Let's Not Meet~ Reddit Horror Stories

Somebody Repeatedly Breaks Into Room And Leaves 'Gifts'

This happened to a close friend and housemate of mine whilst at university. I'll call her Laura for the purposes of this story.

We were in our second year of university, and while it's typical to move out of halls and into a house during second year, for financial reasons we both decided to apply to stay in our halls of residence again. We attended the University of York (in the UK), and chose the college just behind the library due to the en suite bath rooms and the close location to Heslington West (where all our lectures were held).

The halls were 3 floors high, with 10 people living on each floor, and everyone seemed pretty nice. Everyone had a key card, which you had to use to access the main building, and again to access your floor (only the key card specific to that floor would work), and the only other way to access the building was if you rang the buzzer and someone physically came and opened the door. If you lost your key card, you had to report it to the porter and it would instantly be cancelled so it no longer worked and you would be issued a new one.

Now I've described our living situation, I'll proceed with the story. Term started off normally enough. My friend and I were both on the same course (genetics), and we attended our lectures (unless we were too hungover), did society stuff, went to the library and etc. We were a fan of midnight library trips, and one day we came back from the library around 2am.

We buzzed ourselves in, went in the lift to the second floor, and headed to our respective rooms to sleep. I was brushing my teeth maybe five minutes later, and there was a knock on my door. I answered it, and Laura came in with a confused expression and asked me to come to her room with her.

I followed her, and she went over to her desk and picked up an origami swan. She swore she hadn't made it, and that it hadn't been there before our library trip. She asked me if I'd put it in there at any point, but I'd never seen it before.

While we used cards to buzz ourselves through the door system, we unlocked our personal rooms with a key. I asked her if she'd locked her room before going out, and she insisted that she had. I told her that she must have forgotten and left it unlocked accidentally, and that it would just be one of our housemates pratting around. It's not uncommon for people to prank each other at uni- during my first year, a housemate left his room unlocked, so we went and wrapped all his stuff in tin foil and clingfilm. Laura was still looking a bit worried however, but I told her not to worry, and she agreed that a paper swan was innocent enough, so she let it go and we both went to bed.

Around a week and a half passed, and we were busy with uni so we'd pretty much forgotten about the weird origami swan incident. In this time, Laura had asked all our housemates about it, but none of them owned up, so we decided that it was definitely a housemate messing around but not wanting to admit it was them. One day, we had a gap between our morning lectures and a laboratory session in the afternoon, so we came home to make some lunch. I was making a sandwich in the kitchen chatting with a couple of our other housemates, and Laura came in. She was carrying another origami swan and a ribbon. She said the ribbon had been around her door handle, and that the swan had been on her desk again.

This time, I knew she'd locked her door as we'd headed out for our 9am lecture together that morning, and I'd seen her do it. I was a bit confused, but I still insisted that it had to be one of our housemates messing around, because no one else could get in that corridor due to the door card system. Laura agreed with me, but was concerned because she knew she'd lost her key whilst drunk during freshers week.

I hadn't known this, but apparently a few days into term, we'd been on a night out out to a club, and the next morning Laura hadn't been able to find her key. She said she figured she must have lost it in the club somewhere, and had immediately gone to the porters and paid the fine to collect the new key. They'd told her just to hand the missing one in if it ever turned up.