My sister and I were having a prank feud. At night, I heard my closet door open. I thought she wanted to prank me and had snuck in, forgetting that my door squeaks. I got up and pushed her. She stepped out of the closet, but it wasn’t her! I saw an older woman in a janitor-style uniform staring at me with wide eyes, holding a screwdriver.
I screamed so hard I thought my throat would split. She didn’t move, just backed up slowly with her hands out like I was the threat. I bolted for the hallway and nearly tackled my sister, Maribel, who was brushing her teeth and mid-scroll on her phone.
We both ran downstairs, screaming for Mom. By the time we all got back upstairs, the woman was gone. The window in my room was wide open. We live in a two-story home, and my closet doesn’t back up to anything. It’s not like someone could’ve just wandered in.
Mom called the cops. They took a statement, looked around, but didn’t find anything. They guessed maybe the woman was part of a cleaning crew from one of the companies in the neighborhood and got the wrong house. But how would she end up in my closet? And why did she have a screwdriver?
For a while, we all slept with our doors locked and chairs up against the knobs. But the police didn’t find any signs of forced entry, and over the next week, things settled down. Still, the prank war between Maribel and me stopped cold. Neither of us said it aloud, but I think we both felt like someone else had joined the game—and it wasn’t funny anymore.
A few months passed, and I tried to forget about it. I buried myself in my senior year, trying to keep my GPA up and nail down scholarships. Mom had started dating again, too—nothing serious, just some guy named Garrison she met at her volunteering shift. I only met him once or twice. He seemed fine. Maybe a little too polished, like a guy who knew the right answers to every question.
Anyway, around early spring, strange stuff started happening again. Not scary-strange, just… weird. My charger cable would be swapped out with a different one. My schoolbag would be zipped differently than how I left it. One morning, I found my deodorant in the fridge. Maribel swore she hadn’t touched anything, and honestly, I believed her.
But it wasn’t just me. Maribel started complaining that her room smelled like smoke, even though nobody in our house smoked. Then she found footprints on her windowsill—muddy ones, even though it hadn’t rained. One night, she came crying to my room because her laptop webcam light kept turning on by itself.
That’s when we started keeping journals. I know it sounds dumb, but we made a pact. If something weird happened, we’d write it down. Dates, times, everything. Our plan was to track it and try to catch whoever was messing with us.
What we didn’t expect was to start finding entries we didn’t write.Maribel swore she never wrote the one from April 9th, where someone had scribbled, “You don’t see what’s right in front of you.” The handwriting was slanted, blocky, and nothing like ours.Another one from April 14th said, “He moves at night. Likes the cold rooms best.”
By this point, we were freaked out. We showed the journals to Mom. She said we’d probably been pranking each other again without realizing it, maybe even sleepwalking. But I saw something flicker across her face. That mom-sense where she knows something but doesn’t want to say it.So I cornered her. Waited until Maribel went to bed and asked her point blank: Was there something she wasn’t telling us?
She hesitated, then finally admitted it.Years ago, before we moved here, Mom briefly dated a man named Ivan. She left him after he got possessive and weirdly controlling. She never told him where she moved. But three months after we settled in this town, she got a package with no return address. Inside was a photo of me and Maribel walking to school. Just that. No note. Nothing.
She never told us because she thought it was a one-time scare. But now, she was wondering if it had anything to do with what we were experiencing.I couldn’t sleep that night. My skin buzzed like I was plugged into an outlet. I wanted to believe we were just paranoid. That maybe we had gone too far with our pranks and now our imaginations were catching up. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had been watching us for a long time.
Then came the twist.Maribel found an old phone wedged behind the air vent in her room.It was one of those burner phones. No case, just scratched-up plastic. Battery half-dead. She brought it to me, eyes wide and shaking. We plugged it in and waited. The home screen had no passcode. Just four apps. Gallery, Camera, Messages, and Notes.
The gallery made me want to vomit. Dozens of photos—of us. Me brushing my teeth. Maribel in bed. Mom loading groceries. All taken from strange angles, like through vents or slightly open doors. Some were zoomed in too close, grainy and off-center. But they were real. Dated over the last six months.
The Notes app was worse. It read like someone’s personal log, except it was all written in third person. “She left her charger again.” “The little one talks in her sleep.” “He doesn’t like when they move furniture.”Wait. He?We scrolled further. One note stopped us cold: “Garrison approved of the new locks.”Garrison. Mom’s boyfriend.
It felt like the floor dropped beneath me. Maribel whispered, “What if it’s not just one person?”We agreed: time to stop being scared and start acting. We told Mom everything and begged her not to talk to Garrison until we had proof. She didn’t argue this time.We took the phone to the police. This time, they took us seriously. When they traced the IMEI number, they tied it to a burner bought under a fake name—but the location history didn’t lie. That phone had been near our house almost every night for months.
Then, like something out of a low-budget thriller, everything broke open.
Turns out, Garrison had a second phone. Police got a warrant, and in his other device, they found copies of the same photos. Even worse, they discovered a network of rented properties across three counties. Storage units, Airbnbs under aliases, weird little hideouts.But here’s the kicker: Garrison wasn’t his real name. His actual name was Steven Challen, and he’d been investigated years ago in another state for stalking and unlawful surveillance—but charges were dropped due to “insufficient evidence.”
This time, though, they had enough. He was arrested.The woman in the closet? Probably one of his hired “cleaners” or accomplices. They believe he used her to install cameras or retrieve memory cards. That’s what the screwdriver was for.He’d been watching us for months. Manipulating Mom, monitoring our routines, probably even sneaking in when we weren’t home.
The reason the doors weren’t forced open? He had a key. Mom had given him one back when things seemed normal.It made my skin crawl. All those times I felt watched. All the “little pranks” we blamed on each other. It was him. Playing us. Studying us. Like some sick experiment.
The arrest made the local news. For a while, we couldn’t go anywhere without people giving us sympathetic looks or stopping us to ask questions. I hated that part. I didn’t want to be known as “that girl whose mom’s boyfriend turned out to be a creep.”But we healed. Slowly.Mom started therapy. Maribel took up boxing, of all things. And me? I began journaling every night—not out of fear anymore, but to clear my head. We got security cameras installed. New locks, new windows.
But mostly, we rebuilt the part of ourselves that had been quietly breaking for months.And here’s the moral I didn’t expect to find:Sometimes, what feels like a silly prank or coincidence might be a warning signal your gut already knows is real. Trust that feeling. Don’t let people talk you out of it. Because while we were playing games, someone else was playing for real. And that’s the difference between funny and frightening.
Also? Never assume someone’s past doesn’t matter. It always leaves traces.
Share this if you’ve ever ignored a gut instinct and regretted it later. It might help someone pay attention before it’s too late.