The guy could feel his heart stop in his chest. It was like he was watching a horror movie, but it was real life - his life. He had been waiting impatiently for days and was finally hoping to find out what had happened to the food in his apartment.
He wanted proof that he was not crazy after his girlfriend continually denied being the culprit. Finally, the proof was in his hands. But it was something he would have liked never to see.
Joe Cummings is an actor who has lived in Manhattan for two years. It's not easy to make ends meet in New York. He is therefore always wary of the amount of his expenses.
So when he started having to shop more often because the food in his fridge and pantry was gone quickly, he became worried. His routine had not changed, so he had no reason to eat more than usual. But there was someone else living with him who could know the answer.
Joe lived with his girlfriend and luckily they had good relationships. But this problem with the food started to gnaw him. One night, as he slept, he heard strange noises coming from the kitchen: a thump on the floor, a creaking door, steps.
In his sleep, he could not tell if it was real or if he was dreaming. But the next morning, when some of the food that was there the night before was gone, he realized he had to act.
Joe asked his girlfriend if she had secretly eaten at night. "I continued to find missing food in my apartment and I knew I was not eating," he recalls. "I confronted my girlfriend who lives with me about it and she says she did not eat it." Joe did not want to call his girlfriend a liar, but he also knew that something was happening in the food .
Maybe she was a sleepwalker without knowing it. Heck, maybe he was. But the only way to know for sure was to obtain evidence.
Another thought soon came to Joe. Maybe an animal entered the apartment and stole the food. But that seemed very unlikely. He always made sure to lock all doors and windows at night because his neighborhood was not the safest.
Not to mention that the food in the refrigerator was gone and he knew no creature able to open the refrigerator doors. It must have been something or someone else. And he had finished speculating - it was time to act.
Joe bought a security camera equipped with night vision. He set it up at the kitchen corner, near the roof, making sure the corner had an unobstructed view of the refrigerator and the pantry. He decided not to tell his girlfriend so that if it was her, he could catch her in flagrante delicto.
He lit it and spent his day. The next morning, he removed the memory card and prepared to finally know the truth. But it turned out he was not ready at all.
The movie starts pretty normal. It's late at night and Joe and his girlfriend are getting ready to go to bed. They turn off all lights and leave the kitchen.
During the next two hours, there is no movement, except for occasional lights coming from the street. Then something starts to stir. And nothing could have prepared Joe for what he was about to see.
Joe looks out of breath as a woman slowly pulls out of the storage area above the kitchen entrance. "My girlfriend must have discovered the camera and done it to give me a joke," he thinks. But the hairs on the nape stand up.
He feels that something is wrong at all. He continues to watch the images, hypnotized.
The woman leaves the reserve, crawls on a table and stabilizes. Then she reaches out and grabs a nearby step, with which she jumps to the ground. It seems to Joe that she has done this before.
His mind was walking miles away as he tried to figure out why his girlfriend would go through all this trouble. Then the woman looks up and sees her face as clear as day. And it's not his girlfriend.
The woman in the video is none other than a complete stranger. Joe does not believe his eyes. But, in spite of his horror, he lets the images turn. He observes her as she goes around her kitchen, as comfortable as if it were his.
She opens the fridge door and drinks juice straight out of the box. Then she climbs on the sink and urinates. Joe watches the nightmare unfold and he continues to worsen.
At one point in the video, the woman is sitting on Joe's couch nibbling when she hears a noise from the bedroom. Surprised, she enters the kitchen and hides. Then Joe appears and goes to the fridge for a glass of water.
A few minutes after her departure, the woman returns and resumes her food attack. It takes hours, but Joe can not keep his eyes out of the footage.
Joe watches as the morning light begins to appear and the woman crawls into the storage area. Shortly after, he sees himself entering the kitchen, dressed in his everyday clothes.
He opens the fridge and drinks the juice straight out of the box, just as the woman did a few hours ago. He looks at the video until the end, then stays still while the implications of what he has just seen begin to come to light.
Joe felt a mixture of terror and relief - after all, the pictures proved he was not crazy. Someone had stolen his food. But it was not his girlfriend, as he had thought from the beginning.
It was something much worse. There was a strange woman in her apartment, hidden in a storage room in the kitchen while sitting a few steps from the bedroom. He had to get out of there, quickly.
Joe grabbed his computer and rushed out of his apartment. He ran to the nearest police station, where he explained what had happened and showed them the images of security. "I do not know how she got there," he said.
"The only way to get in is through the window because I'm on the top floor and there's an escape route." The cops then escorted Joe home, where they were able to arrest the woman. But what they discovered only made him even more petrified.
After questioning the woman, the police discovered that she had been hiding in Joe's apartment for at least two weeks. "The police think she will probably steal me when I'm gone and decide to stay in the crawl space," he said. Once the ordeal ended, he posted the terrifying movie on YouTube, where he quickly became viral.
And while many doubt about Joe's story, it's not a bad idea to regularly check your storage space: you never know what might be hidden there. But this is not the first time something like this has happened.
It was like a horror movie coming to life. Part of her even wondered if she had a very lucid nightmare. There was no other way for her to explain what was happening.
But it was not a fiction. He was there, at home, since who knows how long without it having any clue. And when all the implications of this fact began to emerge for her, she could not help but panic.
Even before this incident, life had not been easy for Tracy. She was a single mother of five and lived in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Throughout her life, she struggled to make ends meet and provide for her family.
Some of her children were now grown up, but they all lived together in the family home to reduce costs. Despite their circumstances, they lived a happy family life. But then, something began to happen that threatened all that.
One day in September, Tracy started hearing strange noises coming from the attic. The first thing she thought was that there might be an intruder, but she was always very careful to lock all doors and windows. She did it as a precaution because they lived in a poor part of the city and burglaries were quite common.
She saw no sign of forced entry and so it's all up to her imagination. But she soon began to wonder if anything else was happening.
Over the next few days, Tracy still heard random sounds coming from above. She asked her children if they were playing in the attic, but they all said no. She believed them - the attic was dark and moldy and was not a fun place for kids.
She rarely went up there herself, except when she had something to store. But as the noises continued, she proposed a different theory.
One day, as she cleaned the house, Tracy realized that the sounds in the attic were also moving from room to room. Then, it came to mind that the strange noises could very well come from a possum or raccoon that had somehow found in his house. She thought she would need to call animal control.
However, it was a Saturday and they did not work on weekends. So she decided to wait until Monday. But the presence in the attic seemed to have other projects.
That night, around half past two in the morning, Tracy was awakened by creaks on the ceiling. But this time, she also heard gentle beat noises on the floor of her own room. She looked down and in the twilight of the night she saw a number of nails scattered on the carpet.
She realized that the nails were coming out of the planks of the ceiling. His heart stopped - it was not a possum or a raccoon.
Tracy remembers thinking "there were poltergeist problems." She was too terrified to go to the attic to investigate. So she threw the blanket over her head and did her best to go back to sleep. But she knew she had to do something about any entity occupying her attic.
She could not continue living like this. The next morning she acted.
In the morning, Tracy was relieved to hear that her nephew was visiting her two grown-up sons at her home. The presence of the three young men comforted her. She told them about the noise on the ceiling and asked them to check the attic.
The men climbed as Tracy waited just outside the attic door in the hallway. None of them were prepared for what they would find.
Once in the attic, the young men realized that something was wrong. A strong nauseating odor struck them immediately and they saw garbage scattered on the ground.
The old coats and jackets that Tracy kept for storage were all in a corner of the room near the heating unit. And then they saw it - it was a body.
As soon as the men began to move into the attic, the body in the corner stirred. Apparently, he was sleeping there before going up. He looked at them and they looked at him, and they all stopped in surprise for a few seconds.
Then the man got up and rushed towards them towards the stairs. Tracy saw him as he escaped and she realized terribly that she knew this man.
The man wanted to find Tracy, but she refused. Then one day, he stole his truck. He was then caught and sent to prison. But while he was locked up, he continued to harass Tracy.
He sent her letters informing him that he had changed and begging her to pick him up. After his release, Tracy heard the rumor that he had moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. But she discovered the truth in the worst possible way.
The police responded to the call and searched the attic where the man had been found. It seemed like he had been living there for a few weeks. "He had packed all the old coats and jackets in the heating unit and was sleeping in the heating unit," says Tracy.
They also found a number of plastic cups where he had relieved himself, which explains the bad smell. But an even more frightening discovery was soon made.
The investigators discovered that the intruder had installed the vents on the ceiling so he could look into Tracy's room. Tracy could not contain her horror at the thought of her spy eyes. "I am stunned," she said in an interview.
"How can you look at someone through a vent?" What was worse, they still did not know how he had entered the attic, because the only door leading to it was in the hallway between his children's bedrooms. And the threat remained.
Although the police know his identity, the man was able to escape the authorities and is still on the run. A few days later, Tracy thought she saw him near her house, but the police were not able to find him. She wants justice.
"I want him to be charged," she said. "It could be someone else to whom he is doing the same thing, but she might not be so lucky."