You mention your mother-in-law in the OP but then no other mention of her. Is she still around, have keys, staying over, in and out at all?
CO[sub]2[/sub] is carbon dioxide, which is produced by every animal on Earth. Carbon monoxide is what can kill you.
(True, extremely high concentrations of carbon dioxide can kill you too, but there’s essentially no way to have that kind of concentration occur accidentally.)
I don’t want to disregard what could be an actual intruder, but your anxiety may have led you to interpret more innocent sounds as an intruder. But as oft stated, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t following you. So even if it was nothing, maybe it’s just as well that you make your home more secure. That may reduce your anxiety, and you never know when there could be a real intruder, and maybe there was one too.
Oops.
Thanks!
Is this a single family house or a duplex/apartment type multifamily structure? Reason I ask is because of something that happened to me right after I moved into my second place away from home [I moved in with the sister of a friend] it was the first real snow storm of the year, and RIT had shown a bunch of movies including The Shining to the lot of us hanging out in the Student Union waiting for the Rochester snow plows to clear the roads enough for us to get home. Here it is, late at night and I am all alone in the apartment and I heard someone walking up and down the long hall but there was nobody there! It turned out that with the power off, the person walking in the hallway mirroring mine sounded just like they were in our hallway.
But then again, if a previous tennant has keys and let themselves in to snoop around, that would explain everything [or ghosts … ]
I’ve decided it was the cats making weird noises. When I first got the kitten, I fretted he never got along with my older cat, now they play constantly and it sounds like a herd of stampeding elephants at any given moment. I had the bathroom fan on at the time, so maybe it just twisted the sound of them playing to sound like footsteps.
aruvqan: It’s a double-wide mobile home. It’s also brand new, so no previous tenants.
Is it remotely possible that this was a dream? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had very detailed and specific intruder dreams in which I checked all the locks in the house (in the dream). Then I had to go do it all again when I’d woken up.
Does she sleep in the bathroom?
One could dream they were in the bathroom. :rolleyes: Perhaps let’s wait for the OP address the question, since she’s best situated to do so.
I beg your pardon.
Considering my immediate response was to lock my bathroom door and text both my husband and my FIL, and my husband found me wide awake, waiting in a locked bathroom, and I have evidence of all these text messages on my phone, I’d say the odds I was dreaming are quite low.
This is possibly bad advice, but it beats living with uncertainty. Next time you see or hear something, confront it. Open the door if there is pounding, run towards the footsteps if you hear it. Either you’ll have something horrible happen to you or figure out its nothing. Good luck!
That really is creepy!
On a somewhat similar vein I was once home alone, upstairs late at night using my PC and listening to music on my headphones, when the album ended I didn’t take them off.
Next thing I know I hear two men talking and moving around downstairs! I get an icy chill down my spine and moment of pure panic, desperately thinking what I should do when…I remember about the music album…of course it was one of those with the hidden extra content at the end of the tracks…
I suppose I really should have wondered why the intruders were talking in American accents (I live in Northern Ireland) :smack:
But yes, I understand why you’re freaked out!
Miss Stake and I, (no pun intended), live in a bad area. We have a huge breaking and entering problem where I am at. It is usually better to confront it where I am at, because that makes you look like a much more difficult target. It helps that that I got a shotgun too.
I still say upgrade your door & window security with physical barrier bars.
I doubt you imagined it, but even if you did it can’t hurt.
Besides, lets say the thief brags to a friend:
“hey, that key works great! She was even naked splashing around in the bathtub. I coulda done ANYTHING to her man…”
“Anything? Awww… you Gotta go back… and I wanna go Too!!!”
Stay Safe.
Ok, just had to ask. I didn’t want to assume it was an hallucination, but you did say you found everything locked with no signs of forced entry.
If it were me, I’d waste no time getting chain locks and some other physical security. I can’t prove I’m not crazy, but I sure can secure the house and rule out intruders.
There was a reddit thread about someone who was being stalked. It turned out that it was CO poisoning.
https://np.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/34l7vo/ma_postit_notes_left_in_apartment/cqvrdz6?context=3
It’s possible, of course, that the whole thread was simply a hoax, but I read it and thought, well…a CO detector is cheap and worth it.
Yeah, in addition to the chain locks, I’d be shopping for a CO monitor too.
Fascinating.
I’m fairly certain that my roommates and I were suffering from CO poisoning back in college. We came back after Christmas, realized the apartment could not be kept warm enough, and spent several days putting up weatherstripping and plastic on the windows and so on to reduce the gale-force winds in the apartment. It helped.
But for the next 2 months, all three of us were exhausted ALL THE TIME no matter how much rest we got. We all went to the student health clinic and they all threw up their hands in bafflement. We even had the gas company come out and make sure the furnace didn’t have a gas leak.
We went away for spring break, came back, and all felt much better - so we decided we were just all worn out from school.
It was 10-15 years later that I read an article on CO poisoning and realized that was very likely what was going on: near-immediate correlation with the weatherstripping, and inprovement once the weather warmed up (i.e. no more furnace). I guess the gas company guy didn’t test for CO. And we’re lucky that fatigue was all that happened, versus death or whatever.
There’s a famous reddit thread where the poster originally had issues because he thought his landlord was trying to drive him crazy. He’d come home and things would be rearranged, and there would be post it notes he’d have up where the message changed. Redditors were able to deduce that he had some kind of gas leak in the house and it was making him crazy. He got checked and I think it was CO2 or something but I’m not sure.
So don’t count out the fact that you might be crazy!