The Dapper Den Barbershop in Ridgefield is where I get my haircut, but it's also become place where I hangout.

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The Den has become a fun weekend destination for me. I've become friendly with the owner Jared and the rest of the crew, so it's not unusual for me to be there for three or four hours on a Friday. I get my hot towel neck shave, my haircut and my beard trimmed. Then, I sit and enjoy a complimentary cocktail and kick it with the fellas (yep, I said it).

I was there this past Friday (1/13/23), and I was watching a movie on the big screen while having a tequila concoction when I heard the owner Jared going wild. He was reacting to something on someone's phone.

The person with the phone was Alex Medeiros. Alex was there with his father showing Jared and some of the guys a photo that had everyone shocked. I got up, took my first look and wondered what's the big deal? Then, Alex zoomed the photo in and this is what I saw.

Alex Medeiros
Alex Medeiros
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I've been fooling around with this photo all morning trying to prevent quality degeneration along the way. Even when you're not zoomed in, if you increase the brightness you can see it.

Alex Medeiros
Alex Medeiros
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Alex Medeiros
Alex Medeiros
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Alex Medeiros
Alex Medeiros
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If it helps, you can download these photos and zoom in and out on your own. On a smartphone you can press your thumb on the picture and select "save to photos." If you're on a desktop, right click and choose "save image as."

Alex Medeiros
Alex Medeiros
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Is it just me, or is there a stranger in Alex's backyard? Is that stranger wearing a nun outfit? It certainly appears that way. I asked Alex for some background information and things got exceedingly more creepy. This is what Alex told me about the photo:

November 18th, Weston and the surrounding towns received its first snow storm. By the time the storm was finished it was already way into the night so everything outside was pitch black. Trying to get a glimpse of how much snow fell, I used the night mode setting on my phone’s camera to try to enhance the lighting so it wouldn’t come out as just a black screen.

Considering it was about 11:30 at night, the picture still came out pretty dark so I went into the photo settings to increase the exposure, highlights, shadows and definition. Not until then was the figure visible. The only possible explanations at the time were how it could be one of our neighbors but even if that was the case, it still raises a lot of questions. The only houses that are near ours are all to the North and East, opposite of the direction the picture was taken in. They would have to sneak around our property to get to that side of the woods, and for what? To stand there in below freezing temperatures motionless hoping to get a scare out of one of us? It all didn’t line up. Any claims arguing that it's an animal also don’t make sense because the figure clearly looks bipedal and has defined human-like anatomy.

As frightening as it is, at the moment there’s not much you can do. All of the doors are locked, not even like that matters though because the damn thing hadn’t moved for 20 minutes. Even reporting it to the cops would be a little strange trying to explain how there’s a stationary figure in the woods that may or may not be a human or even alive at all. Thankfully I have the picture to prove what I saw because trying to have such claims taken seriously without photographic evidence would be nearly impossible.

Additionally: 

  • The property is located in Weston CT
  • All of the lots are quite large with tons of woods in between
  • To the West, the direction the picture was taken in, there isn’t another house for about another ¼mile
  • Without night mode on the camera in it would have come completely dark
  • It was completely silent besides the rustling of the trees

First of all, I dig Alex's style. He used bipedal and I dig it. Alex was anticipating the arguments that would be made against this photo. Some people need to ruin a good thing and will try and explain this away. I choose to believe this is a terrifying picture of a night-stalking lunatic wearing a robe in the woods of Weston.

As the conversation developed, I wanted to know if Alex and his family have any paranormal experiences. I've come to believe that some people are magnets for paranormal or inexplicable events. It turns out the Mederois clan does have some history with such things. Here is some of what Alex told me:

My family has a vacation house up on Martha’s Vineyard where we’ll spend a couple weeks out of the summer and rent out the rest of the time. I don’t know much about the house’s history besides the fact that it was built by my great grandparents and has been in the family for about 90 years. Over the years, I remember a couple of renters mentioning how they’ve heard footsteps from upstairs when they were certain they were the only people home. I was always skeptical about some of the claims, always questioning why for the past 15 years my family or I had not experienced anything. That all changed the summer of 2020.

The pandemic made it nearly impossible to travel outside the country that summer so we spent a lot more time up there than usual. The first trip of the summer was in July with my dad and uncle. After a four hour drive and hour-long boat ride, we finally made it up there. Upon entering the house, one of the first things I noticed was how the clock had stopped working. It was this tiny red battery-powered clock that must’ve been at least a decade old. The batteries in the clock probably died sometime over the winter. The hands were positioned exactly at 6:30. We didn’t pay much attention to it though as we had a lot more work to do. My uncle popped open the back of the clock and threw away the batteries. We would get a new one tomorrow but in the meantime we focused on cleaning up the place.

Everything felt different that year. The cars that we would usually hear at night were nowhere to be found. Our entire street was completely stagnant. I fell asleep with ease that night and didn’t wake up until late the following morning. Usually I wake up with the first pass of the street sweeper at 5:00am but not this trip. I can hear my dad and my uncle down stairs so I went to go see what all of the commotion was about. They were staring at the clock on the wall above the fridge. Now the hands read 7:49. My dad claimed that was about the same time he entered the room. Confused at how this could have happened, my uncle jokingly yelled up at the clock “hey Charlie, stop screwing with the clock.” Charlie was my great grandpa who built the place in the 1930’s and is thought to be the one causing all of the ‘paranormal’ events. Not a second after he said that, the clock not only corrected itself to the right time, now about 8:05am, the hands started moving again at the proper pace. My mind raced to think of possible solutions but such an event is much too difficult to even make up explanations. We probably looked like idiots standing still speechless at the oddity of what we just witnessed. We still had to get a lot of work done around the house though so we just left it and decided to monitor what was happening every once and a while. Despite still not having batteries, it ran for the next hour and a half until we left for the beach. When we came back in, the clock was back at 6:30 and motionless as when we first walked on the first day. The rest of the trip was pretty normal. Nothing crazy happened, the clock stayed broken at 6:30 and we finally started to enjoy escaping all of the paranoia from the pandemic, well that was until the morning of the last day.

I'm not just saying this, the Dapper Den is the spot. I know a lot of people are loyal to their barber and I can respect that, but if you're looking, come to the Den. You can get the best cut around, have some booze and listen to Jared fire and rehire his employees over and over again. It's awesome.

Do you like hearing about CT's most absurd stories? If so, check out the Ethan, Lou & Large Dave Podcast on Apple and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the same show we do on the radio but with limited commercials and no music. Or, listen live by streaming the show on the I-95 Rock Mobile app, or tune into I-95 (95.1FM).

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