This fake utility worker story happened to me in January of 2020, in Lansing, Michigan. A polite man with a clipboard asked to check my gas meter, and then he asked which bedroom I slept in. It was the most frightening scary experience of my life, and it started with a knock in broad daylight.
I was sixty-one that winter. I’d retired the year before after thirty years as a school librarian, and my husband had passed two years before that. I lived alone in a brick ranch on the east side with a cat named Dewey and more books than shelves.
It was a Tuesday, around one in the afternoon. Bright and bitterly cold, about eight degrees. The doorbell rang and there was a man on my porch in a navy work jacket and a knit cap. He had a clipboard and one of those little handheld devices with a screen. He was maybe forty. Clean-shaven. Friendly.
He said there’d been reports of a gas smell on the street and the company was checking meters and carbon monoxide levels house to house. He said it would take ten minutes. He said, “Better safe than sorry with this cold, ma’am.”
My husband always handled things like that. I didn’t know what the gas company did or didn’t do. And honestly, I was glad somebody was checking. I let him in.
Which Room Do You Sleep In?
He went down to the basement first. The gas meter is outside, but the furnace and water heater are down there. I stood at the top of the stairs and listened to him walk around. He was down there longer than I expected. Maybe eight minutes. I heard the little beeps of his device.
When he came up, he said everything looked fine with the furnace. Then he asked to check the bedrooms for carbon monoxide.
“Which room do you sleep in?” he said. “That’s the one we worry about most.”
It made sense when he said it. Carbon monoxide gets you in your sleep. I showed him my bedroom at the end of the hall. He held the device up near the ceiling, then near the floor. He looked at my window for a second, the way you’d look at anything. Then he wrote something on his clipboard and said I was all set.
At the door, he said, “You live here by yourself?”
I said yes. I don’t know why I said yes. It came out before I thought about it.
He smiled and said, “Keep your doors locked, then. Lots of crazies out there.” And he left.
I noticed one thing about the clipboard as he walked down the steps. The paper on it was just a plain list. Handwritten addresses, about ten of them. No company logo. No form. Just a list.
I told myself that’s how they do it on house-to-house calls. Somebody gives them a list.
The Basement Window Latch
Two days later, I went down to the basement to switch the laundry and felt a draft.
The basement has three small windows up at ground level. The one behind the water heater has an old metal latch. It was flipped open. Not open, just unlatched. The cold was coming in around the edges of the frame.
I latched it. I thought maybe I’d opened it in the summer and forgot. I hadn’t been back there in months. Then I went upstairs and didn’t think about it.
Three days after that, I went down again, and it was unlatched again. This time there was a strip of gray duct tape stuck over the latch, holding it in the open position. Neat. Pressed down flat.
I stood there with a basket of towels on my hip and I didn’t move for a long time. The only person who had been behind that water heater in years was the man from the gas company.
I peeled off the tape, latched the window, and called the gas company.
The woman on the phone was very kind. She looked up my address. She said they had no reports of a gas smell on my street. She said they had no service call for my house that week or that month. She said their technicians wear photo ID badges and drive marked trucks, and they almost never ask to come inside unless the customer calls them.
Then she said, “Ma’am, I think you should call the police.”
I did. An officer came out that afternoon. He looked at the window and took the piece of duct tape in a plastic bag. He said a lot of these guys case houses by pretending to be from a utility. He said they look for people living alone and an easy way in. He told me to put a wooden dowel in the window track so it couldn’t open even if the latch was undone. He said they probably wouldn’t come back now that I’d noticed.
I put a dowel in the window. I put dowels in all three. My neighbor’s son came over and screwed the frames shut.
2:40 A.M.
Nine days later, I woke up at 2:40 in the morning because Dewey was growling.
He’d never growled in his life. He was standing at my bedroom door with his back arched, staring down the hall.
Then I heard it. A scraping sound from below. Wood on metal. Short, then again. Somebody was working at a basement window. And when that didn’t work, I heard it move to the next one.
I locked my bedroom door. I called 911 and whispered my address. The dispatcher told me to stay where I was.
The scraping stopped.
And then, from right outside my bedroom window, a man’s voice. Calm. Friendly. The same voice.
“Just checking the reading, ma’am.”
He knew which window. Of course he did. I’d shown him.
I don’t remember what I said. I think I screamed at him that the police were coming. The dispatcher was saying something in my ear. I heard boots on the snow going away from the house, fast.
The police got there four minutes later. He was gone. They followed his footprints in the snow from my bedroom window, down the side of the house, across my backyard, and over the low fence into the alley.
The footprints went down the alley and stopped at the back gate of a house three doors down.
How My Fake Utility Worker Story Ended
That house belonged to a woman in her seventies named Arlene. She lived alone. When the police knocked on her door at 3:15 in the morning, she said a nice man from the gas company had been by to check her meter two weeks before.
Her basement window had duct tape on the latch.
The police took it seriously after that. A detective came to see me twice. He told me there were at least six women on the east side who’d had a visit from a man with a clipboard that winter, all of them living alone. All of them had let him in. He never took anything during the visits. He just looked.
They never caught him. The visits stopped in the spring.
I sold the house in 2021 and moved into a condo on the third floor of a building with a doorman. My daughter thinks I overreacted. Maybe I did.
But I still have that list in my head. Ten addresses, handwritten, on a clipboard with no logo. I’ve thought about it more than I’ve thought about anything else in my life. Because I counted. He was at my house and at Arlene’s. That’s two.
I never found out who the other eight were.
For more creepy short stories for adults about people who get too close, read about someone living in my attic, a scary Airbnb story about a device on the Wi-Fi that wasn’t ours, or the small town ghost story of a family under the lake.
Have you ever met a fake utility worker?
Has anyone ever shown up at your door claiming to be from the gas or power company? Share your fake utility worker story, or any scary encounters with a stranger you let inside, in the comments below.
How scary was it?
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