The author recounts a harrowing personal experience while engaging in the illegal and voyeuristic hobby of "gazing," detailing a terrifying night near Park City, Utah, that led to a profound and fearful renunciation of the practice.
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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
techsavvy 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
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.
The first thing is 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. The second thing is 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
2000s. 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.
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
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. Anytime you gaze, it usually means
an overnight trip to a specific
neighborhood. That meant that you either
needed a car with nothing discernable
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 station 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 mountains
seemed to slope in just a way that I
could comfortably and constantly walk
downhill in the thick forest surrounding the
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
petty
misdemeanor. But god damn, it was a beautiful
beautiful
walk. Squirrels and birds seemed to be
everywhere, and the scent of the alpine,
a unique blend of fur trees, pines, and
sage brush, 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.
civilization.
Meticulously sculpted pavement snake
down towards the west side of what I'll
call the pit. Every quarter of a mile, a
three, occasionally fourstory house
split off from the roads. It would have
been a nightmare to navigate if there
wasn't a consistent pattern on the leftmost
leftmost
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 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
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 fieldsiz
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 parters 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
[ __ ] 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,
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 diarama 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, pingpong 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 have
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
surrounded
them. The entire site 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 kind of
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
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 cheapel
looking apartment building made with red brick.
brick.
Four wide and obscured windows were
evenly spaced out along its
backside, 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
the
forest. She didn't know where I was, but
she knew I was
there. "Come on, please," she whispered
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
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
eye
out. I'm going to 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 have 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
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 light switch 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.
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 15 or 20 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.
phrase. 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. Flood lights
and police cruiser lights spinning on
top of cars marked Park City Sheriff's
Department. I don't know what would have
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. Noises of
foliage being pushed aside as the cops
approached me or fanned out to look for me.
me.
But the shouting
continued, the flood lights and police
lights blaring together and making an
odd mixing of swirling colors into the
trees. What got me moving after another
15 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 5t when one
of the flood lights swung directly
towards me. There he is.
Fire. I
ran. Slow and cumbersomelike 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 [ __ ] 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 headful 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 have
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
city's 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
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 have ignored it if the
light from the backyard didn't sear into my
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 fire light.
There were people there, at least a
dozen. Each was tied up on X-shaped St. Andrews
Andrews
crosses. Connecting them all were confetti
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.
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
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
girls' feet. Hey,
Hey,
you. One of them whispered directly at me.
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-l lookinging one that was made of
massive logs and full of windows, was completely
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
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 fire
light 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
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
match the houses that were on the satellite
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 vagabons on what
they've seen come out of
voyerism. But nobody would believe my
story, so I'm posting it here.
Don't go gazing near Park City. Or
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