[edgy music]
♪ ♪
- I felt like I was acting like a crazy person
But then there's like a towel set out with knives on it.
- He wanted to perform surgeries
On my wife and children.
- Things that you would see in scary movies.
- I think that I'm on the verge
Of a complete mental breakdown.
- I saw something that I will never forget.
- This person had been watching us.
- Hold up. We are not alone.
[woman screams]
Wow, there's literally a man living in your closet.
♪ ♪
- Man found hiding between a family's walls.
- Intruder secretly living inside her attic.
- Man slithers out from under home.
- Make sure your crawlspaces are locked.
- I hear footsteps.
- I'm vulnerable, naked, and someone is in my house.
- There was somebody violating my home.
- I want to believe it's in my head.
- It's a giant man's handprint.
- You came into my home. You invaded my privacy.
[tense music]
- We had a phrogger in our house.
♪ ♪
- It actually turns out that I wasn't going crazy...
♪ ♪
But the reality of what was happening was way worse.
[eerie notes]
[edgy music]
♪ ♪
- In 2019, I'm living in honolulu, hawaii,
With my wife and two children.
♪ ♪
When we'd gotten to hawaii, we were newlyweds.
We had just gotten married in 2018.
We went and did the whole las vegas thing
And had elvis marry us in the pink cadillac.
It was a ton of fun.
- I've known james since we were in high school.
We dated for a little bit right after high school.
And then we reconnected.
James and I are kind of a strange juxtaposition.
I do tend to be more outgoing and bubbly
And kind of a little bit more crazy.
James is a lot more analytical,
And he likes to really think decisions through.
I feel like we even each other out really well.
♪ ♪
He actually was a single father.
Had two sons.
♪ ♪
It made me feel really excited in a lot of ways.
But at the same time, it was really scary
Because I had just become a mom for the first time.
I had just gotten married. I was in a totally new place.
And then also just learning about all my new surroundings.
It took a while for me to find my footing.
- She had really stepped up and become a stepmom
To my two sons.
She really became mom for them.
It was great to move to hawaii.
It was a big adjustment, but we really liked the environment.
We brought our cat from the mainland,
But we had just gotten a new dog
That we've purchased in hawaii.
Life was looking good.
[ominous music]
[muffled chatter]
♪ ♪
[birds chirping]
♪ ♪
- Our new neighborhood wasn't exactly what you would think of
When you think of, you know, living in hawaii.
It was actually very normal.
It's like something you'd see on the mainland.
♪ ♪
The community that we lived in,
It was totally just your typical suburban community.
- It was a safe neighborhood in honolulu.
We lived on a cul-de-sac. It was a two-story house.
As you walked through the front door of the home,
Immediately in the family room,
Which had vaulted ceilings,
You could see upstairs to the banisters.
If you walked further towards the stairs to the right,
There was the kitchen and a small dining room
With a sliding glass door that went to the backyard.
As you go up the stairs, there was a hallway
And our son's bedroom was off to the left
And our master to the right.
There was one bathroom upstairs.
Above the bathroom, there's a crawlspace attic.
♪ ♪
- One day I go to the garage,
And I see all of our packed boxes in the garage,
But they were opened,
And there would be things pulled out of them
That had previously been packed away in the box.
- A lot of my music gear had been shifted around.
Just really weird.
♪ ♪
- One thing that I did almost every day
When I was getting ready,
Is I would sit and watch makeup tutorials.
One day, I was upstairs doing my makeup,
Watching my makeup tutorials.
[door slams]
I hear the front door slam out of nowhere.
♪ ♪
- Even that evening, she was hearing the door shut,
Open, and close.
- I asked james, "hey, did you leave the door unlocked?
"like, did you remember to lock the door
Before we went up to bed?"
- And I said, "yes, I had just done it."
I had just come upstairs from locking the doors
And making sure everything was okay downstairs.
And I thought, to be honest, that she was being paranoid.
So I was getting a little frustrated with her.
There's no noises downstairs. There's nothing going on.
She got frustrated with me and went downstairs
And checked to see if I had locked the doors.
♪ ♪
And, of course, they're unlocked.
So we got in a little bit of an argument about that.
♪ ♪
- I'm like, okay, like,
"why would my husband lie to me about locking the door?
Like, why would he say that he did when he didn't?"
Or I would think, is one of the boys
Trying to sneak out at night? What is going on?
And I tend to be a very trusting person,
And it started making me feel like I was being so paranoid
And honestly crazy.
Like, I felt like I was acting like a crazy person
Obsessing over these unlocked doors.
♪ ♪
- We're upstairs and we hear the sliding door
Open and shut. [door opens and closes]
I had thought that the sliding door was locked.
She did have me go downstairs in this incidence.
And I checked and the sliding door was unlocked.
The screen had been pulled open as well.
I continued to be skeptical that anything could possibly
Be happening to the family or to the home.
I thought that brittany was maybe just on edge
About something maybe because it was a new environment.
- James and I start having arguments
Over the door being unlocked, but it became an actual issue,
And it was like this fixation for me.
- But I definitely continued to be dismissive
Throughout these incidents.
- So at this point, I think that I'm on the verge
Of a complete mental breakdown.
I'm just, like, "wow, I've taken on way too much.
"the stress is completely getting to me.
"I'm imagining things.
"I'm starting to be paranoid about all kinds of weird stuff.
I'm just not acting like myself at all."
♪ ♪
- One day, I was downstairs playing piano.
♪ ♪
While I'm playing piano,
There was just a shadow of a person...
♪ ♪
Maybe listening to me play piano.
♪ ♪
I got up and they had walked away.
I was a little bit weirded out by it.
Thought it was just somebody being nosy
Or annoyed with me playing piano.
♪ ♪
One day, I'm just at home with the boys,
And I look at the desk calendar
And something's written on there.
"your rehabilitation starts today.
"do as I did.
Choose a house. Clean it. Set up devices."
I had no idea what this was referring to.
I had assumed maybe brittany had written it
And that it was just some sort of inspirational thing,
And she wanted me to clean the house.
I just started to clean up a little bit around the house.
I thought that that's what she wanted me to do.
And I'm, like,
"okay, yeah, I could probably clean up a little bit."
♪ ♪
- One night we were going to see a movie,
And there was a blanket that I had that sat on the couch
That my family would use to snuggle with
Like while we're watching a movie.
And I thought, oh, I want to take that blanket with me.
That'll be like super nice to watch the movie with.
And, you know, I go downstairs to the couch.
It's gone. The blanket's not there.
- Brittany asked if I was using the blanket.
I tell her no.
We asked the kids if they had seen the blanket
Or had been using it. They insist no.
- And I would think that they just didn't want
To go back upstairs to go grab the blanket.
So I'd be, like, "okay, come on, guys.
Like, just go get it."
And they would insist, "no, we don't have it."
- It turned into a big argument,
And it was just over a dumb blanket.
But it was gone.
And we ended up leaving the house.
♪ ♪
- So we come home from the movies.
We walk through the front door,
And the blanket is there.
♪ ♪
- The blanket is put back, folded nicely.
- And that was the first time james admitted
That something strange was going on.
He can't explain it either.
- Did the kids sneak the blanket back?
It seems like a really ridiculous thing to lie about.
Maybe they're moving the blanket and lying about it
Because they think they're gonna be in trouble.
- I feel relieved. I feel vindicated.
I'm not going completely crazy.
- One night, I remember looking at my computer
And noticing that my webcam light was on
In the middle of the night
And me having no idea why it would do that.
You hear about people watching you on your webcam or whatever.
But there was no reason for anybody to be watching me
That I could think of.
♪ ♪
- In September 2019, brittany and the boys and I
Flew back to the mainland to visit family
For about a week.
♪ ♪
- We end up taking an earlier flight back.
♪ ♪
We finally land in honolulu.
We go. We get to our car.
- Our home was not too far from the airport,
So it took us just a short time to get back home.
♪ ♪
- As we pull into the driveway,
I see james' really nice road bike sitting out.
- She asks if I was riding my bike before we left.
I tell her no.
And we noticed something is just off.
♪ ♪
- We tell the kids to wait in the car.
We go to the garage.
♪ ♪
- Opened up the garage,
And I saw that it had just been completely trashed.
♪ ♪
- It looked like a bomb had gone off.
♪ ♪
- I see boxes from when we moved
That had just been opened, torn apart.
And there's just all of our items
Are just thrown everywhere and kind of into piles.
Everything's just on top of each other.
And at that moment, I'm thinking we got robbed.
I grabbed a sledgehammer.
♪ ♪
I'm concerned for the safety of my family.
So I start to walk towards the front door of the house.
♪ ♪
I slide the key in,
Unlock it,
Start to push it open,
And it's met with some resistance.
♪ ♪
- He pushes the door really hard.
♪ ♪
And it opens a crack.
You can see a person inside our house.
- Who are you? Get out of our house!
- There's a man peeking through the door.
I'm calling 911 right now!
He's trying to hold it shut,
And the man says, "this is not your house,"
Just very calmly.
"this is not your house. You've got the wrong house."
And I'm just floored.
- And I'm screaming at the person,
"let us inside our home."
And I call 911.
- She tells them, "there's a man in our house.
We don't know who he is or why he's here."
I start cursing and yelling back at him,
"get out of my house." I push the door open.
- My husband is able
To pull the person out into the front yard.
♪ ♪
- And at this point we notice, he's wearing my clothes.
Things are just getting crazier by the moment.
♪ ♪
I'm telling him that if he doesn't listen to me,
I'm taking this as a threat.
I'm trying to ask him, "what are you doing here?"
And he's kind of just contending,
"I just didn't have anywhere to go."
So I'm thinking, well, this is just a homeless guy,
And he needed a place to stay.
He's kind of a young kid. Maybe he's on drugs.
I don't know.
I'm also thinking, I can't bludgeon a man to death
In front of my kids.
They got out of the car. They had to use the bathroom.
I'm telling them, "get back in the car."
My wife is yelling.
She's concerned about our cat, who is in the house.
- He says, "don't worry.
"I took care of your cat. I fed him.
He's inside."
- So I'm out on the lawn staring down this guy,
And brittany runs in the house to check on the cat.
- The first thing that I notice is our living room.
And it's really bizarre.
It's almost like he had it set up like he was doing
An inventory of everything that was in our home.
My husband has a lot of musical equipment,
And it was all kind of sitting out almost like
It was on display at a garage sale.
So I go into the kitchen, and my cat, mr. Franklin,
He's in a cage that was for training the puppy.
He had no water.
The man had been trying to feed him dried apricots.
I look at him, make sure that he's okay.
♪ ♪
I go back outside.
[sirens wailing]
He was very calm. He just kind of stood there.
♪ ♪
- As soon as the police arrived,
I just start pointing at him.
"hey, I don't know this guy. I don't know why he's here."
- The police came over and started talking to him,
And he just kind of started having a casual conversation
With the police and walked away with them.
It was really as if this person
Didn't think that he was doing anything out of the ordinary.
- They put them in handcuffs. He doesn't resist.
And they put him in the cop car.
At this point, we're still in shock,
But we're thinking,
This must have just been a robbery or a simple instance
Of a homeless guy needing a place to stay.
Everything is just trashed.
♪ ♪
My keyboard was now sitting on the couch for some reason.
There's pots and pans just piled on top of each other.
- One of the things that seemed really odd
Is the boys' bedroom.
He had actually done all of their laundry
And made their beds, and it was immaculate.
Like, the entire house was in complete shambles,
But for some reason, our boys' bedroom was--
It was almost like a sacred space.
It was extremely neat and tidy and pristine.
♪ ♪
In our bedroom, everything is in a huge disarray.
But then there's like a towel set out with knives on it.
♪ ♪
And then next to the knives, there's our computers.
It was an old computer that we didn't use anymore.
Something told me to, you know, go ahead and look at it.
So I start pressing buttons, and the screen comes on.
There's a text document that's on the screen.
- And there are all of these typed notes called
"the omnivore trials.
A rehabilitation for rat like people."
- It's like a journal that this person had been keeping.
The journal has entries about us.
- But they're like observations about our family.
- He has profiles about us.
There's intimate details that he knows about us
That's written down.
- There were some things in the writing
That detailed some very personal information
And some things that he could have only known
If he was listening in on our private conversations.
- He somehow knew that my husband and I
Were trying to have a baby.
And he wrote that I should give up
On trying to have a baby
And focus on the children that I have.
And nobody knew.
Like, we hadn't even told family
That we were trying to have the baby.
This person had obviously somehow been privy
To very private conversations.
- Now it's gone from trashing the house
To somebody's been stalking us.
Somebody's been listening in on our private conversations.
- And it becomes apparent to me
That this person was not just a random person.
This person had been watching us.
♪ ♪
- He had planned to perform various surgeries on us.
[tense music]
- These writings were suggesting
That surgical procedures should be performed
On my wife and my children.
♪ ♪
It mentions, like, how he's gonna go about doing it
And drugging our family.
And we found these serums that are labeled,
"to use on the omnivores," so he detailed us
As being a species that he called omnivores.
♪ ♪
- He had looked at websites trying to buy surgical tables.
He had looked up how to perform specific surgeries.
- And he had been looking up videos
On how to surgically remove an arm.
He looked up how to do gender reassignment surgery.
♪ ♪
- Everything that he had written about
Wanting to do in his plans,
He had researched ways
To implement these plans that he had.
He had actually had an agenda, and there was a reason
That he was in our home specifically.
So in addition to the computer that had the notes on them,
There was my computer that I used
That would sit on my makeup desk.
I started looking through that computer as well,
And I found a video file on it.
- Hey, what's going on, everybody?
It's me.
I'm actually doing this video to show some--
Some ways that you can change
Your outer appearance.
This is day two of the trials that I've been working on.
This one is just called cosmetology.
It kind of hurts a little, but they believe beauty hurts.
♪ ♪
Anyways.
- Watching the video,
The way that he was talking in it,
It seemed like he was talking directly to me and mocking me,
To be honest.
He begins by drawing a line,
And it's supposed to demonstrate
Some kind of spiritual transformation.
It was a makeup tutorial of sorts.
- Okay, boomshakalaka.
How does it look?
- But with a really bizarre kind of twist on it.
- I'm showing you that you can...
Make yourself lighter.
[belches]
Excuse me.
- This guy had been sitting naked in my chair.
That's disgusting.
- Hold on.
- I just felt terror.
That was pretty much the only way I can describe it.
It was just a sense of just complete terror.
A bunch of different things kind of flooded back
To my mind.
Looking at my computer,
I'm noticing that my webcam light was on.
My mind began to go all kinds of places wondering,
How long was this person watching us?
It kind of started making a lot of things make sense.
- So all those things that were happening--the blanket,
Unlocked doors, noises in the house,
They all add up to making sense.
♪ ♪
The suspect was charged with felony burglary.
And within days, he was granted supervised release.
He's released out into the public.
At this point, I got really upset
Because I felt like our family was in danger.
But it wasn't long before he ended up
Burglarizing the buddhist study center
And was arrested again.
And they revoked his supervised release.
So he remains in jail during his psychological evaluation,
And we're told he allegedly murders his cellmate.
♪ ♪
This is an incident
That's really affected us psychologically as a family.
It's uprooted our entire lives. We've since moved from hawaii.
Almost every aspect of our life has been touched by this.
♪ ♪
- Recovering from this has been really difficult.
There's not exactly like a support group for people
Who've been victims of a psychopath that stalks them,
Breaks into their home,
And plots to perform surgery on them.
- There's not even a single part of me would have thought,
Hey, there's a guy, maybe up in our attic,
Writing a medical manifesto who wants to transform
My family to a species that he called omnivores.
Who would think that?
♪ ♪
I'm absolutely grateful that nothing serious
Physically happened to my wife brittany and our two boys.
We're very lucky that we came home when we did.
If it had been at nighttime,
Or if the boys had gone into the home first,
Who knows what could have happened?
And there were just so many things
That could have happened that didn't
That we're very grateful for.
- This is business. This is serious work.
[singing cheerfully]
- It's a complete violation.
I felt like nothing in my space was sacred
Or mine anymore.
♪ ♪
When you realize that there's been a stranger in your home,
And not just a stranger,
But a stranger who had sinister plans for you.
♪ ♪
[mellow hip-hop music]
- My name is madisyn gidrey.
In 2019, I'm 20 years old and a junior in college
At the university of north carolina at greensboro.
- ♪ yo, get me going, get me out... ♪
- I live two minutes away from the university
With my two roommates destiny and ahmiyah.
- My name is ahmiyah mcbride. - My name is destiny alford.
I knew maddie for being my freshman college roommate.
So I would think it was good to get my first apartment
With her since I trust her.
And then ahmiyah being my best friend, I'm like,
"all right, there's our third girl.
So let's go ahead and throw her in the mix."
And that's how we got our first apartment.
- We just did everything together off campus.
So it became just a no-brainer
To go ahead and start living together.
- So I was so excited to have my own space.
And I'm excited to have my own space with destiny and ahmiyah
'cause we are good friends.
- We are all so different in the best of ways.
Madisyn is the risk taker.
She's brave. She's adventurous.
She's down to do anything you want to do.
- Ahmiyah, very intelligent person.
And ahmiyah's more quiet and closed in.
- I'm sort of the--the laid-back one, the goofy one.
- Destiny is outgoing.
Destiny's the loudest out of us.
- I am like the mother of the group.
I'm always trying to bring my friends up, you know,
Just make their day a little bit better.
- We got along very well. We didn't fight.
Lots of fun and laughs with us.
[foreboding music]
- We moved in August just before school started.
- It's a ground-floor apartment.
We stayed on the very first floor.
- The three of us each had our own bedrooms.
Those bedrooms also had our own bathroom.
So we found that to be amazing.
- When I initially moved in, I felt safe at the time.
But then I noticed on the weekend nights,
So many people on the streets, you know, going to the bars
And going out to the nightclubs.
I'm, like, "all right,
That's a little too much traffic going on."
- There were a lot of homeless people at the church
Across the street from the apartment that we lived in.
A lot of them did sleep on the church steps.
- We had homeless people at the gas stations
Where all the cops were at, you know, chillin'.
♪ ♪
- Madisyn was a bit of a fashionista.
I love madisyn's style.
- I do a lot of shopping. I have tons of clothes.
- She has like every pair of sneakers in the world almost.
She'd have her jeans in a certain section,
All her dresses beautifully hung up in the middle.
She'll have tennis shoes to match her dresses.
- I'm very organized, so it's very easy
For me to notice if anything is out of place in the room.
♪ ♪
So one day I'm looking for a t-shirt,
And it's not there, I can't find it.
I'm thinking it could have got lost in laundry.
We are three girls all doing our laundry in the same room.
So I'm thinking, like,
"oh, maybe they picked it out of my laundry."
After that, I'm looking for socks.
I can't find any socks.
Also, I was looking for work clothes, couldn't find them.
And I had went to go redo my hair,
And I realized I was missing a brush
That I use, like, all the time.
So I'm, like, "why is this brush missing
When I use it almost every day?"
And I always buy like, a 100-pack of bobby pins.
I would be missing a chunk of them at a time.
I reached a point where I was missing a lot of items.
So we just met together in the living room.
I was like,
"hey, have you guys had any of my clothes
Or maybe have a t-shirt of mine?"
And they both said no.
- I know ahmiyah's not taking it,
And I know I'm not taking it, so this is very weird.
- And destiny told me that she was missing some items too.
So where did everything go?
- Now as to my stuff... [chuckles]
Missing a crop top and, you know, a hairbrush
Here and there, I don't think much of it.
Those kind of things are about 5 bucks.
I was like, "okay, I'll just replace that."
So I didn't think much of that.
♪ ♪
- The three of us are in destiny's room
Which is located at the front of the apartment.
♪ ♪
- We're just sitting there watching a movie.
My phone rings. [cell phone trills]
- Madisyn picks up her phone. It's a phone call from me.
[cell phone trilling]
- And it's ahmiyah, but she's sitting right next to me.
So I'm confused. Who's calling me?
And I'm like, "where's your phone?"
- I didn't have my phone on me.
I actually left it in the room on the bed.
- Hold up. Her phone is in her room.
Who's in the room?
[women scream]
We all jumped on my bed, like, really, really scared.
Like, we had blankets over us, like, "oh, my gosh.
What is going on?"
I sat up out of my bed.
And I'm, like, "hold up, y'all.
"my room is right here by the front door.
"we would have heard if somebody would have went
Through the door, but we ain't hear nothing."
- Who's calling me? And who has ahmiyah's phone?
We're all thinking someone's in her room.
- So this freaks us out even more.
[laughs]
And now we're thinking of plans of getting out of this room.
All right, we're gonna jump out a window,
Or we're gonna grab something
And just hit this person upside they head.
And I'm sitting here, like,
"what's about to happen after that?
"like, we're gonna have somebody bleeding out
In our living room, y'all. What we're gonna do about it?"
- We wanted to call the police.
We wanted to scream until someone else heard us.
We wanted to go outside and be brave.
And we decided that we would have to fight this,
Whatever it could be.
[suspenseful music]
- So we ended up just picking stuff up in the room
That we maybe could use as a weapon.
I ended up picking just a hard elephant statue,
Lifted it up in my hand.
- We were all just standing at the door, like,
"all right, y'all, on three. One, two, three."
And we bust out of the room.
- I don't know what to believe. So confused.
[tense music]
- Opened the door really quick
And just looked down the hallway.
But there was no one there.
♪ ♪
- We immediately go to ahmiyah's room.
- And I went in and noticed that my closet door was open.
Normally for me, I have to close things.
- And then that's when we discovered her phone
In the closet
When she said that was not where she had it at.
So at this moment, I'm for real freaked out.
- Something was going on in the house
That we didn't understand.
We thought it could have been a ghost potentially.
We thought it could have been this
Supernatural being coming to mess with us.
So we didn't know specifically what we were dealing with
And we didn't know if it was severe enough
To get law enforcement involved.
♪ ♪
- I come home thanksgiving break
Just to settle in and unpack
Before I have to work in the morning.
And I go to use the shower,
But it looks like the water had ran up.
And it was super dirty.
So I go in the shower and kind of see, like,
A ring around the tub of, like, dirt.
- It was really, really dirty.
Almost looked like somebody, like,
Rinsed off they feet from running on the ground.
- I'm, like, that's unusual because
My tub is normally clean.
- And then there was a long piece of hair.
It's a blonde hair. It's not ours.
- It was heartbreaking because we knew at that point,
It had to be someone or something.
It was definitely creepy.
♪ ♪
- The next day as I'm looking in the mirror,
I saw something that I will never forget.
[ominous music]
So I call destiny and ahmiyah into the room.
- It's a giant man's handprint on the mirror.
♪ ♪
- I just kept going back to the ghost, honestly.
It was a way of not being as scared because,
"oh, we can just blame it on the ghost
That lives with us in this apartment."
- And we're all just like jokingly saying
The ghost is messing with us. - Girl, it might be.
If we have a ghost, I know what to do.
- Destiny decided that
She would purify our apartment by burning sage.
- I said, "ladies, open up y'all bedroom doors.
I got you."
I lit up the white sage.
And then I saw the smoke, just the thick smoke,
Coming up from the sage,
Reading psalm 23 as loud as I can from the bible,
Banishing whatever was bothering us,
To have a fresh start.
♪ ♪
- One day, I'm at the apartment alone,
And I heard some chatter suddenly.
I sent a text message to destiny.
And I asked her, "are you expecting anyone?"
- Uh, there shouldn't be anybody home but you, ahmiyah.
So what's going on?
- I'm hearing whispers on the other side of the door.
I couldn't make out what they were saying,
But I knew that they were definitely male voices.
It had to be more than one person.
Destiny texted madisyn and asked her,
"is there anyone you're expecting?"
- I'm like, "well, I know for sure I've been at work.
"I know I locked the door when I left for work.
And I know my boyfriend is not at my house."
♪ ♪
- By the time I called ahmiyah,
She tells me that the guys are gone.
And then she said the door is unlocked
When the door was locked.
- I was terrified.
I was nervous to be home alone.
I wanted to always be in maddie or destiny's room.
♪ ♪
Who's to say that it wasn't something supernatural?
It was beyond something we can understand,
So we didn't know what course of action to take.
I decided that it would be best for me to go home,
Back to my hometown, so that's what I did.
Destiny and madisyn still stayed at the apartment.
- When ahmiyah left, I was really, really sad
'cause that was my best friend.
We have some good moments in that apartment.
[somber music]
I don't know what's going on, but it's not good at all.
We are not alone.
♪ ♪
- Early February, one day I had to work, so I figured
I'd take a lunch break in between and go home.
But when I came in, the door was locked.
So I unlocked the door, put my phone in the kitchen,
Walked to my room to use the restroom.
I'm in the bathroom, and I hear a lot of noise and ruckus
Coming from my closet on the other side of the wall.
Somebody was snatching clothes off of the hangers.
Something is in my closet. I am super, super scared.
[hangers rattling, clothes shuffling]
- I'm freaking out.
My heart is pumping
When I realize it has to be someone in my closet.
At this point, my phone is still in the kitchen
From where I dropped it
When I first came into the apartment.
So next, I put my hand on the door
Because I'm thinking I'm just gonna bust the door open.
But I realized I had a smartwatch,
And I should probably try to call the police
Before I even open the door.
Of course, I couldn't get the watch to work to call.
And at this point,
I just feel, like, pressure pushing against the door.
They might get me before I can get to them.
The door opens,
And I see a man in all my clothes.
First thing I ask him, "is who are you,
And why are you in my closet?"
He told me his name was drew
And him and his friends raid closets to get clothes.
♪ ♪
So I'm kind of watching him as I run and get my phone
To snatch it up and come back to the room.
I don't call the police because I don't want him to hear me
And try to attack me.
I end up just taking a quick picture...
♪ ♪
And sending it to my good guy friend and telling him,
"hey, come over.
I just found a man in my closet."
♪ ♪
He texts me back, "I'm on the way."
And after that, we just sat and we talked.
He says his mom abandoned him and thought that he was ugly.
Then he starts asking me, do I think he's pretty?
Or do I like his hair?
He did ask me if we can hug,
And I broke that off very quick.
Absolutely not.
So we talked for around ten minutes
Before my guy friend shows up.
His demeanor was more like he was scared of me,
Rather than me being scared of him.
I just felt really bad for him.
I was like, "just don't bother me anymore."
So then we let him go and he leaves.
♪ ♪
He goes in that gas station that's in front of my complex,
And the cops are already kind of just hanging outside.
I tell the cops, "hey, that guy that's in the bathroom
"was just in my closet when I came home.
He was pretty much robbing me."
So they end up arresting him
And taking me back to my house so they can see the evidence.
They realize my closet has indeed been ran through.
Some of the stuff that he had dropped
Had also been in the house.
- Maddie's bravery is just like, "this is my house,
"and I'm going to find out who's in my closet
Wearing my things."
So it's just like she took charge of that situation.
- Maintenance comes the next day
Just to check out what happened.
They check this window
That the blinds were always up and shut.
And it was a recliner right in front of the window.
And we realized, as we look outside of the window,
My brush, my hair stuff,
Hair ties, were outside of the window.
So that's how he was coming in and out.
We later found out that his name was andrew swofford,
And he was 30 years old.
He pleads guilty for breaking and entering
And gets sentenced to 79 days in jail.
- When I first saw the picture of drew in the closet,
I was very creeped out. Wow.
There's literally a man living in your closet.
We have to move. We have to move asap.
We're not staying there.
- The following week, I moved out,
And I've never been back.
After this, we've gotten much closer together
Than we were before just 'cause
We experienced something crazy with each other
And we really know we have each other's backs.
If I could do it all over again,
Not that I want to,
I would call the cops as soon as I saw him.
♪ ♪
I would have never believed
That I had a phrogger in my house.
♪ ♪
- I look up, and the crawl space door is open.
[woman screams]
Something is opening and closing the cabinet.
These eyes are familiar.
Someone is waving at us.
I'm standing face to face with this thing.
♪ ♪
- Someone is in my house.
♪ ♪