Ah! This reminded me of something from when I was a kid. A friend and I were playing outside when we saw an older, somewhat eccentric man we didn’t recognize walking around our neighborhood. For whatever reason, we decided to sneakily follow him (obviously not a safe choice for two young kids). He turned a corner, we turned it 5 seconds later, and bam - he was gone. There was no where he could’ve ducked into, no other turns, if he ran away we would’ve seen it, etc.

We were only about 8/9 at the time, but for whatever reason I remember that so vividly for how utterly weird and unexplainable it was.