Speaker 1: This happened last January. I had taken a week off
of work following New Year's mostly in hopes that everyone
else would be back at work by then and I
could enjoy the week without it being busy everywhere. My
plans consisted of shopping around and really just chilling at
my apartment by myself. On this day, I was out
driving around in the snow and going to a few stores,
then made my way back to the apartment by seven pm.
I went inside and cooled off, then took a seat
on the couch with some snacks I had just got.
I was watching TV and even dozing off a little
bit from the long day out of the house. But
then at some time around eight thirty, the PA system
in my apartment buzz, meaning that someone was outside and
wanting me to let them in the building. I had
no plans of anyone coming over, so I had no
idea who it was. They buzzed my room again, so
I got up and went to the window that faced
the front of the building. I tried to not lift
the blinds too much, only enough for me to see
who it was. At the door to the apartment building
was a large man. It was still snowy out and
kind of dark, but I could tell he was older,
like mid forties, but I had never seen him before.
There were only three other people living in the complex
at the time, so I was at least familiar with
who lived here, and he was not one of them.
I also figured that if he did live here or
was visiting one of the other people, then they would
let him in. I walked over to the PA system
and muted it, then got back to the couch and
continued watching TV. I really didn't put any more thought
into it, and even dozed off several times in the
next hour. Eventually I shut off the TV and went
to bed. By then it had to be around ten.
I fell asleep. Just about as soon as I laid down.
A few hours into the night, my eyes shot open
to a thud from just outside my room. It was
extremely loud, but having just woken up to it, I
didn't know what it was or exactly where it came from.
My heart was racing as I stared across the room
at my door, listening for anything else. It was very
quiet now, almost like nothing even happened. I got out
of bed and slowly moved toward the door. Then leaned
my ear against it to listen to the other side.
It was still quiet, nothing more than the walls creaking
from the building. I turned the handle and looked out
into the living room, not seeing anything out of the ordinary.
The whole place was really dark, though, and for some reason,
I still felt like I needed to be quiet and
not make myself known, so I left the lights off.
As I moved through the living room and looked down
the front hallway, the door to my apartment was fully open.
I froze up, staring at the open doorway and feeling
fear run through my whole body. It almost didn't seem real.
I took a few steps back, staying quiet, and made
my way back toward my room, and now on the
other side of the door, I could see a huge
dent in the wood right by the knob. Once I
saw that, I ran in and locked it behind me,
then called nine one one while hiding in the closet.
I was sure that whoever it was had to be
somewhere inside my apartment still, and it would only be
a matter of time before they get into my room.
But as I waited for the police, the apartment stayed silent,
whoever had broken into my apartment was gone. Even the
police couldn't find anything to help in finding them. What
they think happened is the intruder tried buzzing all the
other rooms as well, until one of them was nice
enough to let them in once he was in the
main stairwell. It's not really clear why he chose to
go for my room. Maybe they thought it was empty.
What's really strange is the dent on my bedroom door,
which was likely the source of the thud that I'd
woken up to. But it was just one single hit,
not looking like a real attempt at breaking the door down,
but more like something out of frustration before he left.
I still live in the same apartment and nothing else
has happened. Who it was and what they wanted is unknown.
I work for a company that sells bulk out of
a small warehouse. Sometimes the products we get in are
pretty expensive, so I was hired as a security guard
during the late hours of the day and most of
the night. Being a small warehouse, there's not too much
need to walk around the place all night. I spend
most of my time in the office looking at a
bunch of live camera feeds. During my first three years
working there, I'd never had a single incident. No people
ever came by at strange hours, no attempted break ins, nothing.
It made for a boring job and left me mostly
unaware every night, even though it was basically my job
to be aware. On this night, I pulled into the
small parking lot and parked by the front door, next
to the car of the only other worker that was
still there. When I got inside, I let him know
I was there, and he left shortly after. I checked
all the doors and made sure the systems were working properly.
Then I sat back at the office and stared at
the screens. My attention span died out after half an hour,
and I pulled my phone out. I still made sure
to check the cameras every thirty seconds or so, but
every glance back at the screens showed no differences. Then,
at just a couple minutes before one am, the system
made a beep sound. I'd only ever heard it during
the initial tests i'd do at the beginning of my shifts,
so this was the first time i'd actually had something
come up. After a quick look at the alert, it
was a motion detection of a person walking by the building.
It took a few tries to find the right camera,
but on the back side of the building, a man
was walking right on the edge of where the parking
lot meets the grass. He had a thick hoodie on
and was too far to see exactly what he looked like.
The direction he was walking in wasn't really toward anywhere, though.
I mean, that's why I'd never gotten alert before, because
our building is too far out of the way for
anyone to ever have a reason to walk or drive
by it. I watched this man go down to the
end of the parking lot, switching cameras to keep track
of him, but then he suddenly stopped for just a
moment and looked toward the building. He turned his head
back and forth, looking across the whole side, then started
to walk onto the pavement and toward the side of
the building. Immediately it went from just odd to possibly
something I'd have to report on. The man walked along
the side, looking at every door he came across, but
not trying anything. He would just kind of look around
and then move on. Once he got to the corner,
he went around to the front and then went right
up to the main door. I watched from the cameras
as he knocked on the door and heard it echo
from inside the building. I got up from my chair
and opened the office door, slowly looking down the hallway
and seeing the man standing behind the entrance doors. I
don't think he could see me through the glare on
the glass, so I stood in the doorway and just
watched him for a moment. He was trying to look
through and knocked on the door again. I went back
into the office and pressed on the speaker button that
allowed me to talk to them outside. This is a
private location, you need to leave. I watched on the
cameras as the man looked up at the speaker. He
looked like he was going to say something, but then
he frowned and turned, knocking on the door again. In
this moment, something just struck me with an intense, eerie feeling.
It was some sort of gut reaction to this man's behavior.
I looked closer, noticing he was keeping one hand in
his pocket the whole time, making me think this could
be far more dangerous than I'd initially thought. I contacted
the police through our security line, getting instant connection with
them and starting to explain the situation. I walked back
into the hallway and looked down while I talked to
the dispatcher, But the man suddenly pulled something out of
his pocket and slammed it against the door. I couldn't
see what it was, but from the way it hit
the door and the sound it made, I knew it
was some kind of metal object that he was trying
to break the glass with. I rushed back into the office,
hearing a few more hits as I locked the heavy
door behind me. Then I quickly looked back at the cameras,
but by then the man had given up and was
running away from the building. In only a few seconds,
he was completely out of sight of any of the cameras.
It was as I waited for the police to arrive
that I replayed the footage of when the man hit
the door, seeing pretty clearly that he was holding a
small gun and slamming the handle against the glass. We
got a full report on it, but so far, even
with some decent footage of the man, he hasn't been identified.
We also don't know what he was intending to do
once he got in, though he made it obvious after
hearing my voice that he did not care that I
was inside, but from the partial crack formed on the door,
he was likely just a few hits away from shattering it,
and then I would have been forced to find out
the man's true intentions. I work part time at a
gas station in my city. It's more on the edge
of the city, near the suburbs, and overall is just
a very typical gas station. It's not super creepy or
isolated or anything like that. I only really chose to
work here, though, because rent prices were going up and
my other job wasn't cutting it. The only shift I
could do to work around my other schedule was overnight,
and gas stations are one of the few places offering
those shifts. Anyway, this was just ten months ago. It
was pretty cold out this night, and there was some
snow on the ground still from a heavy downfall a
few days ago, but other than that, the night was
going pretty typical. Being in the suburbs, there's not a
whole lot of traffic going around the gas station. It's
mostly just a couple cars passing by every once in
a while. By twelve, only a handful of cars were
coming into the gas station every hour. After a bit.
I got bored enough to leave the front desk and
walk around the shop, rearranging the items on the shelves
to look nice, and it was just a couple minutes
that I heard the door open. I turned around and
saw a man walking in, right up to the front desk.
He leaned over the counter and looked both ways as
if he were looking for someone to help him. Can
I help you with something? I said? As I made
my way back to the counter. The man turned and
looked at me, almost as if I'd scared him, but
then he hesitated before saying no, I'm good and walking
out of the store. It was fairly obvious he did
need help with something, but seeing that made me quickly
think of the possible robbery he was plotting. I did
work at a gas station, after all, so it was
kind of always in the back of my mind. I
watched the guy go outside and into a car that
was parked in a very strange spot, kind of near
the pumps but not actually in the parking section. He
got in and drove away. I had no way to
tell if he was actually planning something, but all of
the signs pointed to it. I figured maybe being behind
him when he walked in and not at the counter,
threw him off, and somehow that was enough to deter him.
Whatever happened, I was confident after a few minutes of
thinking that this was definitely an attempted robbery, and I
called the police to report it, just in case they
were going to try a different gas station. They said
an officer would come by in just a couple minutes
to get a report, so I hung up and waited,
But not even a minute later, that same car pulled
back into the parking lot. They went right to the
spot that they had parked before then just waited there
with the car on. But I was almost positive that
I could see movement in both of the front seats,
like there were at least two people in there. I
quickly locked the front doors and prepared myself for what
could soon happen as I continued looking out the window,
though the car just stayed there, nobody getting out, like
they were watching or waiting for the perfect moment. Luckily, though,
cops pulled in and immediately recognized the car as I
described it. They pulled in behind it, blocking them in. Surprisingly,
there wasn't much of a scene. The officer pretty much
just walked up and then pulled two men out, one
of which was the guy that had come in earlier.
I guess they were trying to play it off like
they weren't doing anything, but that didn't really work out
for them. While it seemed to be straightforward what they
had planned, their car showed a different, more disturbing possibility.
In the trunk, there was a stash of weapons, along
with rope, tape and an assortment of similar items. Both
men are behind bars, but I still feel almost traumatized
after knowing what they had in the car. If I
hadn't reported them after the first strange interaction, I would
have been through far worse than just being robbed, and
possibly would have never been seen after that night.