TRAVEL | HOUSESITTING | BREAK INS | SAFETY
Our Worst Housesitting Nightmare
We came home and the front door was wide open.
Chris and I returned back to Canada for a timeout from our travels over 3 months ago now. We are staying in my hometown of Canmore, Alberta. We didn’t expect to stay this long, but a housesit for the summer came our way and we couldn’t refuse a chance to sit and relax in one place for a while. It’s also been nice to reconnect with family and friends while we are here. Plus, we are painting some murals, so we are happy to be leaving our mark once again.
I’m especially happy to be leaving a mark in my hometown, and on the Legion nonetheless. The Canmore Legion is the last local stronghold in this town. The rest has been bought up and inhabited by what can only be called non-locals.
Don’t get me wrong, many great people have moved into this town and have worked to make it a great place to live and raise a family. But there is also a VERY large contingent of people that only come to stay in their million-dollar homes for a couple of weeks out of a year. The rest of the time, they sit empty.
It’s disheartening to walk the streets and not see kids out playing and people bar-b-queuing. Instead, curtains are drawn, and driveways are bare. I’ve noticed it more on this visit than any time before.
Besides the fact that the town just feels quiet outside of the busy tourist seasons, the lack of people is actually a safety concern as well.
When we first arrived back in May we were given an opportunity to housesit for friends of my parents who were going on a road trip to the US for three weeks. It was just down the street from the neighborhood that I grew up in, and the house was next door to where one of my best childhood friends lived.
So I was very familiar with the territory.
One of the owners had a brother in town, and he was our main point of contact while we were there as he was the one who usually took care of their house while they were away. I think he was happy to have us there so that he didn’t have to worry about it as much.
Because we don’t have a vehicle, the owner's car sat to the side of the driveway, and the driveway was empty. Obviously, this could be a sign to others that nobody was around. I hadn’t even considered that as a thought in the beginning.
Even from the first night, as we sat out on the front porch of the house, looking out over a neighborhood that I thought I knew so well, it felt strange. It felt empty.
Remembering back to my childhood, there was always action on the streets. Kids were riding bikes and playing street hockey, neighbors were chatting, and people were out in their yards. I could tell you about every family that lived in every house around us. It was a community, and people looked out for each other.
These days, not so much.
On our initial tour of the house from the owners, they told us to use the side door to come and go. It had a combination lock so we wouldn’t need a key, and they said that the front door was awkward to open and the lock was sticky. We noticed this on our first night and noted that we really had to push the door in hard to be able to get the deadbolt to close properly.
Closing it took focus and a bit of strength.
About a week after we had been housesitting at the house, we came home one afternoon at about 4:30 pm to find this exact door WIDE OPEN!
It was locked by both the awkward deadbolt and a lock on the handle that you turned from the inside. Double safety. So, how on earth did both locks get unlocked? Not to mention that the door was wide open to the outside.
At first, I panicked. Had we forgotten to lock it? Were we to blame? The thoughts came reeling through my mind. I did a quick sweep of the house and noted that the TV and other important travel artifacts that they had collected were all still there. I couldn’t see that anything was missing, but, of course, I couldn’t be sure.
We have housesat in many locations now throughout the years and we are always diligent about locking doors and double and triple checking everything. We have yet to have any sort of incident in this regard. We are both very responsible when it comes to these things and we take our responsibility seriously.
Horrified by this turn of events, I immediately called the brother to ask him if he had been at the house.
“No, I haven’t been there today. Why, what’s up?” He asked.
“Well, we just came home and the front door was wide open,” I told him in a panicked state.
“You are kidding me!” He said. But then he continued and I listened intently. “You know, this also happened the last time they went away.”
He went on to explain that the last time they were away for three weeks he had checked the house the day before they were to arrive back to make sure that everything looked good and was ready for their return. Of course, he was horrified when his sister's husband came home the next day to find, not one, but two doors open.
He was aghast that this was a possibility and when challenged by his sister he finally succumbed to the fact that he must have left them open. But he said that it was such an internal struggle because he knew that it wasn’t something that he would do. It just didn’t make sense.
As you may guess, I didn’t sleep that great for the next few nights. Every noise and bump in the night had me on full alert. I knew damn well that we hadn’t left that door open, and even if we did, it wouldn’t have blown all the way open on its own.
Somebody had been in the house, but who?
Every time we came home for the next few days it was also with trepidation. “Heeellllooooo.” My shaky and questioning voice would call from the side door as we entered, worried that we would find somebody already inside.
The brother told his sister what was going on and he said that she was non-plussed by it. You see, they have lived in the house for 25+ years and love their neighborhood and community. And I will digress, when I lived in that neighborhood as a child it was about the safest place you could imagine. In fact, the whole town was one big safety net. As a kid, there was never a worry about strangers or being kidnapped, or anything like that. And you certainly NEVER heard of somebody’s house being broken into.
It just didn’t exist in our little paradise.
But I think, in her mind, she is still living in those days. In fact, her brother told me that they only recently started getting serious about locking their doors, and they certainly are not interested in an alarm system. At least they weren’t. They may have changed their tune these days.
We stayed in that house for another couple of weeks with no incident after that. In fact, by the time they came home, I had almost (surprisingly) forgotten about it.
They arrived back around 9:00 pm one evening and we went straight upstairs (we were staying in a downstairs suite) to chat with them and see how their trip had been.
After about 10 minutes of conversation, she said, “Oh yeah, my brother said that there was an incident of a door being open?”
“Oh yes!” I said eyes wide-open.
“So tell me how that happened then.” She said.
We went into a long dialogue about what had transpired and when. We walked over to the front door and demonstrated to her how it looked when we arrived home.
“So you guys never went in and out of this door?” She asked.
“Well, yes, but we are 99.9% (more like 100%) sure that we locked it,” I told her. “Of course, we aren’t perfect, and there is a small chance that we may have left it unlocked, but it doesn’t explain why it was all the way open.”
There was no way that we left it like that.
She then took us to the door to show us a key that was hidden outside for it that we didn’t know about. “Maybe somebody knows where this key is,” she said. “But the key only opens the handle, it doesn’t open the deadbolt. So how would the deadbolt get open?” She asked looking at us very sternly.
I stared back and looked her in the eyes. Deadpan and serious, I said, “I have no idea.” And I didn’t. There was no explanation for any of it.
After we went inside, I believe that she purposely wanted to see how I closed the door and locked it behind us. As usual, I had to push on the door really hard to get the deadbolt to engage properly.
“Oh, so you know how hard that door is to open and close, I see.” I didn’t realize that it was a bit of a test at that moment.
“Oh yes. We know well. This is why I am certain that we would not have left it open. It takes concentration to get it to close properly.”
I then went on to tell her that I was nervous for a few nights staying in the house and that I really thought that they should look into it further. I was insistent that something was amiss, but trying to convince her of that was difficult. But she did start to soften a bit, especially after we demonstrated to her that we knew how to lock the door. (Insert eye roll.)
“But why would somebody come in and not take anything?” She asked perplexed.
Again, I had no explanation. But her brother had previously said that they may be scouting it out to see where things are so that later they can come back and do a fast sweep and take the valuables.
I told her my thoughts on the neighborhood and how nobody seemed to actually live there. To this, she took offense. It was as if I was personally insulting her.
“What do you mean? People live there, there and there!” As she pointed to a few houses in the immediate vicinity.
“Well, it felt very quiet to us and so many of the houses were dark and had no lights on,” I told her. She wasn’t happy about that. This was the end of our conversation and we slunk back downstairs feeling somewhat guilty. Of what, I’m not sure.
The next morning we moved out of the house and didn’t think too much about it again. We had done our best to convince her that we thought something was amiss, and it was beyond our control what she did about it.
Though we did still have a distinct feeling that she felt that we were the ones to blame, which sucked.
About a month later we ran into her brother at a local bar. We got to chatting with him and I, of course, asked if anything had come of the whole intruder thing.
“Well, you know, there IS more to the story.” He said.
I was all ears.
Apparently, they decided to take the situation a bit seriously and went to talk to the closest next-door neighbor who had been doing work on the outside of his house for the duration of our stay, to see if he had seen anything suspicious. Remember, this happened in the middle of the day, surely he must have seen something.
He claimed that he didn’t notice anything, but told them that he has an outside security camera and maybe they could see the front porch of their house on it. They figured out what day it was and watched the footage.
Lo and behold, two guys casually walked up to the house in the middle of the day, sat on the front porch and smoked a cigarette. Then, one stood up to the door and after a few moments, walked right in. It was all caught on camera!
My eyes were wide as he told me this. My god! It was almost unbelievable to hear. Knowing that this actually happened somehow made it more real to me in that moment. How creepy that these men had been inside the house where we were staying. It wasn’t even our house and I somehow felt violated.
But, at least the mystery was solved.
“Thank you so much for saying something.” He said. “I knew that I hadn’t left those doors open before as well. Now I think she believes me.” It was clearly a relief for both of us to learn what actually happened.
I have not heard from the homeowner, and I don’t expect to. She is living in her world, and I’m sure she will take the security of her home more seriously now. For that I am thankful.
But the reality of why these things are happening is so sad. I believe that it is all to do with the fact that the town keeps allowing people to purchase homes that they don’t actually live in. This continues to drive the real estate prices up while diminishing the community feel of the town. Not to mention that it is near impossible to get service workers here because the costs of living are too high and there are housing shortages.
The town is ripe for the picking these days. In fact, more and more break-ins and thefts are being reported every day, and it’s just a matter of time before it becomes more of an epidemic. Especially in these days of over-inflated costs of living. Desperate people do strange things to get by.
One thing I am thankful for, though, is that Canadians don’t run around with guns. If this happened to us in the US, I would certainly not have stayed in that house for one night more!
We are now housesitting in a different part of town where the neighbors are in much closer proximity to each other and seem to know each other. Plus we have seen many out in their yards taking care of the lawn, and kids are heard playing in the streets. People actually live in this part of town, and for that we are thankful.
But yeah. It’s been interesting living back in my hometown some 20+ years after I did the last time. Sadly it is just not the same place it was when I grew up here. There is good that comes with change, but there is also a lot of bad.
Sadly the bad keeps getting worse, as it tends to do.
This has certainly been our worst housesitting nightmare. Have you ever had any housesitting nightmares? I would love to hear about them.
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