The Month

On the 7th of February 2009, the following was posted on a forum in a thread about its users' most disturbing experiences:


 * I'm one of two janitors in a large apartment complex. My job includes checking up on tenants that haven't been seen in a month due to the fact that to enter or exit the apartment complex, one must pass a security camera at the porte-cochère. What that means is that if a tenant has not been seen in a month, there's a good chance they're dead. Before this incident, I'd already found three dead bodies (two old people passed away from natural causes and a junkie who OD'd). So, naturally, when the landlord told me to go check an apartment rented by a guy in his fifties one morning, I was expecting to find him dead.


 * When I went in, there was a kind of musty smell. It was pretty faint so it didn't seem likely for there to be a corpse lying around. I called out the tenant's name but got no response. I went around the apartment looking for him and to see if it looked like he'd been there recently or not. There wasn't much dust anywhere, so it definitely seemed like he was still living there.


 * When I opened the bedroom door, I literally screamed and backed away. There was what appeared to be a mummified woman sitting on the bed. You know, all dark grey-brown and dry-looking with an open-mouthed grimace with teeth visible, arms positioned kind of awkwardly, a couple of patches of hair on the head, all naked. That was clearly where the smell came from, but it didn't really smell like a dead body as far as I could tell. Now, obviously I'd never smelled a mummy before, so I couldn't be sure; to my nose it smelled like garbage and cum.


 * I called the police. Turned out it was actually not a mummy; it was basically a homemade sex doll, so there probably was a lot of cum inside it. I'm not sure what it was made of, but even the police were a bit freaked out when they first saw it. Oh, and the guy was hiding under his own bed and only came out when the cops showed up... I really don't know what to make of that, and I don't think he even tried to explain. That made the whole experience so much scarier, because what the fuck? The guy still lives in that apartment, presumably still fucking that creepy ass life-size mummy doll.

–

Six days later, the same user posted a thread about people ringing his doorbell and throwing pebbles at his window every night. He begged people to stop bothering him, explaining that he did not care what people did in the privacy of their bedrooms and that he understood the tenant was likely suffering from some kind of mental illness. He also explained that he couldn't just move because his job required him to live in the apartment complex. Others were quick to deny responsibility for the harassment and point out that his location was not public and that he had never posted any personally identifiable information.

Later that evening, he posted another reply. He admitted that it was possible that the one behind the harassment was not anybody on the forum but that he was certain it was in relation to the tenant and his doll. Many users suggested that it was the tenant himself, which he could not rule out but considered unlikely because the man barely ever left his apartment.

Some speculated that the tenant had convinced his friends to target the janitor, but the janitor insisted that he did not seem the type to have friends. He promised to investigate further, which raised some eyebrows as it now seemed like he had accepted that it could be the tenant's doing after all. Attempts to get him to explain what he meant by ”investigating” proved unsuccessful as he stopped posting altogether.

–

It wasn't until three months later that the janitor posted again. He prefaced the post by saying that he understood most would not believe a word of it, label him a troll and promptly forget that he had ever posted on the forum. In addition to this, he stressed that it would be his last post.

He explained that he had broken into the dollfucker's apartment one night with the presupposition that the tenant would be asleep. What he found was indeed the man sleeping in his bed next to the doll, only the doll was stroking his hair and whispering into his ear with one of its legs stretched out over him. The janitor froze in his tracks and stared in disbelief as the dried-up fingers swept back and forth. For what felt like minutes, he could only observe. Eventually his courage returned and he demanded an explanation out loud.

As soon as the tenant woke up, the doll fell off of him as lifeless as any other doll. The janitor repeated his question, raising his voice. The tenant simply jumped out of bed and crawled under it, whimpering quietly. The doll's unmoving gaze was fixed on the janitor, its body twisted in a pose that would be too uncomfortable for any human to endure. Clearly, it was not alive and he began to wonder whether he had imagined the whole thing. He apologised to the tenant, attempting to soothe him while approaching the bed. He crouched so that he could look under it and speak to him to his face.

A crackling noise from above sent chills down his spine. He turned to look up over the bed and saw that the doll had moved to a more comfortable position, its head on the pillow and its body straight on its back. Looking under the bed, he saw the tenant was already crawling out from the other side. He tried to get the tenant to explain what just happened but couldn't get a single word out of him. The man climbed back up on the bed and lied down next to the doll.

The janitor concluded the post by revealing that he had been in a psychiatric ward for the past two and a half months after telling the police about what he saw. If he hadn't agreed to be committed, he would've been arrested for breaking and entering. Many users did as he predicted and called him a troll, promptly discarding everything he had posted as lies. Others took him at his word and attempted to explain the incident with increasingly outlandish theories.

–

On the 17th of August 2009, I was asked to check up on the other janitor as he hadn't come out of his apartment for a month. Over the past half a year, he had garnered a reputation of being mentally ill, and before his disappearance he had told me on several occasions that he hadn't gotten any sleep even with sleeping pills thanks to continuing harassment. My apartment was next to his but I had never noticed anything out of the ordinary at night, so I'd brushed it off as being all in his head.

I will never forget what I saw when I entered the apartment: my coworker was dead in his bed with the mummy doll curled up by him like a lover.