Photo: TikTok
She thought he was being far too generous by paying her to pick up his mail, but she soon found out why his price was so high.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on Apr 12, 2023
One woman on TikTok named Marissa had the most incredibly odd encounter with a man that lived right across the hall from her in her building after he asked for a favor.
He explained to her that he would be going out of town for a week and as her neighbor, he asked if she would be willing to pick up his mail for him while he was gone — a fairly normal request, but things quickly went from fine to frightening after they talked about it more.
He offered her $100 a day to pick up his mail for him while he was on vacation.
Marissa posted a video describing her interaction by using a popular trend where you say you’re doing an “impression” of something, reacting to the insane story you’re about to tell.
The two-minute-long video has received over 9.8 million views and thousands of comments, and she begins by saying “this is my impression of when your neighbor goes out of town for about a week and asks if you’ll pick up his mail for him while he’s away and you say ‘of course, that’s what neighbors are for.’”
It quickly stops being a video of her doing an impression, and she continues to tell the strange story about how a simple favor turned into a strange and creepy experience.
“He says ‘Great, I’ll give you $100 a day,’ and you say ‘Whoa, that is really not necessary, I live next door. You can just let me borrow some flour the next time I run out or something,’” she continues.
Marissa explains how she would never run out of flour “not because you always have flour on hand or anything but more because you’re a baker in the same way you’re a Pulitzer Prize winner.”
All jokes aside, her neighbor insisted that she take the money, so she made a deal to say, abundantly clear, that it was unnecessary and a lot of money, but that she would accept since he insisted on it.
Likely feeling bad that she would be getting paid $100 a day to pick up his mail, Marissa asked him if he had plants that needed to be watered or anything else, but he said no, and “asks if you can bring it inside his apartment and put it in the ‘mail basket,’ he’ll give you a key to his place.”
Seems like a lot of work when she could simply take his mail to her apartment and hold it for him while he was on vacation, but he once again insists that she take his key and drop it in the mail basket instead of holding onto it.
He then asked her to come over to his apartment to show her the ‘mail basket.’
When he asked her to come over the night before he left for vacation in order to show her the mail basket, that’s when things started to get weird.
“So the night before he’s supposed to leave, you cross the hall, knock on his door, and he invites you in,” she explains. “Now, you have never been inside this apartment before and he wants to give you a tour.”
He starts showing her around and says that she can make herself at home while he’s away, despite her home being likely less than 5 feet away from his front door — she, of course, thought this was odd, but brushed it off as some sort of courteous gesture.
Once he shows her the “aforementioned mail basket” in the kitchen, he explains that she could invite her friend over if she wanted to and explains that he even stocked the fridge “in case you want to throw a party of something.”
“He opens the fridge and there is nothing in there but a seemingly endless supply of beer,” she explains, moving on to the part of the tour where he shows her the bedroom and claims that she can stay the night if she wants to and even use the shower.
“You say ‘that really won’t be necessary’ and he says ‘well [it’s] if you’re too tired and inebriated after the party to go all the way home’ (across the hall) and that he put out clean towels for you.”
That’s when she saw the stack of towels probably 15 towels high, and also when she concludes the story of the tour and returned to the original purpose of the video.
“So anyway, this is my impression of when you go back home after that and get on StreetEasy [a NYC real estate marketplace] and start looking for new places to live,” she ends the video.
Commenters believe that there was definitely something shady going on.
Marissa even captioned the video saying “Listen, benefit of the doubt is great and everything, but you cannot convince me he didn’t have hidden cameras in that bathroom.”
Many of the people in the comments agreed and even gave their own thoughts on what the truth behind the situation was.
“At first, I was sure he was expecting something illegal in the mail,” one of the top comments read. “Definitely has cameras hidden all over his place,” another user wrote.
One person suggested that she should have looked up his name on Google to see if he had any criminal charges, and someone else suggested that maybe the truth wasn’t so sinister after all.
They said, “the more likely possibility is that he's really [lonely] and desperate to make [friends] by any means necessary and he’s socially awkward so doesn't.” However, being lonely doesn’t give you an excuse to be creepy.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Keep up with his rants about current events on his Twitter.