I Used AirBnB To Rent Out A Room For A Weekend, And Now Something Strange Is Going On In My House

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The alien words stared back at me in the warm glow of the summer morning. Etched crudely into the soft wood of the inside of my closet, they reminded of the juvenile graffiti that was frequently carved on the desks at my middle school. However, there was one stark difference here – sticking out of the final letter of the statement was a shard of what looked to be a red-painted fingernail.

This was a most discomforting way to start the work week.

I didn’t have time for this shit. I had to be at work in 15 minutes and my hair was still sopping wet from the shower.

I pried the shard of potential fingernail out of the carving and put it in an empty jewelry box on my dresser. I punched the words into a note on my phone to translate at work before throwing on my clothes and leaving.

The translation would make it nearly impossible to work for the rest of the day.

I pray to you to make this stop.

The language detected was Polish. I sat at my desk numb and nauseous for a few moments before I was jolted by a co-worker walking up behind me to remind that we had to leave for an off-sight meeting.

At this point, I am going to have to backtrack a little bit to put this situation into proper framing.

A few months before this, I took a job selling condos in the first modern living complex ever installed in the Big Sur area of the Central California coast. After spending years in LA chasing a half-cocked dream of being an actress, the full-time position in one of the world’s most picturesque and relaxed locales sounded like a dream.

The salary was low, but a rep from the company gave me a tremendous tip. She said that rental houses in the area were fabulous, but expensive. However, you could easily make up the extra cost by simply renting out on AirBnB one weekend a month. Having to go camping or having to drive down to LA stay with friends one weekend a month wasn’t ideal, but the gorgeous two-bedroom house with a distant view of the rocky Pacific shore that looked torn from the pages of Sunset Magazine with a garden in the backyard was more than worth it.

I upgraded my life in a short amount of time. I went from working part-time as a waitress and part-time as a background extra in TV and living in a dirty, cramped environment, to working full-time with a job that gave me certifiable future skills and let me live in a lush dream of fresh air and freedom. There is no other way to put it other than to say the change was simply good for my soul.

Until the day that I found those Polish words carved into the inside of my closet.

Once I combed through the cloud of fear that initially engulfed my brain upon discovery, I could only think of one thing: Thom Garretson.

Thom was my dream of a renter. The first person to jump on renting out my house for a weekend, Thom was an almost comically short 30-ish guy who seemed to overcompensate for his lack of height with a ridiculous handle-bar mustache, slicked back black hair and perpetual leather jacket. Even if he came off a bit like a tool, he couldn’t have been a nicer guy or a better renter.

I was always telling co-workers how wonderful he was in that he rented my place one weekend a month, always left the place spotless (even buying his own cleaning supplies) and always left some beer or desserts in the fridge for me for when I came back after spending the weekend camping or staying with friends. I was especially appreciative of this because my co-workers always mentioned how their renters were frequently college kids or young hippies who would party and trash the place or possible tweakers looking for a place to cook up a new batch.

The carving on the inside of my closet appearing the Monday after one of Thom’s weekend stays was more than enough to wipe out all of the good vibes he had built up. I was done with Thom, or anyone else renting my place from that day forward. The manager of my favorite bar in town had told me that I could make extra money bartending on the weekend if I ever wanted to and it would be enough to make up for the rental money I would miss out on.

Things had gone well for the first few weeks of avoiding Thom and renting out my place. I was actually making more money in tips bartending than I was renting my place out. I also brought myself a little peace of mind by convincing myself that the carving had probably been there since before I had moved in, but I had just never noticed it. It was tucked back towards the side of the closet where the clothes I rarely wear were hung.

All of this false comfort would come crumbling in the middle of one cold night.

I shivered myself to a fragile sleep under three blankets to the sounds of whipping winds blustering against the walls of my upstairs bedroom when a stiff knock upon the front door shook the entire house. In the five months that I had lived the in house, no one had ever knocked upon the door, let alone at 3 AM on the coldest night of the year.

I stayed underneath my cover of blankets, like a child, thinking that they might protect from the terror that was likely lurking just outside of my front door and maybe the knocking would just go away.

It didn’t.

Another barrage of pounding rattled the cold bones of the old house.

I bit my lip and forced myself up and out of bed.

The rickety stairs took me to the huge wooden front door of my house and I tiptoed up to the door.

I literally jumped backwards when another flurry of knocks boomed against the heavy entrance.

“What do you want?” I screamed into the door.

I have to admit, I was deeply comforted when a woman’s soft voice trickled through the fibers of the door and into my frightened ears.

“I’m looking for Thom.”

My face and brain made the same utterly confounded movements. Who the hell would show up in the middle of the night looking for Thom? He hadn’t even rented my place in at least a month.

“He told me to come by tonight,” the woman’s voice went on.

“This isn’t his place,” I shot back. “He doesn’t even rent here anymore. I don’t know why he told you that, but no,” I said in a tone so stern it shocked even me.

“Oh, okay.”

I heard footsteps drift away upon the soggy hollow wood of my front porch.

I ran to the door and got up on my toes to peer through the little windows that lined the top of the door. Out the windows I saw the back of a woman who looked as tall as a WNBA player with a flowing mane of red-hair descend the steps of my front porch. I caught a slight glimpse of her face from a distance, before she dropped down into a sleek new car parked on the curb in front of my house. My brief glimpse led me to describing her as looking like a Game Of Thrones character – almost painfully slim with a tightened pale face, her shining red hair gave her a look of undeniable intensity.

I wouldn’t sleep the rest of the night.

I did some more investigating in my closet at first light. The carving I saw was still there, etched in horror, the words stared back at me before I conducted a thorough search of the rest of the closet that was about four by eight feet and completely cluttered with my clothes and shoes.

My search turned up nothing sinister, but did lead to me reuniting with one of my favorite pairs of jeans that was wedged beneath a box that contained a broken space heater. I decided to throw them on when I realized that I was just about late for work.

The work day was an utter drag. I am a person that simply cannot function without enough sleep, so I spent the first half of the day, zonked out, blankly staring at my computer monitor praying no one would ask me to do something.

As lunch approached, I discovered something that would do the job of waking me up from my misty funk – a ripped up half of a business card that was tucked into one of the pockets of my jeans.

The print that was left on the shred of the card was unreadable to me, written in another language, but even without translating the text, it seemed to me to just be a standard business card. What I didn’t understand and immediately needed to investigate was a URL sloppily scribbled on the thing in red ink.

www.przyszłemodele.pl

I immediately regretted plugging the link into my work computer when it produced a shitty mildly pornographic site that looked to be crawling with viruses. The writing was what I assumed was Polish and even though my browser tried to translate the copy it still didn’t even really make sense in broken English.

I was able to glean two things:

1. The site was for some kind of sketchy modeling agency in Poland that wanted girls to do modeling in America.
2. There was an email at the bottom of the page – futureamericanmodelingopps@gmail.com

Other than that, the website was pretty much a useless mystery, but Googling the email address would prove fruitful.

The search led to a porn-y site that cued up a video in the middle of the screen and started bogging down my computer, making everything slow. The sound of footsteps approaching from the hall next to my desk rattled over the sound of my computer chugging out deep breaths as if it was finishing a marathon.

I tried to close my browser as the footsteps got closer, but I couldn’t, the video fired up and immediately appeared to be a trailer for some kind of porn movie.

“Shit. Shit. Shit,” I whispered.

The video finally starting playing and the first frame nearly stopped my heart… it was the outside of my bedroom closet door.

“What the fuck?” I muttered to myself louder than I had planned.

The footsteps stopped in the hallway and a face popped out from the walkway in front of me and just to the right of my desk.

“What’s going on?”

The annoying face of Jeremy Hawes shouted out, making me jump up in seat and clutch my chest before I scrambled to close the browser on desktop and knocked a cup of water all over my desk.

“Oh, sorry,” Jeremy apologized, dropped his head and slunk off, luckily never seeming to grab a glimpse of my screen.

I had known that investigating on my work computer had been a horrible idea. I was just waiting to get a call from our IT guy or get called into my boss’ office at any moment to discuss what the hell I was looking up. I figured I would be able to pull off watching the video on my phone though.

But my phone wouldn’t play the video file. I would have to wait until I was home to watch the video and sit for hours at my desk acting as if a fear wasn’t eating me from the inside out.

I rushed home down the Pacific Coast Highway, nearly skidding out of control once on a hairpin turn, but made it home before complete nightfall.

I couldn’t get my laptop open fast enough and let my fingers fly to the video site I had found at work. It only took a few minutes, but I was there, staring at a frozen preview image of the cracked paint of the outside of the closet that was in my line of sight, just to the left of my main dresser.

I took the deepest of breaths before I clicked play on the video.

At first play, I was terribly confused. The 10-second video was just a plain shot of by closet door.

“What the hell?”

I quickly realized the problem. My sound was off. I turned up the volume and restarted the video.

A gut-wrenching, hideous sound filled the frigid air of my bedroom. It sounded like the squealing catfights that used to wake me up in the middle of the night back in my apartment in LA during the dripping hot summer nights when I had to sleep with the window open. Making the soundtrack even worse, was the accompanying sounds of pounding and scratching upon the inside of the closest.

The video came to an end after 10 seconds. I sat numb on the foot of my bed with the laptop lying across my thighs and the trickle of sunlight that had been giving my bedroom a cool blue glow dying all around me.

I was frozen. I didn’t know what to do. My mind was reeling. Fear, suspicions, helpless accusations… It was as if they were all fighting each other at once like some kind of mental Royal Rumble.

I slowly worked my way through the traffic jam of thoughts in my head to remind myself that what I had watched was actually just the preview of another video. I still had to find the full fucking length version.

It wasn’t easy, but I was able to locate the video after searching through a maze of horrific porn sites.

The length of the full video was little over a minute. Looking back now, I don’t know how I made it through the whole thing.

The video started with the seminal image of my closet door being pounded and scratched upon to the tune of stomach-turning shrieks and wails. After the initial 10 seconds I had already watched, the camera panned back and you could see a heavy padlock wedged in the handle of the closet, keeping it shut despite the best efforts of the person who was inside.

After a few more seconds of wailing, two dark figures covered in head-to-toe dark garb stepped into the shot. Even though their outfits could not have been anymore concealing, I could still tell from their clothed outlines, that one of them was very short and the other very tall. Based on their movements, the shorter one was male, the taller one female.

I watched in captured horror as they took the lock off of my closet door and a naked and bound young woman tumbled out and fell upon the floor in a heap. Her cries were now accompanied by the laughs of the two dark-clad figures.

“Holy shit. Holy shit.”

My jaw began to quiver when I watched the taller figure pull out a machete type knife that I had really only seen in jungle adventure, Indiana Jones-type movies.

“No. No. No!” my words started to mirror those of the pale naked young woman in the video.

I could tell you about what happened next on the video, but I don’t need to. Just go look up some terrorist beheading videos on the Internet and you will see for yourself. What was much more important were my feeling and thoughts at the moment and what I discovered next.

My mind immediately accused, actually convicted, Thom and the mysterious tall red headed woman who knocked on my door of being the culprits in the video, but I still had slight reservations about if the video was real or. I had heard about Faces Of Death or snuff videos before and was under the impression that they were actually fake. Maybe this was just another fake. Thom had said he spent his time up in the area shooting stock nature footage for companies that made commercials. Maybe he was just an aspiring horror filmmaker or something. If he was though, he was a pretty fucking convincing one.

Unfortunately, what I discovered next would deepen my suspicions and fears. Next to the first video were thumbnails for numerous videos that at first glance all seemed to be set in my bedroom. I caught my breath and clicked on one of the videos.

The setup was the same as the previous one. It started with a shot of my closed closet door, grotesque wails from the pit of a stomach radiating from it, terrible scratches raking against the inside, booming pounding beating the wood. The two dark cloaked figures of opposite stature stepped into frame, unlocked the door and a bound and naked woman tumbled out in a whirling scramble.

I would not be able to watch much of this one. The taller figure walked off screen and quickly returned with a wooden crate. It felt as if my spine got up and jumped out of my body as soon as I saw one of those cream yellow pythons slowly slither out of the crate and head in the direction of the woman. She couldn’t even see the terror in front of her through the blindfold that wrapped around her face. I had to turn away when the snake curiously approached the woman’s crying face and a slick forked tongue flicked out of its mouth in her direction.

Fake or not, the videos had terrified me to my absolutely core. I threw a few pieces of clothing into a backpack before I realized that I should probably take a key piece of evidence with me. The shard of the fingernail I placed in the jewelry box on my dresser months ago.

I opened up the jewelry box and immediately lost my breath – there was nothing in there. I certainly had not opened the thing since I had put the fingernail in there and no one other than me had been in my house since.

Just as this realization sunk in, I heard a thump come from direction of my closet.

A feverish chill ran over me. I stood in the near dark with the back of my mind telling me to just sprint to the front door, but I had to investigate the closet. I tore over to the door and threw the thing open to, revealing the source of the thump.

Thom crawled out of a trap door in the back of the closet with a video camera in his hand.

I screamed and recoiled back towards my bed. Thom stood up in the doorway of the closet.

“Why are you doing this?” I screamed. I ran towards my bedroom door, but was stopped dead in my tracks.

The tall red-headed woman from so many nights before cut me off. Towering over me in her thick heels, it seemed as if she was daring me to try and even make it around her.

I started to walk backwards. I forgot Thom was waiting behind me until I bumped into him. I was trapped between the both of them now, the two descending on me slowly, but menacingly.

I gave up. There was nothing I could do at this point. Every muscle in my body slacked its tension. I hoped that maybe my disappearing fear and tension might actually relieve some of their zest.

It didn’t. My eyes locked with Thom’s and the faintest hint of smile developed upon his crusty lips.

“What the fuck do you even want from me?” I whispered.

That smile kept developing further upon Thom’s lips.

“I want you to be the star of my next film.”