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Actually, upon reflection, I really want to share how I kept my room-mate out of my private area. It was dubbed the "Home Alone" security system.

I had two potential entrances to my private area, a sliding glass patio door and a regular door to the common area. I secured the common door with a padlock on the outside which was really just for show. The inside was barricaded. At the bottom I had a rolled up towel, and I sealed the rest of it with tape to avoid smell or other chemical assaults from the common area. I packed against the door with my king-sized bed, which was in turn secured from being dislodged by a bookshelf full of weights and books. Even if he got through the padlock, he would not have been able to open the door without busting it in two. The top half of the door was unsecured; I was worried he might break the door and gain access, so when I siezed his stuff I had it put in public storage across town.

Now the sliding glass door is where the home alone shit comes in. It had a lock, but it was nonfunctional and only accessible from the inside. So in order to secure the door while I was away, I got a remote controlled car, attached it to a string which was secured by a fisheye screw at the top of the door, and tied to a security bar which would drop into the tread of the sliding door, preventing it from being opened.

Anyone who has a sliding glass door would know how this works, but if anyone needs further explanation, I'm happy to furnish it.

So when I came home, I would whip out my little remote control, make the RC car run off and lift the bar, then gain access to the apartment. To prevent this system from being discovered, I papered the inside of the sliding door with butcher paper, and I ran a wire outside of the door in an obvious manner, so that the roomie would think that this wire somehow, if tugged correctly, would undo the lock. To my knowledge, all of his attempts to get inside my apartment were by messing with this wire, which was attached to the handle of an antique coffee grinder and a paint can. If you tugged it, you'd get a wierd uneven resistance as the handle crank turned and the paint can danced, which added to the illusion that this wire was some secret way of ingress.

I heard this account from the neighbors, because it occurred while I was away, but apparenty he had lost his front door key, had some kind of intestinal problem, and had to take a shit really bad. All of the neighbors he knew he had already hit up for toilet access and been refused by this point. So he's swearing like crazy and yanking at this wire, and bashing against the door in a frenzied desperation when the neighbors call the cops, reporting a B&E. When the cops show up he's taking a shit in the bushes just outside my window. I fucking hate him so much.

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The feces he left around falls into three categories:
A) Experiments he conducted. The stove top feces thing was an experiment he conducted after his toilet was broken, and I refused him access to mine, and his neighbors got sick of letting him use theirs. I think he was trying to find some new way of getting rid of his shit. Either that or he thought it would be funny to make me clean shit off of his stove top and then got curious about what would happen if he turned on the burner. He really liked playing with heating elements and fire. It was fucking stupid. The dead cat in the oven, I think, falls into this category as well.

B) Feces in the refridgerator, shit in the closet, vomit on the TV, etc. I lump this into the "OOPS I SHAT ON YOUR CARPET DURING A PARTY" category.
C) Shit inside baggies in various places: After I stopped letting him use my bathroom he got angry and I think this started off as his way of "proving" to me that I should let him use my bathroom. After a while of this I think it started to take on a life of his own, and he started stashing his feces due to some mental illness. This is purely speculative.

Actually, Jed was much smaller than me, and emaciated. In retrospect I could have taken him, easily. That's just not how I do things. I do not break the law. Ever. I absolutely must have a clean, orderly house, which is why I went around cleaning shit up, regardless of who did it. I am not some cowardly little bitch, in fact, I think Jed was afraid of me, which is why he did passive agressive shit like shitting in light fixtures. I generally don't try to solve disputes by shouting or anything, I just quietly give notice of the unacceptable condition, document it, and clean it up. Somewhere back at my parent's house I have a box full of typed, dated, signed letters to Jed stating the date, time, and extent of a mess I had to clean up, and a notice that such behavior is not acceptable, and that unless he stopped, I would move out and make him responsible for rent. Those letters helped me eventually recover back rent from him for the equivalent value of the common area he exclusively occupied during my stay there.

I eventually got so pissed off at the condition of the rest of the apartment that I could only deal with it by sealing it off, and ignoring it. Essentially there is a blank period of about a month where I absolutely ignored anything from the common area, which is why it got so bad.

I was crazy busy with schoolwork and my job, so I basically just shut the whole situation out of my mind for a while. After some time, I came to the realization that this guy might start a fire and get us both killed, which is really the beginning of the end. The thing that ended the insanity was his discovery that
A) He had access to the fuse box
and
B) He could trip the fuse to my room with some metal and a hallway plug
and
C) He was too stupid to manually flip the fuse switch and just turn off my power, so he had to go the fire hazard route. I think he might have been afraid of touching the fuse box for fear of being electrocuted.

But I'll detail the downfall of this shit later.

For those of you wondering why I didn't call the landlord. I was kind of in denial. I just figured that whatever happened over there was Jed's business. I think I was on a sublease under him at the time, so I wasn't too worried about damage to the apartment. I withheld rent from him during this time too. His family was paying rent for the whole unit, and I would reimburse him directly. I deducted cleaning costs and other things from the rent I paid him. I think he was too embarassed or crazy to call me on it, or have his lawyer financial guru daddy get me busted.

Quick fact: His father was on the cover of Forbes magazine like 8 years ago.

Have you ever had something go wrong, and, knowing it was someone elses responsibility, just didn't intervene out of sheer curiousity about how it fucking bad it would get? I didn't turn him in for that reason too. I just... wanted to see how bad it would get. I was stupid, mad, curious, and really didn't have any responsibility for damage to the unit, knowing his family would cover the costs.

Edit: So, basically, I didn't kick his ass for two reasons: A) I am always law abiding to a fault, and B) The setup I made was really very convenient for me, and made it so I never even had any contact with the guy. It was basically rent-free... I paid $50 a month in rent after all of the deductions for unsanitary conditions and ouster from the common area I made (and documented... and got to keep after the courts got done looking at it...), and I was exiting and entering from an opposite end of the house. Basically, I only really knew what Jed was up to during this period from forensic evidence in the apartment and the accounts of friends, neighbors, and the police.

The Black Time:
I'm very preoccupied with work and school at this point. Since my point of entry on the house is opposite from the front door, the only real contact I have with Jed at this point is what I can hear from him through the walls, and whatever odor seeps under the door past my homeland security setup. This is pretty tolerable as a condition, definetely worth the $50 a month I was paying for it, but I was starting to get worried. I was worried about Jed's tarantulas getting into the ventilation system, so I sealed that off with plastic wrap and duct tape. Then I started worrying about fire. Jed liked to play with heating elements and flames, and he was an alcoholic, so I was worried that with the sealed off vent I wouldn't know if the house were on fire. At around 3pm, I was studying, when I noticed that my feet were getting wet. Upon inspection, the carpet next to the wall was wet. I went around to the front of the house and found that the door was ajar. I went back to my apartment and picked up a plumber's wrench and a flashlight to see what was wrong.

I'm not exactly the best at descriptions, as you can probably tell from the poor quality of writing in this thread, but here's the best I can do. I'll try to portray these things from my perspective at the time, and not reveal what they eventually turned out to be.

I unlocked the front door of the apartment and pushed it open, after confirming that Jed's truck was gone. The lights in the place were out and the shades were drawn. The light shone inside and revealed that there were strange particulates hanging in the air. Not quite smoke. I would almost say that the odor was so thick in the apartment that it could be seen with the naked eye. Upon reflection, I imagine that what I was seeing was mold spores.

As the arc of light from the bright outside swept across the room, a few things were revealed in sequence: First off, the common area was absolutely covered in free student newspapers. There were obviously things underneath because the newspapers bulged, and I could even identify an easy chair covered in newspapers in the corner. The kitchen was crammed with garbage. I could identify two large bulky garbage bags in the corner of the common room. Investigating them further, I discovered that they were covered in some kind of glistening brown muck. The whole place smelled absolutely rank. I swept my light across the place a few times, just to make sure Jed wasn't there lying in wait with a knife or something, and I proceeded into the apartment, leaving the door open. I took some vic's vaporub from my pocket and doubed just under my nose. The garbage bags had been hastily pulled out of the common room closet, the one which contains pipes leading to Jed's bathroom. I shined a light into the closet and a rat or mouse or something ran very quickly under the newspapers in the common room. I looked and saw that there were several dents in a pipe in the common closet, and it was otherwise soaked. Finding no immediate source for the water, I proceeded into the hallway area towards Jed's room.

I was a little uneasy, because the whole place was filled with debris. The common furnature that came with the apartment was lodged in the strangest places. Like the hallway to Jed's room had the common couch in it, upturned. I climbed over that after making sure Jed wasn't under it. I was a little more nervous because my egress had been essentially blocked by this couch, and walked past the debris. It looked like he was salvaging equiptment and building materials from local construction yards. I could identify in the hallway, piping materials, a toilet lid, cinderblocks, scrap wood, and a box of pilfered nails. Jed's large sledge hammer (or geologists hammer, I don't know which) was lodged in the door of his room. I pushed it open and the damn thing fell out, giving me a fright. Anyway, I proceeded into his room, which was strangely clean. There was nothing in there, but the floor was absolutely soaked. I realized what happened; he realized there was water everywhere and threw all of his shit outside of the room into the hallway, and leaned his mattress against the sliding door (where it remained, to my knowledge, for like two weeks. I have no idea where he was sleeping.). The leak was coming from his bathroom, so I went in with my wrench ready to clock the shit out of my crazy room mate if he should jump out at me.

I saw the familiar smashed bathroom fixtures, and I was very thankful for the vic's vaporub, but the stench stung my eyes still. There was a bathtub covered in newspapers. I proded it with my wrench and the newspapers gave way, like they were on top of jello or something soft and organic. I prodded it harder and what I can only describe as fecal fluid seeped from the sides of the newspaper. I think he was taking shits in the bathtub and covering it with newspapers, like some kind of foul lasagna. The leak was coming from under his sink, which he had dislodged through some violence. I could see the remains of a cinderblock on the pipe, so I think he might have been hitting the pipe with a cinderblock. I turned off the water to the sink, stopping the leak, and decided that it would be best if I left before he returned.

On my way out, I climbed into the kitchen area and opened the fridge, just out of curiosity. There was a ball-like, organic mass in the middle, with tendrils of mold growing out of it. It was roughly the size of a human head with a large dent in it. Not desiring to get toxic mold in my nostrils, I closed the fridge and surveyed the common closet again. The walls of the closet were covered in a black shiny material which glistened. Upon closer inspection, it was mold. I didn't know that mold looked like that. I prodded the newspapers a little bit, but remembering the rat, and not wanting to get bitten, I left the apartment, closing the door behind me.

I got a towel and did my best to dry out the carpet. I left my sliding glass door open to help air the place out. I printed out a notice to Jed that I had entered and fixed his sink, and placed it under the door. I later heard Jed come home, and he obviously discovered I had been in there, because he started freaking out, swearing, and throwing things around. I heard the couch in the hallway get rammed into my door. He threw a tantrum for another five minutes, and then I heard the front of the apartment door slam. I heard him approach my sliding glass door, swearing, and I can only imagine that after seeing it open, he decided not to come any further. Like I said, the guy was afraid of me. He left in his truck a few minutes later, to return in ten minutes. I heard strange moaning and stumbling around in the apartment after that. I think he was moving furniture or something. I heard breaking glass a few times, but after that, silence.

The Kidnapping.

Let's get this over with.

So as I said, I am a pretty easy going person and I could tolerate this situation pretty endlessly. But as I hinted earlier, Jed eventually made this situation unlivable. Here's how it goes down:

I've long been using a cellphone since Jed pretty much has control of our apartment phone, and whenever anyone calls he'll answer with crazytalk. To my knowledge, he still has access to the store room in Longs Drugs, from which he has been stealing crates full of random stuff.

Anyway, lately, Jed was more active than usual. I hear a lot of heavy stuff getting dragged around, and crashing, and lots of moaning, hollering, and other psychotic outbursts.

One evening I hear Jed making a hell of a lot of noise, then silence. Then I hear the front door slam, and his truck goes off. A while later, he comes back, I hear more slamming into things, and a bunch of really high pitched loud vocalizations, kind of like whales mating.

I get a call on my cellphone. This is basically how it goes.
*ring* *pickup*
Jed: SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSATAN!
Me: Hi Jed. You're nuts.
Jed: I HAVE SARAH (Jed's ex girlfriend)
Me: Really.
Jed: LISTEN
. I immediately hear a high pitched shrieking from the other end of the apartment, and banging and stumbling around. Sarah is a water polo champ. I think if he somehow got her into the apartment, he would have to hit her in the head with his big geologists hammer, because there's no way he would be able to wrestle her inside conscious. At any rate, I bet at the time that he hadn't grabbed Sarah, and the high pitched screaming was really that crazy motherfucker. I've been getting all kinds of crazy phone calls from Jed lately, so I call bluff:
Me: That sounds like you Jed.
Jed: COME AND SEE.
Me: I need to study. Bye Jed. *click*

This is a very normal response from me, because by this point Jed has been calling me and saying all kinds of crazy shit. Basically, if I can hear him through the wall, I completely disregard anything he might say on the phone. He's called me once and begged for help because he's stranded on the nascar race track in the middle of a race and I can clearly hear him through the wall. So I have a very trained automated response to Jed's calls: "Hi Jed. You're crazy. That's nice. I need to study. Bye Jed."

At this point, I smell smoke. This is very disconcerting, because as I said earlier, I have been living in fear of the whole place going up in flames. I stand up from my desk, and at that very moment, the power goes out, and I hear Jed laughing like crazy through the wall. I hear what sounds like something banging against the pipes in his bathroom, and some other, deeper noises, which I haven't heard before. The noises have a sort of deep bass resonance, like a big drum, as if a bull or some other large creature were banging around over there. Jed's a small guy, and I didn't think him capable of moving shit around heavy enough to make that kind of noise with that degree of frequency. Since I smelled smoke and the power was out, I grab my gigantic wrench, smear some vic's on my nose, put on my leather jacket, put on a motorcycle helmet I confiscated from Jed, and prepare myself for battle, maglight in hand.

I am really psyched up at this point. I know a lot of you will be saying that I was stupid for operating like this, but I reasoned with myself that I had better go over there just in case he HAD captured some poor girl and was, I dunno, by the noise of it, bludgeoning her to death with a tuba. I headed around to Jed's car and looked inside. I saw he had rope and there was blood inside the cabin. I tried the door, it was locked. I smashed the window with a wrench and went inside the cabin. Behind the seat was some bloody rags. Ohhhh shit. At this point I decide I had better get the fuck in there and stop whatever he was up to. I felt really guilty at this point for letting it get this far. I decided that if I were to go in there and die, I would've earned it for letting him get that crazy for that long.

I trucked it over to the door, set my wrench on the ground, and fumbled for my keys. I unlocked the door but it wouldn't give. The door was moist. I didn't quite understand that. I pushed and pushed but it hardly moved an inch. So I started stomping at the door as hard as I could. Eventually I heard something slide and shift and collapse on the other side of the door, and I gave it another kick. My foot actually made a hole and went through the door, and I fell over. I started freaking out because I was worried Jed would stab my boot or something, so I struggled and hurt my ankle. I also broke my foot from the kicking. Eventually I calmed and got my foot out of the door, and bodychecked the door. It came flying off the hinges, and came completely to pieces.

More next post.

The apartment was completely silent by this point. All I could hear was some kind of dull tubal thumping from inside the place, that same dull bass noise I heard earlier. Remembering my crack training at counterstrike, instead of going further in, I limped over to the kitchen area and flung shit around to make sure that nobody was hiding under the newspapers. I could see that he had gotten a lot more crap since the last time I was here. There were mason jars of urine in the kitchen, along with gallon jugs of the stuff. There were a lot of things he had obviously stolen from longs drugs. There was a crate of sour patch kids all over the place. On one wall was a poster of homer simpson naked drinking beer, and a bunch of knives had been stabbed into it. I was too angered and pumped up to be frightened. I opened the refridgerator and stomped the shelves apart while I was at it, just to be sure he wasn't hiding in there.

I had a huge floodlight but it couldn't illuminate everything all the time, especially with the dank murk of mold spores and the smoke, so I ended up trying to shine it everywhere at once as I proceeded. The common closet was closed, so I kicked that in and swung my wrench into the dark area within. I hit something soft so I kept pounding at it, but it wasn't human. It was a trash bag full of something soft and yielding. I gave it a kick and moved on.

I ripped the doorway off of the hall closet and swung my wrench inside, but I only hit a few canned goods in there.

I could hear high pitched shrieks coming from the interior of his room. His hallway was pretty fucking well blocked with shit, so I started grabbing things and chucking them into the common room. He had a gigantic stuffed pluto doll, about as big as a gorilla, which I chucked. Among the other things I hurled was a futon I recognized as salvaged from the end of our block, some patio furniture, a bag full of mcdonalds playpen balls, and something which was big, black, disgusting, soft, covered in growht, which I cannot, even to this day, identify.

I crawled through the remaining debris with the wrench in front of me.

MORE TO COME.

I'm splicing this in because I was a lazy fucker and failed to describe the guy's room:

Quote

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...the very air in Jed's room was absolutely thick with mold and smoke, which I couldn't smell from the vix, but it still stung my eyes anyway. He had smeared all kinds of crazy gibberish on the walls with what looked like red lipstick, and the walls themselves were absolutely covered in growth. The barricades in the hallway must've been there for a while, because they essentially kept a lot of moisture in the air in Jed's back section.

Also, I forgot to mention this as well, but as I was running like a sissy through Jed's room, I knocked into his mattress which he had leaned against the side door a few weeks prior (my estimate). The mattress was completely soaked and very heavy, and the instant it hit me I thought I had fallen into an insidious trap or something, so I further injured myself by trying to struggle out from underneath it. Jed was making these freaky noises the moment I burst into his room, but the echo chamber effect of the bathroom and ventillation system, and the strange nature of the noises, made it difficult to determine where the hell they were coming from. Also, there were tons of boxes of hostess cupcakes and other similar products.

The carpets in his room were really rank. The previous water leak had made them dank with mold, and I can only imagine what the high fecal content of the air did. It was difficult to breathe, and nearly impossible to see, which really added to my panic. It was almost like I had been buried alive. The scrawlings on the wall, though I didn't really get to see them in much detail because I was far more concerned with other things at the time, were just... creepy. The vibrations made me think for a second or two that he had tunnelled under the apartment and I'd have to go into some kind of underground basement he'd made.

Edit: Scrawlings on the wall from what I saw consisted of nonsense latin words, tons of triangles within triangles within triangles trailing all over the place, and a few goatsatan faces made of triangles.

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