no cohesive thoughts at the time, just the need to go downhill as hard and fast as I could. Any moment, a cop could get a lucky hit in.

Only later I realized why I wasn’t shot. I couldn’t have been shot, at least not by any self-respecting cop that had ever held a gun before. With a target as large and slow as I was, it would have been harder to miss me than not.

Like I said, I didn’t think about it at the time. I didn’t have any thoughts, just a head full of adrenaline that was doing its best to ignore the pain in my arms and legs from the running and praying that I would get to see the next sunrise.

They didn’t chase me. I kept running, long past the reach of any of the lights until I ran face first into a birch tree. My vision was a blur as I fell to the ground, rolling down the hill until I came to a sudden stop against another tree that caught me right in the abdomen. What air I had left in my lungs was knocked out.

After a very painful, forced rest on the ground, my breath came back to me. It hurt, and so did my nose that wasn’t broken but ran with blood, but I managed to claw my way to a standing position next to the tree that had both saved me and given me a huge bruise on my midsection. If it hadn’t, the odds were more than likely that I would’ve broken something farther down the hill. The only thing that had broken was one of my night vision goggles’s lenses. Still, I was grateful that I had that much. It and the compass that pointed directly toward the pit’s exit was all I needed to run in a straight line as fast as I could to get the hell out of there. My days of gazing were over, to say the least.

One step down the hill, it started to rain.

Despite the urgency I felt in every atom of my body, I looked up towards the sky, confused. There hadn’t been any clouds before, and there weren’t any now. The stars shone bright even if a bit muted from the nearby cities light pollution. I couldn’t actually see where the rain was coming from, but I swear it was there. A smaller and much creepier detail that I thought about a ways down the hill was that the rain was falling everywhere, including under canopies of leaves that rain naturally ran down to leave the trunks of trees dry.
I ignored it. Actually, the smell of ozone and forest rain calmed me down a little. It wasn’t much compared to the growing strain on my body and my clothes getting soaked and really uncomfortable but it was something.

There was one more house on my straight shot to the pit’s exit even with my straight run through the forest. I would’ve ignored it if the light from the backyard didn’t sear into my eye. Since I was so close to the exit back into Park City, my night vision goggles went back into my pocket.

Unfortunately, the hill rose and split in a way where the much quicker route wound towards the house’s backyard that, I saw as I got closer, was lit with a low firelight. There were people there, at least a dozen.

Each was tied up on X-shaped, St. Andrew’s crosses. Connecting them all were confetti streamers. The torches, blazing even in the rain, spread across the yard and only lit up the bodies on the crosses enough for me to get the barest look.

Halfway around the hill that I knew would let me out onto a street right next to the pit’s exit, I realized that it wasn’t streamers that connected all of the crosses. Streamers weren’t pink and fleshy, with a tubular shape. I could also finally see that the “streamers” were coming from and tied between each of the bodies.

Before I could scream (or more likely, puke my guts out) I heard a sharp whisper near me, from the right side of the yard. The cross closest to the end of the yard had a living person on it. A girl with one “streamer” already out and tied to another cross behind her. Two kids, teenagers, were trying to pull an iron stake out of one of the girl’s feet.

“Hey! You!” One of them whispered directly at me. “Please! Come help us, we’re so close!”
“Please,” the other whispered, eyes darting between me and her friend as she sobbed. “Please help!”

The edge of the yard was only a few steps away. The house, a large temple-looking one that was made of massive logs and full of windows, was completely dark.

I took a few steps forward, not really sure if I was going to help or not, and tripped. Falling face forward, I reached towards the ground with all my might and dug my fingers into the hard dirt. One of my nails ripped off, but I slowed to a crawl mere inches from the edge of the yard. I had to bite down on the cuff of my jacket to keep from screaming.

When I looked up, the kids were both staring at me with… With a hunger and anticipation that was so powerful that they were smiling and holding their breaths as they watched my hand, so near the border between the yard and forest, with an eagerness I haven’t seen before or since.

The girl tied up to the cross looked the same way, only she was smiling ear to ear. Her eyes almost glowed in the firelight as she looked at me. I scrambled backwards up the hill and ran again, this time not even bothering with the night vision goggles.

I ran, and I ran, then I ran some more. Rain and tree branches scraped at my hands and face as I stumbled through the forest. Eventually, I spilled out onto a black-paved street. Ahead of me, with only one phosphorescent light to see it by, was a concrete guard post next to an iron gate that passed through the lowest edge of the pit.

I’d made it.

Next to the gate, on a grassy hill that sloped down from a mansion I could barely see even with the night vision goggles, was my car. Same color, license plate, everything. There was no doubt that this was my car.

I took a few shaky steps toward it. Then stopped in the middle of the street.

I pulled my keys out of my pocket and hit the lock button. Far to my right, past the iron gate, there was a distant honk as my car signaled that it had been locked.

“Nice try…” I wheezed softly, not even hearing myself.

Looking back toward the pit, which now towered in front of me, I couldn’t see anything of what I’d passed before. Except for a house on the opposite side of where I’d climbed down from. Lights were flashing from the inside, red lights that looked like flames. My binoculars didn’t come out of the backpack, I was much too tired (and scared, if I’m being honest) to even do that, but I would swear that the girl I’d seen at the party through those same binoculars at the top of the pit, the one that was the last to enter the only normal house I’d seen throughout the night, was there. Watching me.

I climbed over the iron gate, found my real car, and got the hell out of there. I haven’t been up to Park City since nor do I intend to set foot near the place. All I did was double-check the Google images of the pit, only to see that none of the houses I’d seen matched the houses that were on the satellite images.

Beyond that, my gazing days are done. My story is far from the only strange one that you get from talking to homeless people or vagabonds on what they’ve seen come out of voyeurism. But nobody would believe my story, so I’m posting it here.

Don’t go gazing near Park City.

Or better yet, don’t go gazing at all.

Credit: Chance Kimber

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