I had heard more noises from downstairs and there was DEFINITELY someone or something down there.

I spent a few months doing a circuit of share houses. The one that most sticks in my mind was a crappy old place, quite literally falling apart (but the rent was cheap). The front door didn’t open, as the hinges had come off and someone had nailed it shut. Half the light switches didn’t do anything. There was a hole in the roof so the kitchen flooded when it rained. No-one had ever been bothered wiring the place properly, so wires hung all over the place. You get the picture.

But despite the holes in the walls, the mouldy carpet and broken windows, the people living there weren’t bad. There was me, another girl and a guy who didn’t go to college with us but worked near campus. Rent was paid to a P.O. box in cash, $300 a month (I said it was cheap). I had never met the owner.

One night the other two had gone out, but I had some sort of stomach bug and decided to say home and watch TV. I had just gotten comfortable on the couch when I hear a noise in the basement. I told myself it was nothing, but, knowing the locks on the doors were not great, called a guy I knew and asked him to come over. He told me I was paranoid and to ignore it.

I had just hung up when I hear a door open in the basement. The doors in this house sounded very distinctive, as the wood in the frames had swollen over time and so the doors didn’t quite fit. I call out my roommates names, though, realistically, there was no way they could have come back home without me noticing them coming in – like I said, the doors sounded distinctive and I would have heard them.

Plus, the door the basement was always locked and none of us had found the key, so I didn’t know what they would be doing down there anyway.

Now I was freaking out about who might be in the house. I had heard more noises from downstairs and there was DEFINITELY someone or something down there. Screw waiting for my friend, I called the cops. They showed up, checked the basement and came out with this girl I had never seen before. She was around 30, with really stringy greasy hair and the whitest skin I had ever seen.

And she owned the house.

Yep, that’s right. The owner of the house had been living in the basement and none of us had even known. I guess she only came up for air and groceries when none of us were home and the rest of the time, the noise we made upstairs had covered the noise of her downstairs. But to live in a place for over a month and not notice the creepy owner in the basement? Yeah, it was weird.

Anyway, after checking she owned the house, the cops laid into me about making fraudulent 911 calls. They wouldn’t believe that I had not known someone lived in the basement and thought I had called them on this girl for fun.

By this time, someone had let the other residents of that house know that cops were all over the place, so they came home to see what was going on. After they too claimed they had not known about the girl in the basement, the cops finally left.

I left that house the next day. The girl in the basement was not seen again.