Fiction notice: This original horror story is presented in first person. Names, places and events are fictional, and the account is not independently verified because it is not presented as fact.
Please publish this without my name.
I have changed the city, the street, and the name of the company that owned the building. Everything else happened as I remember it.
For a long time, I did not tell anyone the full story. I was afraid people would think I had imagined it because I was living alone, working too much, and sleeping badly.
Sometimes I still wonder whether that would have been easier.
At least then I could have blamed myself.
The apartment above mine was empty
I moved into the building in early January. It was an old four-storey property with thick walls, narrow staircases, and windows that rattled when buses passed outside.
My apartment was on the third floor.
The flat directly above mine had been empty for almost a year. The previous tenant had died, and the owner had not yet renovated it. I knew this because the caretaker mentioned it while showing me the basement storage rooms.
“You will have peace and quiet,” he said. “No one above you.”
For the first two weeks, he was right.
Then I began hearing footsteps.
They always started after midnight.
Slow. Careful. Barely audible.
Three or four steps across the ceiling, a pause, then another few steps in the opposite direction.
The first time, I assumed the sound came from the roof or another apartment. Old buildings carry noise in strange ways.
The second time, I stood on my bed and pressed my palm against the ceiling.
The footsteps stopped.
I remained there for almost a minute, feeling ridiculous.
Then something tapped back.
Once.
Directly above my hand.
The caretaker found nothing
The next morning, I called the property manager. They sent the caretaker that afternoon.
He unlocked the apartment above mine while I waited in the hallway.
The flat smelled of dust and cold plaster. There was no furniture, no electricity, and no visible sign that anyone had been inside. The windows were locked. The balcony door was covered with plastic sheeting from an old repair.
We walked through every room.
The caretaker even opened the built-in wardrobes and checked the small storage cupboard beside the kitchen.
Nothing.
He suggested that pipes might be expanding at night.
I wanted to believe him.
For several days, the noises stopped.
Then, on a Sunday evening, I found a wet footprint outside my front door.
It was long and narrow, with a worn section at the heel. There was only one print, angled toward my apartment as though someone had stood close to the door.
The rest of the stairwell was dry.
I took a photograph and wiped it away.
That was my first mistake.
Someone knew when I was asleep
I worked at a dental clinic and usually left home at 7:10 each morning. I returned at roughly the same time every evening.
A few weeks after the footsteps began, I started finding small things out of place.
My doormat was slightly crooked.
The lift was waiting on my floor even though I had heard no one use it.
A cigarette end appeared on the windowsill outside the stairwell window. No one on my floor smoked.
One night, at 2:26, I woke to the sound of my letterbox moving.
Not opening fully.
Just a soft metallic click.
I lay still and listened.
Someone was breathing on the other side of the door.
The sound was faint but unmistakable. A slow inhale. A pause. A longer exhale.
I reached for my phone and opened the camera.
Before I could stand, the letterbox lifted again.
A shadow crossed the thin line of light beneath the door.
Then a man whispered, “She is awake.”
He did not say it to me.
He said it to someone else.
I called the police while sitting on the bedroom floor with the door locked.
By the time they arrived, the stairwell was empty.
There were no cameras in the building. None of the neighbours had heard anything. The officers checked the basement and the entrance but found no one.
They asked whether I had an ex-partner who might be frightening me.
I did not.
They asked whether I had enemies.
I laughed because the question sounded absurd.
Then I started crying.
The marks around the lock
The property manager replaced my lock the next day. I bought a door camera and a small alarm that sounded if the door opened.
For almost a month, nothing happened.
I began to relax.
Then I noticed scratches around the new lock.
They were thin and bright, as though someone had recently pushed a metal tool into the edge of the cylinder.
The camera had recorded no one.
That meant whoever had approached my door had either covered the lens or come from an angle the camera could not see.
I reviewed every recording from the previous night.
At 3:08, the image flickered.
For less than a second, a pale shape filled the frame.
At first, I thought it was a hand.
When I enlarged the image, I saw an eye.
Someone had placed their face directly against the camera.
The eye was open very wide.
There was no expression around it. No raised eyebrow. No tension. Just the eye, staring into the lens.
Then the recording stopped for seventeen minutes.
I sent the clip to the police.
An officer visited the building, took photographs of the lock, and spoke to the neighbours. One elderly woman on the second floor said she had seen a man carrying tools in the stairwell several times. She assumed he worked for the property company.
He wore dark work trousers and a blue jacket.
The property company had no employee matching her description.
The keys in the basement
The police told the owner to inspect every shared area of the building.
Two days later, the caretaker found a ring of copied keys taped beneath a shelf in the basement laundry room.
There were eleven keys.
Three opened external doors.
Two opened storage rooms.
One opened the empty apartment above mine.
None opened my new lock.
The remaining keys were never identified.
After that, the building owner installed cameras at both entrances. The police increased patrols for a short time.
The footsteps stopped.
I should have moved then, but I had spent nearly all my savings on the deposit and furniture. The rental market was difficult, and the owner promised that the building was secure.
I stayed.
For six weeks, nothing happened.
Then I received the first photograph.
The envelope on my pillow
I came home from work on a Thursday evening and found my bedroom door closed.
I always left it open.
The front door was locked. The alarm had not sounded. Nothing appeared disturbed.
I stood in the hallway for several minutes before calling my brother. He stayed on the phone while I checked the apartment.
No one was inside.
On my pillow was a white envelope.
Inside were four printed photographs.
The first showed me entering the building.
The second showed me sleeping on my sofa.
The third showed me brushing my teeth.
The fourth had been taken from inside my bedroom wardrobe.
I was standing at the foot of the bed, changing my shirt.
On the back of that photograph, someone had written:
YOU NEVER LOOK UP.
I left the apartment and never slept there again.
The police searched the rooms. They found no hidden cameras. The photographs had been printed on ordinary paper with a common home printer. There were no fingerprints suitable for identification.
The lock showed no damage.
That was the part I could not understand.
Someone had entered without forcing the door.
Someone had been close enough to photograph me while I slept.
Someone knew exactly where to leave the envelope.
What they found above the ceiling
The answer came two days later.
A detective asked the building owner for the original plans.
The plans showed a narrow maintenance void running between the empty apartment and the apartments below. It had been used decades earlier for pipes and electrical work.
The entrance was hidden behind a removable panel inside the storage cupboard in the empty apartment.
The caretaker had opened the cupboard during our first inspection.
He had not known the back wall could be removed.
Inside the void, the police found blankets, bottles of water, food packaging, cigarette ends, a torch, and several pieces of women’s clothing.
Some belonged to me.
A scarf I thought I had lost.
A black T-shirt.
A pair of underwear.
They also found a small drilled opening above my bedroom wardrobe.
It was no wider than a coin.
Through it, someone could see almost the entire room.
There was another opening above the bathroom.
The police believed the man had entered my apartment through a disused service hatch above the wardrobe. The hatch had been painted over so many times that I had never noticed its outline.
It could be lowered silently from above.
That explained why the lock was undamaged.
It explained why the camera saw no one approaching my door.
It explained the footsteps.
It did not explain who the man was.
He had watched other women
The clothing in the maintenance void did not all belong to me.
The police contacted former tenants. Two women recognized personal items they had reported missing years earlier.
One had lived in my apartment.
The other had lived on the floor below.
Both remembered strange noises at night.
Neither had reported them.
The previous female tenant of my apartment had moved suddenly after only four months. The property company claimed it did not know why.
The police later learned that she had complained about someone entering her home.
Her complaint had been dismissed because there was no sign of forced entry.
She had died two years later in another city from causes unrelated to the building.
Her death was the reason the apartment above mine was empty.
She had been renting both flats.
I still do not know why.
The police would not tell me whether they believed she had discovered the maintenance space or whether someone had used her name to rent the upper apartment.
The investigation continued for months.
No arrest was made.
The man in the blue jacket
I moved in with my brother and later found another apartment in a newer building.
I changed my number and stopped using social media. I check ceilings, vents, cupboards, and loft hatches whenever I enter a room.
People laugh when I do it.
I do not explain.
Almost a year after I moved, I received a call from the detective who had handled the case.
A man had been arrested for burglary in another neighbourhood. He carried copied building keys and wore a blue work jacket.
The police searched his home.
They found photographs of several women.
None were of me.
He denied knowing anything about my building and was never charged in connection with what happened there.
The detective said the man was probably unrelated.
Probably.
That word has stayed with me.
The final recording
Last winter, the building owner contacted me.
Renovation workers had finally started rebuilding the empty apartment. While removing part of the wall, they found an old mobile phone sealed inside a plastic bag.
The battery was dead, but police technicians recovered several audio files.
Most were recordings of ordinary sounds from the building.
Doors closing.
Water running through pipes.
People talking in the stairwell.
One recording was made inside my apartment.
I could hear myself sleeping.
For nearly eight minutes, nothing else happened.
Then floorboards creaked beside the bed.
A man breathed close to the microphone.
He whispered something too quietly for the police to understand.
They increased the volume.
The detective did not want to tell me what he said, but I insisted.
The words were:
“Not this one yet.”
I asked what he meant.
The detective said they did not know.
I asked who the man had been speaking to.
He said they did not know that either.
I no longer live alone.
I still wake whenever I hear footsteps above me.
My current apartment is on the top floor.
There is no apartment overhead.
But some nights, just after three in the morning, I hear someone walking slowly across the roof.
Three steps.
A pause.
Then three steps back.
