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it was in the late 90s I I can't quite remember the exact year actually um but I was dating a guy who had a
00:00:10
birthday that was a day before mine so every year we would kind of go do something for our birthdays and we
00:00:17
um didn't know what to do that particular year so we decided to go away to a small town where
00:00:24
the town it's a small town in northern California called Aetna and we neither of us had ever actually
00:00:31
been there before so we were pretty excited to go check it out um I grew up in a really small town so I
00:00:37
always kind of am drawn to vacation in small places so you're just going to go there you didn't know anything about it
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but you thought it'd be fine you just get away for a couple of days yeah I mean you know we looked at the town
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and it was really cute and we thought we'd go hiking and things like that so Aaron Peters and her boyfriend made a
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reservation at a little bed and breakfast in Aetna I can't even remember how we found it because
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you know you didn't really go online in 1997. so how did we find places in 19 I can't
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even how did we find places I can't remember I assumed that we went online and then I
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was like I don't even I don't know yeah would you call like the Chamber of Commerce I can't probably okay so you
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found a place yeah I mean I may have asked my family for a recommendation I can't even remember
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so somehow I found this bed and breakfast and as as far as I know it was one of the few places you could actually stay
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in the town There's No motel or hotel or anything like that so what did you do when you arrive at
00:01:43
the bed and breakfast um I think that we fell asleep for a while because we were both kind of
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exhausted and then we got up and I remember you know having a glass of wine and there was no one else staying there
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will you describe I mean we the the bed and breakfast a little bit what it looked like what your room was like
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it was a pretty old building um we stayed and I I'm sure it was probably the least expensive room that
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they had [Music] um but you know you're kind of your typical bed and breakfast with probably six to eight rooms in it
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total maybe even less so you met the owner she was nice and pleasant and helpful oh yeah yeah she
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was very friendly and happy to give us like suggestions on where to eat and she was basically like
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there's one restaurant that's open in town so we walk down there but when Aaron Peters and her boyfriend got to
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the restaurant it had just closed so there they were in this Tiny Town on their birthdays and they couldn't find
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anything to eat but they decided they would try to make the best of it at least they were in a pretty place they
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wandered around and took a lot of pictures this was the late 90s so Aaron and her boyfriend were shooting on film
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yeah lots of pictures of the town there are some really beautiful mountains right nearby and you can go hiking
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around there and it's really beautiful you get back to the bed and breakfast hungry
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and you just you go to sleep how did you sleep that night um I think we slept fine in fact I
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remember she had a video collection um so we watched a movie and I don't remember seeing her when we returned
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um and I remember we watched that movie about um it's basically about the clintons I
00:03:40
think primary colors I think that might be the name of it and then we went to bed after that and what was the next
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morning like she made breakfast that was you know just like some fruit and stuff like that
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I remember she had pictures of her and her husband all over kind of like the kitchen area
00:03:57
and where we were eating and she talked about her husband a little bit who had passed away
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um and they seemed you know really sweet pictures of them together and were you just there for one night
00:04:08
yeah you know I was trying to remember I think it was just one night so what happened when you got home
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um so we got home and and you know I'm sure a few days passed or some time passed and then I had taken the film in
00:04:23
to develop and I don't know if I waited and there were a couple rolls or if it was just that role
00:04:29
but when I went to pick up the prints it takes a few days or whatever and immediately you look through like I
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remember every time I would take photos you flip through the prints like immediately and you're always really
00:04:44
excited usually like sitting in your car you know and I was flipping through and
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part way in there's a picture of my boyfriend and I just kind of in our we were in our clothes like on the outside
00:04:54
of the bed you know like just kind of had fallen asleep and um I looked at it and we were both very
00:05:02
clearly asleep um and I immediately was like well how could we both be asleep like this is so
00:05:10
strange like did he you know did he happen to take this picture and you know so I'm looking at
00:05:16
it really closely um and you can just tell by you know like our eyes and the way our bodies
00:05:22
were that we were totally out I mean really asleep um so then you know I kind of freaked
00:05:29
out and I was just like how could this happen and so I um called my boyfriend I either
00:05:36
called him or you know I then you know that evening when I saw him I can't remember and I showed it to him and I
00:05:43
was like we're both asleep and he was kind of like yeah that's weird and I was like well how'd the picture get taken
00:05:49
you know and he um he was like oh yeah that's kind of creepy and I was like well you know someone else had to take
00:05:57
this picture and he wasn't nearly as I think Disturbed as I was and then of course the more I started thinking about
00:06:06
it the more I just wondered how it happened and who it could have been um did your camera have a timer on it at
00:06:15
all that could have um like not that I ever used I mean it may I'm sure it must have I was just
00:06:22
thinking about whether your boyfriend could have done it but yeah I mean he could have well no I mean he could have
00:06:28
he certainly denied doing it and he really looked asleep that was the thing that kind of threw me off I thought it
00:06:34
could have been and like oh yeah he did you know like just took a picture and it
00:06:39
was funny and he thought it was cute um but he was really asleep you know like it wasn't just me like I knew I was
00:06:46
asleep and he is very clearly asleep as well and it's also just like the angle the way it was taken it doesn't look
00:06:55
it's just like an odd angle you know like you can really see the top half of our bodies like laying in this bed
00:07:01
completely asleep what were the difference in scenarios that were running through your head oh I
00:07:07
don't know I mean at first I just I you know that there was maybe other there were other people that were guests
00:07:13
there uh but there weren't I no there was no other guess um so then I was just really freaked out
00:07:22
um you know I think I came to the conclusion that I mean I think I guess that it may have been her and I think I
00:07:30
remember even saying to him like she was so nice you know she seemed very normal
00:07:35
very normal and um so I thought oh wow what you know I don't know and I guess I thought I would never know what happened
00:07:44
um I can't that's like a horror movie well I think the weirdest part to me too was that somebody knowingly did it with
00:07:53
your own camera like knowing that you would go home and sometime later discover that they were in your room
00:08:02
I mean the fact that like you intentionally like are gonna get caught in a way you know oh man
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[Music] oh so what did you do did you call the woman no I didn't you know I didn't really do
00:08:20
anything I think that I thought maybe briefly about who I could call like could you call the sheriff or could you
00:08:26
call somebody um but then I was like what would I say and you know what what do I have to
00:08:32
prove but like all you can see is like the quilt of the bed you know and maybe like part of the bed frame so how could
00:08:38
you even prove that anybody did anything wrong you know like it just doesn't really seem like a
00:08:44
believable story I have never liked bed and breakfasts I refuse to say than them because it's for
00:08:52
me it's just this kind of it's like this forced intimacy and it's so personal and
00:08:58
so when you wake up in the morning like I never want the breakfast I don't want a woman making breakfast for me I want
00:09:03
it to be so impersonal it feels like I'm in their kitchen but I don't know them and you have to go help yourself to get
00:09:11
the orange juice oh yeah it's really and see all the other stuff in their house yeah yeah it's it's really personal and
00:09:18
you know that's the thing I'm sure we didn't lock the door um you know it's very like the whole
00:09:23
house is wide open it's not like I was nervous about my well-being that was kind of it Aaron saved the
00:09:31
photos but she tried to forget about it years later she went to a San Francisco Giants game with a friend from high
00:09:39
school and her friend's fiance Steve we're sitting there and it's the first time I had met him
00:09:44
and um he's talking about himself and I was like well Steve where are you from and
00:09:51
he was like oh I'm from Aetna and I just completely kind of froze and I was like
00:09:56
you're from Aetna and he was like yeah why and I was like oh I um I stayed at this bed and breakfast and the weirdest
00:10:07
thing happened and he didn't even need to hear any more of the story he was like yeah I know exactly what you're
00:10:13
talking about and um the woman was busted and doesn't you know no longer has this bed and
00:10:21
breakfast and I was other people well I according to according to this um you know to my friends uh fiance yeah
00:10:31
and that she had gotten caught and I asked him a couple more questions but you know we were at a baseball game so I
00:10:37
didn't I didn't find out too much but it was just a trip and you know then of course I after the fact had lots of
00:10:44
questions like how did she get caught and how many years had she been doing this
00:10:50
oh and then I started thinking about um did she used to do this with her husband they had run this place together
00:10:55
for years like how long has this been going on I mean maybe she thought she was giving
00:11:01
you a nice memory or something yeah that's a nice way to think about it I I don't know it's it's so scary I I
00:11:09
don't know I guess I would have to assume that there was the maybe the idea or the thrill of kind
00:11:16
of freaking someone out a little bit um I don't know maybe that's why she did it
00:11:22
I really have no idea I was hoping you guys could figure that out we made some calls one guy said there
00:11:31
used to be an old Inn and a big Victorian house it's since burned down the locals nicknamed it the peekaboo Inn
00:11:38
because the owner would spy on his guests through holes he drilled in the walls maybe that's what Aaron's friend Steve
00:11:46
was thinking about but we didn't find a single thing about it in the newspaper archives
00:11:52
we tried the Aetna police department they did not return our call maybe one day we'll take a trip out there and try
00:12:00
to finish the story we did happen to stumble across a 2011 guide to owning and operating bed and
00:12:07
breakfast in a section about thank you notes it says some hosts like to take a photograph of each guest at some point
00:12:16
during the visit and mail it as a memento it goes on to say this is a great idea
00:12:22
provided that the timing and occasion of taking the picture are appropriate Aaron Peters got in touch with us a few
00:12:31
months ago after he spoke with a woman named Amber Dawn the first night I moved in
00:12:39
you know I had I had been playing music while I was unpacking and I went to bed that night and I
00:12:45
turned off the music and I was laying in my bed and I heard footsteps in the Attic
00:12:53
and they're very clear footsteps if you missed that one it's called a bump in the night
00:13:01
at the end of the episode we asked you to get in touch if something unusual like that had ever happened to you
00:13:08
a lot of people wrote to us so today for our last episode of 2017 here are the ones we couldn't stop
00:13:18
thinking about I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal [Music] foreign [Music] one morning me and Brett had woken up
00:13:40
for band practice really early and MJ woke up for football practice and we were walking around the house and
00:13:47
noticed that somebody had opened up all of the cupboards and drawers and the microwave door and the oven door and
00:13:54
shower stall doors and everything the refrigerator the dishwasher the dryer the washer everything was open what do
00:14:02
you mean you woke up in the morning and it was all open or yeah we all had just gone to bed after
00:14:07
like a normal night and then woke up in the morning and everything was open yeah
00:14:11
everything was just left wide open as if a ghost had come through the house and blowing everything open or something we
00:14:17
weren't sure how to explain it in their senior year of college at Ohio State Mark Hartman and Brett McGlynn
00:14:24
moved into a huge house with a lot of their friends 10 of them but Mark Brett and their friend MJ got there a little
00:14:33
before everyone else because they had to start training for marching band and football
00:14:39
they'd only been there for a few days when they woke up to find everything opened up but even before that the house
00:14:46
was apparently just bad here's Mark oh it was terrible uh we moved in and it was as if uh no one had ever been in the
00:14:55
house since the last tenants moved out there was trash everywhere and everything was still dirty and there was
00:15:03
furniture and some electrical problems and some stairs in the house were falling apart and things like that it
00:15:11
was a very large house I mean on our lease there are 10 of us and we took up the second and the third floor there is
00:15:22
a completely separate lease though on the first floor and there was no actual physical separation between our
00:15:30
leases there was like a staircase that would go down to like a door that just walked out of the house
00:15:37
um and you could get to any floor from there including the basement okay so it was just three of you in this big house
00:15:42
at this point at this point in time yeah did you ever think that one of the other
00:15:47
people was playing a trick on you yeah honestly uh Brett had slap walked a few times throughout
00:15:54
college so I kind of assumed maybe he had just slept walked and done some something random like that
00:16:01
but I was on the third floor of the house and it seemed a pretty impressive feat for me to sleepwalk down a flight
00:16:08
of stairs open up everything and then walk back upstairs without hurting myself so
00:16:14
I didn't seem like it was really what happened [Music] yeah what did you do I mean I think that I
00:16:22
would be really scary I think I would try to get out of the house what did you do we decided to go
00:16:30
to go grabs you know you know and then we were going through all the rooms and opening the closets
00:16:35
and so all of you had a baseball bat yeah or a baseball bat or a knife or a something like one of us would hold the
00:16:44
closet and the other one have like baseball bat ready to like jump at anything that like came out of the
00:16:50
closet we would kind of like open the doors quickly as if we were a SWAT team or something yeah basically breach and
00:16:57
clear uh and other than just like the house being dirty um we didn't really find anything until
00:17:04
we went to the basement oh yeah we definitely saved that for last so when we went down there
00:17:13
um I mean it's very dark in the basement uh it was like a different like uh boilers and Breakers
00:17:22
and whatnot but there's also a door down there and there's a door that none of us
00:17:28
had the key to and MJ started freaking out so what we ended up doing is just we propped up a uh a door that was lying
00:17:38
around in the basement we propped it up in the open uh doorway that led down to the basement and put a wedged chair
00:17:45
between it and the door so that whatever was down there wouldn't come back up so it's like in case there was like a
00:17:53
like a monster or like a bad guy you this would help this would save you yeah yeah I guess that's what we did to try
00:18:01
to make ourselves feel safe I would get worried that I'd be happy that I had barricaded the door but I
00:18:09
also think I'd be worried that if someone were in there I would be starving them to death exactly and that
00:18:14
was kind of some of my motivation to take down that uh the chair wedge between the wall and the door that we
00:18:20
had I was like in case he was down there I didn't want didn't want to trap someone down there
00:18:26
you know or make them even more mad exactly so after that initial search did you did
00:18:34
you go back down into the basement so I lived on the third floor and uh I don't know if it was faulty
00:18:44
wiring or you know a bad breaker or something but like uh every like like three or four times a
00:18:52
week like just all the power in my room would just shut off and I'd have to like go down to the
00:18:58
basement flip the breaker and then the power would be back on my way so one of those times that I had to
00:19:03
go flip the breaker um it just so happened that that door was open [Music] I was kind of shocked like so I like
00:19:17
walked downstairs looked into the door and it was just a normal bedroom like had mattress and dresser and
00:19:25
you know a normal College looking room and then uh from the bathroom somebody said or a guy said like I was wondering
00:19:33
when I get to meet the people that live here like a like a regular college student
00:19:40
and when was he just kind of Kennedy you're completely non-threatening and um later that day A bunch of us were
00:19:54
hanging out and Brett's talking to the downstairs roommates and and says hey I met your guy's roommate Jeremy today and
00:20:03
they were like we don't have a roommate named Jeremy he's like yeah he's the one down the
00:20:08
basement no one had ever heard of anyone named Jeremy so they called their landlord who called
00:20:16
the police I come home from practice there are police and landlords and all my roommates out on the lawn and it's
00:20:26
very chaotic scene no uh I don't think the guy was actually downstairs when the police came so like I don't actually
00:20:33
know what happened to him I'm honestly not sure I came home and he wasn't home when they knocked his door down and uh
00:20:42
then a couple days later I went down and all the stuff was gone I never saw him again who was this guy
00:20:50
um he was just a student going for a master's degree at Ohio State the school newspaper the lantern wrote
00:20:59
up the incident and they made a video what they found shocked everyone a bedroom that someone else had been
00:21:06
living in no what like you got to be kidding me Jeremy had access to a bathroom in the
00:21:13
basement and a sink that he could have used to do laundry but the guys don't think he ever ate their food or went
00:21:18
into their rooms Chelsea Spears for the lantern did you feel a little famous oh I did it was crazy how much it how
00:21:27
much it blew up um we got we had articles on USA Today ABC headquarters in New York called me did
00:21:36
an interview Jay Leno talked about us in his monologue Steve Harvey contacted me asking asking
00:21:42
if we wanted to go on a show it was pretty crazy did you do any of these things I did a few of them I didn't I
00:21:48
didn't physically go anywhere like I think Steve Harvey's thing would have required us to fly to Chicago
00:21:55
so uh I did a couple of phone interviews and things like that but Mark and Brett graduated and moved out
00:22:02
of that big house the one thing that always bothered me about that whole sequence of events is we never really
00:22:08
figured out who went around opening up all those cabinets but years later I'm working at
00:22:17
a startup and eventually the people at the startup like you know find out about this story and so like
00:22:25
you know people are talking about it and one of the people I'm working with comes
00:22:29
up to me and starts to talk to me about the story and you know this random co-worker of
00:22:36
mine told me it was him he was the one that opened up all those cabinets he had lived in the house the year
00:22:43
before us and the guy that was in the basement was a cousin of one of the people that was on their lease
00:22:51
and they had made some kind of arrangement with him that he would pay them a little bit of money in order to
00:22:56
live in that room in the basement after they had left their lease that guy decided to keep his key and then he
00:23:05
would like periodically come in and then just kind of like screw with the people
00:23:08
living in the house you know opening cabinets and like other things like that but I guess they had never told the
00:23:15
basement roommate that they were leaving although how you could not tell that everybody had left
00:23:21
you know it's beyond me so the probably the guy in the basement just decided to stay there as long as he could because
00:23:28
you know you're living there for free essentially because he could just sneak in in that side entrance and go straight
00:23:35
to the basement without ever being seen by anyone basically I mean it's awful it is awful to think
00:23:43
that you know when you go to a place who's like okay well the last people are gone it's safe for me it's crazy to
00:23:48
think that someone else would have the keys to the house that you just moved into
00:23:51
yeah that's pretty creepy like I mean it wasn't just like the guy in the basement it was also
00:23:58
that co-worker of mine he also had keys and I have to assume that it wasn't just
00:24:05
him that also had keys I wonder how many landlords never actually changed the locks
00:24:15
[Music] no hello I'm looking for Amanda hello it's Phoebe judge calling are you in Texas I am in Texas I'm in
00:24:33
Austin well thanks very much for speaking with us and for writing in about your story
00:24:38
of course um I thought it was an interesting story that y'all had done and um at the end of it I was like oh
00:24:45
well yeah it's kind of happened to me and I honestly I wasn't really expecting an
00:24:50
email back so here we have to look at that here we are well so just again introduce yourself will you
00:24:58
um my name's Amanda I grew up in a really small town and I came to Austin for school I went to Saint Edwards
00:25:07
University so you grew up in a small town in Texas it's called Yocum it's uh about an hour
00:25:15
and a half Southeast ish of Austin so when you left and came to Austin was Austin kind of like a big it must be a
00:25:24
big City compared to Yoakum oh yes very much so um Yocum has got I think 5 000 people
00:25:30
roughly and what car were you driving then I'm thinking about this car it doesn't
00:25:46
have a lot of it's not that ostentatious it's not that fancy it's it's just like it's a car
00:25:53
it's a simple good car they're a diamond doesn't like you see them all the time it's that's my that's
00:25:59
been my first car that I've ever had that I'm still driving um but I don't have the original key
00:26:07
um to the car and because I just have a copy anytime I lock my door and I don't have a clicker
00:26:14
anymore so anytime I lock my door I have to put the key in to unlock it and because it's
00:26:21
not the original key it just there's this alarm that goes off every single time and it doesn't stop until I start the
00:26:27
ignition she says this alarm is horrible and she hates it so she just doesn't lock the
00:26:33
car and leaving it unlocked isn't a big deal for one she says she never leaves anything of value in her car she says
00:26:41
that if she did have something worth stealing she'd rather someone just open the door to take it better than breaking
00:26:47
a window and she never had any issues she'd been in Austin for a couple of years never
00:26:54
locking the car and never having any trouble until one morning when she was a junior in college it had rained really
00:27:05
and I went out into my car and I noticed that my seat was pushed all the way back
00:27:11
and I kind of thought it was odd but I was like well you know maybe I just did this and I forgot that I had done this
00:27:20
um and I was probably running late to class already so I kind of just brushed It Off
00:27:26
um and it continued to ring kind of heavy that day and into the next day and overnight and that's when I noticed it a
00:27:35
second time it was the second day that my seat had been pushed back and just down all the way down
00:27:43
and that's when I was like oh somebody slept in here okay you're just like okay you said okay okay
00:27:53
you know there's not anything I could do other than lock my car um but I guess in the back of my mind I
00:28:00
thought oh well this is a creative way to not you know sleep in the rain and stay out of the rain so
00:28:08
um I just kind of Let It Go and it was something that continued to happen and that was just kind of our little system
00:28:17
did you notice any other strange things was it in the car no um um I'd be given a little gift
00:28:28
uh so there were some bushes that would Bloom near uh next to my apartment and occasionally there would be a flower
00:28:37
there [Music] um one time they left me a little bit of change in my senior year they left me a little
00:28:45
rained that you would get like out of a coin machine but nothing was ever taken from my car
00:28:52
[Music] um or really moved other than my seat uh there was another time that my work sweater that had been in
00:29:03
the back because I kind of just took it off and threw it in the back um was actually up in the front seat and
00:29:12
that one was I think the only time that they actually used anything of mine and I remember thinking oh well it was
00:29:19
really cold last night so do you think that you're the nicest person on Earth I think I would have locked that door
00:29:34
after about night too that's fair um and it's something I I mean I lost my car occasionally but I mean even like even
00:29:43
right now it's I know for a fact it's not locked and they were leaving you little thank
00:29:48
you gifts yeah never um any actual interaction and that was the interesting thing is that over this
00:29:56
like year and a half almost two year long period we never ran into each other we never saw each other
00:30:03
um that was just kind of our little system was I'll leave my car open and you can
00:30:09
sleep here and if I mean you don't have to leave anything but occasionally they would and that was it and that was our
00:30:16
system for two years and we just don't talk so I get it and and I think I get you
00:30:22
park the car you don't need it but what what happened if you in the middle of the night got sick and thought I have to
00:30:28
go and I have to get some Tylenol I have to go I mean would it then what would that keep you from going I like I don't
00:30:36
want to wake them up and they're in the middle of their sleep I don't know that that never
00:30:45
really occurred to me like what what I guess if it were raining I'd probably make one of my roommates come with me
00:30:51
and you know feel like yeah I gotta use my car right now you gotta go buddy so this was you think this was only
00:31:00
happening when it was raining yeah it only happened when it would rain and it would have to rain fairly heavily
00:31:08
so not too too often but often enough that saying you where to find my car and they knew it was open
00:31:17
after graduation Amanda went to Cambodia to teach English for a year so she was gone and her car wasn't in its usual
00:31:25
spot in her apartment complex I did think about that at the end of my senior year when I was moving that
00:31:35
um like I was like well where are they gonna where are they gonna sleep now hopefully they can find another place
00:31:42
that's safe you know it's funny everybody is so afraid of everything lately and I'm so afraid of everyone
00:31:50
else this is a good reminder we don't have to be they needed was a shelter and if I can provide that in a
00:32:03
really small way then yeah why not [Music] thank you thanks to everyone who wrote To Us with
00:32:21
mysterious stories from their lives hearing from you is one of the best parts of the job
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we'll be back in January with brand new Criminal stories and we're excited to announce that we're also working on a
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little side project that has nothing to do with crime we'll tell you more about it in the new year
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thanks so much for listening and supporting us it means an awful lot criminalists produced by Lauren Spore
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Nadia Wilson and me audio mix by Rob Byers our intern is Matilda or fellino Julian Alexander makes original
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illustrations for each episode of Criminal you can see them at thisiscriminal.com where on Facebook and
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Twitter at criminal show criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina public radio wunc we're a
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proud member of radiotopia from PRX a collection of the best podcasts around and thanks to adzerk for providing their
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ad serving platform to radiotopia until next year I'm Phoebe judge this is Criminal
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[Laughter] [Music] radiotopia from PRX