[tense music]
♪ ♪
- She said to me, "mommy, there's someone in the closet."
- This story has become like a legend.
- We could have been all axe-murdered.
- There were two perfect footprints
Of a shoe on the wall.
- I hear someone behind me say, "oh, I was wondering
When I'd get to meet the people that live here."
- I heard them doing the countdown
And saying, "we're gonna let the dog loose."
My house is a crime scene.
♪ ♪
- Man found hiding between a family's walls.
- Intruder secretly living inside her attic.
- Man slithers out from under home.
- Make sure your crawl spaces are locked.
- I hear footsteps.
I'm vulnerable, naked, and someone is in my house.
- There was somebody violating my home.
I wanna believe it's in my head.
- It's a giant man's handprint.
- You came into my home. You invaded my privacy.
- [screams]
- We had a phrogger in our house.
♪ ♪
- In 2008, I was living in plains, pennsylvania,
With my three children.
Cory, age 14,
Alyssa, age 11,
Courtney, age 4.
♪ ♪
Plains, pennsylvania, is a very tight-knit,
Very welcoming community.
♪ ♪
Holidays do tend to put a lot of stress on people,
But christmas was very special.
It was a very happy time.
Getting the porch ready and making sure
That the christmas lights are on.
Decorating, putting up the snowman,
Putting up the santa clauses, putting the christmas tree up,
Wrapping presents and hiding presents,
Keeping everything a big secret.
Seeing their faces is what truly is important.
- Christmas for my mom was very important
Because she knew that she was able to give us
The christmas that we all wanted.
♪ ♪
[light music]
- We moved into this house
About three years prior to 2008.
The street that I lived on was a dead end road.
Our house is a double block,
So it was two regular houses just put together,
So the neighbors were directly on the other side of the wall,
And in this particular house, the attic was shared.
Right at the top of the steps,
My two daughters did share a bedroom.
Then you walk down the hall, and it was cory's room
And my master bedroom
Was right at the end of the hallway.
Being a single parent, life was very hectic.
There was two teenagers in the house,
Kids constantly at the house.
It was chaos.
At the time in 2008, I was a supervisor
At a home improvement store.
So over the christmas break,
I was a little bit more flexible with my schedule
To make sure that the kids
Enjoyed their time off from school.
Christmas break, it's fun.
There's children. There's their friends.
- Our house was always the one that the friends came to,
And my mom was always so welcoming
Of all of our friends.
Our house was always busy.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- I come home from work
To open up refrigerator to get a glass of soda,
And that soda bottle was missing.
♪ ♪
Then I proceeded to go to the cabinet
To get the extra soda,
And all of the soda was missing.
♪ ♪
I immediately blamed the children.
I just thought maybe their friends came over.
They had drank it all.
Never thought anything else about it.
I did ask each child if they had drank the soda,
Or if they've seen the soda.
I got the answer of, "wasn't me. I didn't do it."
- My brother cory and I insisted
We did not drink all the soda, but five bottles were gone.
- And that's when strange things
Started happening around us.
♪ ♪
One day, alyssa had asked me
If I had washed a pair of her pants and shirt,
And I knew that I didn't have anything
In the washer or dryer.
She did look in her bedroom.
They weren't there.
When alyssa didn't find her clothes,
I just assumed she left them
Over at one of her friends' house.
This is what kids do.
- I was definitely mad at my mom
When she accused me of losing this outfit,
Because it was my favorite outfit.
There was no way I lost it.
♪ ♪
- Alyssa was very persistent.
She knew that she had them one day,
And a few days later, that they were gone.
♪ ♪
One morning, just wake up, getting ready to go to work.
Open up the medicine cabinet...
♪ ♪
My toothbrush is missing.
♪ ♪
There were a lot of toothbrushes at my house.
Every time that the kids had their friends stay over,
I was the parent that always kept an extra toothbrush.
There's a basket there
With a bunch of marked toothbrushes in it.
My toothbrush was not there.
♪ ♪
Once the toothbrush was missing,
You just kind of throw your hands up in the air.
It's tough. There's three kids at home.
It's a busy house.
♪ ♪
A few days before christmas, courtney and I
Were in bed watching a movie.
I had fallen asleep, and courtney had woken me up
In the middle of the night, and she said to me,
"mommy, there's someone in the closet."
♪ ♪
And I consoled her, put my arm around her,
And I told her she was just having a bad dream,
And let's go back to bed.
♪ ♪
Courtney has never been woken up
In the middle of the night by strange noises,
What she thinks she's seeing.
This was the first time that she's ever woken me up
To tell me that she had saw something.
♪ ♪
I didn't look in the closet. I didn't think about it.
I just assumed that she was having just a bad dream.
♪ ♪
But I didn't know what was happening.
Just a lot of questions unanswered.
♪ ♪
[eerie music]
♪ ♪
Our family tradition every christmas eve
Was to let the kids open one present of their choice
From underneath the tree.
- We all ran downstairs,
And then I opened the gift up that I picked,
And it was the mp3 player
That I had been asking for for months.
I was so excited.
I gave my mom a big hug,
And I was ready to use it right then and there.
- Alyssa was very surprised. She was very happy.
Kicking, screaming like a little kid would do.
- My mom plugged it into our computer,
And she let it charge so I could use it later on.
- After we had opened up some presents,
We then put our christmas pajamas on,
And it was bedtime.
♪ ♪
It's christmas morning, and everything goes haywire.
♪ ♪
The kids are opening up their presents.
We're all sitting around the christmas tree.
They're all happy.
Everybody's in a very good mood.
Then we get everybody ready. We go and visit my parents.
♪ ♪
We were there for a few hours.
- And when we got back to the house,
We saw that my mp3 player
That we had plugged in was just gone.
♪ ♪
- We asked courtney,
Thinking that she had moved it somewhere.
It's christmas. Presents are everywhere.
House is a mess.
She doesn't know what we're talking about.
- At that time, I was very upset
That my mp3 player was missing, but at the same time,
I didn't notice anything different with my mom
And how she was acting.
She was always so composed,
And she had a lot on her plate.
- I would never put any of this together.
The soda, the mp3 player, or alyssa's clothes.
These things are normal, everyday things
That go missing in, you know, your house.
♪ ♪
We were getting ready to go
To another family's house, and we went
To go pick up our christmas cards.
♪ ♪
And all of the cards were missing,
And so was the money that was inside the cards.
At that point,
We stopped everything that we were doing,
Because we had felt like something was happening,
And we just didn't know what was happening.
♪ ♪
I immediately called the police.
♪ ♪
The police came. They looked around the house.
♪ ♪
They noticed that there was no sign of forced entry.
We didn't notice anything out of the ordinary.
- As an 11-year-old, seeing police in your house
On christmas day,
It was stressful, because I was afraid.
I didn't understand really what was going on.
My mom asked us to go out on the front porch
For a little bit.
She didn't want us hearing
Whatever she knew that we didn't.
- So the police told us that they were going to do
A couple drive-bys just to check on the house
To make sure that everything was okay.
♪ ♪
We were about to leave and visit some more family,
But now before we left,
I had made sure-- I didn't just double-check,
But I triple-checked that the windows were locked.
We had chains on the backs of the doors,
Made sure that they were all locked,
And just made sure that everything was right
Where I knew where everything was.
- I remember my mom,
She actually took wax parchment paper,
And she put it over the window that was in our front door,
Thinking that if somebody was coming into the house,
They were looking through that window to see
If anybody was home, so she blocked that window off
So you couldn't see through it anymore,
And after that, we--we left.
♪ ♪
- We didn't arrive home until almost midnight
Christmas night.
♪ ♪
When we came in,
I immediately walked into the kitchen.
♪ ♪
I saw that the chain
Was undone on our door.
♪ ♪
And alyssa had noticed that her charger
That was still plugged into the computer
For her mp3 player was now gone.
♪ ♪
And at the same time, cory had said to me,
"mom, your laptop is missing."
♪ ♪
That's when it took a turn for complete chaos.
[eerie music]
- Christmas night, we called 911.
Again, the police came.
They did a full report.
Again, no sign of forced entry,
But the chain was undone on our door.
The charger was missing. The money was missing.
The mp3 player was missing. My laptop was missing.
♪ ♪
We were unaware of the things that were happening around us.
♪ ♪
I was a little scared. I was a little frightened.
I had three kids in the house.
Was unaware of how they saw me with my emotions.
- The first thing I remember was the way my mom reacted.
She immediately just had tears in her eyes.
[tense music]
Seeing my mom that upset, it was hard,
Because my mom always kept it together.
♪ ♪
We all knew that something was really, really wrong.
♪ ♪
- I then packed up the kids, and we left,
And we went and stayed with family that night.
♪ ♪
- That night, I ended up staying at my dad's house
With my brother, and my mom and sister
Went to my grandmother's house.
♪ ♪
- Sleeping that night at my parents' house
Was--I could just remember
Laying down in bed with courtney
And just crying myself to sleep,
Knowing that I didn't provide
A safe environment for my children.
♪ ♪
I didn't know what was happening,
And I didn't have answers for any of them.
♪ ♪
The day after christmas, I went back to my house.
♪ ♪
- My mom was in contact with us all day.
She just wanted to keep us up-to-date
Because she knew we were also worried.
- I was getting ready for work.
I got a phone call from a family member.
They asked, "is there someone
That could have possibly come in?"
I said, "I don't know."
Because there was no forced entry,
I definitely thought someone had a key to my house.
So at that time, the locks were being changed.
You know, at that point, my family member told me,
"hey, why don't you check the attic?"
And I said, "there's no way
"that you can even get up in that attic.
There's no way."
♪ ♪
The attic is directly above all three bedrooms,
And the attic access was in my bedroom closet.
We did not use the attic. It was an unfinished attic.
♪ ♪
My family member then said, "why don't you check
"the clothes that are on top of the shelving unit?
Make sure that there's nothing dirty."
♪ ♪
I was in my closet on the phone.
Checked my clothes. There was nothing.
I didn't see anything that didn't belong.
It was a very tight closet, so at that time,
I was turning around to leave,
And that's when I noticed...
♪ ♪
There were two perfect footprints
Of a shoe on the wall.
♪ ♪
That's when panic struck.
That's when...
♪ ♪
I was scared.
♪ ♪
I saw the footprints.
I immediately dialed 911
And let them know someone entered my home.
- From what I saw, the prints were lined up perfectly
To show that he used it to get into the attic.
♪ ♪
So when my mom told us what was happening,
The sound of shock in her voice shocked us as well.
- When the police showed up,
The whole street was entirely blocked off.
It felt like the whole entire
Plains township police department was there.
♪ ♪
And my house is a crime scene.
The police came, evaluated the situation,
And that's when we noticed above the doorway
That there was actual handprints on the wall.
My first reaction was it was the neighbors.
We had a shared attic.
They were coming in and out of the house when I wasn't home.
♪ ♪
Police immediately walked over to the neighbor's house
To see if any of my belongings were there.
So looking for a laptop,
Looking for an mp3 player, looking for the charger,
Looking for anything that belonged in my house,
And nothing was there.
♪ ♪
A few minutes later,
The police were back at my house.
The neighbor had opened up my front door,
And he yelled in,
"hey, are you guys in the attic?"
I took a step back.
The police officer said, "no, I'm sorry.
Why? What's going on?"
The neighbor said he had moved his access panel to the attic,
And when he pushed up,
It resisted, and someone pushed down.
That's when I realized
That somebody was really there.
It was unreal to even think
That this was right above where we were all sleeping.
[dramatic music]
[tense music]
- The police had ripped out everything out of the closet.
They took the access panel down.
They put a ladder going up into the access panel,
And they couldn't get up there
Just because it was a very small area.
So the k9 unit came to the front door.
They let the dog go to the top of the ladder...
[dog barking]
And he started barking profusely.
♪ ♪
So the cops had started yelling,
And the person in the attic was yelling back.
♪ ♪
And I heard the cops doing the countdown and saying,
"we're gonna let the dog loose if you don't come down."
♪ ♪
He then surrendered.
♪ ♪
When he came out of the attic,
He was definitely disheveled.
You--he was not fully cleaned.
He did come out wearing my sweatshirt,
Alyssa's sweatpants, and my sneakers,
And then he was placed in handcuffs in my bedroom.
♪ ♪
We had been guessing
That he was up there for about nine days.
♪ ♪
And they also discovered
He had a makeshift toilet.
♪ ♪
The cops had found out that, between the slats
Of the roof, he had a piece of wood
Going through, so when he actually pulled
The piece of wood down, the shingles would lift up
So he had access to see the road,
Who was coming, who was going, and who was also home.
♪ ♪
He was there when I was sleeping.
He was there when the children were sleeping.
He was there when we were
Celebrating christmas downstairs.
He was there the entire time.
♪ ♪
When he came walking out in handcuffs, I was angry.
I was upset, so I had to tell him...
♪ ♪
Like, "don't forget. You came into my home.
You invaded my privacy."
♪ ♪
Then they placed him in the car.
♪ ♪
His name was stanley carter.
He's 21 years old, and he was from arkansas.
He had been staying with the neighbors for days.
They were friends with this guy.
♪ ♪
The neighbors wanted him to leave,
And from what we found out later,
He had written a note stating that he had gone for a walk,
And he never came back.
♪ ♪
When he left the note,
He didn't take any of his belongings,
And that's when they started piecing everything together
That it had to be him in the attic.
♪ ♪
We had no clue that he was next door.
We weren't spending time outside.
It's cold. It's christmas.
Plus, with a busy schedule, we were just on the go,
Not paying attention to our surroundings.
♪ ♪
Once they had left with him,
They did let us back in the house,
And they just started handing stuff down from the attic.
♪ ♪
The things that were missing. My laptop came down.
♪ ♪
The money started to come down.
♪ ♪
The toothbrush came down.
♪ ♪
Alyssa's mp3 player came down.
The bottles of soda came down.
Ooh.
Seeing the stuff coming down just--
It was heartbreaking.
♪ ♪
There was a list, and it was titled on the top,
"stanley's christmas list," and he had a list
Of everything that he had taken from the house.
♪ ♪
One thing that did really raise a lot of concern
Was he had the spare key to my car.
♪ ♪
What was the plan?
What was the next step that he was gonna take?
♪ ♪
- Now that the attic was open,
I never wanted to see what was up there.
I do remember my mom, a few days later,
Bolting it down.
♪ ♪
- The neighbors definitely did feel terrible about it.
They did apologize.
They were very sympathetic.
♪ ♪
But at the same time, I was mad.
I was upset. I was hurt.
♪ ♪
So after it was all said and done,
It was a little uneasy at first.
♪ ♪
There was some nights my youngest didn't sleep.
She was up crying.
Cory and alyssa were definitely on edge.
Every little noise you heard, every little thing
That went missing, it was like, "what's happening?"
♪ ♪
- After all of this happened, our sense of security was gone.
- You know, you try to forget about it,
But you can't.
You just can't.
♪ ♪
A few months later, the police did bring the evidence back,
'cause court cases were done.
They no longer needed the evidence,
And that brought back a lot more memories.
♪ ♪
Looking back, I didn't observe anything that was missing.
I didn't recognize it.
Putting courtney back to bed after she had saw someone.
Alyssa's clothes were missing.
The mp3 player was missing.
Realizing it wasn't their fault.
I let someone come into my home.
I put my children in danger.
That's the way that I felt.
♪ ♪
So the only thing I did take from the evidence
Was my laptop.
I did ask them to throw everything else away.
There was nothing found up there that I wanted back.
♪ ♪
He was ordered to pay $1,640 in restitution.
$1,640 is not nearly enough
For what he has done to all of us.
He had taken a lot of things away from us.
Happy memories that we were supposed to have,
He took those away.
He had ruined christmas for my entire family.
♪ ♪
- After all of this happened,
I could say that my mom, even though she was terrified
And she was always looking over her shoulder,
She made sure that we were still having
A good time like we did before this happened.
My mom truly is a strong, strong woman.
♪ ♪
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- In 2013, I am a senior at ohio state university
Studying computer science and engineering.
I was looking forward to graduating
And starting my career after school.
I'm thinking it's gonna be a good year.
- Brett is my roommate,
And I've known him for four years.
Most of us, we all know each other through engineering.
We all are in the same dorm together.
- We live next door to our friends,
And there were about eight of us,
And on top of that, there were two more
That wanted to get in on living with us,
So we started looking for larger places to live.
♪ ♪
We ended up finding a place
On 13th avenue in columbus, ohio,
That appeared to be, like,
An old fraternity house of some kind,
And it had enough bedrooms to accommodate all of us.
♪ ♪
- You look at the house,
And it looks like a typical campus house.
It's a little deceiving because of how deep it goes.
You wouldn't know how large it is from the front.
It's not until you walk around all the way to the back
That you start to realize how large this house really is.
♪ ♪
You go in through the back entrance
Up a steel stairway and into the back
Of the house hallway on the second floor
Where there are six bedrooms,
Three on the left, three on the right.
It's just a long, wooden floor hallway,
And as you keep going on the wall facing you,
There is a bathroom.
If you were to make a left, there is the laundry area
Where there's a washing machine and a dryer.
If you make a right, you go into the kitchen
Where we all share common space
For the refrigerator and the oven and the stove
And a little bit of storage for food.
And there was also a basement.
Nobody was living on the first floor
When we moved in,
And that was the case for about a month or so.
♪ ♪
So that first morning, we wake up...
♪ ♪
And we walk into the kitchen.
♪ ♪
- Every single cabinet is open.
Every single door that someone had access to is open.
The fridge, the washing machine,
The oven, the dishwasher-- everything.
♪ ♪
- My initial thought
Is that it could be brett sleepwalking.
- I have a history of sleepwalking.
I have been known to get up in the middle of the night
And just go to the fridge
And open that and leave it open,
To move things around in the house.
♪ ♪
- When we lived together at our old apartment,
Every now and again, you would see him
Kind of just walking around,
Or something strange would happen.
Like, he would go into the fridge
And rearrange things or leave doors open,
And that's exactly what we were dealing with.
- Because of that, they just assumed
That it was me that was the one
That had opened all the cabinets.
- I turn to brett, and I say,
"brett, have you been sleepwalking?"
Brett denies that he could have possibly done this,
But I was convinced that it was him,
Even though he told me that he didn't,
Because it seemed to be the only logical solution
To what had happened.
- There's no way that I would have been the one
To open up all of the different cabinets,
Just because it seemed
Too planned out and meticulous.
I've never done something like that while sleepwalking.
- Initially, the thought did cross our mind
That there's a ghost in our house.
♪ ♪
I mean, it--it seems like pretty ghostly activity
To just have strange occurrences
Like that in your house.
- The possibility that it was a ghost
Occurred pretty immediately.
- And I think we-- we made that joke a few times,
"hey, we have a ghost in our house,"
Whether it was serious or not.
♪ ♪
- You know, a lot of us
Are engineers who believe in science.
We're like, "ghosts aren't really real."
♪ ♪
- So initially, me and brett didn't believe
That there was a ghost in our house,
But our roommate did.
He was the most fearful of all of us.
We just laugh and kind of brush it off.
- But at the same time, we couldn't really explain
Why all the cabinets were open.
♪ ♪
- If it wasn't any of us, who could it have been?
♪ ♪
Is there somebody still in the house?
♪ ♪
So we decide to search the house.
A ghost seemed less threatening than an intruder.
♪ ♪
Our plan is to start at the top
Because there's no exit points up there...
♪ ♪
And sort of sweep our way down swat-team style.
♪ ♪
So we worked our way from the third floor...
♪ ♪
All the way downstairs.
♪ ♪
- Even though the idea of a ghost
Being the culprit seemed crazy, I began to doubt myself.
♪ ♪
- We checked every room and closet and everything else.
♪ ♪
- We get down to the basement,
And on the landing of the basement,
In front of us is a breaker box.
There's a door to our right,
And then to the left there is, on the far side,
A half bathroom.
In the half bathroom, there's a cup
That has a toothbrush in it.
The cleaning crews for the apartment
Hadn't actually fully cleaned out the house,
So we just thought that they hadn't actually
Gotten to that point yet.
♪ ♪
So we start to look around the basement,
And it is a very dark, dank basement
With lots of, like, debris all around the house,
Maybe some, like, tools and stuff
That might have been used
For, like, maintenance of the house,
But it seemed to also be divided into rooms.
There was one room to the right.
♪ ♪
We walk up to the door
And try to jiggle the handle to see if we can get in,
'cause it's the last room that we wanted to clear.
It was locked.
♪ ♪
- So we each try our keys
In the deadbolt that's on the door,
And we can't even get the keys to go into the deadbolt.
- Which was strange, 'cause that was the only door
In the house that we didn't have access to.
So when we put our ears up to the door to try to hear
What was on the other side, we heard,
Like, a whirring noise,
Kind of like a computer fan or something,
And we just kind of thought to ourselves,
"well, maybe it's a maintenance room."
♪ ♪
- We don't call the police because we don't see
Any immediate threat.
♪ ♪
We see an old door off to the right,
And it's just leaning up against the wall.
So we decide to take this door
And barricade the stairwell to the basement shut,
And we use a stool to prop it closed
So that if there is somebody down there,
Or something down there, that it's not going to get out.
♪ ♪
[eerie music]
♪ ♪
- In the first week of school,
I am sitting at my desk working on some homework.
♪ ♪
And suddenly, all the lights in my room
And my air conditioner just go out.
♪ ♪
I think to myself, "it's probably the breaker."
And I remember seeing the breaker box
Down in the basement, so I go down into the basement...
♪ ♪
And flip the breaker.
♪ ♪
I just chalk it up to bad maintenance
With the house, like how the cleaning crew
Didn't quite make it down to the basement.
It's just, you know, probably the fact
That it's an older, more worn house.
- The house is in poor condition
When we move in,
So the fact that we had electricity problems
Wasn't surprising.
♪ ♪
- My power started repeatedly going out
In my room at least three to four times a week.
♪ ♪
About a month later, it's about 1:00 p.M.
I'm again working on some homework,
And my power goes out, so just like normal,
I go down into the basement to go flip the breaker.
♪ ♪
When I get down there, though, I see that the door
That was locked previously is actually open.
♪ ♪
I put my head into the door...
♪ ♪
And I see just a normal college bedroom.
♪ ♪
There's a rug on the ground, a bed set up.
There's a guitar,
A mirror, and a dresser.
Just a college bedroom,
And it finally solved the mystery of, like,
What was behind that door.
♪ ♪
As I'm looking in the room, I hear someone behind me say,
"oh, I was wondering when I get to meet
The people that live here."
♪ ♪
My initial reaction to hearing that
Wasn't to immediately question it,
Because in my mind, there is that division
Between the second and third floor
And the first floor.
I just thought that him saying, "I was wondering
When I would get to meet the people that live here,"
Was more that we had never really officially met
Our first floor neighbors,
And he was just part of their lease.
♪ ♪
He introduces himself as jeremy,
And he's a student at ohio state.
♪ ♪
He is wearing just classic college wear.
He is a medium build,
Just a normal college kid.
♪ ♪
I think to myself,
Due to some of the other facets of this house,
Like, "of course they would put someone
In that dark basement."
Like, that'd be the worst room to have.
♪ ♪
We have a short conversation.
We talk about the fact of him
Living in the basement and how awful that must be,
But he says that he's normally not in the area anyway
Just 'cause he's normally staying with his girlfriend.
♪ ♪
I'm walking up the stairs,
And as I'm walking up the stairs,
I run into a roommate who, you know,
We had been, like, kind of discussing the house
And, like, how many kind of interesting things
Were going on in the house, and I told him,
"can you believe that there's a guy in the basement?
I just met him."
That roommate finds that really weird
That there's a person in the basement.
Shortly after that,
I have to go off to marching band practice.
♪ ♪
And then that roommate decides to call the realty company.
♪ ♪
The realty company says that no one's
Supposed to be in the basement.
♪ ♪
They call the cops.
♪ ♪
- I come back from band practice late that day.
I see everybody standing out in the yard.
There's police. There's the landlord.
And one of my roommates just runs up to me and says,
"hey, dude, guess what.
"that room that you thought
"somebody might be in the basement,
Turns out there actually was somebody living down there."
I am shocked at this. It's not a ghost.
It's a living person in our basement.
That explains why the kitchen had been gone through
And all the doors were opened.
♪ ♪
The police go down there and broke the door down.
♪ ♪
He wasn't there, but I was able to see everything
That he had in his room.
[eerie music]
Inside, they find somebody's living quarters.
He had a bed.
He had a dresser, a desk with, you know,
Schoolwork and a desk lamp and everything you would expect
To see in a college kid's room.
♪ ♪
- The contents of the room that I had just looked in
Are kind of spread across the front yard.
The idea that there could be someone
Just with such easy access
To all of our stuff and all of our rooms
And none of us knew that he was there,
'cause he just had such an easy way of getting in
And out of the house without detection,
It's kind of scary.
We could have been all axe-murdered.
♪ ♪
Shortly after that happens, one of my roommates had been
Talking with a friend of his that worked for "the lantern,"
Which is the student-run publication of ohio state.
He tells her about this story, and she's blown away by it,
And she wants to do a report on it.
The school does the article,
And then the local news is suddenly interested in it,
And from there, they publish a story, and it then goes viral
And it becomes a national story.
- When mark and his roommates
Moved into their new place off-campus,
It seemed just like any other college house
That needed a bit more work.
- There's mold in our air conditioners.
The walls and the floors were all dirty.
- But after a month of living in the house off east 13th,
The guys started to get the feeling
That something more was wrong.
- We had been telling everybody the story
About the ghost in our house,
Coming and opening all our cupboards
And the oven and the microwave and all this stuff.
- They started getting even more suspicious,
So mark and his eight housemates
Search the house.
Down two flights of stairs in their basement,
They found a door.
They tried opening it, but it was locked.
- Behind the locked door, there were some weird noises.
Like, dings and alarms and stuff.
- When their realtor finally opened the door,
What they found shocked everyone:
A bedroom that someone else had been living in.
- No, what? Like, you gotta be kidding me.
- According to brett, jeremy wasn't home
When the boys finally got into the room.
- Some random guy had a key to our house
And was just living in our house
Without anyone knowing.
- The guys have changed the locks on their doors.
They just feel lucky it didn't turn out worse.
♪ ♪
- It is pretty awesome, during my senior year,
To have a story like that in your back pocket
That you can just, like, break the ice with
Or just tell anyone about,
And they instantly know who you are and what happened.
♪ ♪
You could tell anybody on campus about that story,
And they know that story,
And then it made us, like, minor celebrities on campus
That it was our house that it happened to.
♪ ♪
About a month later, I'm at a happy hour,
And a coworker approaches me
And starts talking to me about the incident,
And he starts giving me details
That were never specifically mentioned in the news articles,
Like the fact that all of those cabinets had been opened
In the first place,
And I asked him how he knew that,
And he tells me that it's because he lived
In the house the year before,
And he had actually kept the key
From the house the year before
And had intended on pranking everyone living in that house
For who knows how long, and his first prank
Was to go into the house that night
And open up all the cabinets.
♪ ♪
- For a long time, I figured
That it was jeremy the whole time opening up the cupboards
And going through the upstairs floors...
♪ ♪
Until I found out differently.
♪ ♪
- It's crazy that the whole cabinet-opening incident
Is what caused us to go down to the basement
And find that room in the first place,
But in the end,
It wasn't actually this guy in the basement.
It was someone completely unrelated to that,
And it's just two bizarre coincidences
At the same time.
♪ ♪
This got such wide media attention
That we put phrogging on the map
And made that a phrase that people use.
- I never found out how jeremy had gotten in.
He just disappeared,
And I never heard from him again.
♪ ♪
- I felt someone staring at me.
- I hear a thud from the bedroom.
- The frog was dead.
- She starts repeating, "he's in here.
He's in here."
- My heart is racing, I'm physically shaking.
- Dial 911 now.
- There is a green eyeball
Staring directly up at me.