Always Lock Your Doors
When I was a kid, my family rented a beach condo for our vacation. The unit next door was a regular residence, and we met the family on the day before we left.
They were leaving at the end of the week for their own trip, but the daughter had to work one more overnight shift as a nurse. The dad and the younger kids left that day, and the mother and daughter were going to leave the next morning and catch up with them.
That morning, as we were packing up our own stuff to go home, we started hearing sirens out on the road in front of the condos. As we watched through our windows, several emergency vehicles arrived outside, and eventually an air evacuation helicopter landed on the road.
A gurney was rolled out of the unit next door and into the helicopter, and it took off. A while later, we got the full, disturbing story. The daughter had come home from her shift and found the mother beaten to death.
We hadn’t heard or seen anything, even though we shared a wall. The creepiest part was that the officers found that the killer had accessed the house by the back porch door, the one facing the beach.
The bedroom my brothers and I were sleeping in was down on the ground floor, with the same porch door leading out to the beach, only a few feet away from the door the killer used. Talking about it later, we weren’t even sure we had locked the door that night. We locked our doors every night after that.
Story credit: Reddit / orcus74