The Peeper With the Flashlight
For centuries, Peeping Toms have been spying on people through windows as the unsuspecting home owners dress or sleep. And Reddit user miles_kilow learned she had a Peeping Tom of her when she saw a shadow with a flashlight looking into her bedroom.
“I’d been living in my first apartment alone for maybe two weeks. It was a basement apartment which meant cheap and the windows were right at ground level so you could see legs and shoes walk by. There were two bedrooms. I slept in one with the blinds closed, but the other room’s window had some water damage so I kept the blinds all the way up to let it dry out before maintenance came. That room had nothing in it but spare boxes from moving in.
One night, I was asleep and then suddenly completely awake and alert. Every fiber of my being was suddenly on edge. I looked at my phone and saw it was around 4:00 A.M. I laid in bed for a minute before I turned towards my closed window and saw it: a large dark shadow of a person with a flashlight trying to see in to my bedroom. I instantly freaked. I quietly grabbed a small hunting knife and stealthily moved to the hall so I could see into the other bedroom—the one whose window coverings were WIDE open. As I peeked around the corner, the person was scanning the floor of my bedroom methodically with the flashlight. They were big, had on heavy boots, and keys that jingled.
At this point—as a single girl alone in a [bad] apartment I thought this was it. I was 100% prepared to take my little hunting knife and fight this [guy]. My adrenaline was sky high. At that moment, my phone buzzed and I got a text from a friend on the police force who literally asked, “What’s going on at your apartment?” I thought—yep, this is a bad guy…he’s peering in my windows and is going to bust in any second now…but then he went away. I didn’t hear from my police friend after I texted him back. I decided to go lie down on my bed and just wait to see what happened next.
Not five minutes after lying down, someone knocked on my door with incredible force. The panic mounted again. Now—I have no peephole, no safety chain…just a deadbolt. At the top of my voice, in case it’s a murderer I want to wake people up, I yell, “who is it?” I hear a meek voice reply that it is the police. My first thought is now that is a clever plan to get a girl to open her apartment door. I stood there silently before I heard the voice say again, that I wasn’t in trouble. I opened the door a smudge, ready to slam it, to see two cops, one backed away from the door and one up the steps. They must have seen my tiny little knife or something. They proceeded to apologize for scaring me—they were the ones looking in my windows. I yelled at them and possibly cried a little … the adrenaline finally broke, okay? I got the whole story from my friend the next day—turns out a fellow resident of the apartment complex had gotten drunk, lost his keys, and broken into his own apartment to go to bed. They thought it was mine and were confused by the lack of broken windows….I was terrified at the time, but it’s a good story now.”