I’m a college student, and I live alone in a single dorm room in a building close to the center of my campus. This is my second year living in this room. My girlfriend of a few years lives right down the hall from me, and I spend most of my time during the day in her room; she’s a good decorator and generally keeps a cleaner room than I do. I still sleep in my room because the beds are small, and she tends to wake up a lot earlier than me.
Our building, called Wharton Hall, is pretty old. The walls are thick, but the floors are pretty thin and creaky. I hear the people above me all the time, and it always sounds like they’re stomping around, but I think it’s just the building. Last year, I had some friends over to watch the premiere of a show we all followed, and the person living below me came upstairs to ask us to quiet down. We were all sitting on the floor, but the creaking was so bad she thought we were moving furniture (or so she said, but she was kind of an ass.) The college recently put up drop-tile ceilings in this building to catch all the paint that was falling off the existing drywall and onto students’ stuff. They’re renovating it next year.
One afternoon I was walking to my room, room 295 on the second floor, to drop my stuff off after class before heading down the hallway to my girlfriend’s. I opened the door at the top of the staircase, which is right across from my room, and I saw a girl standing at my door as though she’d knocked and was waiting for an answer. She seemed a little pissed.
I told her it was my room and asked what was up. She told me she was trying to write a paper and she needed me to quiet down. I was surprised and almost laughed a bit, since I was obviously not in the room. I still had my backpack and jacket on and was just getting back.
She told me rather indignantly that, clearly, someone was in the room, and that I needed to quiet them down, as if I was covering for them or something. She told me I’d been making a lot of noise this week in the afternoons. I told her I’d check it out and to let me know if I was being too loud again. I gave her my number to save her the trip up the stairs. I try to be a good neighbor.
She paces off and walks back downstairs. I unlocked my door and found exactly what I expected: nothing. I suspected it was just the building settling or the pipes making noise or whatever other bullshit reasons buildings make noise. My room was completely undisturbed and exactly how I remember leaving it; bed a mess, clothes on the floor in the corner, recycling sorely in need of removal, and the blinds pulled down.
I headed to my girlfriend’s room and didn’t think about it again for the rest of the day.
The next day was Tuesday, so my classes ran a little later. I was sitting in class fucking around on my laptop when my phone started ringing. It was a nearby area code, but I didn’t have the number saved. I let it go to voicemail and texted them.
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“Hey, I’m in class, could you remind me who this is? don’t have your number saved.”
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“Hi. It’s Jessica downstairs. If you’re in class you need to tell whoever’s in your room to cut it out. Worse than yesterday.”
I thought it was strange that the noise would be louder than yesterday, especially considering I was, again, not in my room. I quietly stepped out of class to call her back.
“Hey, listen, this really isn’t cool. I don’t care if you’re hiding someone in your room or whatever, just tell them to shut the fuck up.” That was the gist of it. She didn’t give me time to convince her that nobody was there.
This was really starting to confuse and piss me off. Either she was messing with me and pulling an aggressively irritating prank, or something was making noise in my room when I was gone. I have a small refrigerator that rattles a bit when it cuts on and off, but nothing I’d dream of complaining to a neighbor about.
When I got back to my room, I again found nothing. Everything was as precisely disheveled as I had left it, and I found no evidence of someone coming into my room. On top of that, I happen to know the lock on my door is essentially impossible to pick, as I’ve tried it a few times when I locked myself out (the doors only have button locks and don’t unlock themselves when the door shuts, and they’re spring loaded to swing closed and impossible to prop open without a chair). If someone was getting into my room, they were clearly breaking in, and they were a much better lock picker than me. Nobody else has a key to my room.
So I was pretty pissed at this point. I kept thinking about how this sounded like the plot of a shitty horror movie (and I don’t even like the “good ones”). I was ready to get to the bottom of this and get whoever was breaking into my room arrested.
I took an old smartphone I had lying around and installed a security camera app on it with motion and sound detection. If anything happened in my room, I’d get it on camera and get a notification on my current phone immediately. I propped it up on the floor in the corner of the room, trying to make it inconspicuous. I went to bed that night feeling good that I was about to catch the asshole who kept barging into my bedroom.
The next day while I was eating a late lunch, my phone buzzed in my pocket. “MOTION DETECED!” it informed me. I stood up, left my stuff in the cafe with my friend, and ran for my room. As I was running I tried to pull up the live feed of my room, but the Wi-Fi signal kept disconnecting and reconnecting as I passed different buildings. I switched to cellular, but by the time the connection was established I was already at my dorm. I bounded up the stairs, into the hallway and to my door.
It was locked, and I heard nothing inside. I fumbled with the key and finally unlocked the door, throwing it open and jumping into the room.
Nothing.
My security phone was still in the corner, but it had slid and fallen, camera up, from it’s admittedly precarious position. Shit. Still, detecting the sound of my violent entry, it promptly notified me that someone was in my room.
I looked around the room; nothing seemed to be disturbed. Shit. I picked up my old phone to check the footage and see if it caught anything before it tipped over. I unlocked it and opened the security camera app.
Two clips had been stored on the phone; the thumbnails were both still frames of the lower portion of my closed door and far wall of my room. The sound must have triggered the camera before anything came into frame.
I know that the second clip will just be me foolishly barreling into my own bedroom and gawking at nothing, so I open the first clip.
I hear the faint sound of the doorknob turning. Shit. No rattling, no sound of keys or picks fiddling with the lock. The door opens, and someone walks in. The camera angle was no good, but I could see the pale, bare feet and slim jeans of who I assumed was a male. It didn’t look like anyone I knew, and nobody I know walks around barefoot this time of year.
They paced. They walked back and forth between three points on the floor of my room, walking with such heavy steps that the video was rattling. This kept on for a good few minutes, during which time the phone fell over and all I could see was the ceiling. The sound of the loud pacing continued for a bit and then suddenly stopped. The footage cut out.
The second clip was time-stamped just 15 seconds after the end of the first one. Whoever was here ran like hell when they heard me bounding up the stairs or fiddling with the lock. And I still didn’t have a picture of this jerk’s face.
This time I was pissed as hell. I still hadn’t told my girlfriend about any of this because I didn’t want her to worry, and she tends to be more superstitious than me. I was positive someone was breaking into my room to screw with me, but I was guessing her suspicions would be more supernatural. She knew nothing about it, and I wanted to keep it that way. I decided to solve this once and for all. I was going to get a picture of this guy’s face.
I had a nice DSLR camera that also had motion detection, which I avoided using for the sake of conspicuousness and avoiding having it stolen, but I didn’t care at this point. The camera had Wi-Fi, so I set it up to immediately take a picture when something in the room moved and upload it to Dropbox. Even if the dick decided to steal my camera, I’d have a picture. I put it on a tripod, made sure it was aimed right at head-level on the door, set it to the fastest shutter speed and autofocus, and the next morning when I left for class, I turned it on.
The camera wouldn’t notify me like the security app, so I would just have to wait and see what it captured when I got back. It was a regular day, no texts from Jessica, and even though I knew I would probably lose my camera, I figured the burglar was probably a student and I’d likely get it back once I had a picture to show campus police.
When my last class let out in the afternoon, I made my way back to Wharton. When I entered the hallway, I saw the door to my room and froze.
The door was closed, and the brass doorknob was crushed and mangled, barely clinging to the hole in the door where it had been twisted out. There were thin, wiry dents in the shape of a hand disfiguring both sides of the doorknob, and the bits of wood around the screws had been ripped out of the solid wood door. I pulled the door open.
My tripod lay flat on its side on the floor, my camera completely gone. The TV on my dresser was smashed and leaning against the wall, the cracks on the screen matching the shape of the tripod. Bits of glass from the lens were in a small pile on the floor, and the plastic from the bottom of the camera and the tripod mount were still stuck to the tripod’s screw adapter. Someone had crushed my $600 camera with their bare hands and ripped it off the tripod to keep me from seeing who they were.
I suppressed my instinctive terror and immediately took out my computer and logged into Dropbox. A single picture had been uploaded.
A jumbled mess of superimposed images filled my screen. I saw my bedroom door closed, superimposed by a dark, faceless figure standing in the open doorway, superimposed again by a transparent black blur which covered half the screen. In the center of the blur were two faint white lights that looked like eyes. The image was overlain with the pattern of shattered glass and bits of refracted light.
In the fraction of a second it took to take that picture, someone had effortlessly opened my locked door, heard the sound of the shutter opening, crossed the room, ripped the camera from the tripod and destroyed it all before the shutter closed again. The thought must have occurred to them that the camera was connected to the internet, because they clearly left in a hurry.
I moved out of that room as soon as the school would let me. That was over eight months ago, and since graduating I’ve heard from my RA friends still at school that two students have moved in and out of that room, and that the girl below me left, too. They repaired the door and replaced the knob. After seeing the picture and the leftovers of my ruined camera, the school offered to pay the remainder of my room and board in an off-campus apartment and gave me a deep discount on the remaining tuition, all with the stipulation that I don’t make a big deal about what happened.
I got an invitation to a private Facebook group today from a name I didn’t recognize. He was an older guy who also went to my school. The group was called Wharton 295.
Submitted February 13, 2017 at 11:29AM by mosskin-woast http://ift.tt/2kBbJnI nosleep
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