The Previous Tenant Kept Coming Back for Her Mail

When we moved into our rental, the landlord mentioned, offhand, that the previous tenant had left in a hurry and might come by for forwarded mail, and not to mind her. We did not think anything of it. People have mail sent on. It happens.

But she did not knock and ask for her mail. She let herself in. We came home more than once to find our front door unlocked when we were sure we had locked it, and the small pile of her mail on the hall table disturbed, some of it taken. She had a key, clearly, that the landlord had never collected, and she was using it during the day while we were at work, coming in, taking her mail, leaving.

We asked the landlord to change the locks. He shrugged it off, said she was harmless, said he would get around to it, and did not. So we lived with the low crawling unease of a stranger with a key coming and going, and then it got worse, because she stopped limiting it to daytime. I woke one night, maybe two in the morning, to the sound of the letterbox and soft footsteps in our hall, and by the time I got up there was no one, but the deadbolt we had started throwing was undone from the inside, and her mail was gone from the table.

We finally called the police, and in looking into it, they found the thing that still makes me cold. She had never fully left. She had been living, on and off, in the attic of the house, accessed through a hatch in the shared stairwell the landlord never checked, coming down into our flat when it suited her, for her mail and, I suspect, for other things we never noticed. Our locked flat had a person moving through it, in and out of the ceiling, the entire time we lived there, and the landlord had all but told us so on day one and called her harmless.

They removed her. We broke the lease, and the landlord, amazingly, tried to keep the deposit, until a copy of the police report changed his mind. I will never again wave off the phrase "the last tenant might come by." I want the locks changed, in writing, before I bring in a single box.