A Bump in the Night and Unexpected Guests

Amber Dawn was 20 when she moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Enumclaw, Washington. On her very first night, she began to notice strange sounds. And they didn’t stop. These episodes were originally released in 2017. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We talk all about attending a fashion show in Paris together, throwing dinner parties, and making her Broadway debut in other desert cities. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  How far would you go to have a healthy baby?

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Embryo editing is very much illegal in the United States. It is illegal in most countries. But there is growing interest as the technology has gotten better.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  This week on Explain It To Me, the ethics of embryo maxing. Listen to new episodes Sundays wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:10Phoebe Judge?

  Hi, it's Phoebe. This August, we're releasing some of our very favorite episodes from the last 12 years of Making Criminal. When we were thinking about what to share, this episode was the first that came to mind. It's one that I still think about all the time, especially when I'm alone in the house, and one that people are still writing to us about, nine years after we first released it.

• 1:35Phoebe Judge?

  Well, let's just start with you introducing yourself.

• 1:38Speaker 04

  My name is Amber Dawn, and I live with my family in Berwyn, Illinois. I work as an animal trainer at the Shet Aquarium, and that's about it.

• 1:51Phoebe Judge?

  What kind of animals do you train?

• 1:53Speaker 04

  Mostly penguins and otters. But I also work with all of our animals in the marine mammal department.

• 2:00Phoebe Judge?

  What do you train a penguin to do?

• 2:02Speaker 04

  Mostly husbandry care. So we practice going to the vet with them. We ask them to be calm in our lap and calm with other people. We can teach them to spin and to follow us, train them to come to their names. You can teach a penguin almost anything.

• 2:19Phoebe Judge?

  So do you have penguin friends, ones that you like more than others?

• 2:23Speaker 04

  Well, I love all of our penguins, but I do have my favorites. I helped handraise 11 of them. So yeah, I mean, a penguin chooses you. They choose you to be their person. And then every time you come out into exhibit, they come out of the water and run up to you and do their little flirty behavior.

• 2:49Speaker 04

  I knew I wanted to work with animals ever since I was a small child, so I started working with them eight years ago.

• 2:56Phoebe Judge?

  Well, we're here to talk about something that happened longer ago than that. How long ago were you living in that apartment in Washington?

• 3:08Speaker 04

  21 years ago.

• 3:11Phoebe Judge?

  Long before she worked with penguins, Amber Dawn moved to one of the rainiest places in America, the small town of Enham Claw, Washington, to be closer to her brother and sister-in-law.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  It was gorgeous. I could see Mount Rainier out of my bedroom window of this apartment. Like, right there. It was gorgeous.

• 3:31Phoebe Judge?

  She moved into a small apartment building. Her apartment was on the top floor, a one-bedroom with a little dining room, a living room, and kitchen, and a little balcony on the front. She was 20.

• 3:43Speaker 04

  The first night I moved in, you know, I had been playing music while I was unpacking. And I went to bed that night, and I turned off the music. And I was laying in my bed, and I heard footsteps in the attic. And they were very clear footsteps.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  And I wasn't quite sure why I would be hearing that. But you know, whenever you move into a new apartment, you know, you start to notice all the little different sounds that that particular space makes. And so I wasn't quite sure what it was, but it sounded like footsteps.

• 4:27Phoebe Judge?

  Had you been told that there was an attic in the apartment? Or did you have an entrance to the attic in your apartment?

• 4:35Speaker 04

  There was a crawl space that... It was just a little push-up. I don't even know what you would call it.

• 4:43Phoebe Judge?

  It's like a trap door in the ceiling, kind of.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Sort of, yeah. It was like it would push up into the ceiling. So it was like a square, maybe 2 1/2 by 2 1/2 feet, that pushed up into the ceiling. And that came into my bedroom. Or it was in my bedroom ceiling, so I could see it from my bed. And I thought, okay, you know, that's probably not what it is. You know, you have an act... Like, I know I have an active imagination. So I just, you know, fell asleep anyway. But the next day, I went to the landlord, and I told them, you know, I think I heard footsteps up there last night. Is there any way that anybody could be up there?

• 5:30Speaker 04

  And she told me, no. She said it was probably squirrels or raccoon or something. I was like, well, that squirrel's wearing a pretty big set of boots then.

• 5:42Phoebe Judge?

  We've all had that feeling, that something isn't quite right. And we're very good at talking ourselves down, going on with our lives, telling ourselves that it's all in our imagination. And most of the time, it is. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  I was very meticulous. You know, everything was very organized. I knew it was in my cupboards. And I would buy a six-pack of soda. I would drink one, maybe take one to work with me. And I would come back, and there would be three left. And it's like, well, did I drink two? That's odd. Or like cans of soup would be missing.

• 6:36Phoebe Judge?

  What did you think was happening?

• 6:39Speaker 04

  Well, I had moved to Enham Claw to be close to my brother. And he lived about three blocks away. He had a key to the apartment. I assumed that he was coming into my apartment and eating my food, because that is something he would do. Just come over and grab a can of soda or whatever. So I thought it was him.

• 7:03Phoebe Judge?

  Did you confront him?

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I called him. I told him, you know, I can't afford to feed juice. Don't come over here and eat my food. And it wasn't happening all the time. I just would notice it every now and again.

• 7:17Phoebe Judge?

  Amber wasn't home much. She was working several jobs, processing papers for an accountant, working at the local drugstore, and waitressing at night. So when she noticed that little things in her apartment had been moved, she'd second-guess herself, chalk it up to exhaustion. She was starting to feel at home in Enham Claw. She had her two cats, and then she got a puppy.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  She was a beautiful German Shepherd mix. She was maybe nine or 10 weeks old, so...

• 7:50Phoebe Judge?

  Really little.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, she was just a baby. So she was learning to be potty-trained. So I would come home in between my jobs and walk her. And I was kennelling her in the bathroom while she was, you know, learning her manners and learning to be potty-trained. So I kept her in the bathroom with newspaper on the floor and water and toys and stuff.

• 8:18Phoebe Judge?

  One night, she was waitressing when she got a call from her landlord saying that her bathroom was flooding.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  And my downstairs neighbor was getting rained on in her bathroom. So I came home, and we came in my apartment, and I opened up the bathroom door, and my puppy was in the bathroom sink. I asked her, I was like, did you put her in the sink? She's like, no, we wouldn't open the door because we didn't know how big the dog was. We didn't know if it was people-friendly, so this is why you had to come here.

• 8:53Speaker 04

  But there's no way she could have gotten into that sink. She was a little puppy. And the toilet was, you know, far enough away from the sink that she wouldn't have been able to climb.

• 9:04Phoebe Judge?

  Was there water all over the ground?

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Uh huh. It was a big mess.

• 9:09Phoebe Judge?

  But the puppy was dry, like, safe in the sink?

• 9:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, she was sitting in the sink.

• 9:16Phoebe Judge?

  But like, someone must have put her in the sink, right? There's no way she could have...

• 9:19Speaker 04

  Yes, someone must have put her in that sink.

• 9:24Phoebe Judge?

  Enemclaw is a tiny, safe farming community. Nothing ever went on there. So anytime Amber got worried, she just reminded herself that her brother and sister-in-law were three blocks away. And she kept herself busy. She'd been living in her apartment for about six months when she got sick and called into her jobs. And so, on this day, for the very first time, she didn't leave her apartment at all.

• 9:53Speaker 04

  It was around 7 o'clock at night. I was on the couch. And I was watching, I was watching my stories, watching my TV. And I heard a loud thump in the bedroom. And I just dismissed it because I have animals and they make noise. And I just dismissed it and kept on watching television. Later on that evening, around 11 or so, I turned off all the lights. I drew a bath. I got undressed. And I got into the bathtub. And so I'm in the bathtub. I got a candle lit.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  And I look up and that crawl space door was open. And everything just slowed way down.

• 10:45Phoebe Judge?

  And you're in the ba-- in the bathtub?

• 10:47Speaker 04

  I'm in the bathroom.

• 10:48Phoebe Judge?

  Naked in the bathtub?

• 10:49Speaker 04

  Naked in the bathtub, in the dark. And I must have sat in that bathtub for 10 to 15 seconds after seeing that crawl space door open. But it felt like five minutes. And I put it all together. I was like, okay. The footsteps the first night. The doors being closed when I had left them open. The missing food. Thea, my dog, in the sink.

• 11:20Speaker 04

  There was someone living in my house with me. So I very calmly got out of the tub and got my robe. I put it on. There was only one place he could have been hiding, and that was in the bedroom closet. And I had to walk by the closet in order to get out. And the closet were those mirror doors. And that was really scary to see myself, you know, in the dark, knowing that he was on the other side of that door.

• 11:54Phoebe Judge?

  Did you say anything?

• 11:56Speaker 04

  No, no. If he would have, if he would have opened that door, if I would have seen him, I would have lost it. He's been living in my apartment for six months. If he wanted to hurt me,

• 12:10Speaker 04

  that's not what he wants. He just needs a place to stay. He's probably not a bad guy. Like, he put Thea in the sink. Like, he's, I don't want to freak him out. I don't want to scare him by screaming and yelling because then he might hurt me so that he doesn't get caught.

• 12:30Speaker 04

  So I very quietly walked past the closet. And I didn't go out the door. I went to the phone. And under my phone, I had a junk drawer. And in the junk drawer, there was a hammer. So I had the hammer in my hand, claw out. So if anybody came at me, they're going to get a face full of hammer claw. And I called my sister.

• 12:54Phoebe Judge?

  This was before most of us had cell phones. So Amber had to stay in the apartment and use the landline. She told her sister-in-law that someone was in her house. And her sister-in-law told her to get out of there as fast as she could.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  So I grabbed my puppy and I walked out the door. I walked out the door in my robe with a hammer in one hand and a puppy in the other. And I got to the bottom of the stairs. And I, I was looking at the apartment door. And I was like, please don't come out. Please don't come out. Please don't come out. Because, like I said, like, if I would have seen him, I think I would have lost it. She was there within minutes with her two giant German Shepherds in the back of her car. And we went,

• 13:39Speaker 04

  we went to her house and we called the police.

• 13:41Phoebe Judge?

  And what did they find out?

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Well, the police came to the apartment, but he was gone.

• 13:47Phoebe Judge?

  In the attic, the police found a little bit of food, a book, and a sleeping bag.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  I don't know how he was getting into the apartment. I mean, I, I left a window open for my cats. So he could have gone in and out that way.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  I had a spare key. He could have taken my spare keys and made a copy, too. I mean, I don't know. He could have lived there before me. And maybe the managers didn't change the locks. I don't, I don't know.

• 14:26Phoebe Judge?

  She filed a police report. And while Amber believes it was a man, there's no way to know. Whoever was living up there was never found. We spoke to Amber's brother, Eric Olson. And he remembers just how nervous and scared she was through the whole thing. And how relieved she was to get out of there. We also asked if he remembered Amber accusing him of stealing food from her apartment. He said, that sounds about right. It's been more than 20 years. And Amber says she still wishes she could find this person and ask them what was going on.

• 15:05Phoebe Judge?

  Did you stay in the apartment?

• 15:07Speaker 04

  No, no. My grandparents came over the next day and we moved out. We moved all my stuff out.

• 15:15Phoebe Judge?

  You'd think that if there was a stranger in the house, like, the puppy would have been barking.

• 15:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, I got her while I lived there. So as far as she knew, that's, that's normal. You know, mom goes to work and then

• 15:34Phoebe Judge?

  Dad comes--

• 15:34Speaker 04

  my friend comes-- Yeah, my friend comes down from the attic and hangs out and plays with me. So when he came in that night, she didn't bark. She was just like, oh, hey.

• 15:49Phoebe Judge?

  In her next apartment, she made the landlord padlock the attic door.

• 15:55Phoebe Judge?

  It makes me so nervous now because I lose things and think I've done that. Like, wait a second, did I drink that? Did I eat? And now, and I'm like, Phoebe, no, you're fine. But now I'm really, you've given us all reason to be really worried. Like, no, maybe there is someone in here.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  You know,

• 16:14Speaker 04

  not that I want to make everybody paranoid, but I think you just have to listen to your instincts. I think that's what I've learned from this. Like, deep down, I knew what was going on, but I didn't trust myself. I, you know, I thought I was just imagining it. But I think it's, since then, I have learned to listen to my instincts. And if my instincts are telling me that something is not right, then something's not right.

• 16:41Phoebe Judge?

  So now, do you ever do things like check in the garbage can to count how many soup cans there are or?

• 16:49Speaker 04

  No, I, I live, I live with a family. Nothing is ever where it was placed, you know? I have no idea how many cans of soup I have in the cupboard.

• 17:11Phoebe Judge?

  We first released Amber Dawn's story in 2017. At the end of the episode, we asked you to get in touch if something unusual like that had ever happened to you. A lot of people wrote to us. After the break, we're sharing an episode we made a few months later with the ones we couldn't stop thinking about.

• 17:32Phoebe Judge?

  We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  Are you tired of hearing about business, tech, and finance from the bros? We are the Tiger Sisters, a top business podcast with the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tiger Sisters releases every Monday, and we decode money, power, and love. And who doesn't love all those things? We are the internet's Wall Street and Silicon Valley big sisters. Tune in every Monday for Late Night Sister Talk meets Boardroom Strategy. Check out Tiger Sisters on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Tiger fam.

• 18:19Speaker 06

  It was in the late 90s. I can't quite remember the exact year, actually. But I was dating a guy who had a birthday that was a day before mine. So every year, we would kind of go do something for our birthdays. And we didn't know what to do that particular year. So we decided to go away to a small town.

• 18:41Phoebe Judge?

  Where?

• 18:43Speaker 06

  The town, it's a small town in Northern California called Etna.

• 18:48Speaker 06

  And neither of us had ever actually been there before. So we were pretty excited to go check it out. I grew up in a really small town, so I always kind of am drawn to vacation in small places.

• 19:00Phoebe Judge?

  So you're just gonna go there? You didn't know anything about it, but you thought it'd be fine? You just get away for a couple of days?

• 19:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, you know, we looked at the town, and it was really cute. And we thought we'd go hiking and things like that.

• 19:13Phoebe Judge?

  So Erin Peters and her boyfriend made a reservation at a little bed and breakfast in Etna.

• 19:20Speaker 06

  I can't even remember how we found it, because, you know, you didn't really go online in 1997. So...

• 19:27Phoebe Judge?

  How did we find places in 1990? I can't even, how did we find place?

• 19:31Speaker 06

  I can't remember.

• 19:34Speaker 06

  I assumed that we went online, and then I was like, I don't remember going online.

• 19:37Phoebe Judge?

  I don't know, yeah. What do you call, like, the Chamber of Commerce? I can't...

• 19:41Speaker 06

  Probably.

• 19:42Phoebe Judge?

  Okay, so you found a place?

• 19:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I may have asked my family for a recommendation. I can't even remember. So somehow, I found this bed and breakfast. And as far as I know, it was one of the few places you could actually stay in the town. There's no motel or hotel or anything like that.

• 20:00Phoebe Judge?

  So what did you do when you arrived at the bed and breakfast?

• 20:04Speaker 06

  I think that we fell asleep for a while, because we were both kind of exhausted. And then we got up, and I remember, you know, having a glass of wine. And there was no one else staying there.

• 20:18Phoebe Judge?

  Will you describe, I mean, the bed and breakfast a little bit? What it looked like, what your room was like?

• 20:24Speaker 06

  It was a pretty old building. We stayed in, I'm sure it was probably the least expensive room that they had.

• 20:32Speaker 06

  But, you know, you're kind of your typical bed and breakfast, with probably six to eight rooms in it total, maybe even less.

• 20:39Phoebe Judge?

  So you met the owner. She was nice and pleasant and helpful?

• 20:43Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, she was very friendly and happy to give us, like, suggestions on where to eat. And she was basically like, there's one restaurant that's open in town, so we walked down there.

• 20:56Phoebe Judge?

  But when Erin Peters and her boyfriend got to the restaurant, it had just closed. So there they were, in this tiny town on their birthdays, and they couldn't find anything to eat. But they decided they would try to make the best of it. At least they were in a pretty place. They wandered around and took a lot of pictures. This was the late 90s, so Erin and her boyfriend were shooting on film.

• 21:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, lots of pictures of the town. There are some really beautiful mountains right nearby, and you can go hiking around there, and it's really beautiful.

• 21:30Phoebe Judge?

  You get back to the bed and breakfast hungry, and you just, you go to sleep. How did you sleep that night?

• 21:41Speaker 06

  I think we slept fine. In fact, I remember, she had a video collection. So we watched a movie, and I don't remember seeing her when we returned. And I remember, we watched that movie about, it's basically about the Clintons. I think Primary Colors, I think that might be the name of it. And then we went to bed after that.

• 22:03Phoebe Judge?

  And what was the next morning like?

• 22:06Speaker 06

  She made breakfast that was, you know, just like some fruit and stuff like that. I remember she had pictures of her and her husband all over, kind of like, the kitchen area and where we were eating. And she talked about her husband a little bit, who had passed away. And they seen, you know, really sweet pictures of them together.

• 22:25Phoebe Judge?

  And were you just there for one night?

• 22:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, I was trying to remember. I think it was just one night.

• 22:30Phoebe Judge?

  So what happened when you got home?

• 22:35Speaker 06

  So we got home, and, you know, I'm sure a few days passed or some time passed. And then I had taken the film in to develop. And I don't know if I waited, and there were a couple of rolls, or if it was just that roll. But when I went to pick up the prints, it takes a few days or whatever. And immediately, you look through, like, I remember, every time I would take photos, you flip through the prints, like, immediately. And you're always really excited, usually like, sitting in your car, you know? And I was flipping through, and partway in, there's a picture of my boyfriend and I just kind of in our, we were in our clothes, like, on the outside of the bed, you know? Like, just kind of had fallen asleep.

• 23:17Speaker 06

  And I looked at it, and we were both very clearly asleep.

• 23:24Speaker 06

  And I immediately was like, well, how could we both be asleep? Like, this is so strange. Like, did he, you know, did he happen to take this picture? And, you know, so I'm looking at it really closely.

• 23:37Speaker 06

  And you can just tell by, you know, like, our eyes and the way our bodies were, that we were totally out. I mean, really asleep. So then, you know, I kind of freaked out, and I was just like, how could this happen? And so I called my boyfriend. I either called him, or, you know, that evening when I saw him, I can't remember. And I showed it to him, and I was like, we're both asleep. And he was kind of like, yeah, that's weird. And I was like, well, how'd the picture get taken? You know, and he was like, oh, yeah, that's kind of creepy. And I was like, well, you know, someone else had to take this picture. And he wasn't nearly as, I think, disturbed as I was.

• 24:22Speaker 06

  And then, of course, the more I started thinking about it, the more I just wondered how it happened and who it could have been.

• 24:31Phoebe Judge?

  Did your camera have a timer on it at all that could have?

• 24:35Speaker 06

  Like, not that I ever used. I mean, it may, I mean, sure, it must have.

• 24:40Phoebe Judge?

  I was just thinking whether your boyfriend could have done it.

• 24:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, he could have. Well, no, I mean, he could have. He certainly denied doing it. And he really looked asleep. That was the thing that kind of threw me off. I thought it could have been like, oh, yeah, he did, you know, like, just took a picture, and it was funny, and he thought it was cute. But he was really asleep. You know, like, it wasn't just me. Like, I knew I was asleep, and he is very clearly asleep as well. And it's also just like the angle, the way it was taken. It doesn't look, it's just like an odd angle, you know? Like, you can really see the top half of our bodies, like, laying in this bed, completely asleep.

• 25:21Phoebe Judge?

  What were the different scenarios that were running through your head?

• 25:25Speaker 06

  Oh, I don't know. I mean, at first, I just, you know, that there was maybe other, there were other people that were guests there.

• 25:33Phoebe Judge?

  But there weren't?

• 25:35Speaker 06

  No, there were no other guests. So then I was just really freaked out.

• 25:42Speaker 06

  You know, I think I came to the conclusion that, I mean, I think, I guessed that it may have been her. And I think I remember even saying to him, like, she was so nice. You know, she seemed very normal, very normal. And so I thought, oh, wow, you know, I don't know. And I guess I thought I would never know what happened.

• 26:03Phoebe Judge?

  I can't, that's like a horror movie.

• 26:06Speaker 06

  Well, I think the weirdest part to me, too, was that somebody knowingly did it with your own camera. Like, knowing that you would go home and sometime later, discover that they were in your room. I mean, the fact that, like, you intentionally, like, are gonna get caught in a way, you know?

• 26:28Phoebe Judge?

  Oh, man.

• 26:33Phoebe Judge?

  So what did you do? Did you call the woman?

• 26:36Speaker 06

  No, I didn't. You know, I didn't really do anything. I think that I thought maybe briefly about who I could call. Like, could you call the sheriff? Or could you call somebody? But then I was like, what would I say? And, you know, what do I have to prove? But like, all you can see is like, the quilt of the bed, you know? And maybe like, part of the bed frame. So how could you even prove that anybody did anything wrong? You know? Like, it just certainly seemed like a believable story.

• 27:05Phoebe Judge?

  I have never liked bed and breakfasts. I refuse to say them then. Because it's, for me, it's just this kind of, it's like this forced intimacy. And it's so personal. And so when you wake up in the morning, like, I never want the breakfast. I don't want a woman making breakfast for me. I want it to be so impersonal. It feels like I'm in their kitchen, but I don't know them.

• 27:28Speaker 06

  And you have to go help yourself to get the orange juice. Oh, yeah, it's really. And see all the other stuff in their house. Yeah. Yeah, it's really personal. And you know, that's the thing. I'm sure we didn't lock the door.

• 27:40Speaker 06

  You know, it's very, like, the whole house is wide open. It's not like I was nervous about my well-being.

• 27:46Phoebe Judge?

  That was kind of it. Erin saved the photos, but she tried to forget about it. Years later, she went to a San Francisco Giants game with a friend from high school and her friend's fiance, Steve.

• 28:00Speaker 06

  We're sitting there, and it's the first time I had met him. And he's talking about himself. And I was like, well, Steve, where are you from? And he was like, oh, I'm from Etna. And I just completely kind of froze. And I was like, you're from Etna? And he was like, yeah, why? And I was like, oh, I stayed at this bed and breakfast, and the weirdest thing happened. And he didn't even need to hear any more of the story. He was like, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. And the woman was busted and doesn't, you know, no longer has this bed and breakfast.

• 28:40Phoebe Judge?

  Who's these other people?

• 28:42Speaker 06

  Well, according to, according to this, you know, to my friend's fiance, yeah. And that she had gotten caught. And I asked him a couple more questions, but, you know, we were at a baseball game, so I didn't, I didn't find out too much. But it was just a trip. And, you know, then, of course, I, after the fact, had lots of questions. Like, how did she get caught? And how many years had she been doing this? Oh, and then I started thinking about, did she used to do this with her husband? They had run this place together for years. Like, how long has this been going on?

• 29:18Phoebe Judge?

  I mean, maybe she thought she was giving you a nice memory or something?

• 29:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a nice way to think about it.

• 29:26Speaker 06

  I don't know. It's so scary. I don't know. I guess I would have to assume that there was, maybe the idea or the thrill of kind of freaking someone out a little bit.

• 29:39Speaker 06

  I don't know. Maybe that's why she did it. I really have no idea. I was hoping you guys could figure that out.

• 29:46Phoebe Judge?

  We made some calls. One guy said, "There used to be an old inn in a big Victorian house. It's since burned down. The locals nicknamed it the Peekaboo Inn, because the owner would spy on his guests through holes he drilled in the walls." Maybe that's what Erin's friend Steve was thinking about. But we didn't find a single thing about it in the newspaper archives. We tried the Etna Police Department. They did not return our call. Maybe one day, we'll take a trip out there and try to finish the story. We did happen to stumble across a 2011 guide to owning and operating a bed and breakfast.

• 30:27Phoebe Judge?

  In a section about thank you notes, it says, "Some hosts like to take a photograph of each guest at some point during the visit and mail it as a memento." It goes on to say, "This is a great idea, provided that the timing and occasion of taking the picture are appropriate."

• 30:50Phoebe Judge?

  We'll be right back.

• 31:06Speaker 07

  One morning, me and Brett had woken up for band practice really early, and MJ woke up for football practice. And we were walking around the house and noticed that somebody had opened up all of the cupboards and drawers, and the microwave door, and the oven door, and shower stall doors and everything. The refrigerator, the dishwasher, the dryer, the washer, everything was open.

• 31:33Phoebe Judge?

  What do you mean? You woke up in the morning and it was all open, or?

• 31:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, we all had just gone to bed after like, a normal night, and then woke up in the morning and everything was open. Yeah, everything was just left wide open, as if a ghost had come through the house and blown everything open or something. We weren't sure how to explain it.

• 31:51Phoebe Judge?

  In their senior year of college at Ohio State, Mark Hartman and Brett McGlynn moved into a huge house with a lot of their friends, 10 of them. But Mark, Brett, and their friend MJ got there a little before everyone else, because they had to start training for marching band and football. They'd only been there for a few days when they woke up to find everything opened up. But even before that, the house was apparently just bad. Here's Mark.

• 32:20Speaker 07

  Oh, it was terrible. We moved in, and it was as if no one had ever been in the house since the last tenants moved out. There was trash everywhere, and everything was still dirty, and there was furniture, and some electrical problems, and some stairs in the house were falling apart and things like that. It was a very large house. I mean, on our lease, there are 10 of us, and we took up the second and the third floor. There was a completely separate lease, though, on the first floor. And there was no actual physical separation between our leases.

• 33:02Speaker 07

  There was like, a staircase that would go down to like, a door that just walked out of the house. And you could get to any floor from there, including the basement.

• 33:11Phoebe Judge?

  Okay, so it was just three of you in this big house at this point?

• 33:14Speaker 07

  At this point in time, yeah.

• 33:17Phoebe Judge?

  Did you ever think that one of the other people was playing a trick on you?

• 33:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, honestly, Brett had sleptwalked a few times throughout college, so I kind of assumed maybe he had just sleptwalked and done some, something random like that. But I was on the third floor of the house, and it seemed a pretty impressive feat for me to sleepwalk down a flight of stairs, open up everything, and then walk back upstairs without hurting myself. So it didn't seem like it was really what happened.

• 33:51Phoebe Judge?

  What did you do? I mean, I think that I would be really scared. I think I would try to get out of the house. What did you do?

• 33:58Speaker 07

  We decided to go and investigate the house. We each grabbed, you know, a baseball bat or something, and we were going through all the rooms and opening the closets and...

• 34:07Phoebe Judge?

  So all of you had a baseball bat?

• 34:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, or a baseball bat, or a knife, or a something. Like, one of us would hold the closet, and then the other one would have like, a baseball bat ready to like, jump at anything that like, came out of the closet. We would kind of like, open the doors quickly, as if we were a SWAT team or something. Yeah, basically, breach and clear. And other than just like, the house being dirty, we didn't really find anything, until we went to the basement. Oh, yeah, we definitely saved that for last.

• 34:42Speaker 07

  So when we went down there, I mean, it's very dark in the basement.

• 34:48Speaker 07

  There was like, different, like, boilers and breakers and whatnot. But there's also a door down there. And there was a door that none of us had the key to. And MJ started freaking out. So what we ended up doing is just, we propped up a door that was lying around in the basement. We propped it up in the open doorway that led down to the basement and put a, wedged a chair between it and the... Door so that whatever was down there wouldn't come back up.

• 35:21Phoebe Judge?

  So it's like in case there was like a, like a monster, like a bad guy, you, this would be help, this would save you.

• 35:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, I guess that's what we did to try to make ourselves feel safe.

• 35:35Phoebe Judge?

  I would get worried that I'd be happy that I had barricaded the door, but I also think I'd be worried that if someone were in there, I would be starving them to death.

• 35:45Speaker 07

  Exactly, and that was kind of some of my motivation to take down that, the chair wedge between the wall and the door that we had. I was like, in case he was down there, I didn't want, didn't want to trap someone down there, you know?

• 35:58Phoebe Judge?

  Or make them even more mad.

• 36:00Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 36:01Phoebe Judge?

  So after that initial search, did you, did you go back down into the basement?

• 36:08Speaker 07

  Often. So I lived on the third floor and I don't know if it was faulty wiring or, you know, a bad breaker or something, but like every, like, like three or four times a week, like just all the power in my room would just shut off. And I'd have to like go down to the basement, flip the breaker, and then the power would be back on my room. So one of those times that I had to go flip the breaker, it just so happened that that door was open.

• 36:46Speaker 07

  I was kind of shocked, like, so I like walked downstairs, looked into the door and it was just the normal bedroom, like had mattress and dresser and, you know, a normal college looking room. And then from the bathroom, somebody said, or a guy said like, oh, I was wondering when I get to meet the people that live here. And it was just like a, like a regular college student.

• 37:12Phoebe Judge?

  And when, was he just kind of casual about it all and nonchalant and you're like, oh, hi?

• 37:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, basically it was like, you know, completely non-threatening.

• 37:22Speaker 07

  And later that day, a bunch of us were hanging out and Brett's talking to the downstairs roommates and says, hey, I met your guy's roommate Jeremy today. And they were like, we don't have a roommate named Jeremy. He's like, yeah, he's the, he's the one down the basement.

• 37:41Phoebe Judge?

  No one had ever heard of anyone named Jeremy. So they called their landlord, who called the police.

• 37:49Speaker 07

  I come home from practice one day and there are police and landlords and all my roommates out on the lawn. It's a very chaotic scene. Now, I don't think the guy was actually downstairs when the police came. So like, I don't actually know what happened to him. I'm honestly not sure. I came home and he wasn't home when they knocked his door down. And then a couple of days later, I went down and all this stuff was gone. I never saw him again.

• 38:19Phoebe Judge?

  Who was this guy?

• 38:21Speaker 07

  Um, he was just a student going for a master's degree at Ohio State.

• 38:27Phoebe Judge?

  The school newspaper, The Lantern, wrote up the incident and they made a video.

• 38:33Speaker 05

  What they found shocked everyone. A bedroom that someone else had been living in.

• 38:39Speaker 07

  No, what? Like, you gotta be kidding me.

• 38:42Speaker 05

  Jeremy had access to a bathroom in the basement and a sink that he could have used to do laundry. But the guys don't think he ever ate their food or went into their rooms. Chelsea Spears for The Lantern.

• 38:54Phoebe Judge?

  Did you feel a little famous?

• 38:56Speaker 07

  Oh, I did. It was crazy how much it, how much it blew up. We got, we had articles on USA Today, ABC, headquarters in New York called me, did an interview. Jay Leno talked about us in his monologue. Steve Harvey contacted me, asking, asking if we wanted to go on his show. It was pretty crazy.

• 39:16Phoebe Judge?

  Did you do any of these things?

• 39:18Speaker 07

  I did a few of them. I didn't, I didn't physically go anywhere. Like, I think Steve Harvey's thing would have required us to fly to Chicago. So I did a couple of phone interviews and things like that, but.

• 39:31Phoebe Judge?

  Mark and Brett graduated and moved out of that big house.

• 39:35Speaker 07

  The one thing that always bothered me about that whole sequence of events is we never really figured out who went around opening up all those cabinets. But years later, I'm working at a startup and eventually the people at the startup, like, you know, find out about this story. And so like, you know, people are talking about it. And one of the people I'm working with comes up to me and starts to talk to me about the story. And, you know, this random coworker of mine told me it was him. He was the one that opened up all those cabinets. He had lived in the house the year before us. And the guy that

• 40:17Speaker 07

  was in the basement was a cousin of one of the people that was on their lease. And they had made some kind of arrangement with him that he would pay them a little bit of money in order to live in that room in the basement. After they had left their lease, that guy decided to keep his key and then he would like periodically come in and then just kind of like screw with the people living in the house, you know, opening cabinets and like other things like that. But I guess they had never told the basement roommate that they were leaving, although how you could not tell that everybody had left, you know, is beyond me. So probably the guy in the basement just decided to stay there as long

• 40:59Speaker 07

  as he could because, you know, you're living there for free essentially. Because he could just sneak in and that side entrance and go straight to the basement without ever being seen by anyone, basically.

• 41:11Phoebe Judge?

  I mean, it's awful. It is awful to think that, you know, when you go to a place who's like, okay, well, the last people are gone, it's safe for me. It's crazy to think that someone else would have the keys to the house that you just moved into.

• 41:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's, it's pretty creepy. Like, I mean, it wasn't just like the guy in the basement, it was also that coworker of mine. He also had keys. And I have to assume that it wasn't just him that also had keys.

• 41:38Phoebe Judge?

  I wonder how many landlords never actually change the locks.

• 41:43Speaker 07

  Who knows?

• 41:54Speaker 06

  Hello?

• 41:55Phoebe Judge?

  Hello, I'm looking for Amanda.

• 41:57Speaker 06

  Hi, this is Phoebe.

• 41:58Phoebe Judge?

  Hello, it's Phoebe Judge calling.

• 42:00Speaker 06

  Hi, how are you?

• 42:01Phoebe Judge?

  Are you in Texas?

• 42:03Speaker 06

  I am in Texas. I'm in Austin.

• 42:05Phoebe Judge?

  Well, thanks very much for speaking with us and for writing in about your story.

• 42:09Speaker 06

  Of course. I thought it was an interesting story that y'all had done. And at the end of it, I was like, oh, well, yeah, something like that kind of happened to me. And I honestly, I wasn't really expecting an email back. So it was really cool to get that.

• 42:24Phoebe Judge?

  Here we are. So just again, introduce yourself, will you?

• 42:29Speaker 06

  My name's Amanda. I grew up in a really small town and I came to Austin for school. I went to St. Edward's University.

• 42:40Phoebe Judge?

  So you grew up in a small town in Texas?

• 42:42Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. It's called Yocum. It's about an hour and a half southeast-ish of Austin.

• 42:50Phoebe Judge?

  So when you left and came to Austin, was Austin kind of like a big, it must be a big city compared to Yocum?

• 42:57Speaker 06

  Oh, yes, very much so. Yocum is, I think, 5,000 people roughly.

• 43:02Phoebe Judge?

  And what car were you driving then?

• 43:05Speaker 06

  I drive the same car now. It's a 2005 silver Chevy Cobalt.

• 43:13Phoebe Judge?

  Okay, I'm thinking about this car. It doesn't have a lot of, it's not that ostentatious. It's not that fancy. It's, it's just, it's a car. It's a simple, good car.

• 43:27Speaker 06

  They're a dime a dozen. Like, you see them all the time. It's, that's been my first car that I've ever had that I'm still driving. But I don't have the original key to the car. And because I just have a copy, anytime I lock my door, and I don't have a clicker anymore. So anytime I lock my door, I have to put the key in to unlock it. And because it's not the original key, it just, there's this alarm that goes off every single time. And it doesn't stop until I start the ignition.

• 44:00Phoebe Judge?

  She says this alarm is horrible and she hates it. So she just doesn't lock the car. And leaving it unlocked isn't a big deal. For one, she says she never leaves anything of value in her car. She says that if she did have something worth stealing, she'd rather someone just open the door to take it, better than breaking a window. And she never had any issues. She'd been in Austin for a couple of years, never locking the car and never having any trouble, until one morning, when she was a junior in college.

• 44:32Speaker 06

  It had rained really pretty heavily the night before. And I went out into my car and I noticed that my seat was pushed all the way back. And I kind of thought it was odd, but I was like, well, you know, maybe I just did this and I forgot that I had done this. And I was probably running late to class already, so I kind of just brushed it off. And it continued to rain kind of heavy that day and into the next day and overnight. And that's when I noticed it a second time. It was the second day that my seat had been

• 45:10Speaker 06

  pushed back and just down, all the way down. And that's when I was like, oh, somebody slept in here. Okay.

• 45:22Phoebe Judge?

  You were just like, okay, you said, okay.

• 45:24Speaker 06

  Okay. You know, there's not anything I could do other than lock my car. But I guess in the back of my mind, I thought, oh, well, this is a creative way to not, you know, sleep in the rain and stay out of the rain. So I just kind of let it go. And it was something that continued to happen. And that was just kind of our little system.

• 45:48Phoebe Judge?

  Did you notice any other strange things? Was it in the car?

• 45:53Speaker 06

  No. So occasionally I would get, I'd be given a little gift. So there were some bushes that would bloom near. Next to my apartment and occasionally there would be a flower there. Um, one time they left me a little bit of change. Um, in my senior year, they left me a little ring that you would get like out of a coin machine. Um, but nothing was ever taken from my car. Um, or really moved other than my seat. Uh, there was another time that my work sweater that had been in the back, because I kind

• 46:35Speaker 06

  of just took it off and threw it in the back, um, was actually up in the front seat. And that one was, I think, the only time that they actually used anything of mine. And I remember thinking, oh, well, it was really cold last night. So.

• 46:54Phoebe Judge?

  Do you think that you're the nicest person on earth?

• 46:57Speaker 06

  Oh, gosh, I'm definitely, definitely not. Definitely not, but, um.

• 47:02Phoebe Judge?

  Because I'll tell you, I think I would have locked that door after about night two.

• 47:07Speaker 06

  That's fair. Um, and it's something I, I mean, I lock my car occasionally, but I mean, even like even right now, I know for a fact it's not locked.

• 47:17Phoebe Judge?

  And they were leaving you little thank you gifts.

• 47:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, never, um, any actual interaction. And that was the interesting thing is that over this like year and a half, almost two year long period, we never ran into each other. We never saw each other. Um, that was just kind of our little system was I'll leave my car open and you can sleep here. And if, I mean, you don't have to leave anything, but occasionally they would. And that was it. And that was our system for two years and we just don't talk.

• 47:50Phoebe Judge?

  So I get it. And, and I think I get you park the car, you don't need it. But what, what happened if you in the middle of the night got sick and thought, I have to go and I have to get some Tylenol. I have to go. I mean, would it, then what, would that keep you from going, I think, I don't want to wake them up and they're in the middle of their, their sleep?

• 48:10Speaker 06

  Um, I don't know. That, that, that never, it never really occurred to me, like what, what the, I guess if it were raining, I'd probably make one of my roommates come with me and, you know, be like, yeah, I gotta use my car right now. You gotta go, buddy.

• 48:29Phoebe Judge?

  So this was, you think this was only happening when it was raining?

• 48:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, it only happened when it would rain and it would have to rain, um, fairly heavily. So not too, too often, but often enough that they knew where to find my car and they knew it was open.

• 48:48Phoebe Judge?

  After graduation, Amanda went to Cambodia to teach English for a year. So she was gone and her car wasn't in its usual spot in her apartment complex.

• 48:59Speaker 06

  I did think about that, um, at the end of my senior year when I was moving that, um, like I, I was like, well, where are they gonna, where are they gonna sleep now? Hopefully they can find another place that's safe.

• 49:14Phoebe Judge?

  You know, it's funny, everybody is so afraid of everything lately and they're so afraid of everyone else.

• 49:22Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:23Phoebe Judge?

  But this is a good reminder, we don't have to be.

• 49:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, all they needed was a little bit of shelter. And if I can provide that in a really small way, then yeah, why not?

• 49:37Phoebe Judge?

  Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Roberson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, and Lena Silasen. This episode was originally mixed by Rob Byers. Special thanks to Dick Gordon, Carol Jackson, and Matilda Fellino. And thanks to everyone who wrote to us with mysterious stories from their lives. Hearing from you is one of the best parts of the job. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.

• 50:22Phoebe Judge?

  Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com and you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. We hope you'll join our membership program, Criminal Plus, now on Patreon. It's the very best way to support our work. You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus you'll get behind the scenes photos and videos. You'll be able to talk directly with us and other Criminal listeners and you'll get access to bonus episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spoor. We just shared our latest one on the Criminal feed, so you can see what they sound like. Learn more and sign up at patreon.com/criminal.

• 51:04Phoebe Judge?

  We're on Facebook at This is Criminal and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal underscore Podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.