4x22: The Shower Curtain

[00:00:00] I've always been good friends with one of my cousins, Cole, who is the same age I am. The two of us were not quite inseparable, but we always did get along very well together.

[00:00:36] And we were often found together, both in school, as we had always wound up in the same classes together throughout elementary school and outside of it. When we were 12 and in 6th grade, I was hanging out with Cole on a Friday afternoon around the later part of May.

[00:00:55] We were pretty psyched at the start of the weekend. We had wound up at his house, since he didn't live too far from me, and at one point my mom called to say that our grandpa was in the hospital.

[00:01:07] While the issue with our grandpa wasn't expected to be life-threatening, he was being kept at the hospital overnight for observation. And both my parents and Cole's were planning on staying with him and my grandma at the

[00:01:19] hospital, since my mom and her sister were the two siblings that lived close by. I was told that I was given the okay to stay at Cole's house for the night, with Cole's 15-year-old brother, Hunter, being in charge while our parents were out. This was fine by us.

[00:01:38] I got along well enough with Hunter, and he was never the bossy older brother or cousin that some of my other friends said they had to put up with. We ordered out for pizza and enjoyed goofing off as boys that age tend to do.

[00:01:53] Around 9 or so, there was a knock at the front door, and Cole went to answer it. I was a bit curious as to who it could be at that time of night, so I watched from quite a ways back. At the door were two older men.

[00:02:13] They said that they were with the city and that they were investigating reports about the water pressure supposedly being bad in our neighborhood. They asked Cole if his parents were home, and when Cole said that they were unavailable

[00:02:29] at the moment, which we were told to tell strangers if our parents weren't home, the guys started asking a bunch of questions about how the water pressure was in the house and if they could come inside to check.

[00:02:41] Hunter came over at that point and politely told the guys that the water pressure was fine and perhaps they should move on to check the other homes in the neighborhood. The guys seemed reluctant to leave but turned and walked away after Hunter started closing the door.

[00:02:56] After the door was shut, we looked at each other and just shrugged, but didn't think too much of it after that and went back to goofing off. Eventually we decided to go to bed.

[00:03:08] Cole and Hunter shared a bedroom and we all agreed that I would sleep in there with them rather than me hitting the sack on the couch or something like that so that we could all talk while we fell asleep.

[00:03:20] Hunter grabbed a sleeping bag out of their camping supplies for me. When we got into their bedroom, they stripped down to their briefs and I remember Cole had mentioned to me once a while back that they started sleeping in just their underwear.

[00:03:35] Since I hadn't originally planned on staying the night, I hadn't brought anything with me from home as far as overnight stuff goes, but since I wasn't in the mood to sleep in my clothes, I stripped down to my briefs as well, though I felt a bit embarrassed even

[00:03:50] though we were all guys and I knew they wouldn't say anything to be judgmental. They climbed into their beds and I quickly crawled into the sleeping bag. And after a while of just talking about random stuff, we eventually fell asleep.

[00:04:06] Early the next morning, I got up and I had to pee. And so I quietly got out of the sleeping bag and went and did my business in the bathroom. On the way back to the bedroom, I heard something from the family room, which was on the opposite

[00:04:22] end of the house from the bedrooms and particular bathroom that I was using. I didn't pay much attention to it at the time thinking it must have been either Cole or Hunter until I got back to the bedroom and realized that they were both there.

[00:04:40] Not trying to panic, I woke the house. They quietly followed me. And the moment that we walked into the family room, we saw the two guys from the night before in there and it was clear they were robbing the place.

[00:04:56] One of them started moving towards us as he pulled out a wicked looking knife. The three of us promptly raced to the front door, somehow managed to get it unlocked and opened. And we fled as luck would have it. A cop was driving by at that particular moment.

[00:05:13] He quickly flagged him down and told him about the two guys in the house. The cop called for backup and within a couple of minutes, several other cops were there and they proceeded to enter the house. And after some searching, they caught the two guys.

[00:05:29] The cops figured out that the two guys must have entered from a window in the laundry room that had a broken latch on it and had probably targeted that house because while it wasn't empty, they'd probably realized that there were no adults there and figured

[00:05:44] that if we discovered them, we could be more easily dealt with than the adults. To add insult to injury, while we were waiting outside for the cops who searched the house,

[00:05:57] both to get the guys and make sure that no one else was with them, some of the neighbors came out to see what all the commotion was. And this included some kids who went to the same school as Cole and I, including a few

[00:06:11] who were in the 6th grade class with us. And it was during that time that the three of us realized we never had the chance to get dressed. So just like the stereotypical nightmare, we had to stand in full view of everyone in

[00:06:26] just our briefs for what seemed like forever before being allowed back inside. When we went back to school that Monday, Cole and I had to put up with more than a bit of snickering, stares, and ribbing for the next few weeks until school ended for the summer.

[00:06:57] When I was 25, there was a short time that I was staying at my aunt's. It was her, my two cousins, and I. She lives in a nice apartment complex, and her unit is on the lower level.

[00:07:10] Her living room has a lot of windows that she keeps open for fresh air and for her cats to watch people. Her unit happens to be on the corner near a grassy courtyard path.

[00:07:21] When I had first moved in, I noticed a man who gave me a weird off vibe. My cousins and aunt said he lived upstairs and two units over, recovering from hard drugs that permanently messed him up.

[00:07:38] His parents paid for him to stay there as they didn't want him with them. They also said that other than hearing him mumble and say weird things, no one ever really had an issue. My aunt works nights and leaves at 3am.

[00:07:52] My younger cousin works nights and leaves at 2am. That usually left the same-aged cousin and I, the only two there, until we leave for work around 8. For context, it is a very open living room to dining room floor plan.

[00:08:09] My aunt always has people staying over, so she has a second couch in the dining room in place of a table. This is where I slept. She stayed on the one in the living room. My aunt has also never been one to lock the doors until this incident.

[00:08:28] One night, I'm on my phone trying to sleep at about 1am and I hear a man yelling. He's yelling, don't shoot and banging on the door to the right of ours. Two male college students live there and told him that he had the wrong apartment and to leave.

[00:08:47] He said sorry and walked off. I'm looking through the kitchen window which is in direct line of sight from the couch bed and it's the weird neighbor who sees me and he grins. He then walks back to his home.

[00:09:05] I was unsettled but not enough to wake anyone else up over it. I told my family nonchalantly the next day in a lol that was weird kind of way. My cousin and I watch a movie and we head off to bed.

[00:09:20] I have a very hard time staying asleep, but I woke up this time to the feeling of someone watching me. I check my phone and it's around 3am, so I know it's not my aunt or cousin.

[00:09:35] I sit up and figure I'll go watch TV on my aunt's couch since she was gone already. The feeling gets stronger as I'm in the living room. Then I see the shadow of a person standing still in the grass courtyard looking in. I froze.

[00:09:54] I immediately go back to my couch and get my phone. As I do, the person leaves. I'm now trying to calm myself down and think of maybe waking up my cousin when I hear the creepy man's voice.

[00:10:11] He's now at the kitchen window which looks out directly in front of her front door. I drop to the floor out of his line of sight and start frantically trying to call my cousin. The man is now saying things at the front window like,

[00:10:29] I'm not going to hurt you. I'm unarmed. He's said it over and over again. His face is up against the window now. He starts talking about wanting to pet the cats. I can't get a hold of my cousin and it's been 20 minutes of this.

[00:10:51] In this complete clown shit situation, I didn't have many options. I could jump up and run for a knife but then I'd need to go to the kitchen. I could try to respond to him and ask him to leave but I've learned that when you underestimate

[00:11:06] crazy, you lose every time. I now hear him knocking and knocking while repeating his nonsense. I'm doing that ridiculous looking army crawl, snake slither across the floor and down the hall. I see the door handle start to turn.

[00:11:26] I'm about to jump up when my cousin bursts out of his room directly across from the front door. He's not the biggest guy but boy was he intimidatingly mad at the circus show that took place at the front door.

[00:11:41] He starts yelling at the guy that he needs to get the fuck off of the porch and that he's calling the cops. The man tries to say, I'm unarmed. I'm not going to hurt you. Don't be afraid.

[00:11:53] My cousin goes off and yells that that's fucking dandy but it's 4am and you need to leave or I'm calling the cops. What is wrong with you? The guy backs up with his hands in the air and leaves. Needless to say we didn't go back to sleep.

[00:12:09] My aunt was called who called the apartment manager. The next day we came home from work and his parents were there packing moving boxes into a truck from his place. Maybe he was trying to get me to open the door by seeming friendly.

[00:12:26] Maybe he had a bad trip and really wanted to pet a cat to feel better. We'll never know. This happened a few years ago in my old one person flat. I had a strange feeling that something wasn't right for a few days.

[00:12:54] Things like the food that I would put in the fridge, it seemed like there was less of it than the last time I looked. I found pillows from my couch on the floor. Stuff like that.

[00:13:06] I lived alone back then so there wasn't anyone else with access to my flat or so I thought. One night I woke up around one in the morning sweating and even though I didn't remember I was sure that I woke up from a nightmare.

[00:13:27] Since I was drenched in sweat I decided to take a shower so I put my phone up in the bathroom for music. I turned on the water and just enjoyed the shower. After a few minutes I heard the door move.

[00:13:44] I never close it but it still never moves. I took a look at the shower curtain and I saw a shadow against it and a look at my phone confirmed someone was there since I could clearly see a reflection on the screen that

[00:14:04] showed someone standing next to the shower curtain. It took me a lot not to scream and to keep acting like I didn't notice anything while silently taking the shower head off the holding and turning the water all the way hot.

[00:14:22] I'm still kind of impressed with my quick thinking. Our water got really hot when you cranked it all the way and a few seconds later steam was rising and the water hurt my feet flowing down the drain.

[00:14:36] I turned around ripped the shower curtain open and held the shower head right at the person behind. It was a woman she screamed in pain and I whacked her in the face with the shower head then jumped out of the shower and ran her to the door.

[00:14:53] I took the key out of the lock and locked it closed behind me. A little later she started to bang on the door but the door didn't give. Thank God for German quality work.

[00:15:06] I called the cops and went to the kitchen to get my big kitchen knife just for safety. I felt like my throat was closing up when I saw it missing. I realized there's only one place it could possibly be right now.

[00:15:22] The police came and they arrested the woman who turned out to have been the former person living in the flat and was evicted after not paying rent. It seems that she made a copy of the key and came into the flat when I was at work and

[00:15:38] sometimes at night. It's possible that what woke me up in the first place was her and honestly I don't even want to think about it. Ever since then I always insist that the locks are changed when I move into a new place.

[00:16:07] When I was in my early 20s, I lived in Chicago. I wasn't making much money. When I found this apartment, it was too good to be true. The top floor of a duplex with 6 rooms for $775 per month.

[00:16:23] The agent showed me the apartment and stressed to me that the landlords were very religious. I didn't have a problem with that even if it did sound a little ominous. The landlords were an elderly couple that lived downstairs. They seemed okay at first.

[00:16:41] When I saw them in the courtyard, they would smile at me. I took good care of the house. Then when they saw me having my boyfriend over, things started to get very weird. One day I was in my office writing and I hear a knock at the door.

[00:17:00] I open it and it's the lady from downstairs. Before I can say hello, she says, have you ever gotten an abortion? I shut the door in her face. No thanks. However, this ended up being a colossal mistake. The house was laid out kind of weird.

[00:17:23] There was a door at the bottom of a flight of stairs that I thought led to a communal laundry room but after accidentally opening it once, I discovered it led directly into my landlord's living room. I unfortunately learned this the hard way.

[00:17:41] I was in my kitchen cooking, my boyfriend was at work and I was by myself when I heard what sounded like the click of a door. Okay, I say out loud, what the fuck was that?

[00:17:57] I didn't really make the connection that it could have been the door that led into their living room. I walk into the hallway and look around. I don't see anyone at the end of the hallway. I poke my head into all of the rooms and still nobody there.

[00:18:15] I then look down the staircase leading to their house and the neighbor lady is standing there staring at me. I screamed. She flinched and stepped back into her apartment and slammed the door shut.

[00:18:33] After that, every time I left the house and I spent every possible moment out of the house after that incident, I would come back and something would be moved. A window would be shut. Once the shower was dripping and my towel was damp.

[00:18:53] I couldn't lock the door because since it was technically the door to their house, they were the only ones with a key. The knocking got so frequent, three or four times a day, that my boyfriend and I had propped

[00:19:07] up an old mattress so that we didn't have to hear it while we slept. The second to last straw was when I opened the door for work and the stairs were gone. I physically could not leave my house because there weren't any stairs.

[00:19:26] They had been dismantled and were sitting on their porch. I called them repeatedly, but they didn't answer. Finally, their son came out of the house and explained that they were remodeling their porch and told me that I had to cut through their apartment downstairs.

[00:19:44] I descended the stairs and opened the door. They were both sitting at this filthy kitchen table staring at me. They kept staring at me with this blink look on their faces. I crossed their kitchen and left out their back door.

[00:20:02] A few days later, I came home from my job and noticed the bathroom floor was almost completely flooded, like somebody had left the faucet on or the shower on. The old woman, seeing that I had come home, came upstairs and knocked, screaming at me

[00:20:19] that I had flooded the bathroom and that her son had come to fix it. I was so run down at this point that I just told her that it was okay. Her son comes by a few hours later. He is completely shitfaced.

[00:20:36] I open the door and tell him that I need an hour or so before he comes, and he picks up something and swings it at me. It was a massive wrench. I somehow duck out of the way and he stumbles over.

[00:20:48] I book it down the newly repaired stairs as quickly as possible and call the police. They come by and take down a complaint but claim that since there was no physical contact they can't do anything. I later learned that the older couple has a daughter on the force.

[00:21:06] In the middle of the night, me, my boyfriend, and several of his other friends packed all of our stuff into a Chevy Astro. We lived in hotels and the van for the rest of the month until we found another place. They never attempted to contact us again.

[00:21:25] Old landlords, let's not meet again. So about two years ago, a friend of mine had moved into his own apartment. The sofa that was there was old and worn so he decided that we would try to find one in a better condition.

[00:21:52] He asked me to help him look for one as my dad had a van and we would need to use it to transport the sofa. So we went on Craigslist to have a look at what other people had for sale.

[00:22:03] We came across one that had stated a three seater cream leather sofa in great condition free to the first viewer. There was a picture of it and it looked like it was in perfect condition.

[00:22:16] Now the ads had been up for about a week or so and we thought that it was probably gone and that they had just not taken down the ad yet. So my friend contacted the seller and nearly instantly got a reply saying that they still

[00:22:31] had the sofa and it was available if we could come to collect it. I was a bit weary that it was still available, I mean a free sofa in perfect condition that had been up for a week and nobody had taken it yet.

[00:22:45] We thought that maybe there was something wrong with it that could only be noticed when viewing the sofa that was maybe hidden from the pictures. It was a weekend and we had no plan so we decided that we would go and check the sofa out.

[00:22:59] My friend contacted the seller and organized a time and place to meet up. They decided on a local McDonald's car park at 9pm as the seller said that he was at work until 8pm and that he would need time to get ready after work.

[00:23:14] The seller said that he would be driving a green Honda Accord with a trailer. So we pulled into the McDonald's parking lot at about 8.50pm. There were a lot of people around so we had no reason to think that we would be in danger or anything like that.

[00:23:32] At about 8.55pm my friend got a text saying that the seller was about 15 minutes away and they asked him to describe what vehicle we were in so he described the van. About 5 minutes after the text we see an overweight man around 50 years old with a grey scruffy

[00:23:50] beard and greasy grey hair approach the driver's side window of the van which was my side as I was driving. He was wearing a plain white t-shirt with what looked like food stains all over it,

[00:24:06] with black jeans and holes torn in them and dried mud stains all over them along with a pair of black steel toe cap boots also covered in dry mud. He knocked on my window so I rolled it down a bit. You boys here for the sofa?

[00:24:21] He said in a gravelly voice that sounded like he needed to cough but couldn't get it out. Uh yeah I said to him. He replies. Rob's car is broken down just up the road and his battery on his phone died.

[00:24:36] I was with him and I walked up to get you guys. He's with the car waiting for AAA but can you come down and collect the sofa off of him? My friend and I looked at each other unsure of what to think. Can I get in the van?

[00:24:53] We'll go back to Rob together? The guy asked. How far down the road is he? I asked before he replied not too far but I need to show you where to go. At this stage my friend pretended to get a phone call. Hello? Yes? Ah no way really?

[00:25:13] We'll be right there. He said before pretending to hang up with his phone. He then looked at me and said we gotta go my dad needs us to help him with the flat tire.

[00:25:24] I nodded knowing that this was a fake call for us to get the hell away from this creepy guy. We've gotta go now but we'll contact you tomorrow about the sofa. The guy just stared at us as I rolled up my window and started to drive away.

[00:25:40] My friend and I looked at each other. That was creepy. I got bad vibes off of that guy my friend said. Definitely I replied. We decided to drive around the back of the parking lot to see if we could find out if

[00:25:55] the guy was up to something or not. We could see him standing in the same spot where we left him and he was on the phone. He put his phone down and about two minutes after that a car pulled up with three men in

[00:26:10] it and he got in. My friend's phone started ringing and it was Rob the guy who was supposedly giving away a sofa. He answers hey can you meet tomorrow? I can hold on to the sofa for you until then.

[00:26:29] As he was on the phone I noticed one of the men in the car that had collected the creepy guy was also on the phone. My friend told Rob that he would contact him tomorrow. He was busy and couldn't talk right now.

[00:26:44] At the same time that my friend hung up the phone the guy who was in the car also finished his phone call. At this point I explained to my friend that there probably was no car that had broken

[00:26:56] down and that creepy guy was trying to lure us somewhere so the guys in the car could do god knows what to us. We drove home and my friend blocked the number from Rob and we never heard from them again.

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