Lifestyle

Person gripped by fear after discovering mysterious notes in house written by themselves

Person gripped by fear after discovering mysterious notes in house written by themselves
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Whenever someone has a lot on their mind, they might find they've forgotten some of the small tasks they've done during the day - but one person was left unsettled after finding multiple handwritten notes but they couldn't remember writing out.

Posting their dilemma to the r/LegalAdvice, Redditor u/RBradbury1920 explained the different instances and their overall confusion as to where the notes were coming from.

"On the 15th of April I found a yellow post-it note in a handwriting that wasn't mine on my desk reminding me of some errands I had to do, but told literally nobody about. While odd, I chalked it up to something I did in my sleep, thinking maybe in my half-awake state I scrawled it so it didn't appear to be my handwriting. I threw it out and thought little of it.

"On the 19th, I found another post it note on the back of my desk chair, in the same handwriting as the previous note, telling me to make sure I 'saved my documents'. I was freaked out, but there were no other signs of a break-in, so I set up a web-cam in my house aimed at my desk and used a security-cam app for it to record after detecting movement.

"On the 28th, I woke up to find another post-it note, this one saying, 'Our landlord isn't letting me talk to you, but it's important we do.' I immediately checked the webcam's folder on my computer and found nothing from the night before, but my computer's recycling bin had been emptied, which I am certain I did not do recently, indicating someone had noticed the webcam and deleted the files. (They were just saved straight to a folder on my desktop called "Webcam".

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"Today, on the 1st of May, I found another post it note, this time on the outside of my door, with nothing written on it– and there also appeared to be post-its on many other doors in my apartment complex, all blank, in varying colors.

They then asked for some advice from the subreddit in terms of how to find out who the culprit is and whether to inform the authorities.

"Do I have any legal recourse here? I have no proof except for the post-its, but those are written by my pen and on my post-it notes, so conceivably I could have faked them. Would contacting the police get me into any trouble, if they can't determine an outside source for this? I just want to make sure I'm not wasting anyone's time.

"Should I consult my landlord? Those also living in the complex?"

At the end of the post, the person added their suspicions that their landlord may be the one leaving the notes around the place.

"EDIT: I pulled up a letter I received from my landlord back when I moved in, and the handwriting is identical. Could this count as evidence?"

In response, one user Ken Roach (r/Kakkerlak) didn't believe the landlord was the one responsible for the notes and noted how this "might be a mental health issue."

"You might be experiencing some sort of dissociative disorder," he wrote, but then also mentioned how it "might be a physical problem."

"You mentioned that you have a very unusual narrow bedroom with no windows; is there a chance that you are not getting enough ventilation when you sleep, or that there is a carbon monoxide leak in the building? A cheap CO detector (which you should have anyway) is a fast way to find out. You'll also have really bad headaches.

At the end of his comment, he added: "You know your own medical and mental history and your other experiences. If you think these incidents might be you, writing notes to yourself, there's no shame in getting somebody qualified to give you an opinion."

Such was the mystery a podcast was made by WBUR Boston Public Radio about the mystery as part of their /u/Endless_Thread project with Reddit where they spoke with experts to get down.

Dr. Tom Scammell, a director at The Sleep Disorders Clinic at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center shot down the sleepwalking theory and told the podcast: "Writing would be an unusual thing to happen because writing is a very high-level cognitive function," he said.

"... to see fully-formed and good-looking sentences like 'Our landlord isn't letting me talk to you but it's important we do,' that's pretty sophisticated."

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