My scary Airbnb story didn’t start with a hidden camera or a weird host. It started with the Wi-Fi. There was one device on the network that didn’t belong to any of us, and it only came online after we went to bed. Of all the scary house stories my friends and I tell now, this is the one nobody laughs at.
In June of 2023, my two best friends and I rented a lake house near Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a long weekend. Me, Gabby, and Deonne. We’ve been friends since middle school in Fort Worth. Every summer we pick a place within driving distance, split the cost, and do nothing for three days.
The listing had great reviews. Two stories, a dock, a screened porch, kayaks. The host’s name was “Wade,” and his profile picture was a bass he’d caught. Check-in was a lockbox. We never saw him.
There was a house binder on the kitchen counter with the Wi-Fi password, the trash schedule, and a list of rules. Most of it was normal. No smoking. No parties. Kayaks at your own risk. At the bottom of the rules page, in bold, it said: “Please do not use the hall closet upstairs. Owner storage.”
The hall closet had a regular door with a keyed lock on it. We didn’t think twice. Every rental has a locked owner closet.
An Extra Device on the Network
I work in IT for a hospital system. It’s not glamorous. I spend a lot of time looking at network logs. So when the Wi-Fi in the house kept dropping on the first night, I did what I always do. I logged into the router.
The admin password was still the default one printed on the sticker. That’s normal for rentals too, unfortunately.
The router’s page showed a list of connected devices. Our three phones. Gabby’s laptop. The smart TV. A smart thermostat. And one more, with the name “Galaxy-S9.”
None of us had a Galaxy S9. Deonne has an iPhone. Gabby has a Pixel. I have an iPhone.
I told myself it was a neighbor. The houses on that side of the lake are close together, and maybe Wade had given a neighbor the password. Or it was an old phone Wade left in the house to control the thermostat. That’s actually pretty common.
But the router showed the time each device connected. Galaxy-S9 had joined at 1:14 a.m. and disconnected at 6:02 a.m. We’d gone to bed around midnight.
Where the Signal Was Strongest
The second night, I checked again before bed. No Galaxy-S9. At 1:20 a.m. I woke up to use the bathroom and checked on my phone. It was back.
I lay there in the dark listening to the house. It was quiet. The AC was humming. Somewhere downstairs, the ice maker dropped a load of ice.
I know this sounds crazy. But I downloaded a free app that shows Wi-Fi signal strength from nearby devices. I walked around my bedroom with it. Then I walked out into the upstairs hall.
The signal got stronger as I walked toward the end of the hall. It was strongest in front of the hall closet. The one marked “Owner storage.”
I stood there in my sleep shirt in front of that closet door and I could smell something through the gap at the bottom. Coffee. Old coffee, and a burnt smell, like a camp stove.
I told myself it was a phone. Just an old phone, plugged in on a shelf in the closet, set to wake up at night and update its apps.
Then I heard a very small sound from inside. A cough. The kind you try to swallow.
I went back to my room, shut the door, and texted Gabby and Deonne in the group chat. I wrote, “Don’t say anything. Wake up. Get your keys. Meet me on the porch.” Gabby said later she thought I was joking until she saw my face.
We left with what we had in our hands. Phones, keys, Deonne’s purse. We drove to a gas station on the highway and called the county sheriff’s office from the parking lot at 1:52 a.m.
Behind the Owner Storage Door
The deputies called us back around four in the morning and asked us to come meet them at the house.
They’d opened the closet. Behind the shelves of towels and toilet paper, the back wall of the closet was a panel on hinges. Behind the panel there was a narrow space, maybe five feet wide, that ran along the back of the upstairs bedrooms. It was built into the slope of the roof.
There was a cot in there. A camp stove and a coffee pot. A cooler. A charger plugged into an outlet that had been wired in. Paperback books. A trash bag full of food wrappers.
And a stack of printed paper. The deputy showed us one sheet. It was a printout of the guest reviews from the listing, all of them, going back two years. Some of the guest names were circled.
The deputy said whoever was in there had gone out through a small vent hatch in the roof that led down to the porch roof. There was a ladder lying in the side yard.
He was gone. So was the Galaxy S9.
What We Found Out After Our Scary Airbnb Story
When we tried to message Wade the next morning, his host account had been deactivated. The rental company refunded us and said they were “investigating.” The sheriff’s office told us that the house was owned by an LLC, and the man who managed the LLC said he’d never heard of anybody named Wade. He said he’d hired a property manager who handled the listing, and the property manager hadn’t returned his calls in weeks.
Nobody was ever charged. Nobody could even figure out who it was.
I think about the reviews he printed out. I read a lot of them later, online. They’re all five stars. People loved the dock. People loved the quiet. One said the house was “so peaceful, you’d never know anyone else was around.”
Gabby and Deonne and I still take our trip every summer. We just stay in hotels now.
And I still check the Wi-Fi everywhere I go. Every hotel, every friend’s house. I look at the list of devices before I go to sleep.
Last month, in a chain hotel off the interstate in Shreveport, there was a Galaxy-S9 on the network.
It’s a common phone. I know that. There are probably millions of them.
I checked out at two in the morning anyway.
Want another night of bad sleep? Read the home intruder story about a candy bowl that kept refilling, our scary apartment stories post about a robot vacuum that wouldn’t clean one spot, or a creepy stalker story about lost things coming back.
Do you have a scary Airbnb story?
Have you ever stayed in a rental that felt like somebody else was still living there? Tell us your scary Airbnb story, or any creepy house stories from a vacation rental you couldn’t leave fast enough, in the comments below.
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The Note in My Rental’s House Binder Was Written by the Man Upstairs
The Man From the Gas Company Asked Which Room I Slept In
The Sellers Left Two Garage Remotes, but the Opener Had Three
The Trick-or-Treaters Kept Waving at the Upstairs Window