The Creepy Truth Behind 10 Urban Myths
5. There's Someone Living In Your Attic
The Legend
A person (who probably lives alone) begins to notice some odd goings on. Food begins to disappear at an alarming rate, perhaps there have been some odd noises in the middle of the night and one day they wake up to find that some of their belongings aren't quite where they left them.
It is usually at this point in the story that the protagonist sets up a surveillance camera to find out whether they're being visited by evil spirits or just have a bad case of sleep-walking. Upon viewing the footage the next day, they are horrified to see a figure crawling out of a seldom-used cupboard and helping themself to the contents of the fridge. They slowly turn their head, it's the cupboard that is right next to them.
The Truth
In 2008, a man in Japan noticed that his food had started to disappear from his cupboards. He set up cameras in his home that would send pictures to his phone when the motion sensors were activated. Whilst out and about one day, he started to receive images of a strange woman wandering around his flat.
He called the police and they burst into the flat to discover a 58-year-old woman that had been living in his cupboards for over a year.
In this instance, she turned out to be a mostly harmless, if slightly spooky, homeless lady. But, in another case in Pennsylvania, things took a slightly more threatening turn.
For a few days around Christmas, Stacy Ferrance had noticed some strange happenings in the duplex that she shared with her three children. Food was going missing, but so were valuables such as electronics and even cold hard cash. Upon discovering mysterious footprints leading to the attic hatch in her bedroom (the scariest place of all to find mysterious footprints), she called the police.
After sending up a police dog into the attic, a young man named Stanley Carter descended the ladder. Everything he had stolen was later found written down on a list titled "Stanley's Christmas List". Stacy was horrified to see that he appeared to be wearing her daughters clothes and had even stolen her toothbrush (vom).