A Bump in the Night and Unexpected Guests

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This August, we're releasing some of our very favorite episodes from the last 12 years of making criminal.

When we were thinking about what to share, this episode was the first that came to mind.

It's one that I still think about all the time, especially when I'm alone in the house. In one that people are still writing to us about nine years after we first released it. Well, let's just start with you introducing yourself. My name is Amber Don and I live with my family in Burwin, Illinois. I work as an animal trainer at the Shadow Aquarium and that's about it.

What kind of animals do you train? Mostly penguins and otters. But I also work with all of our animals in the Marine Mellon department. What do you train a penguin to do? Mostly husbandry care, so we practice going to the vet with them.

We ask them to be calm in our lab and calm with other people. We can teach them to spin and to follow us, train them to come to their names. You can teach a penguin almost anything.

“So do you have like penguin friends, ones that you like more than others?”

Well, I love all of our penguins, but I do have my favorites. I help tan rays 11 of them. So yeah, I mean, a penguin chooses you. They choose you to be their person and then every time you come out into exhibit, they come out of the water and run up to you and do their little flirty behavior.

I knew I wanted to work with animals ever since I was a small child. I started working with them eight years ago. Well, we're here to talk about something that happened longer, go to the mat. How long ago were you living in that apartment in Washington? 21 years ago.

Long before she worked with penguins, Amber Dawn moved to one of the rainyest places in America. The small town of Enem Klaw, Washington, to be closer to her brother and sister-in-law. It was gorgeous, I could see Mount Rainier out of my bedroom window of this apartment. Like, right there is, it was gorgeous. She moved into a small apartment building.

Her apartment was on the top floor, a one bedroom with a little dining room, a living room, and kitchen, and a little balcony on the front. She was 20.

The first night I moved in.

I had been playing music while I was unpacking. And I went to bed that night and I turned off the music. And I was laying in my bed and I heard footsteps in the attic. And there were very clear footsteps. And I wasn't quite sure why I would be hearing that.

Whenever you move into a new apartment, you start to notice all the different sounds that that particular space makes. And so I wasn't quite sure what it was, but it sounded like footsteps.

“Had you been told that there was an attic in the apartment or did you have an entrance to the attic in your apartment?”

There was a crawl space that it was just a little push-up. I don't even know what you would call it. It's like a trap door in the ceiling kind of. Sort of, yeah, it was like it would push up into the ceiling. So it was like a square, maybe two and a half by two and a half feet.

Let push up into the ceiling and that came into my bedroom. Or it was in my bedroom ceiling. I could see it from my bed. And I thought, okay, you know, that's probably not what it is.

So I just fell asleep anyway.

But the next day I went to the landlord and I told them,

“I think I heard footsteps up there last night.”

Is there any way that anybody could be up there? She told me, no, she said it was probably squirrels or raccoon or something. It was like, well, that squirrels were in a pretty big set of boots then. We've all had that feeling that something isn't quite right. And we're very good at talking ourselves down.

Going on with our lives, telling ourselves that it's all in our imagination. And most of the time, it is. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. I was very meticulous. You know, everything was very organized.

I knew it was in my cupboards. And I would buy a six pack of soda. I would drink one. Maybe take one to work with me. And I would come back and there would be three left.

And it was like, well, did I drink two? That's odd. Or like, cans of soup would be missing. What did you think was happening?

“Well, I had moved to Ianclaw to be close to my brother.”

And he lived about three blocks away. He had a key to the apartment. I assumed that he was coming into my apartment and eating my food. Because that is something he would do. Just come over and grab a can of soda or whatever.

So I thought it was him. Did you confront him? Yeah, I called him. I told him, you know, I can't afford to feed you. Don't come over here and eat my food.

And it wasn't happening all the time. I just wouldn't notice it every now and again. Amber was in home much. She was working several jobs. Working papers for an accountant, working at the local drugstore,

and waitressing at night. So when she noticed that little things in her apartment had been moved,

she'd second guess herself.

Chocolate up to exhaustion. She was starting to feel at home in Ianclaw. She had her two cats. And then she got a puppy. She was a beautiful German shepherd, mix.

She was maybe nine or ten weeks old. So really little. Yeah, she was just a baby. So she was learning to be potty trained. So I would come home in between my jobs and walk her.

And I was kenneling her in the bathroom. While she was, you know, learning her manners and learning to be potty trained. So I kept her in the bathroom with, you know, newspaper on the floor and water and toys and stuff. One night she was waitressing when she got a call from her landlord,

saying that her bathroom was flooding. And my downstairs neighbor was getting rained on in her bathroom. So I came home and we came in my apartment and I opened a bathroom door. And my puppy was in the bathroom sink.

“I asked her, I was like, did you put her in the sink?”

She's like, no, we wouldn't open the door because we didn't know how big the dog was. We didn't know if it was people friendly. So this is why you had to come here. That there's no way she could have gotten into that sink. She was a little puppy.

And the toilet was, you know, far enough away from the sink that she wouldn't have been able to climb. Was there water all over the ground? Uh-huh. It was a big mess.

But the puppy was dry. Like, safe in the sink. Yeah, she was sitting in the sink. But like, someone must have put her in the sink, right? There's no way she could have, yes.

Someone must have put her in that sink. Enem call is a tiny safe farming community. Nothing ever went on there. So anytime Amber got worried, she just reminded herself that her brother and sister-in-law were three blocks away and she kept herself busy.

She'd been living in her apartment for about six months when she got sick and called into her jobs.

And so, on this day, for the very first time,

she didn't leave her apartment at all. It was around 7 o'clock at night. I was on the couch. And I was watching, I was watching my stories, watching my TV. And I heard a loud thump in the bedroom.

And I just dismissed it because I have animals and they make noise.

Later on that evening around 11 or so,

I turned off all the lights. I drew a bath.

“I got undressed and I got into the bathtub.”

And I saw him in the bathtub. I got a candle lit. And I look up and that crawl space door was open. And everything just slowed way down. And you're in the bathtub. I'm in the bathroom.

Make it in the bathtub. Make it in the bathtub. In the dark. And I must have sat in that bathtub for 10 to 15 seconds after seeing that crawl space door open, but it felt like five minutes.

And I put it all together as like, okay.

The footsteps, the first night.

The doors being closed when I had left them open. The missing food. Thia. My dog. In the sink.

“There was someone living in my house with me.”

So I very calmly got out of the tub. And got my robe. I put it on. There was only one place he could have been hiding. And that was in the bedroom closet.

And I had to walk by the closet in order to get out. And the closet were those mirror doors. And that was really scary to see myself. You know, in the dark knowing that he was on the other side of that door. Did you say anything?

No. No. If he would have opened that door, if I would have seen him, I would have lost it. He's been living in my apartment for six months.

If he wanted to hurt me, that's not what he wants. He just needs a place to stay. He's probably not a bad guy. But he put via in the sink. I don't want to freak him out.

I don't want to scare him by screaming and yelling. Because then he might hurt me so that he doesn't get caught. So I very quietly walked past the closet. And I didn't go out the door. I went to the phone.

And under my phone, I had a junk drawer. And in the junk drawer, there was a hammer. And my hand clawed out. So if anybody came at me, they were going to get a face full of hammer claw. And I called my sister.

This was before most of us had cell phones. So Amber had to stay in the apartment and use the landline. She told her sister-in-law that someone was in her house. And her sister-in-law told her to get out of there as fast as she could. So I grabbed my puppy and I walked out the door.

I walked out the door in my robe with a hammer and one hand and a puppy in the other. And I got to the bottom of the stairs. And I was looking at the apartment door. And I was like, "Please don't come out. Please don't come out. Please don't come out."

“Because like I said, if I would have seen him, I think I would have lost it.”

She was there within minutes with her two giant German shepherds in the back of her car. And we went, we went to her house and we called the police. And what did they find out? Well, the police came to the apartment, but he was gone. In the attic, the police found a little bit of food, a book, and a sleeping bag.

I don't know how he was getting to the apartment. I left a window open for my cats, so he could have gone in and out that way. I had a spare key. He could have taken my spare keys and made a copy too. I mean, I don't know. He could have lived there before me. And maybe the managers didn't change the locks. I don't know.

She filed a police report, and while Amber believes it was a man, there's no way to know.

Whoever was living up there was never found.

We spoke to Amber's brother, Eric Olson, and he remembers just how nervous and scared she was through the whole thing. And how we're leaving she was to get out of there. We also asked if he remembered Amber accusing him of stealing food from her apartment. We said that sounds about right. It's been more than 20 years, and Amber says she still wishes she could find this person and ask them what was going on.

Did you stay in the apartment? No. No, my grandparents came over the next day and we moved out. We moved all my stuff out.

Yeah. Well, I got her while I lived there. So as far as she knew, that's normal. Mom goes to work, and then the friend comes to help my friend come to help from the attic and hangs out and plays with me. So when he came in, she'd embark. She was like, "Oh, hey." In her next apartment, she made the landlord padlock the attic door.

It makes me so nervous now because I lose things and things think I've done that.

Like, wait a second. Did I drink that? Did I eat?

And now, and I'm like Phoebe, no, you're fine. But now I'm really, you've given us all reason to be really worried. Like, no, maybe there is someone in here. You know, not that I want to make everybody paranoid. But I think you just have to listen to your instincts.

“I think that's what I've learned from this.”

Like deep down, I knew what was going on, but I didn't trust myself. I, you know, I thought I was just imagining it. But I think it since then, I have learned to listen to my instincts. And if my instincts are telling me that something is not right, then something's not right. So now, do you ever do things like check in the garbage can to count how many soup cans there are?

No, I live with a family, nothing is ever where it was placed. You know, I have no idea how many cans of soup I have in the cupboard. We first released Amber Dawn's story in 2017. At the end of the episode, we asked you to get in touch if something unusual like that had ever happened to you. A lot of people wrote to us.

“After the break, we're sharing an episode we made a few months later.”

With the ones we couldn't stop thinking about. We'll be right back to listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. There's nothing like a good pair of thoughtfully made socks. Bombas has a whole line of pro-level sports socks made for specific activities, like golf, yoga, the gym, and socks for every kind of runner. You might know I'm a runner, and I've tried bombas for myself.

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So every year we would kind of go do something for a birthday. And we didn't know what to do that particular year, so we decided to go away to a small town. Where? The town, it's a small town in Northern California called Etna. And we neither of us had ever actually been there before, so we were pretty excited to go check it out.

I grew up in a really small town, so I always kind of drawn to vacation in small places.

So you're just going to go there, you didn't know anything about it, but you thought it'd be fine, you just get away for a couple of days. Yeah, and we looked at the town and it was really cute and we thought we'd go hiking and things like that. So Aaron Peters and her boyfriend made a reservation at a little bed in breakfast in Etna. I can't even remember how we found it, because you know, you didn't really go online in 1997.

“So how did we find places in 1999? I can't even, how did we find place?”

I can't remember, I can't remember, I can't remember. I assumed that we went online and then I was like, I don't even know, I don't know. Yeah, we didn't call like the Chamber of Commerce, I can't remember. Okay, so you found a place? Yeah, I mean, I may have asked my family for a recommendation, I can't even remember.

So somehow I found this bed in breakfast. And as far as I know, it was one of the few places you can actually stay in the town. There's no motel or hotel or anything like that. So what did you do when you arrive at the bed in breakfast? I think that we fell asleep for a while because we were both kind of exhausted.

“And then we got up and I remember having a glass of wine and there was no one else staying there.”

We just cried, I mean, we, the bed in breakfast a little bit, but it looked like what your room was like. It was a pretty old building. We stayed and I'm sure it was probably the least expensive room that they had. But you know, you're kind of your typical bed in breakfast, but probably six to eight rooms in it total, maybe even less. So you met the owner, she was nice and pleasant and helpful.

Oh yeah, yeah, she was very friendly and happy to give us like suggestions on where to eat.

And she was basically like there's one restaurant that's open in town, so we walked down there.

But when Aaron Peters and her boyfriend got to the restaurant, it had just closed. So there they were in this tiny town on their birthdays and they couldn't find anything to eat. But they decided they would try to make the best of it, at least they were in a pretty place. They wandered around and took a lot of pictures. This was the late '90s, so Aaron and her boyfriend were shooting on film.

Yeah, lots of pictures of the town. There are some really beautiful mountains right nearby. And you can go hiking around there and it's really beautiful. You get back to the bed in breakfast, hungry, and you just go to sleep. How did you sleep that night?

“I think we slept fine. In fact, I remember she had a video collection.”

So we watched a movie and I don't remember seeing her when we returned. And I remember we watched that movie about it's basically about the Clintons. I think primary colors. I think that might be the name of it. And then we went to bed after that. And what was the next morning like? She made breakfast that was, you know, I'm just like some fruit and stuff like that.

I remember she had pictures of her and her husband, all over the kitchen area, and where we were eating. And she talked about her husband a little bit who had passed away. And they sing, you know, really sweet pictures of them together. And were you just there for one night? Yeah, you know, I was trying to remember. I think it was just one night. So what happened when you had home?

So we got home and, you know, I'm sure a few days passed or some time passed. And then I had taken the film in to develop. And I don't know if I waited and there were a couple of roles or if it was just that role. But when I went to pick up the prints, it takes a few days or whatever. And immediately you look through, like I remember, every time I would take photos, you flip through the prints, like immediately.

And you're always really excited. Usually like sitting in your car, you know.

And I was flipping through in part way in. There's a picture of my boyfriend and I just kind of in our clothes, like on the outside of the bed. You know, like just kind of head fallen asleep. And I looked at it and we were both very clearly asleep. And I immediately was like, well, how could we both be asleep?

And you know, so I'm looking at it really closely. And you can just tell by, you know, like our eyes and the way our bodies were, that we were totally out. I mean, really asleep. So then, you know, I kind of freaked out. And I was just like, how could this happen?

And so I called my boyfriend. I either called him or, you know, I, you know, that evening when I saw him, I can't remember. And I showed it to him. And I was like, we're both asleep. And he was kind of like, yeah, that's weird. And I was like, well, how'd the picture get taken?

You know, and he, he was like, oh, yeah, that's kind of creepy. And I was like, well, you know, someone else had to take this picture.

“And he wasn't nearly as, I think, disturbed as I was.”

And then, of course, the more I started thinking about it, the more I just wondered how it happened and who it could have been. Um, did your camera have a timer on it at all that could have been? Um, like, I, not that I ever used. I mean, it may, I'm sure it must have.

I was just thinking about whether your boyfriend could have done it. But yeah, I mean, he could have. Well, no, I mean, he could have. He certainly denied doing it. And he really looked asleep.

That was the thing that kind of threw me off. I thought it could have been like, oh, yeah, he did, you know, like, just took a picture and it was funny and he thought it was cute. Um, but he was really asleep. You know, how that, like, it wasn't just me.

Like, I knew I was asleep and he is very clearly asleep as well. And it's also just like the angle, the way it was taken. It doesn't look, um, it's just like an odd angle, you know? Like, you can really see the top half of our bodies like laying this bed completely asleep.

“What were the difference in scenarios that were running through your head?”

Oh, I don't know. I mean, at first I just, you know, that there was maybe other, there were other people that were guests there. Uh, but there weren't. I know.

There are no other guests. Um, so then I was just really freaked out. Um, and, you know, I think I came to the conclusion that, I mean, I think I guess that it may have been her. And I think I remember saying it.

Like, she was so nice. You know, she seemed very normal. And, um, so I thought, oh, wow, what a, you know, I don't know.

And I guess I thought I would never know what happened.

Um, I can't, that's like a harm movie. Well, I think the weirdest part to me, too, was that somebody knowingly did it with your own camera. Like, knowing that you would go home, and sometime later, discover that they were in your room.

I mean, the fact that, like, you intentionally, like, are gonna get caught in a way. You know? Oh, man. So what did you do?

Did you call the woman? No, I didn't, you know, I didn't really do anything. I think that I thought maybe briefly about who I could call. Like, could you call the sheriff or could you call somebody? Um, but then I was like, what would I say?

And, you know, what do I have to prove? But like, all you can see is like the quilt of the bed, you know, and maybe like part of the bed frame. So how could you even prove that anybody did anything wrong? You know?

Like it just isn't really seem like a believable story.

I have never liked bed and breakfast.

I refuse to stay with them. Because it's for me, it's just this kind of, it's like this forced intimacy. And it's so personal, and so when you wake up in the morning, like, I never want the breakfast.

I don't want a woman making breakfast for me. I want it to be so impersonal. It feels like I'm in their kitchen, but I don't know them.

“And you have to go help yourself to get the orange juice.”

Oh, yeah, it's really, and see all the other stuff in their house. Yeah, yeah, it's really personal. And you know, that's the thing. I'm sure we didn't want the door. Um, you know, it's very, like, the whole house is wide open.

It's not like I was nervous about my well-being. That was kind of it. Air and save the photos. But she tried to forget about it. Years later, she went to a San Francisco giant scheme

with a friend from high school and her friend's fiance, Steve.

We're sitting there and it's the first time I had met him.

And, um, he's talking about himself. And I was like, well, Steve, where are you from? And he was like, oh, I'm from Etna. And I just completely kind of froze. And I was like, you're from Etna.

And he was like, yeah, why? And I was like, oh, I, um, I stayed at this bed and breakfast. And the weirdest thing happened. And he didn't even need to hear any more of the story.

And, um, the woman was busted and doesn't, you know, no longer has this bed and breakfast.

And I was like, people? Well, I, according to this, um, you know, to my friends, the fiance. Yeah, and that she had gotten caught. And I asked him a couple more questions, but, you know, we're at a baseball game. So I didn't, I didn't find out too much.

But it was just a trip. And, you know, then, of course, I after the fact had lots of questions. Like how did she get caught? And how many years had she been doing this?

“Oh, and then I started thinking about, um, did she used to do this with her husband?”

They had run this place together for years. Like, how long has this been going on? I mean, maybe she thought she was giving you a nice memory or something?

Yeah, that's a nice way to think about it.

I don't know. It's, it's so scary. I, I don't know. I guess I would have to assume that there is. Maybe the idea, the thrill of kind of freaking someone out a little bit.

Um, I don't know. Maybe that's why she did it. I really have no idea. I was hoping you guys could figure that out. We made some calls.

One guy said, there used to be an old inn in a big Victorian house. It's been spurned down. The locals nicknamed it "the peek-a-boo inn" because the owner would spy on his guests through holes he drilled in the walls.

“Maybe that's what Erin's friend Steve was thinking about.”

But we didn't find a single thing about it in the newspaper archives. We tried the Etna Police Department, they did not return our call. Maybe one day we'll take a trip out there and try to finish the story. We did happen to stumble across a 2011 guide to owning an operating bed in breakfast. In a section about "Thank You Notes," it says,

"Some hosts like to take a photograph of each guest at some point during the visit, and mail it as a Momento." It goes on to say, this is a great idea, provided that the timing and occasion of taking the picture are appropriate. We'll be right back.

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Must be an active subscriber to receive free dessert. One morning, me and Brett had woken up for a band practice really early, and MJ woke up for football practice, and we were walking around the house and noticed that

somebody had opened up all of the coverage and drawers in the microwave door, an oven door, and shower stall doors,

The refrigerator, the dishwasher, the dryer, the washer. Everything was open.

“What do you mean you woke up in the morning,”

and it was all open or? Yeah, we all had just gone to bed after a normal night, and then woke up in the morning and everything was open. Yeah, everything was just left wide open as if a ghost had come through the house,

and blown everything open or something. We weren't sure how to explain it. In their senior year of college at Ohio State, Mark Hartman and Brett Maglin moved into a huge house with a lot of their friends, 10 of them,

but Mark Brett and their friend MJ got there a little before everyone else because they had to start training for marching band and football. They'd only been there for a few days when they woke up to find everything opened up,

but even before that, the house was apparently just bad. Here's Mark. Oh, it was terrible. We moved in and it was as if no one had ever been in the house since the last tenets moved out.

There was trash everywhere and everything was still dirty and there was furniture and some electrical problems and some stairs in the house were falling apart and things like that. It was a very large house.

I mean, on our lease, there were 10 of us

and we took up the second and the third floor.

There was a completely separate lease, though, on the first floor. There was no actual physical separation between our leases. There was a staircase that would go down to a door that just walked out of the house.

You could get to any floor from there, including the basement. Okay, so it was just three of you in this big house at this point. At this point in time, yeah. Did you ever think that one of the other people was playing a trick on you?

“Yeah, honestly, Brett had slept walk a few times”

throughout college, so I kind of assumed maybe he had just slept walked and done something random like that. But I was on the third floor of the house and it seemed a pretty impressive feat for me to sleep walk down the flight of stairs, open up everything

and then walk back upstairs without hurting myself. So, I didn't seem like it was really what happens. What did you do? I mean, I think that I would be really scared. I think I would try to get out of the house.

What did you do? We decided to go and investigate the house. We each grabbed baseball bat or something, and we were going through all the rooms and opened the closets. So all of you had a baseball bat?

Yeah, baseball bat or a knife or something. Like one of us had hold the closet and the other one had baseball bat ready to like jump at anything that came out of the closet. We would kind of open the doors quickly as if we were a swat team or something.

Yeah, basically, breaching clear.

And other than just like the house being dirty, we didn't really find anything. Until we went to the basement. Oh, yeah, we definitely saved that for last. So when we went down there,

I mean, it's very dark in basement. It was like a different, like a boilers and breakers and whatnot. But there's also a door down there.

“And there's a door that none of us had the key to.”

And MJ started freaking out. So what we ended up doing is just, we brought up a door that was lying around in the basement. We brought it up in the open doorway that led down to the basement

and put a wedge to chair between it and the door so that whatever was down there wouldn't come back up. So it's like, in case there was like a monster, like a bad guy, this would help. This would save fuel.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess that's what we did to try to make ourselves feel safe. I would get worried that I'd be happy that I had barricaded the door.

But I also think I'd be worried that if someone were in there, I would be starving them to death. Exactly. And that was kind of some of my motivation to take down the chair wedge between the wall and the door

that we had. I was like, okay, see it was down there. I didn't want to trap someone down there, you know. Or make them even more mad. Exactly.

So after that initial search, did you go back down into the basement? Often.

So I lived on the third floor.

And I don't know if it's halt you wiring or bad breaker or something, but like every like three or four times a week, like just all the power in my room

And I'd have to like go down to the basement,

“breaker, and then the power would be back on my room.”

So one of those times that I had to go flip the breaker, it just so happened that that door was open. That's kind of shocked. Like I saw like walk downstairs. What's into the door?

It was just the normal bedroom. Like had mattress and dresser and, you know, a normal college looking room. And then from the bathroom somebody said, "Oh, I was wondering when I get to meet the people I live here."

And it was just like a regular college student. And when was he just kind of casual about it all, and nonchalant me like, "Oh, hi."

Yeah, basically completely non-corrupting.

And later that day, a bunch of us were hanging out

“and Brett's talking to the downstairs roommates.”

And says, "Hey, I made sure you guys roommate Jeremy today." And they were like, "We don't have a roommate named Jeremy." He's like, "Yeah, so he's the one down the basement." No one had ever heard of anyone named Jeremy. So they called their landlord who called the police.

I come home from practice one day and there are police and landlords and all my roommates out on the wall and it's very chaotic scene. Now, I don't think the guy was actually downstairs when the police came.

So like, I don't actually know what happened to him. I'm honestly not sure I came home and he wasn't home when they knocked his door down and then a couple of days later I went down and all the stuff was gone.

I never saw him again. Who was this guy? He was just a student going for a master's degree at Ohio State. The school newspaper, the lantern, wrote up the incident and they made a video.

What they found shocked everyone, a bedroom that someone else had been living in. No, what? Like, you gotta be kidding me. Jeremy had access to a bathroom in the basement and a sink that he could have used to do laundry

but the guys don't think he ever ate their food or went into their rooms. Chelsea Spears for the lantern. Did you feel a little famous? Oh, I did. It was crazy how much it blew up.

We had articles on USA today. ABC headquarters in New York called me. Did an interview. Jay Leno talked about us in his monologue. Steve Harvey contacted me asking if we wanted to go on a show.

It was pretty crazy. Did you do any of these things? I did a few of them. I didn't physically go anywhere.

“I think Steve Harvey's thing would've required us to fly to Chicago.”

I did a couple of phone interviews and things like that. Mark and Brett graduated and moved out of that big house.

The one thing that always bothered me about that whole sequence of events

is we never really figured out who went around opening up all those cabinets. But years later, I'm working at a startup. Eventually, the people at the startup find out about this story. People are talking about it. One of the people I'm working with comes up to me and starts to talk to me about the story.

This random coworker of mine told me it was him. He was the one that opened up all those cabinets. He had lived in the house the year before us. The guy that was in the basement was a cousin of one of the people that was on their lease. They had made some kind of arrangement with him that he would pay them a little bit of money in order to live in that room in the basement.

After they had left their lease, that guy decided to keep his key. Then he would like to directly come in and then just screw with the people living in the house. Oakland cabinets and other things like that.

But I guess they had never told the basement roommate that they were leaving,

although how you could not tell that everybody had left. It was beyond me. So probably the guy in the basement just decided to stay there as long as he could because you're living there for free, essentially. Because he could just sneak in and that side entrance and go straight to the basement without ever being seen by anyone, basically. I mean, it's awful.

It is awful to think that, you know, when you go to a place, just like, okay, well, the last people are gone. It's safe for me. It's crazy to think that someone else would have the keys to the house that you just moved into. Yeah, that's pretty creepy.

And I have to assume that it wasn't just him that also had keys.

I wonder how many landlords never actually changed the locks.

You know. Hello, I'm looking for Amanda. Hello, it's Phoebe Dredge calling. How are you? Are you in Texas? I am in Texas. I'm in Austin.

Well, thanks very much for speaking with us and for writing in about your story. Of course. I thought it was an interesting story that Jal had done. And at the end of it, I was like, oh, well, yeah, something like that kind of happened to me.

“And I honestly, I wasn't really expecting an email back, so.”

Well, here we are. Well, so just again, introduce yourself, will you? My name is Amanda. I grew up in a really small town and I came to Austin for school. I went to St. Edward University. So you grew up in a small town in Texas?

It's called Yokem to about an hour and a half southeast of Austin. So when you left and came to Austin was Austin kind of like a big city, it must be a big city compared to Yokem. Oh, yes, very much so. Yokem is, I think, 5,000 people roughly. And what car were you driving then?

I drive the same car. Now it's a 2005 silver Chevy cobalt. Okay, I'm thinking about this car. It doesn't have a lot of, it's not that ostentatious. It's not that fancy.

It's just a car. It's a simple good car. There are diamonds. I don't like you see them all the time. That's my first car that I've ever had that I'm still driving.

“But I don't have the original key to the car.”

And because I just have a copy any time, I lock my door and I don't have a clicker anymore. So anytime I lock my door, I have to put the key into unlock it. And because it's not the original key, it just there's this alarm that goes off every single time. And it doesn't stop until I start the ignition. She says this alarm is horrible and she hates it.

So she just doesn't lock the car. And leaving it unlocked isn't a big deal.

For one, she says she never leaves anything of value in her car.

She says that if she did have something worth stealing, she'd rather someone just open the door to take it, better than breaking a window. And she never had any issues. She'd been an Austin for a couple of years never locking the car and never having any trouble until one morning when she was a junior in college.

It had rained really pretty heavily the night before. And I went out into my car and I noticed that my seat was pushed all the way back. And I kind of thought it was odd, but I was like, well, you know, maybe I just did this and I forgot that I'd done this. And I was probably running to class already so I just brushed it off. And it continued to rain kind of heavy that day and into the next day and overnight.

And that's when I noticed it a second time.

It was the second day that my seat had been pushed back and just down all the way down. And that's when I was like, oh, somebody stopped in here. Okay. You were just like, okay. You just did okay.

Okay. You know, there's not anything I could do other than lock my car. But I guess in the back of my mind, I thought, oh, well, this is a creative way to not, you know, sleep in the rain and stay out of the rain. So I just kind of let it go. And it was something that continued to happen.

And that was just kind of our little system.

“Did you notice any other strange things was it in the car?”

No. So occasionally, I would get, I'd be given a little gift. So there were some bushes that would bloom near next to my apartment. Occasionally, there would be a flower there. One time, they left me a little bit of change. And my senior year, they left me a little rain that you'd get out of a coin machine.

But nothing was ever taken for my car. Or really moved other than my seat.

And that one was, I think, the only time that they actually used anything of mine, and I remember thinking, oh, well, it was really cold last night. So.

“Do you think that you were the nicest person on earth?”

Oh, gosh, I'm definitely not, definitely not. Because I'll tell you, I think I would have locked that door after about night, too. That's fair. And it's something I, I mean, I'd lock my car occasionally, but I mean, even, like even right now, I know for a fact it's not locked. And they were leaving you little thank you gifts.

Yeah, never any actual interaction enough.

The interesting thing is that over this year and a half almost two year long period, we never ran into each other, we never saw each other. That was just kind of our little system was, I'll leave my car open and you can sleep here. And if, I mean, you don't have to leave anything, but occasionally they would. And that was it. And I was there system for two years and we just don't talk.

“So I get it. And, and I think I get you park the car. You don't need it.”

But what happened if you in the middle of the night got sick and thought, I have to go and I have to get some Tylenol. I have to go, I mean, would it, then what would that keep you from going, I don't want to wake them up in the middle of their sleep?

Um, I don't know that I sat, but never, never really occurred to me like, what the, I guess if we were running, I'd probably make one of my roommates come with me.

And, you know, if you like, yeah, I got to use my car right now. You got to go, buddy. So this was you think this was only happening when it was raining. Yeah, it only happened when it would rain and it would have to rain fairly heavily. So, not too too often, but often enough that they knew where to find my car and they knew it would open. After graduation, Amanda went to Cambodia to teach English for a year.

So she was gone and her car wasn't in its usual spot in her apartment complex.

“I did think about that at the end of my senior year when I was moving that, like, I was like, where are they going to sleep now?”

Hopefully they can find another place that's safe.

You know, it's free. Everybody is so afraid of everything lately and they're so afraid of everyone else. But this is a good reminder, we don't have to be. Yeah, I mean, all they needed was a little bit of shelter. And if I can provide that in a really small way, then, yeah, why not? Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me.

Nadia Wilson is our senior producer, Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Cigico, Lily Clark, and Lena Cilicin. This episode was originally mixed by Rob Byers, special thanks to Dick Gordon, Carol Jackson, and Matilda Felino. And thanks to everyone who wrote to us with mysterious stories from their lives, hearing from you is one of the best parts of the job. Our show is mixed in engineered by Veronica Seminetti.

Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of criminal. You can see them at this iscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at this iscriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll join our membership program, Criminal Plus, now on Patreon. It's the very best way to support our work.

You can listen to Criminal, this is love, and Phoebe reads a mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get behind the scenes, photos, and videos you'll be able to talk directly with us and other criminal listeners. And you'll get access to bonus episodes with me, and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spore. We just shared our latest one on the Criminal Feed, so you can see what they sound like. Learn more and sign up at patreon.com/criminal.

We're on Facebook at this iscriminal, and Instagram and TikTok at criminal_podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge, this iscriminal. Are you a pet owner?

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