Woman & Roommates Are Convinced Someone Is Secretly Living In Their Attic — It Turns Out It's A Very Common Problem
They keep noticing creepy signs, and they're definitely not alone — it's a common problem called "phrogging."
Zaretska Olga / Shutterstock Imagine you keep seeing and hearing weird signs you're not alone in your house. If you're like many of us, you'd probably assume there's something paranormal going on.
But what if you just have a secret roommate you don't know about?
A woman and her roommates were convinced someone was secretly living in their attic after several weird signs and encounters.
Most of us have heard a weird thump or noticed something amiss in our homes at one point or another, and usually, it's easily explained away — an animal running across the roof, or a cat that somehow figured out how to open drawers in the case of a friend of mine. (Never trust a cat.)
But increasingly, it's a problem that actually has a name: Phrogging, a bizarre phenomenon in which people essentially squat in secret in other people's homes without them knowing, until they figure it out, of course.
TikToker Lexi McDonald just might be one of these cases. As she revealed in a series of videos, she and her roommates noticed several weird incidents that left them wondering if they have a secret additional roommate.
Lost items, footprints, and disappearing food left them wondering if someone was secretly living in their attic.
For a long time, the idea of a secret attic roommate was just a joke between housemates. They called the mysterious interloper "attic man" as a joking way to explain the weird phenomena they kept experiencing.
But a recent incident left them feeling like the situation had gone way beyond a joke. As she wrote in onscreen text in a recent video, she and her roommates returned home to find "two half-eaten cookies in different places of the kitchen, and not a single soul didn't finish their cookie."
When that video went majorly viral, McDonald posted another detailing a whole laundry list of bizarre occurrences. "We have lived in this house for three years, and since the first year that we moved in, there has just been weird, random [stuff] happening to us," she said.
They returned from a vacation together to find a dead bird in their house with no explanation, for example. "There's been a multitude of things that have just gone missing in relation to jewelry, laundry, our TV remote went missing," McDonald said.
McDonald has also noticed footprints in the snow around the outside of the house several times, "and just tonight, the night that I'm filming this video, we were in the living room, and we saw two holes in our ceiling that we have never seen before."
People are convinced the women are victims of phrogging, in which people live in someone else's home without their knowledge.
"Please be careful!!" one TikTok commenter wrote. "It is called phrogging, there’s a TV show about it." She was likely referring to the Lifetime series "Phrogging: Hider in My House," which documented people's encounters with this bizarre problem.
Phrogging is a bit like squatting, except that the former happens in unoccupied spaces like abandoned buildings. The term "phrogging" refers to the way people "leapfrog" from occupied house to occupied house, and though it has been around since 2006, it has only recently become popularized.
There have been scores of documented incidents including one bizarre case in which a Kentucky man found people cooking methamphetamines underneath his house with no clothes on. Many others aren't quite so weird, but terrifying nonetheless.
Krista Reuther, an expert on the subject, told the UK's The Sun that phrogging seems to be on the rise because "there are communities online that people go to for phrogging tips and to share locations of places that they've been able to stay successfully so that other phroggers can then go and jump in."
Given how absurd housing markets have become all over the world, it's not exactly surprising to know that this is happening. But that doesn't make it any less creepy. New nightmare unlocked!
But as for McDonald and her roommates? They're not interested in becoming even more creeped out by having authorities investigate.
"We're in the last year of our lease. I don't want to see anything," she said. Instead, they've decided to bide their time until they can move. "He can hang out with the next tenants."
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.