When I was young I rented a room in an apartment shared by 2 other girls for a bit, but the “owner” was…a smidge odd. Nothing crazy, he just gave off the vibes of a small person pretending to be a more successful entrepreneur than he was. No real crime there. He was renting out spaces in a house with basement storage, 1 apartment on each of the 2 floors, and then a converted attic, all with their own entrances. The attic apartment had some guy in it who kinda weirded us out but we just avoided him and it was no big deal. Until he moved his girlfriend upstairs with him and some of the food started to go missing from OUR kitchen. But the strangest part was that his girlfriend (a petite 40ish year old Asian woman) had the voice of a 70 year old three-pack-a-day smoker named Gary. These two argued day and night, loudly, and then other times it would go silent up there for days. Whenever they came out of hiding it was obvious they were both on all sorts of drugs, and eventually I complained to the landlord. He proceeded to tell me that the guy was living there in exchange for maintenance work, but it turned out he had been faking everything and now he “couldn’t get him to leave.” This was only the first of many red flags with the man I was renting from, but that tenant disappeared for good a few weeks later and we all more or less forgot about it. When I moved out myself though a couple months after this incident (because of issues with the NEW attic tenant) the woman in the downstairs apartment called and told me that she found out the landlord didn’t even technically own the property. And then a couple weeks after that, my old roommate called and said that the landlord too, had completely disappeared, and that the electricity had been cut off in the building.

By that point I was safely back at my parents house, happily enjoying all the creature comforts of a stable living environment and completely voided of all interest in being out on my own for the time being. Much older and wiser, I currently have a copy of the public property records for the apartment I rent now lol. And my landlord is wonderful and does his own simple repair work and hires licensed professionals for everything else. And my neighbors only smoke a little weed.