‘A man was secretly living in my house – I didn’t realise until one big giveaway’

Most people often worry if they hear weird bumps in the night or feel like things have gone missing in their home.

However, one woman was left gobsmacked when her fears came to life and she found that a man had been secretly living in her property.

A woman from the US revealed that when she was 20, she moved to a farming town to be closer to her family and could often hear footsteps above her, even though she was on the top floor.

Eventually, the woman also started noticing her belongings were going missing too.

“I would buy a six-pack of soda, drink one, come home from work and find only four left. It was the same with packets of soup and ramen noodles. I also noticed that doors I had left open were closed, or vice versa,” she told the Guardian.

The woman said that at the start, she found it amusing and assumed it was her brother, who had a key, simply pranking her.

But things got weirder and weirder, and one event in particular sticks out in her mind.

When her puppy was being toilet-trained, the woman often kept her in the bathroom. She said that one day when she was out, the apartment flooded, and she came home to find her puppy sitting in the sink.

The dog was too small to have jumped up there on her own, which led her to think someone put her there to save her.

As the months went by, the footsteps continued and when she asked her landlady about it, she was told it was most likely squirrels in the attic.

However, one day when she called in sick to work, all was revealed.

She was having a bath in the evening when she realised the attic hatch, which was always closed, was open.

The woman finally realised that someone else had also been living in her apartment for the last six months with her, so she called the police to search the property.

Although they didn’t find anybody, they did find a sleeping bag, some food and a book. This led the woman to move out the very next day.

“The stranger was never caught. The police had no idea what the intruder was doing there. It was a quiet town with no visibly homeless people,” she said.

“I could never be certain, but I think I saw him once. I was coming out of my apartment to go to the grocery store and there was a guy in his mid-30s with reddish hair, just sitting there – as if he was waiting for something.

“He looked at me for longer than is socially acceptable and I thought it was weird. When I came back from the grocery store, he was gone.”

The woman said she was haunted by the experience for years and couldn’t live in a house with an attic if the hatch wasn’t locked.

Eek, just off to lock our attic!

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