The missing food was strange. Finding out who took it was much worse.
How long could someone live inside your home before you noticed? A night? A week? In some of these cases, the answer was months or even years.
They slept in attics, squeezed into closets, and moved around whenever the actual homeowners left. Eventually, every one of them was discovered.
#5 The Woman in the Closet
In May 2008, a 57-year-old man in Kasuya, Japan, noticed that food kept disappearing from his refrigerator.
Nothing else seemed obviously wrong. The doors were locked. The windows were secure. There was no clear sign that anyone had broken into the house.
So he installed security cameras that could send images directly to his mobile phone. Before long, the system captured a woman moving around inside while he was away.
He called the police, expecting them to find a burglar who had somehow been entering and leaving without touching the locks. Officers searched the house but found no obvious hiding place. Then they opened the upper compartment of a large closet.
Inside was 58-year-old Tatsuko Horikawa.
She was curled on her side in a space barely large enough for someone to lie down. Police found a thin mattress and several plastic bottles inside the compartment, suggesting that this was not a hiding place she had chosen five minutes earlier.
Horikawa told police that she had nowhere else to live. Reports differed on exactly how long she had stayed in the house, but authorities believed she had been using the closet for months and may have moved between other unlocked homes in the area.
Whenever the homeowner left, she climbed down, took small amounts of food, showered, and cleaned up afterward. She was reportedly so careful that the man never noticed another person’s smell or any unusual mess.
Horikawa was arrested on suspicion of trespassing. The homeowner finally learned where his food had been going, although the answer probably did not make sleeping near that closet any easier.
#4 Stanley Carter and the Attic Christmas List
In December 2008, Stanley Carter was staying with friends in one side of a duplex in Plains Township, Pennsylvania.
When they asked him to leave, Carter did not go very far. Police said the 21-year-old climbed through a trapdoor into the attic shared by both sides of the building. From there, he gained access to the neighboring home of Stacy Ferrance and her family.
Carter disappeared on December 19. The friends he had been staying with eventually reported him missing, unaware that he was still inside the same building.
Ferrance heard noises overhead but assumed they were coming from her children. Then food, clothing, cash, and electronics began disappearing. On Christmas Day, she discovered that a laptop and an iPod were missing. A dirty footprint near the attic access point made the situation harder to dismiss.
Police returned with a search dog on December 26. After hearing the dog below, Carter surrendered and climbed down from the attic.
He was wearing Ferrance’s sweatshirt and sneakers, along with a pair of her daughter’s pants.
A search of the attic uncovered blankets, insulation he had reportedly used to keep warm, and property taken from the home. Police also found a handwritten list of the stolen items labeled “Stanley’s Christmas List.”
That was not a nickname invented later by the internet. He had apparently named it himself.
Carter was charged with burglary, theft, receiving stolen property, and criminal trespass. For the Ferrance family, the missing belongings were only part of it. The noises they had dismissed for days had been coming from someone who knew exactly when they were home and when it was safe to come downstairs.
#3 The Lover in the Attic
Most affairs require secrecy. This one required an attic, multiple houses, and a husband who apparently never looked up.
In 1913, Walburga “Dolly” Oesterreich was living in Milwaukee with her husband, Fred, a wealthy apron manufacturer. When her sewing machine needed repairing, Fred sent one of his employees to the house.
That employee was 17-year-old Otto Sanhuber.
Dolly and Otto began an affair. Neighbors eventually noticed how often the young repairman visited, so Dolly introduced him as her “vagabond half-brother.” When that explanation started wearing thin, she came up with something more permanent.
Otto moved into the attic.
Dolly supplied him with a cot, food, books, a lamp, and writing materials. He spent long stretches reading and writing stories in silence. When Fred left for work, Otto reportedly came downstairs, helped with housework, and spent time with Dolly. Before Fred returned, he went back into hiding.
In 1918, the Oesterreichs moved to Los Angeles. Dolly selected a house with an attic, and Otto quietly came with them.
Fred still had no idea.
On August 22, 1922, Otto heard Dolly and Fred arguing downstairs. He emerged from the attic, and during the confrontation, Fred was shot and killed. Dolly and Otto then attempted to make the scene look like a burglary. Otto locked Dolly inside a closet and returned to hiding before police arrived.
The full story did not become public until 1930. Otto was eventually convicted of manslaughter, but the verdict was set aside because the statute of limitations had expired. Dolly’s conspiracy trial ended with a hung jury, and she was never convicted.
For roughly a decade, Otto had eaten, slept, read, and written only a few feet above Fred’s head. The secret finally came apart because hiding a person in the attic was easier than keeping everything that followed hidden too.
#2 Daniel LaPlante Inside the Walls
Daniel LaPlante’s story is often repeated as if he spent months permanently living inside a family’s walls. The documented version is slightly different, but hardly more comforting.
In 1986, members of the Bowen family in Pepperell, Massachusetts, began noticing strange activity inside their home. Fourteen-year-old Tina Bowen and her sister heard unexplained noises. Objects appeared to move. It was easy to dismiss at first, especially when the alternative was admitting that somebody might be hiding inside the house.
On December 8, the family returned home to find lights, televisions, and radios turned on. Someone had also used the basement toilet. Tina’s father, Frank Bowen, began searching the property and opened a closet.
A teenage intruder was waiting inside.
He reportedly had spiked hair, paint on his face, and was holding a hatchet and a steel wrench. The intruder forced the family into a bedroom, but Tina escaped through a window and ran for help. The others eventually climbed out as well.
Police searched the house, the surrounding roads, and the nearby woods. They found the weapons outside, but the intruder appeared to have vanished. He was later identified as Daniel LaPlante, a teenager who had repeatedly entered the home and used its concealed spaces to avoid detection.
Online versions sometimes claim LaPlante secretly lived inside the walls for months. That precise timeline is difficult to confirm from contemporary records. What is supported is disturbing enough: he entered the house, moved around without the family knowing, and managed to disappear during a police search.
The story became far darker the following year. LaPlante murdered Priscilla Gustafson and her two children in a separate crime. He was convicted and sentenced to multiple life terms.
The Bowen family had not imagined the noises or the moved belongings. Someone really had been entering their home and hiding only a few feet away.
#1 The Denver Spider Man
In September 1941, Theodore Coneys entered the Denver home of Philip and Helen Peters hoping to find food and money. Coneys knew the couple through a local music club, but nobody was home when he arrived.
Inside a closet, he discovered a small opening in the ceiling. It led to an attic space barely large enough for a person to occupy. Coneys climbed inside and stayed there, slipping downstairs for food whenever he believed the house was empty.
For roughly five weeks, 73-year-old Philip Peters had no idea someone was living above him.
On October 17, Peters found Coneys searching the refrigerator. A confrontation followed, and Coneys killed him with a heavy iron stove tool before retreating into the attic. When investigators examined the house, they found no obvious point of entry and no sign of the killer. The murder seemed impossible.
Helen later returned home with a housekeeper. Before long, food began disappearing again. Objects moved. Strange noises came from upstairs, and an increasingly foul smell spread through the house. The housekeeper became convinced the property was haunted and left. Helen eventually moved out as well.
Coneys remained.
In July 1942, police officers watching the vacant house spotted movement inside. They entered and heard someone above them. After opening the closet, they saw a pair of legs disappearing through the ceiling and pulled Coneys down from the attic.
He had been hiding inside the house for approximately nine months after the murder.
The cramped space was filled with blankets, discarded food containers, and human waste. One detective reportedly remarked that only a spider could have survived up there, earning Coneys the nickname “the Denver Spider Man.”
Coneys confessed, was convicted of first-degree murder, and received a life sentence. What makes the case worthy of the number one spot is painfully simple: the noises were real, the missing food was real, and the man responsible for an unsolved murder had never truly left the house.
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