To set the tone, I always hated the town I lived in. I moved there alone when I was 18 for college and quickly regretted it. It was a decent sized town but full of not decent people. Nearly every gas station was robbed frequently, there were shootings in broad daylight, robberies, you name it.

Well for the first 3 years I lived with roommates on a side of town that wasnt awful, but it was sketchy. So when I was making decent enough money I moved out on my own.

The house was tiny. Maybe 500 sqft if that, super old and poorly built. It was just me living there so I didn't mind how small it was - but what originally sold me was that it was in the middle of nowhere. It was surrounded by a bunch of fields and some wooded areas with only a few houses nearby. Considering I hated being in the town due to the continuous paranoia of getting mugged or shot, I loved the idea of living out there. So at the beginning of July I moved in. Everything seemed super swell minus not being able to get good internet. A month goes by and everything is still swell to me, and I decided to get a dog to keep me company. He also loved the place, and spent long amounts of time lounging about the yard and trying to convince the nearest neighbor to walk over and pet him. (Important later)

Roughly 2 months into living there I started to notice things out of place. (Something to note is that an old roommate of mine was using my spare room as a storage space until he got moved himself, so he had a key but was never there. He just kinda popped in once every other week to grab something and usually let me know beforehand. ) But I'd come home to my kitchen chair being pulled away from my table, or a bowl in the sink, things like that. They were such small things I wrote it off as my roommate swinging by or just stuff i was forgetting. But then my dog developed this crazy bad separation anxiety. Up until now he didn't even care when I left, he'd just lay on the couch and chew his toys. He never barked, never did anything weird. However, all of a sudden he began acting really awful every time I tried to leave. He'd literally cram his body through the door as I was closing it, screaming and barking and wouldn't stop until I came back in the house. He didn't want me to leave him there alone. At all.

I couldn't afford a kennel for him yet so I decided one day that I'd put a movie in while I was out, thinking maybe the sound of people talking might keep him calmed down. I only had to finish one task up at work and knew I'd be home early, so I put in a copy of Hamlet. I know, boring, but I chose it because the copy I have is 5 hours long. I knew it would be playing when I came back.

Flash forward 3 hours, long before Hamlet should have been over but when I walked in the door not only was the movie not playing, but the TV and the xbox were completely off.
I immediately called my "roommate" and asked if he had been over, and he wasn't even in town. I explained the tv situation to him and he shrugged it off as the tv powering off when it idles for awhile. Even though this is true, there are several reasons I know this isn't the case.

1. It wasn't idling. A 5 hour movie was supposed to be playing.
2. Even if it had shut off, my Xbox wouldn't have. I have left it on by accident for weeks I was gone out of town or whatever and it was still on when I came home. Always. But it was completely powered down this time.

The weird thing is none of my stuff was missing and the door was locked when I entered. I eventually convinced myself that it was something weird with the Xbox or whatever and shrugged it off. That is until my dog started acting even weirder. Remember earlier I mentioned he used to play with the neighbor? Well all of a sudden if she even walked by the house while he was out he'd start yelping and running at me away from her. This was incredibly weird to me, and made me incredibly cautious of her.

I put some cheap alarms on my doors, (the kind that go off when the door is opened ) and slept with my pistol handy. The second night the alarms were on my doors I was woken up by the one on the back door going off. I flew out of bed with my pistol, trying to convince myself that I was about to shoot some intruder, but once I got to the door it was shut and there was nobody there. The alarm had been knocked all the way across the room. The door would have had to opened for it to be chucked like that. It couldn't have fallen off and landed there. Something else weird, the door was locked. But not the way I had locked it. I always locked the knob AND the deadbolt, but upon checking my lock after this, only the door knob was locked. The police wouldn't do much as I had no witnesses, no lead, and they didn't have much to go on.

Needless to say I changed the locks. I didn't have any noticable problems inside after that, but later found out that the "close neighbor" that my dog hated had previously lived in the house I was renting, and the locks had never been changed. I have no way to prove my theory but it's pretty obvious she had a key and was coming and going as she pleased. Why though I can't figure out. Nothing of mine ever went missing. The most unsettling part for me though is that she had tried to come in at night until the alarm scared her off. How many times has she been in my house at night while I was asleep....and why???