This house sitting horror story is about a refrigerator. A very nice one, with a camera inside that takes a picture every time the door closes so you can check from the grocery store whether you need milk. The owners showed me how it worked as a joke. Ten days later I was looking at a photo from 3:07 in the morning of a hand I didn’t recognize taking a container of soup.
I was twenty-four that summer, in 2022, finishing a master’s degree and house sitting for money. A professor’s friend, a couple in their sixties, needed someone for three weeks in July while they went to Portugal. Big old colonial in a quiet town in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Two cats. A pool. Five hundred dollars a week. I said yes before she finished the sentence.
The Kitchen
The owners, Carol and Martin, walked me through everything. Alarm code. Cat food. Pool chemicals. In the kitchen, Martin opened the fridge and showed me the camera in the door and the app on his phone that showed the inside. He laughed and said, “So we’ll know if you eat all the good cheese.”
They left the next morning. The house was huge and quiet. I set up in the guest room on the second floor, at the end of the hall.
The first week was perfect. I swam. I wrote my thesis at the kitchen island. I fed the cats. I talked to my boyfriend on the phone every night.
The only other odd thing that first week was the closet in the guest room. Every morning the door was open a few inches, though I always shut it at night because I don’t like sleeping with a closet open. I blamed the old house. Old houses settle. Doors drift.
The only odd thing was the cats. Both of them, every night, sat in the hallway outside the pantry door and stared at it. I figured they smelled a mouse.
A House Sitting Horror Story Shows Up in an App
On the eighth day, Carol texted me. “Hope you’re enjoying the soup! Glad someone’s eating it.” With a smiley face.
I didn’t know what soup she meant. I texted back and asked. She sent a screenshot from the fridge app. It was a picture of the inside of the fridge, with the timestamp in the corner. 3:07 a.m. The night before.
A hand was in the picture, reaching for a glass container of soup on the second shelf. A man’s hand. Big, with dirt under the nails and a thin gold ring.
I was asleep at 3:07 a.m. I was upstairs with the door closed. I have small hands, and I don’t wear rings.
I didn’t tell Carol at first. I told myself the app’s timestamp was off. That it was an old picture of Martin. I opened the app myself and scrolled back through the history.
There were photos every night. Every single night since I’d arrived. Around 3 a.m., give or take a few minutes. The hand taking a slice of cheese. The hand taking a bottle of water. The hand putting something back. In one of them, the camera caught more. The edge of a gray sleeve, and behind it, through the gap of the open door, the dim kitchen and the pantry door. Open.
The Pantry
I sat at the kitchen island with my laptop open and my heart pounding and looked at the pantry door. It was closed. It was always closed during the day. I realized I had never once opened it. I’d been eating out of the fridge and the fruit bowl for eight days.
I called the police. Then I called Carol. She didn’t believe me until I sent her the photos, and then she went silent, and then she called back crying.
Two officers came. They searched the house. Every room, the attic, the basement. Nothing. Then one of them went into the pantry. It’s a long walk-in pantry with shelves on three sides. He knocked on the back wall. It sounded hollow.
The back wall was a panel. It slid sideways on a track. Behind it was a narrow space, maybe three feet deep, between the pantry and the old chimney, where the house’s original servants’ stairs used to run. The stairs were still there. They went up into the dark, inside the wall, to a little landing that sat right behind the guest room closet.
My closet. The officer pulled the clothes aside. There was a small hinged door at the back of my closet, painted over years ago. The paint around the edges had been cut with a knife.
On the landing behind it, they found a blanket, a flashlight, a stack of the cats’ treats, and empty food containers from the fridge. Washed. Stacked neatly. Like a polite guest.
Who He Was
They never caught him. Carol found out that a contractor who refinished the floors in the spring had asked a lot of questions about the old house. Original details, she said. She’d been happy to show him.
The cats knew the whole time. That’s what gets me. Every night, sitting outside the pantry, staring at the wall.
I’ve told this one a hundred times since. My friends say it’s one of the creepiest short stories they’ve heard, and they like it as one of those scary stories to read out loud with the lights off. For me it’s just my horror story. The part I never tell is the last photo in the fridge app. 3:04 a.m., on the night I left. No food taken. Just a sticky note on the second shelf, in the same spot where the soup had been.
It said, “Thank you for sharing.”
I don’t house sit anymore. And when I stay anywhere, the first thing I do is open the closet and push on the back wall.
Tell us your house sitting horror story
Have you house sat, pet sat or stayed somewhere and felt like you weren’t alone? Share your own house sitting horror story in the comments.
Read someone hiding in my house and scary airbnb story next.
How scary was it?
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