Let's Not Meet Again

An Unexpected Visitor

This took place about 6 months ago now I think. In order for this story to make sense, I have to explain a little bit about my apartment. I live in an old house that was renovated and divided into 3 apartments: one basement suite, one on the main floor, and one little one in the attic. I live in the attic apartment with my boyfriend.

The entrance to the attic apartment is rather difficult to find and either my boyfriend or I often have to go out and collect our pizza from confused delivery guys because even with our instructions they can't figure out how to get to us.

In order to get to our place, you would have to squeeze through the narrow space in between the two cars parked in the house's driveway, stumble over some uneven stepping stones and long grass (a little tricky to navigate in the dark if you aren't used to it), open the gate, go down the path, and then to your right you would find a tall set of wooden stairs leading up the side of the house to our attic door at the top.

Now, I used to get home from work around 9:30pm, so it was around this time when I came home this one night, went through the gate, and was just about at the stairs when I stopped dead. There was a man sprawled out on his front across the bottom of the stairs, apparently asleep or passed out. He was lying vertically and had one arm stretched up above his head like it was reaching out. It looked really creepy. His head was down so I couldn't see his face.

I was instantly freaked out. I had never seen this guy in my life and I had no idea how he had stumbled his way to our stairs in the first place, in the dark and presumably drunk (my only logical assumption at this point was that he was passed out drunk - he didn't seem to be hurt, didn't have a scratch on him and his clothes were perfectly clean). I could see that he was breathing, which was a plus (...right?), but his body was blocking the stairs and there was no way I could get up to the apartment without risking waking him, and I just got an incredibly bad feeling at the thought of trying to walk past him.

I was too scared to touch him or try waking him up. I just had that bad gut feeling in spades so I just quietly backed away, went back to the front of the house and phoned my boyfriend, Tim. Thankfully he answered. I asked him if he was home and then I told him about the guy on the steps.

Tim must've thought I was joking or something - he told me there couldn't be a guy on our steps because he had JUST come home literally minutes before and there had been nobody there, or any sign of anyone. He also hadn't heard any noises or anything from outside. From inside our apartment, we can always hear someone coming up the steps and we can usually hear the gate shut too, so one would assume the sound of a large, muscular drunk man stumbling through the gate, then falling face first on our steps would've made some noise. Apparently not. I insisted that there was seriously a guy sprawled out on the stairs and I was too scared to try to go around him. After opening the door and looking out, Tim could see I was entirely correct.

Not sure what else to do, Tim called the police (just the non-emergency line, not 911, as we didn't think it warranted that). I stood in front of the house while we waited for the cops. For some reason they ended up sending a cop car, an ambulance, and a fire truck, all with sirens blaring, even though we hadn't reported it as an emergency.

The paramedics were the first on the scene so I directed them to the side of the house where the guy was and I came around to watch. Although he hadn't moved throughout the deafening noise of the sirens, he seemed to wake up fairly quickly when the paramedics shook him. He stood up on his own, steadily, and didn't appear to be impaired. At this point the paramedics asked me to go back around the front, out of earshot, as they asked the man questions.

When I went back to the front of the house, there was a blonde woman standing the driveway watching the commotion. She asked me what was going on and I explained it to her. I said I felt awkward to have caused so much drama by calling the police but we just couldn't think of anything else to do and we had a bad feeling about the whole thing.

She immediately reassured me that I'd done the right thing, saying "oh no, he had to GO!" She then told me that she was the neighbour and the guy had been lurking around her property earlier. She said she had chased him away but he had come back until her dad, the property owner, had come and told him to leave. So I have no idea why he was creeping around our two houses or how he wound up passed out on our steps.

Either the cops or the paramedics took the guy away quietly and we never found out anything more about the situation, but it really creeped us out. This is most likely just extreme paranoia, but I really got the feeling he was just waiting for me to get too close to him...? There was something almost....staged about the way he way he was positioned on the stairs. It gives me shivers just remembering it.