As soon as I got home, my neighbor stopped me right at the door and quietly said, “Tell your husband not to make so much noise, he’s disturbing everyone.” But how was that possible if I lived alone and there was no one else in my apartment? 😧
The next day, I didn’t go to work and hid under the bed, waiting for the mysterious stranger. At 11:50, the door quietly opened, and then…. 😱
As soon as I got home, my neighbor stopped me right at the door and quietly said:
— I don’t know who’s living with you, but that man has been disturbing the entire floor for several days. He talks loudly, moves furniture around, and sometimes plays music so loudly that you can hear it through the wall.
At first, I didn’t even understand what she was talking about.
— What man? I live alone.
The neighbor looked at me as if she thought I was joking.
— I haven’t seen him, but I hear him almost every day. Usually around lunchtime. Sometimes he shouts something, then walks around the apartment for a long time. Yesterday, he spent almost twenty minutes moving something heavy.
A cold shiver ran down my spine.
I had been living in that apartment for almost a year and had never given anyone a key. My parents lived in another city, I didn’t have any close friends nearby, and during the day I was always at work.
I tried to convince myself that the neighbor had simply confused my apartment with someone else’s. Once I went inside, I checked everything.
The windows were closed. The front door was intact. My belongings were in their usual places. No one had touched my money or documents.
But then I noticed something strange.
In the kitchen, a mug that I had left in the cupboard that morning was sitting next to the sink. I clearly remembered that I hadn’t used it for several days.
It also seemed like something was missing from the refrigerator. I couldn’t say exactly what, so I decided I was probably just imagining things.
That night, I barely slept.
Every little noise seemed suspicious. Several times, I got up, turned on the lights, and checked the rooms.
In the morning, I decided to conduct a small experiment.
I got dressed as usual, left the building at around eight in the morning, and deliberately walked past the neighbors’ windows so everyone could see that I was going to work.
Then I parked my car behind the neighboring building and came back twenty minutes later.
I entered the apartment through a back entrance from the courtyard, which I almost never used.
I wanted to hide somewhere the person, if he really existed, wouldn’t notice me.
There was a large bed with a high frame in the bedroom. I lay down underneath it, put my phone on silent, and covered myself with the long edge of the bedspread.
For the first two hours, nothing happened. I was already starting to feel ridiculous. I began thinking that maybe the neighbor really had made a mistake and that I was simply lying on the floor instead of being at work.
But at around 11:40, I heard the lock click softly.
I immediately stopped breathing.
The door opened without any banging, without any attempt to break in. Someone had entered using their own key.
A few seconds later, I heard footsteps.
The man calmly walked into the kitchen.
I heard the refrigerator open. Then the faucet started running. A few minutes later, the television came on.
Everything looked as though someone who had lived there for years had simply come home.
I lay under the bed, unable to move.
About ten minutes later, the television was turned off.
The footsteps headed toward the bedroom.
The man entered the room and stopped in front of the wardrobe.
— Of course, she left everything lying around again, — he said irritably.
My hands started trembling.
He was talking about me.
Then the man said my name.
I covered my mouth with my hand so I wouldn’t accidentally make a sound.
He opened the wardrobe, took out some clothes, and began moving them from one shelf to another.
After that, the man walked over to the bed.
His shoes passed across the floor right in front of my face.
He sat down on the bed.
The mattress sank slightly.
And then he did something that made me freeze in complete horror 😳😨
You can find the continuation of the story in the first comment 👇👇
For several minutes, the man just sat there, then suddenly took out his phone and called someone.
— Yes, I’m home now, — he said calmly. — She’s at work, as usual.
My blood ran cold.
I realized that this man hadn’t entered the apartment by accident. He knew my schedule exactly.
When the man went into the bathroom, I carefully took out my phone and sent my neighbor a short message asking her to call the police.
About fifteen minutes later, someone started pounding loudly on the door.
The man froze at first, then quickly went into the hallway.
I heard voices, then shouting and noise.
Only then did I dare to crawl out from under the bed.
The stranger was already being restrained by two police officers.
When he saw me, his expression changed.
Later, it turned out that he was the former owner of the apartment.
Several years earlier, he had sold the apartment to the woman I was now renting it from, but somehow he had kept an old set of keys.
It also turned out that the man had been suffering from a serious mental disorder for many years. For some time, he had been receiving treatment, but later he stopped taking the medication prescribed to him and barely communicated with anyone.
According to his relatives, his condition had noticeably worsened in recent months, and he was convinced that the apartment still belonged to him and that he was the one who had to keep track of everything happening inside it.
But that wasn’t even the strangest part.
The police found a box in his car containing things from my apartment.
Inside were several pieces of jewelry, my notes, a hairbrush, and even a T-shirt that I had believed was lost for several months.
He had been coming there for months.
It turned out that at first, the man would only come in from time to time to look at the apartment because he had once lived there himself.
Then he started staying longer.
He used the kitchen, took showers, watched television, and went through my things.
And after some time, he began taking small items that, according to him, “no one would notice anyway.”
After that incident, I moved out within just a few days.
