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EVERETT, Wash. -- An Everett father is on a mission to figure out who’s been terrorizing his 3-year-old daughter for weeks right outside her bedroom window.

Rick Heater hates to think about what could have happened had his 3-year-old daughter followed the person’s instructions and flipped up the lock on her bedroom window, he said.

"This is the lock they taught her how to open. They taught her how to lift it up. And if she had lifted it up, he would have been in the room," Heater said as he showed a KOMO News crew his daughter's window.

Just about every night for the past month, Heater said his daughter has come into his room in tears claiming a monster’s outside.

Heater would brush it off thinking it was just a phase, he said.

"She was terrified to be in her room, and I never thought anything of it. I was a kid. We dreamt of monsters under the bed. We all did. And so, I just figured that’s what it was," Heater told KOMO News.

Something changed over the weekend when Heater started hearing what sounded like knocks coming from his front door late at night, he said.

No one was at the door whenever he'd get up to check, Heater said.

But about 20-30 minutes later, Heater's daughter would run into his room and tell him the monster was back, Heater added.

Heater didn’t piece together what was happening until a security technician stopped by early this week to install cameras inside their home, he said. The technician pulled up the blinds on Heater's daughter's window and noticed what appeared to be a series of tobacco spit stains on the glass and dozens of cigarette butts on the ground.

"To find out in reality that she wasn’t making it up," Heater said. "It's scary."

"I feel like as parents, we’ve gotten so busy with our lives… we don’t take the time a lot of times to listen to our kids or to go ‘Okay, I can take two minutes to go look through your window and see what you’re talking about.’ And that needs to change," Heater added.

Heater called Everett police. Officers went out to Heater's home Tuesday to take a report and swabs of the stains on the window, an Everett Police Department spokesman told KOMO News on Wednesday.

Heater still worries someone might come through his daughter's window and grab her, he said.

He just wants the person who’s been terrorizing her to be caught and the behavior stopped.

"The Marine in me wants to snap a neck," Heater said. "The father in me goes 'Let’s catch the guy. Let’s get him off the street.'"

It's not known what the man's intentions were.

Police have stepped up patrols in the area, but right now they don't know who might have been lurking outside Heater's daughter's window, he said.