My new house horror story starts with something every buyer hears at closing: “The sellers left the garage remotes in the kitchen drawer.” There were two remotes in that drawer. The garage door opener had three programmed. I’ve read a lot of scary stories with a twist since then, and none of them started with a kitchen drawer.
I bought my first house in March of 2022. A 1970s split-level in north Spokane, Washington. Three bedrooms, one bathroom, a big backyard with a crooked apple tree, and a two-car garage with a door that sounded like a freight train when it went up. I was thirty-four, single, and working day shifts as a respiratory therapist at a hospital downtown. I’d saved for six years.
The sellers were an older couple moving to Arizona to be near their daughter. I never met them. Everything went through the agents. The house was clean and empty when I got the keys, and in the kitchen drawer, as promised, there were two gray garage remotes and a handwritten note that said, “Welcome home! The furnace filter is a 16×25.”
My agent, a cheerful guy named Russ, said that was the nicest note he’d seen all year.
The Garage Door Was Open When I Got Home
About three weeks after I moved in, I came home from a twelve-hour shift and the garage door was open about three inches.
Just a gap at the bottom. Enough for a cat to squeeze under. I sat in the driveway with my headlights on it for a second, then clicked the remote, and it went up like normal.
Nothing was missing. My bike was there, the shelves were there, the boxes I still hadn’t unpacked were there. I figured the door hadn’t closed all the way that morning. Old openers do that. The safety sensor sees a leaf or a shadow and the door stops.
The next week it was open about two feet.
I told myself it was the sensor again. I wiped both sensor lenses with a paper towel and watched the door close three times in a row to make sure. It worked fine every time.
The week after that, I came home at 7:40 at night and the garage door was all the way up. The light on the opener was on. And the dome light in my car was on too. My car had been parked inside all day, because I’d gotten a ride to work with a coworker.
The driver’s door was shut. But the dome light was on, the way it is when the switch is set to stay on. I never touched that switch. I didn’t even know where it was.
The Smart Opener Log
My brother came over that weekend and laughed at me. He said the opener was older than both of us and probably picking up signals from someone else’s remote. He said that happens in neighborhoods with old openers on the same frequency. He said to get a new one.
I didn’t want to spend four hundred dollars on a new opener, so I bought a smart controller for sixty. It’s a little box that clips onto the old opener and connects to an app. It sends you a notification every time the door opens or closes and keeps a log.
The guy from the hardware store who installed it was older, very thorough, and talked the whole time. When he was done, he pushed some buttons on the opener and frowned.
“You know you’ve got three remotes paired to this thing?” he said.
I said I only had two.
He said the opener had three codes in memory. He said I should clear them all and re-pair my two, just to be safe, and he showed me how. Then he said he had another job and left, and I said I’d do it after dinner.
I didn’t do it after dinner. I was tired. I want to be honest about that. I told myself the smart controller would tell me if anything weird happened, and that was good enough.
It was. Four nights later, my phone buzzed on the nightstand at 3:12 a.m.
“Garage door opened.”
I lay there and listened. The garage was under my bedroom. That door was so loud you could hear it in the backyard. I should have heard it go up.
I didn’t hear anything.
I opened the app. It showed the door as open. I tapped the camera feature, and it said I didn’t have a camera. I hadn’t bought one. I lay there in the dark holding my phone while the app said the door was open, and the house was completely silent.
At 3:31, my phone buzzed again. “Garage door closed.”
And then I heard it. Not the door. The door between the garage and the kitchen. The little click it makes when it latches.
The Key on the Hook
I called 911. I stayed in my bedroom with a chair under the doorknob, which I’d seen in movies and which I can tell you does not make you feel any safer. The police got there in about twelve minutes. Nobody was in the house.
The officer who walked through the garage with me was young and polite. He asked if I kept a spare key anywhere. I said yes, on a hook by the garage door, inside the garage. The sellers had left a little wooden key rack there and I’d just used it.
He took the spare key off the hook and turned it over under his flashlight. Then he showed me.
There was a gray, waxy residue in the grooves of the key. Like clay. He scraped a little off with his thumbnail and smelled it.
He said it looked like someone had pressed the key into a mold to copy it. He said it’s an old trick. You don’t steal the key, because the owner would notice. You just borrow it for a minute and put it back.
The door from the garage to the kitchen locks with a key from the garage side. The one on the hook.
That’s when I realized the open garage door wasn’t the point. The garage door was just how they got to the key. Three inches, then two feet, then all the way up. Somebody had been practicing. Checking how loud it was. Checking whether I noticed.
And the dome light in my car? The officer said whoever it was probably sat in my car to wait. Maybe more than once.
What My New House Horror Story Taught Me
Russ, my agent, called the sellers’ agent the next day. The sellers said they’d only ever had two remotes. Their daughter said the same thing. The third code had been added to the opener sometime after they bought the house in 1998, and nobody could say when.
The police never found out who it was. I changed every lock. I cleared the opener and then I replaced it anyway. I put a deadbolt on the door from the garage with a key I keep on my own keychain and nowhere else.
I still have the smart controller. I check the log every morning out of habit.
Last November, two years after all of it, there was one line in the log I didn’t recognize. It said, “Open attempt failed. Unknown device.” The time was 3:12 a.m.
The opener had been replaced. The codes had been cleared. Whoever it was still had a remote, and they were still trying it.
Just to see if I’d noticed.
If creepy stories about strangers and spare keys are your thing, read the someone hiding in my house story about a dryer that was always warm, a fake utility worker story from a Michigan winter, or one of our scary Ouija board stories about a board that kept moving on its own.
Do you have a new house horror story?
Did you ever find out the previous owners left something behind they shouldn’t have? Share your new house horror story, or any intruder stories that started with a door you were sure you closed, in the comments below.
How scary was it?
More Home Intruder Stories
The Fridge Camera Showed Food Disappearing While I House Sat Alone
My Robot Vacuum Kept Cleaning Around Something in My Empty Apartment
There Was One Device on Our Rental’s Wi-Fi That Wasn’t Ours
The Trick-or-Treaters Kept Waving at the Upstairs Window
The Note in My Rental’s House Binder Was Written by the Man Upstairs
My Dog Wouldn’t Go in the Laundry Room, and the Dryer Was Always Warm