I live in a very small studio apartment with a roommate in Hull, England, it can get cramped, it smells bad, and makes weird house noises around 2AM, but hey, its cheap, and a roof
We sleep in the same room in one of those metal prison looking bunk beds, since they’re small and cheap. It’s an okay sized room though. The only other aspects of that room is the flatscreen mounted on the wall and an IKEA wardrobe that we drilled holes in the back for cables to mount the console, and this closet which is basically another room, but closet sized, and it has a wooden trapdoor leading to a crawlspace, it isn’t anything big, its just a 1 meter tall space under the wooden floorboards. It is an apartment after all.
We never really experienced real creepy or scary things. Only some things we thought of as weird, but not weird as in someone is in this house. We’d find doors open, random food waste in the closet but the only thing we really found that scared us was a chicken leg bone, a red solo cup and a screwdriver covered in what we though was blood in the closet room type thing in the bedroom. But since we had just started renting it, we thought someone might have just been lazy and just threw stuff in there when they didn’t want to put it back where it belongs, or in the bin.
One night, my roommate said he was going out to stay with some friends for the weekend, I told him sure, happy that I could have the apartment to myself. He took his bag out from under the bottom bunk and stuffed some clothes, his toothbrush, most things that’d be essential for sleeping over, but he also took the Xbox One S. It irritated me a bit, but I could live without it for the weekend, at least he wasn’t having friends over to this dump.
After he left I started to do some cleaning to the room, it was due anyway and without him in the way of things it’d be much easier. I lifted the biggest thing I saw first off the ground, which looked to be an Under Armour brand backpack, and under it I found an almost empty packet of Chesterfield cigarettes and a standard yellow BIC lighter. I was confused, since neither of us smoked in this house, but I coughed it up to one of his mate’s accidentally leaving them here
After picking up loads of clothes, practically launching them into the washing basket, organising random objects (rubix cubes, lamps, cosmetic decorations) on desks and walls, I finished cleaning up, my OCD was satisfied, but I wasn’t. I decided to take a nap, but before I did I remembered something my roommate said I should do. According to him, I talk in my sleep. I was curious to hear what I said, so I setup my laptop to face me, pressed record, and proceeded to fall asleep.
I woke up about two hours later, and when I got up, my eyes adjusted to the light and found the room absolutely trashed. Having just woken up I didn’t realise what was wrong until I got up and drank from the water bottle next to my bed. My roommate wasn’t home, and I had just organised the room My brain went from scared out of my fucking mind, to rationalizing. Maybe he had just forgot something. I looked around to see what he might have taken and only 4 items were missing from the room.
The half empty packet of cig’s, The lighter, My roommate’s pocket knife and a bottle of mead that none of us cared to drink
I could definitely understand why the knife and mead may have been taken, but not the cig’s and lighter. Was he smoking at the friends house? Did he bring the cigs for the other people to smoke? My thinking was interrupted by a windows notification sound, which when I got closer, said that my storage was running low, then I remembered that I was recording the entire thing.
I texted my roommate ‘you prick I just cleaned this room’ then sat down to watch the video. I skimmed through the video to find any sort of movement, of course there was the usual shuffling in bed, wind blowing the curtains, but at approximately 3 hours and 26 minutes into the video, from the speakers, I heard 13 loud, fast wooden thuds. I assumed it was my roommate, but I paused the video when I got a notification on my phone. It was a text message from my roommate saying ‘wdym ive been at tylers all day’
That message made my stomach drop.
I pressed play on the video, watching in fear and confusion, waiting to see who walks through the door. A man, looks about under average height, wearing ragged black clothes, almost baggy, walks into the room and starts throwing everything out of the IKEA bottom drawer, where we keep all of our junk, and eventually pulls out the lighter I put away and the packet of cigs. It then walks over to my laptop desk, takes my roommates pocket knife, then slowly inches towards me, staring up at me sleeping for a good minute, until it eventually walks away from the bed, grabs the mead bottle, and walks out of frame, where the closet door is.
My heart at this point is pounding through my chest like a jackhammer. I skim faster, hands shaking, trying to find a point where he exits the room and walks out of the house, but no. It’s still in there.
Fumbling with my fingers, I type 999 into the dial app, running out of the apartment and closing doors behind me, I tell them what’s going on and they come within 6 minutes.
They search the house, find nothing in any other room except the closet.
3 words, carved into the wooden trapdoor with the knife.
‘WAKE UP CALEB’
The knife was placed in the open position next to the words, with dried blood on the tip of the blade. The police check the crawlspace and find food waste, water bottles, human feces and empty alcohol bottles. Only then do I piece together that somebody, had been living in my home, for possibly more than I have, and he knew my name.
I texted my roommate the situation after the police had left, but he didn’t believe me. I didn’t want to prove it to him though, if he moved out because of it, I’d be in that house alone.
Needless to say, always check every room before renting or buying.