She Lived on His Closet Shelf for a Year. She Wasn't the First.

In 2008, a 57-year-old man in Kasuya, Fukuoka, in Japan, noticed that food was disappearing from his kitchen.¹

Not a lot. A little at a time. Some rice. A yogurt. Juice he was sure he had not finished.

He lived alone. He kept his doors locked. He checked his windows. The food kept disappearing. So he installed security cameras that sent pictures to his phone while he was at work.¹

One day, at work, his phone showed him a woman in his kitchen. Eating.¹

He called the police. They searched the house. All the doors and windows were locked. Nobody had come or gone.

They found her in his closet.

She was 58 and homeless. She had been sleeping on the top shelf of a closet, in the space where he stored his spare futon, a space just big enough for a person to lie down. She had brought her own thin bedding and plastic bottles of water. Police believed she had been living there for about a year.¹

She had come in one day when he left a door unlocked. She took showers while he was out. She ate his food. She cleaned up after herself.¹ He never knew. She had moved from house to house before.

There is a name for this now. People call it phrogging, from the way frogs jump from one place to the next. Living secretly in someone else's home while they are still living in it.²

Police around the world have reported cases.² Most are found because of small things. Missing food. A thermostat moved. A shower that is already wet.

Most of them.

Hannah Lisowski worked twelve-hour night shifts in an ICU. She slept days. She lived alone in a small house in Portland with a backyard that had been the reason she bought it.

In February, her food started disappearing.

She noticed because she was a nurse and noticed everything. A yogurt gone. The milk lower than she left it. A frozen meal she did not remember eating. She told herself it was the night shifts. Exhaustion does things to memory.

Then she came home one morning and the toilet seat was up.

She had never in her life left a toilet seat up.

She bought a camera system. Secondhand, because it was cheap, from a listing near her neighborhood. Four cameras that recorded whenever something moved and sent clips to her phone.

It came in the original box. Under the foam insert she found a spare house key and a folded note in pencil.

If you're using this to find someone in your house, you'll find them. That's not the hard part.

The hard part is what you do next. Here is the rule I learned too late. When you see them on the camera, do not go home. Do not confront them. Do not look for where they sleep. Call the police and go somewhere else.

Because the one you find is never the first one. And the first one does not like being found.

She figured the note came with the camera from whoever sold it. Some paranoid person. She threw the key in a drawer and put the cameras up.