The noise started while Duncan and I were watching a scary movie. It was a scary noise—like metal grinding on metal—and at first, it was tough to differentiate it from the noises in the movie.

But it continued even when the action on screen was not supposed to be scary.

I hadn’t planned on investigating the source of the noise, because, as you know from watching scary movies, people who investigate noises die.

But then the neighbor’s dog began growling and yelping.

I looked at Duncan and said, “Do you hear that?” He said, “Hear what?” I told him I thought the neighbor’s dog was being murdered by something. He told me to stop being silly—the dog was probably just playing.

But I was sure there was something wrong.

I crept closer to the door, my mind flooding with horrible premonitions of what I might find on the other side.

The dog’s yelps suddenly went silent.

I braced myself for the disemboweling that was sure to follow and opened the door. But to my surprise, there was no immediate violence. I crept into the yard, scanning the darkness for the source of the sound.

The dog had run off, but as I edged closer to the far corner of the yard, a dark shape came into focus:

It was a goose, lurking nonchalantly in the shadows, pecking at the ground. As I was looking at it, it emitted a horrible noise that sounded like metal grinding on metal.

When it finally registered that the source of the sound was merely a honking goose, I was relieved.

Then I had a flashback to my childhood.

And I remembered that most geese are dangerous psychopaths that become extremely violent for absolutely no reason.

Shortly thereafter, it occurred to me that the goose was probably the thing that had been brutally attacking our neighbor’s dog.

I tried to sneak back inside before it noticed me.

But it was too late.

It had seen me.

It lunged at me and I stumbled backward.

I experienced a momentary feeling of relief as it lurched past me, but with sinking dread, I noticed that I had left the door to the house open.

If you were sitting quietly on your couch, waiting for your girlfriend to come back inside so you could finish watching your movie, and while you were waiting, someone called you up and said “I’ll give you a million dollars if you can guess what’s going to happen next,” you absolutely would not guess “I am going to be brutally and unexpectedly attacked by a goose in my own home.” Even if you had a hundred guesses, you would not guess that.

But that’s exactly what happened to Duncan.

I ran inside to find him yelling and throwing things at the goose while it chased him around the living room.

I had never taken birds seriously. They’ve always seemed like silly, innocuous creatures. I mean, their most recognizable traits are flitting about and singing, which is adorable. In school, I learned that birds are direct descendants of dinosaurs, though I never really saw the resemblance. But when I walked into my living room and found this thing chasing Duncan, I finally recognized it: the predatory gleam in its eyes and its jerky, robotic movements were straight out of the dinosaur documentaries I used to watch as a child.

The goose stopped and slowly shifted its reptilian gaze onto me and I understood with startling clarity exactly what it must have felt like to be a baby stegosaurus. I froze and whispered, “Oh no, what do I do?”

Duncan said, “Oh god, I don’t know, why is this happening? I don’t understand why this is happening! WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO ME??”

It is difficult to flee effectively while inside a house. You can sprint across the room, but it won’t be long before you encounter a wall or a piece of furniture, and then you have to angle back toward your attacker if you hope to keep running. So you ricochet around, trying to make up a little ground, trying to get away. You cast various objects into your wake, hoping to inconvenience your attacker. But unless you can trap or otherwise disable whatever you’re running away from, it’s going to catch you eventually.

Earlier in the winter, we had tacked a blanket over the doorway to the kitchen to keep the heat in the living room. This fortunate arrangement gave us a tactical advantage and we were able to trap the goose in the kitchen by luring it in and then allowing the blanket to fall back over the doorway.

The lull in violence made the room feel far too quiet as we stood and stared vacantly at the blanketed doorway. The light in the kitchen cast a sharp silhouette of the goose against the blanket.

“What should we do with it?” said Duncan.

I said, “I guess it lives in our kitchen now.”

He paused thoughtfully. “We can’t just never go into our kitchen again.”

I suggested that maybe we could trap the goose in the basement, but that option was also ruled impractical. We’d have to find a way to get it far away from the house—far enough that it could never find its way back.

Before we could properly consider how to accomplish this feat, we noticed the goose’s shadow looming larger in the doorway.

It was moving closer.

We watched in horror as it began pecking the blanket—testing it to see if it could get through.

The scenario felt strangely reminiscent of the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park: us crouched in terror as some raptor-like bird stalked us through our familiar and formerly peaceful environment.

There was an ominous pause, then its head poked out underneath the blanket.

A tense moment of inaction took hold of us as its eyes scanned the room and finally settled on our crouching forms.

It teetered toward us and we fled upstairs into our bedroom, slamming the door behind us. Leaning breathlessly against the heavy door, we could hear the goose pecking the floorboards on the other side.

We sat quietly, not knowing what to do. Our box fan hummed in the window. Finally, Duncan whispered, “We could trap it with a blanket.”

I said, “This room is pretty big, right? We could just live in here.”

But I knew what we had to do.

We waited until we couldn’t hear the goose outside the door, then we armed ourselves with a down comforter and snuck a peek into the unlit hallway.

The goose wasn’t out there.

We crept down the stairs, holding the blanket out in front of ourselves like a shield. With every creak, we expected the goose to come lurching out of the shadows to peck us to death. Strangely, its lack of action was even more disconcerting. Every suspenseful second that ticked by without an attack felt like it was building up to a slightly more brutal surprise.

Finally, we rounded the corner and spotted the goose in our living room. It was walking around and methodically pecking all of our belongings, as if to convey: This is mine now. I own it. And also this. And also this. And this. Everything is mine.

As I watched from the doorway, I felt an absurd rage build up inside me. Who the fuck does this goose think it is? It thinks it can waltz into my home, bite everyone, and then proceed to claim ownership of my couch and my DVD player?

Geese have no business owning DVD players. It was entirely unacceptable.

I grabbed the blanket and made my move. The goose was caught by surprise and the blanket landed squarely over it like a net.

Its head bobbed back and forth under the blanket in confusion.

Before it could escape again, we wrapped it up and carried it out to our car. There was a duck pond on the outskirts of town. It would feel at home there. We didn’t want to risk letting it free anywhere near our house.

Duncan opened the rear door, and I shoved the goose in. It thrashed around under the blanket like a shark caught in a fishing net.

We drove in silence past darkened windows and dimly lit porches until we reached the edge of town.

There’s an urban legend about a woman who gets into her car without realizing there’s a serial killer hiding in the backseat. She finally looks up and sees him in her rearview mirror just before he kills her.

That story has plagued my nightmares for nearly a decade.

The tale often pops into my head while I’m driving by myself at night. And I work myself into such a frenzy that I have to pull over and check my backseat to make sure no one is there.

If it wasn’t for the slight hint of moonlight shining through the car’s rear window, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the goose until it was too late.

Its head poked up and my peripheral vision picked up its shadow in the rearview mirror.

With years of repressed terror welling up in the deep, primal areas of my brain, I barely managed to grab the ice scraper out of the glove compartment and scream, “DRIVE FASTER; HE’S IN THE BACKSEAT!”

We sped down the lonely highway as I attempted to fend off the goose with the ice scraper long enough to reach our destination.

We came to a screeching stop several hundred yards from the duck pond and stumbled out of the car, slamming the doors behind us. Like two cavemen chasing a tiger out of their cave with stick weapons, we prodded the goose with the ice scraper until it tumbled out of the backseat onto the ground. Once it was out of the car, we jumped back in and peeled out. The goose toddled after us for a few steps and then just stood there in the middle of the road as its reflection shrank away from us.

We never saw it again. I like to imagine that it found the duck pond and chose to trade its violent lifestyle for one of gentle paddling and feasting on bread crumbs.

But that’s probably not what happened.

In the back of my mind, I know that the goose is still up there somewhere, living like a wild beast in the woods at the edge of town, shambling down to the pond every night to terrorize the ducks. I know it’s there, lurking just below the surface of the murky pond, watching the children throw bread crumbs, waiting for them to get just a little too close to the edge of the water.

Author’s note: While all of this was happening, I knew that it was probably going to be a story I’d write down someday. I also knew that the people reading it would probably feel some doubt as to its veracity. Thankfully, while the goose was trapped in the kitchen, I had the presence of mind to shoot a short video of it. Unfortunately, books are not video compatible. But I took some screen captures of the video and put them together so you can at least get some satisfaction that this is a true story: