Flat 6B Has a Tenant the Landlord Can't Evict

I rent the top-floor flat, 6B, and it has a small second bedroom I don't use — I work from the living room and the box room became a place I shut the door on rather than fill. That shut door is the start of everything.

It opens. Not dramatically — I've never seen it move, never heard a latch. But every few weeks, most reliably after I've been away even a single night, I come home to find it standing open, six inches or a foot, into a room that is measurably colder than the rest of the flat. I bought a cheap sensor thermometer for it after the third time, out of a need to prove myself either sane or not: the box room runs three to five degrees below the hallway, consistently, on the open-door days. On normal days it matches the flat.

The building is old, converted from a townhouse, and I told myself: draughts, warped door, pressure differentials, the ordinary physics of old conversions. Then the specifics started refusing to fit. The door only opens INWARD, toward the cold; a draught strong enough to swing it would have to blow from inside a sealed room. It only opens when I'm out, never while I'm home to see it, as if it's shy or as if it's polite. And on two occasions the open room contained a smell — pipe tobacco, unmistakable, in a strictly non-smoking building, in a flat where I've never known a smoker.

The managing agent, when I raised it as a 'draught issue,' went briefly and interestingly silent before offering to send someone to plane the door. The someone came, planed the door, and told me on his way out, unprompted, lowering his voice, that he'd done work in 'a couple of the top flats in these old conversions' and that the top flat 'always keeps a bit of the old man.' I asked which old man. He shrugged, embarrassed to have said it, and left.

I've stopped fighting it. I keep the box room tidy now — I don't know why, except that opening my own front door to a cold, tobacco-smelling, deliberately-opened room feels less like an intrusion if the room is respectable. Sometimes I say hello to it. The door still opens when I travel. I've started to think of it as the flat's way of telling me it minded the door being shut on it. So I leave it ajar now. It hasn't been cold since.