Most scary apartment stories are about noises through the wall. Mine is about my robot vacuum, and the obstacle it kept bumping into in the middle of my empty living room while I was at work. I know most scary stories to read online are made up, so I’m going to tell this one exactly the way it happened.
I’m a baker. In 2021 I was working the overnight shift at a wholesale bakery in Pittsburgh that supplies cafes and grocery stores. I started at 10 p.m. and got home around seven in the morning. I lived alone in a one-bedroom on the second floor of an old brick house in Bloomfield that had been cut up into four apartments.
The apartment was nice. High ceilings, wood floors, a big front window. The floors were the problem. Flour gets on everything when you’re a baker, and wood floors show every speck. So for my birthday, my sister bought me a robot vacuum. The kind that maps your apartment with a little laser on top and shows you the map in an app.
I set it to run at 1 a.m. every night, while I was at work. That way I came home to clean floors. It was honestly the best gift I’d ever gotten.
When I moved in, the landlord, a retired guy named Mr. Danko who lived in the first-floor unit, gave me two keys. He said the last tenant had moved out in a hurry and “never gave back his set, but don’t worry, he moved to Ohio.” I asked if he’d changed the locks. He said he’d get to it.
The Obstacle in the Living Room
The app keeps a log of every cleaning run. It shows you the map of the apartment and the path the vacuum took, a little zigzag line covering the floor. It also marks spots where it bumped into something it didn’t expect. Those show up as small red dots.
About two weeks after I got it, I was looking at the log in the morning, eating cereal. The map was normal, except for one thing. In the middle of the living room, right between the couch and the TV, there was a gap in the zigzag line. A round gap, maybe two feet across, with red dots all the way around it. The vacuum had bumped into something there, over and over, and cleaned around it.
There was nothing there. I was standing in that spot holding my cereal bowl. There was no furniture there. Nothing on the floor.
I figured it was a glitch. The laser gets confused by sunlight, or by shiny things. The app has a lot of glitches. I reported it as a bug and forgot about it.
A few nights later, it happened again. Round gap, red dots, about two feet across. This time it wasn’t in the middle of the living room. It was by the kitchen doorway.
The next time, it was in the short hallway outside my bedroom.
I looked at the three maps side by side on my phone. The gap was moving. Each time it was a little closer to my bedroom door.
And the size never changed. Round, about two feet across. About the size of a pair of feet standing still, with a person on top of them.
The Scary Apartment Stories You Don’t Believe
I tried to explain it to myself. I really did. I said maybe it was a cat getting in. Mr. Danko had a cat. But a cat moves. The vacuum would have chased it all over the place. This thing didn’t move. The vacuum bumped into it from every side, like a post.
I asked Mr. Danko if anyone had been in my apartment. He said no, and he seemed a little offended I’d asked.
So I bought a cheap camera. One of those twenty-dollar indoor ones that plug into the wall. I set it on the bookshelf facing the living room and the hallway, and I went to work.
At 1:05 a.m. my phone buzzed at the bakery. “Motion detected, Living Room.”
My hands were covered in dough. By the time I washed them and opened the app, the camera feed said “Device Offline.”
I stood by the sinks with my phone in my hand while the mixers roared around me. I kept hitting refresh. Offline. Offline. Offline.
At 1:40, the vacuum’s app sent me its normal message. “Cleaning complete.”
I opened the map.
The round gap with the red dots was inside my bedroom. Next to the bed. On the side I sleep on.
What Was on the Shelf
My supervisor let me leave early. I called the police from my car and met them outside the house at a quarter after two. Two officers went up with me.
The door was locked. Nobody was inside. Nothing was taken. My bed was made the way I left it.
The camera was still on the bookshelf. It had been unplugged from the wall and turned around to face the books.
One officer checked the windows and said they were all locked from the inside. He asked who had keys. I told him about the old tenant who never gave his set back. The officer gave me a look. The kind that says, you’ve been living here for four months and you never changed the locks?
The next day Mr. Danko finally called a locksmith. When the locksmith took the old lock off my door, he held it up and showed me the little pins inside. He said it had been used a lot. He said the brass was worn shiny in a way it doesn’t get from one person opening a door twice a day.
Mr. Danko called the old tenant’s emergency contact, his mother, to ask about the keys. She told him her son hadn’t moved to Ohio. She said she hadn’t heard from him in a year and she thought he was still in Pittsburgh. She asked Mr. Danko if he’d seen him.
I Still Check the Map
I moved out at the end of that month. I live in a building with a front desk now, and I got a day job at a bakery in the suburbs, so I’m home at night.
I still have the vacuum. It runs every day at noon while I’m at work.
I still check the map every evening. Old habit. Mostly it’s a perfect zigzag. Every corner covered.
Last week there was one red dot by the front door. Small. Not round. Just one spot where it bumped into something.
When I got home, there was a pair of my sneakers sitting right there by the door, side by side.
I’m almost sure I left them there that morning. Almost.
If you’re after more scary stories for adults to read, try the someone hiding in my house story, a scary babysitter stories favorite from Halloween night in Ohio, or one of our scary bigfoot stories about a knock in the Cascades.
Share your scary apartment stories
Has anything in your apartment ever been moved while you were gone? Tell us your scary apartment stories, or what your smart home caught while you were out. The best horror stories to read online come from moments like that, so leave yours in the comments below.
How scary was it?
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